Bernard Buffet in Paris on 10 July 1928, he was a painter, lithographer, and etcher who studied at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts and gained early critical acclaim and fortune through his prolific output – Buffet painted more than 8,000 works in his lifetime – and immediately recognizable stylistic manner. Active during a time when abstraction was the predominant artistic style, Buffet defended representational art and was an active member of the anti-abstraction group L’homme Témoin (The Witness-Man).

Featuring portraiture, townscapes, still lifes, and historical and religious subjects, Buffet’s oeuvre is primarily graphic, with spiky, angular and elongated forms rendered in a somber color palette. 

This stylistic mode gives his work an austere and melancholic tone that has been interpreted as a representation of the emotional state of the post-war generation. Buffet has had dozens of international exhibitions and was awarded a number of prestigious honors, including being made an Officer of the Légion d’Honneur in 1973 and being inducted into the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1974. Unfortunately, the end of his life was marked by a prolonged battle with Parkinson’s disease, which resulted in the artist committing suicide at the age of 71 on 4 October 1999.