This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I-Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy B. Wilson.

So the poster that is colloquially known as Le Chaudoir, or the Black Cat, is easily one of the most famous pieces of late 19th century European art.

But the artist behind it is surprisingly not all that well known.

And even though that artist's signature appears on the image,

both as his signature and the little icon that he developed

as like a stamp for his signature,

it is actually often assumed that a more famous artist,

who is associated with the Parisian Fendisieckler art scene,

created it.

I actually polled a number of friends about this, including friends who are artists, went to art school, and a lot of them got this wrong, and several of them thought it was, Toulouse de Tres-Rtrecht. It's not. Teofio, Steinlin, was right in the mix of the Montmartre Bohemians alongside now famous artists like Edgar de Ga, and yes, Henri de de de Lis de Troix.

But he has never achieved quite their level of fame, even though he made a pretty good living with his art and contemporaries thought incredibly highly of his work.

And his political work, because he created a lot of political art, which was very

important to him, is often eclipsed by his commercial images of felines. So today we're going to

unravel his life. But what that really means is that we're going to talk a lot about things that

were happening in France and the world politically,

because his art and his life are very much tied to the politics of the day.

In fact, we're really going to talk more about that than we do about his artwork.

But we'll talk about cats, I promise.

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