Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poire)

Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poire) (1858-1909)

Caran d'Ache (Emmanuel Poire) (1858 - 1909)

Emmanuel Poire was born and educated in Russia, and took as his nom-de-plume the Russian name for a lead pencil. However, his paternal grandfather had served in the Battle of Moscow as a Napoleonic officer, and Poire always considered himself to be French. At the age of twenty he was sent to Paris by his father and entered the French army with the intention of becoming a painter of military subjects. Instead, he made his name with the humorous narrative caricatures that he contributed to a variety of periodicals, such as La Vie Parisienne, Le Rire, La Caricature and Le Figaro Illustre. His epic shadow show, l'Epopee, presented at Le Chat Noir, was also a great success. Poire pandered to anti-Semitic, anti-Dreyfusard opinion through the weekly magazine Psst..!, which he helped to run with Jean-Louis Forain between 1898-9. But, despite the equally anti-British content of many of his cartoons, his work appeared in Pick-Me-Up and other magazines before 1900 and had a great influence on the various talents of May, Bateman and Aubrey Beardsley.