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Caran
D'ache (pseudonym for Emmanuel Poiré) (1859-1909)
Caran
D'ache is the namesake for the famouse Swiss Art
Supply Company:
When
Arnold Schweitzer founded the company in 1924,
he named it after the famous French caricaturist
of the Belle Époque, Emmanuel Poiré (1859-1909),
whose work he admired.
French
draughtsman and illustrator. Born into a French
family in Moscow, he was the grandson of a squadron
leader in Napoleon's Guides who had remained in
Russia after being wounded in the Battle of Moscow.
He left Russia in 1878 and enlisted in the French
army in Paris. After designing uniforms for the
army, he worked on the Chronique parisienne in
1880 and then on a number of other French as well
as American, Italian and Russian magazines. He
adopted as his pseudonym the Russian word for pencil
(‘karandash') and specialized in amusing military
scenes, some of which were published in Nos soldats
du sičcle (1890). His ‘Lundis' in Le Figaro,
a series of satirical drawings that appeared each
Monday from 1899, were particularly celebrated
and many of his satirical plates on the Dreyfus
affair appeared there. He also co-founded with
Jean-Louis Forain the anti-Dreyfus weekly satirical
journal Psst!, which ran from 1898 to 1899. In
addition Caran d'Ache was a co-founder of the paper
the Tout Paris and provided illustrations for a
number of books, such as Albert Millaud's La Comédie
du jour sous la république athénienne
(Paris, 1886) and Nikolai Dmitrievich Benardaki's
Prince Kozakokoff (Paris, 1893). He had made a
fortune by 1900, becoming one of the celebrities
of the ‘Belle Epoque'. In his work he created a
completely linear style, schematized like shorthand,
and developed his stories through a succession
of pictures, usually grouped together under one
title but without captions. In this sense he can
be seen as a precursor of the modern cartoon, breaking
up the story into a sequence of extremely simplified
images.
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