 He helped turn the advertising poster into an art form.The son a family of artisans, he apprenticed with a lithographer and also studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs.Finding little work in Paris, he went to London, and designed furniture for a time, but then returned to Paris and had a great success in 1858 with a poster for "Orpheus in the Underworld" by Jacques Offenbach.