Milly la Forêt, The Falconer

Poet, writer, artist, and film maker, Jean Cocteau was born in a small town near Paris. After an eventful childhood, which saw the suicide of his father when he was just ten, in the late 1900s and the years of the Great War Cocteau began to associate himself with artists across differing spheres, including the Russian ballet director Daighilev, composers Stravinsky and Satie, and Picasso.

However, it was not until his later life that Cocteau added art to his catalogue of theatrical productions, films and writing, experimenting in pastels, prints and posters and eventually taking up easel painting in 1950. Cocteau loved the spectacle of bull-fights, often watching shows alongside Picasso, and the Taureaux set of lithographs they inspired was published in 1965, two years after his death.