Folle Journée: The Cat Family Came In

Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen was a Swiss-born artist who became one of the defining visual voices of Montmartre at the turn of the twentieth century, and his relationship with cats was both personal and professional. He kept dozens of them in his studio on the rue Caulaincourt and drew them with a familiarity no other artist of his era matched. Folle Journée, the title translating loosely as "Wild Day" or "Madcap Day", belongs to a series of illustrated vignettes Steinlen produced for popular French periodicals and gift publications around 1900, a period when he was at the height of his commercial and artistic output. Having already achieved international fame through his 1896 poster for the Chat Noir cabaret, Steinlen was by this point translating his mastery of black-and-white lithography into color illustration with increasing fluency. The Art Nouveau movement had given illustrators unprecedented critical respect, and publishers such as Flammarion commissioned Steinlen for elaborately produced cat-themed books that blurred the line between fine art and print culture. These works are now collected by institutions including the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Victoria and Albert Museum, recognized as documents of both Belle Époque Parisian domestic life and the maturation of illustration as a serious art form.