Hen, Japanese-style Work By Francis Jourdain, Brush Ink, 1909

French painter, designer and draftsman. Francis Jourdain established himself as one of the pioneers of the Modern Movement by initiating the functionalist doctrine in the early 1900s. Deeply committed ideologically to anarchism, socialism and then communism, his artistic approaches were diverse: painter, engraver, ceramist, decorator, interior designer, biographer. For Pierre Kjelberg he is "one of the most cutting-edge decorators of the interwar period, astonishingly ahead of his time." He founded modern decorative arts and theorized their application to the popular living environment by distributing, from 1913, useful, refined, unadorned furniture, designed to be mass-produced at low cost. Signed and dated lower right: FR.J.1909.