Steinlen 8 illustrated songs " Paris in songs ".

Steinlen's work is the image of the man: strong and generous. His considerable production is the opposite of a decorative art. It is expressed in all disciplines of the plastic arts: drawing, engraving, painting, sculpture, illustration, caricature, poster ... The street is the main source of her inspiration. The actors of this theater of the everyday life are the common people, the midinettes and the workers, the lorettes and the vagabonds. He stages their stories, their sorrows and their loves, with a brotherly complicity. His series of Parisian women is the best example.

One of Steinlen's approaches was to reveal the beauty and true nobility that lay beneath appearances, another was to highlight the glaring consequences of an unjust society. But he does not practice the biting irony of Forain or Willette: his drawing is never cynical or accusatory. He is not a witness painter of his time either, he does not describe the scenery of his time: he tears out the vivid images of the world around him to brandish them and awaken consciences. These concerns, translated by a mediocre artist, would have produced a laborious work, tinged with miserabilism. Steinlen's genius preserved his work from such an avatar.

His art, slightly tinged with fantasy and Japonism, leaves room for dreams. Can we already speak of poetic realism? Many painters were influenced by the originality of his style. Picasso himself will admit that he was very impressed, at the beginning, by the drawings published in the Gil Blas. It is said that some gifted musicians, capable of identifying and memorizing a sound immediately, have an absolute ear: Steinlen had an absolute eye. His virtuosity is such that he can, like a journalist, go to the place where an event is taking place, observe it - without making the slightest sketch - and reproduce it, much later, in all its truth.........

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