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
A.W.N. Pugin's life was divided between two obsessions: his design and his religion. The first he inherited from his father, an architectural draftsman; the second from life's hard experience, which led him to convert to Catholicism at age 22. The two obsessions combined in Pugin's moralistic approac
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was probably no greater way to gain international recognition as an artist -- or anything else for that matter -- than to be associated with the brilliant actress Sarah Bernhardt. Czechoslovakian painter Alphonse Mucha would get just that opportunity. As a