Theophile Steinlen biography in Biographies from the artzine on artrepublic.com

Steinlens illustrations in the associated journal Le Chat Noir, set him on the road to becoming one of the foremost illustrators in Paris at the turn of the century. Like his contemporaries Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha, he was active as a designer of theatrical and cabaret posters.

Steinlen loved cats. He drew them, painted them, and sculpted them. He tried to translate every imaginable subtlety of their poses and movements.  His house on the rue Caulaincourt in Paris was, according to contemporary accounts, a meeting place for all the cats of the quartier.  In his early, years as an artist, he would sell drawings of cats in exchange for food, and in later years a cat would usually appear in most of his drawings, magazine illustrations, lithographs or posters, almost to the point of being a sort of signature.

Steinlen also held exhibitions of his work at the Salon des Independants. Among these exhibitions were scenes of the countryside, nudes, portraits, and flowers, showing a very different and more personal side of the artist. 

Steinlen was born in Lausanne on 10 November 1859. He went to Paris at the age of 19 to live and devote himself to drawing professionally. Around 1880, he settled in Montmartre, the centre of the art community. Here he began to frequent the literary cabaret known as Le Chat Noir, founded by a fellow Swiss expatriate, Rodolphe Salis.

It was  at the Le Chat Noir that Steinlen met and befriended writers such as Paul Verlaine and the artists Jean-Louis Forain, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Louis Anquetin, Henry Somm, Adolphe Willette, Felix Valotton and Emmanuel Poir known as Caran d’Ache, among others.

Theophile Steinlen died in 1923 in Paris and was laid to rest in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre.