Paul Poiret was born on April 20th, 1879 to a cloth merchant in the neighborhood of Les Halles, Paris. When Poiret was a teenager he took some of his sketches to Madame Cheruit, a dressmaker, who purchased a dozen from him. He continued to sell his sketches until he was hired by Jacques Doucet in 189
Henri Matisse made it look easy, but don't be fooled -- those vibrant, lyrical scenes and simple, geometric portraits which look tossed off the tip of his paintbrush actually took weeks, sometimes months to create. A perfectionist, he once mused, "Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the bran