A rare and quietly witty etching by Paul Jouve, one of the defining animalier artists of the French Art Deco era. A chimpanzee, rendered with Jouve's characteristic anatomical precision and rich tonal cross-hatching, stands in profile studying a small Baule figure from Côte d'Ivoire — a pointed pairing of naturalist observation and African sculptural form that reflects both the period's fascination with non-Western art and Jouve's own lifelong practice of working directly from zoological studies. The subject was published as plate 10 in the celebrated Album Paul Jouve, printed on fine Japon nacré paper — one of the artist's most sought-after graphic suites.

Paul Jouve was born on March 16, 1878, in Bourron-Marlotte, France, the son of painter and ceramicist Auguste Jouve, whose encouragement led him to enroll at the École des Arts Décoratifs in 1900 and later the École des Beaux-Arts. As a student he spent his time at the Jardin des Plantes and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, studying the anatomy and movement of wild cats and other animals — the foundation of the precise, muscular observation that defines his mature work. He began exhibiting at the Salons at just fifteen years old.

In 1900, at only twenty-two, Jouve was commissioned by architect René Binet to design a hundred-meter bas-relief frieze of wild animals for the Exposition Universelle, executed in glazed stoneware by Alexandre Bigot — a project that launched his career. Gallerist Samuel Bing took him on shortly after, giving him his first solo exhibition in 1905 (organized by Bing's son Marcel) and the means to travel to the zoos of Hamburg and Antwerp, where he met fellow animalier sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti. That same year, the Société du Livre Contemporain commissioned Jouve to illustrate Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, eventually published in 1919 in collaboration with engraver F.L. Schmied — the project that made his reputation and remains among his best-known achievements.

Jouve continued to travel extensively — to Algeria as the first resident of the Villa Abd-el-Tif (1907), to Greece and Mount Athos, and, following a travel grant from the French Indo-Chinese government in 1921, on an eleven-month journey through Egypt, Vietnam (Saigon, the Mekong, Angkor) and Cambodia that supplied him with a lifetime of studies of elephants, tigers, and other wildlife. His decorative and sculptural work won the grand prize at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs — the exhibition that gave Art Deco its name — and a gold medal at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques, where he showed a monumental gilded bronze bull's head on the Trocadéro esplanade. He was named a Knight of the Légion d'Honneur in 1920 and elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1945.
Jouve's black panthers, tigers, and elephants — rendered in painting, etching, lithography, and bronze — remain among the most recognizable images of French Art Deco animalier art, held in major museum collections and pursued today by a small circle of specialist dealers. He died in his studio in Paris on May 13, 1973, at the age of 95.