Paul Mathey

[1] Born in Paris, the son of a restorer, Mathey learned his art at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris in painters Léon Cogniet's, Isidore Pils's and Alexis-Joseph Mazerolle's workshops.

He began to exhibit at the Salon de Paris in 1868, and became a valued and recognized portrait painter.

Especially a portrait painter, Mathey did not, however, refrain from landscape, seascapes, lived scenes or decoration.

In his forty-fifth year, at the time of the struggle between reproducers and originals, he had the idea of starting engraving.

Mathey opened Maxime Lalanne's Traité de gravure à l'eau-forte, took the technical information he needed, fetched a sketch from his notebooks and engraved it.