Steinlen stopped taking philosophy at the university in his home town of Lausanne prematurely to start working in Mulhouse as a textile designer. The socially committed, kind-hearted artist left for Paris in 1881, where they moved to the hill Montmartre. In the early nineties, Steinlen still painted traditional subjects such as landscapes, flower still lives and nudes. Later work increasingly displayed social realist tendencies. Steinlen became a sought after illustrator for legendary magazines such as Le Rire and Gil bas.