In 1867, the Paris World Fair brought Japanese prints and textiles to the attention of the French public, and all things Japanese became the rage. These whimsical illustrations by Henri-Charles Gérard are typical of the ensuing style of japonisme, which favored bold, flat areas of color and compressed pictorial space. Gérard became famous for such studies. An artist of tremendous speed and inspiration, he was described as a “modernist, impressionist, Manetist, landscape and marine painter, japonist, fantasist, alchemist, essayist, [with] an imagination that…explodes in a thousand capricious directions: cards, menus, fans, almanacs…, that is to say subjects rapidly glimpsed and more rapidly rendered.”