Théophile Steinlen

Almost everyone has seen his black cat. The tall poster of a bristling, gold-eyed cat above the words Tournée du Chat Noir advertised a touring troupe from the Chat Noir, a Montmartre cabaret often called the first modern one, and it has been reprinted on walls and postcards ever since Steinlen drew it in the 1890s.

He was Swiss, born in Lausanne in 1859, and moved to Paris in his early twenties into the artists' quarter of Montmartre. There he poured out drawings for the illustrated papers and the cabarets, and cats wandered through a great many of them. He kept a houseful of them and drew them constantly.

His steadiest subject, though, was the Paris poor. Laundresses, factory workers, street sellers and the unemployed fill his prints and paintings, drawn with real sympathy rather than as picturesque types. During the First World War he turned the same eye on refugees and soldiers, still working in the black-and-white of the cheap press that had carried his name.