The French painter Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Argenteuil, near Paris. At the age of eight, Braque moved to Le Havre with his family. There, as a young man, he received training as a decorative painter and at the same time attended the École des Beaux-Arts in the evening to take lessons in painting. He completed his artistic education in Paris at the Académie Humbert.
At the beginning of his artistic career, Braque was inspired by the works of the Fauvists and Cézanne. His works of the time reflect this influence. A change occurs in 1907, the year he meets Picasso and sees his painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. The friendship between the two artists brings about a new artistic style of painting: Cubism. The two founders of Cubism were in close artistic exchange, a contact that is evident in the Cubist works of both masters.
The examination of the still life runs through his entire oeuvre. The subject also plays a role in his etchings, which he has been producing since 1907, and in his lithographs. His lithographs approach his painting, but he works with the possibilities that the techniques of printmaking offer him. He is fascinated by the process, and therefore takes it as his challenge to treat the technique in a new way – he wants to make it into a kind of painting rather than a drawing. In order to make the colour richer and denser and to give it the expression of a painting, Braque uses in his lithographs several colour areas on top of each other. Braque has a high demand on his prints, which results be seen in small editions with few prints. The artist died on 31 August 1963 in Paris.