La Roche (auderville), Watercolor By Ricardo Flores, 1917

French painter, illustrator, caricaturist and cartoonist. Of Peruvian descent on his father's side, Ricardo Florez joined the military engineering offices in Alençon in 1894 as an auxiliary cartoonist. In 1896, he entered the Beaux-Arts[. He began to produce caricatures and exhibit drawings, with Marcel Noblot and Evelio Torent as accomplices. The first caricature appeared in Le Rire in 1897, then in Le Frou-frou, Le Bon Vivant, L'Assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, Le Clou, Le Cri de Paris, Le Petit Bleu and Lectures pour tous. He also illustrated the works of Maupassant and various books, such as La Chanson des gueux by Jean Richepin, and executed a few society portraits. He was presented as elegant and a party animal, who loved to laugh and sing, notably in a restaurant at 14bis, rue Norvins in Montmartre, Chez Adèle. It was the characters of working-class Paris that he most readily sketched. In his memoirs, Pierre Mac Orlan cites, around 1910, Ricardo Florès among the regulars of the summer, with the painters Maurice Asselin and Émile Jourdan, of "a small inn perched on the rock, located at the entrance to the jetty that it overlooked", Chez la mère Bacon in Brigneau-sur-Mer2. When the First World War broke out, Ricardo Florès enlisted at the Invalides, as a foreign volunteer, in August 1914. Serving in the 103rd territorial infantry regiment, he became attached in this new environment to the poilus whom he showed in their daily reality. He also depicted the enemy in feldgrau uniform and wearing the cap. At the end of 1914, he published a series of caricatures of the army entitled Boches! and subtitled Deutschland unter alles. He died in a military hospital from sepsis, his wound having become infected. A tear high in the sky was formerly restored.