Paul Gavarni

Who was Paul Gavarni?

Paul Gavarni was the nom de plume of Sulpice Guillaume Chevalier, a French caricaturist, born in Paris. He began life as an engineer's draughtsman, but soon turned his attention to his proper vocation as an artist.

Most of his best work appeared in Le Charivari, but some of his bitterest and most earnest pictures, the fruit of a visit to London, appeared in L'Illustration. He also illustrated Honoré de Balzac's novels, and Eugène Sue's Wandering Jew.

He is said to have taken his nom de plume from the place where he made his first published sketch. He was born in Paris of poor parents, and started in life as a workman in an engine-building factory. At the same time he attended the free school of drawing. In his first attempts to turn his abilities to some account he met with many disappointments, but was at last entrusted with the drawing of some illustrations for a journal of fashion. Gavarni was then thirty-four years of age. His sharp and witty pencil gave to these generally commonplace and unartistic figures a life-likeness and an expression which soon won for him a name in fashionable circles.