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Updated: June 11, 2025
A charming and most interesting addition to the party was M. Forain, the famous French caricaturist, and now one of the chief instructors of the French Army in the art of camouflage the art of making a thing look like anything in the world except what it is!
It was most interesting to hear him describe the work in detail and the rapidity with which his pupils learned the new art. It was M. Forain who coined the famous phrase "that there was no fear for the ultimate success of the Allies, if only the civilians held out!"
At present its chief distinction, in the eyes of most observers, would probably be found in the fact that it is the location of the famous fête forain at one of the annually recurring stages of the endless itinerary of that noted function.
There is a drawing by Forain which instantly obtained celebrity, and which represents two French soldiers talking together in the trenches. "If only they're able to stick it out!" "Who?" "The civilians!" And now at the end of four long years it may be truly said of the civilian that he has "seen it through."
General Pétain said, smiling, that before the war he had sometimes thought of women "as those who inspired the most beautiful ideas in men and prevented them from carrying them out," but the war, he added, had certainly proved conclusively the value of women's work. M. Forain expressed the desire to visit the chief French hospital of the Scottish women at the Abbaye de Royaumont.
Forain, with the pencil of a realism truly Japanese, illustrates with sympathetic incisiveness the pitiless pessimism of Flaubert, Goncourt, and Maupassant as well.
The revues burlesqued him; Sem caricatured him; Forain counterfeited him extensively in that inimitable series of Monday morning cartoons for Le Figaro: one said "De Morbihan" instinctively at sight of that stocky figure, short and broad, topped by a chubby, moon-like mask with waxed moustaches, womanish eyes, and never-failing grin.
Naturally, after the egg trick was discovered we encounter scores of young Columbuses, who paint ballet girls' legs and the heads of orchestral musicians and scenes from the racing paddock. Degas had three painters who, if any, might truthfully call themselves his pupils. These are Mary Cassatt, Alexis Rouart, and Forain. The first has achieved solid fame.
American by birth, she became French through her assiduous participation in the exhibitions of the Impressionists. She is one of the very few painters whom Degas has advised, with Forain and M. Ernest Rouart. She is a pastellist of note, and some of her pastels are as good as Manet's and Degas's, so far as broad execution and brilliancy and delicacy of tones are concerned.
Degas has exercised an occult, but very serious, influence. He has lived alone, without pupils and almost without friends; the only pupils one might speak of are the caricaturist Forain, who has painted many small pictures inspired by him, and the excellent American lady-artist Miss Mary Cassatt.
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