SEMPÉ Jean-Jacques

Jean-Jacques Sempé is a French illustrator born in 1932. After getting through his military service by drawing at night, he settled in Paris. As early as the 1950s, his artwork began to win over editorial staff. A pathological perfectionist and a highly anxious person, he admitted to redrawing his panels up to twenty times to achieve the lightness that would become his signature style.

His rise in the media was marked by prestigious collaborations that honed his artistic style. He created Le Petit Nicolas with René Goscinny in the Belgian weekly Le Moustique in 1954—a character who is now an icon of popular culture. Sempé went on to become a mainstay of publications such as Paris-Match, where he sketched the French with a gaze that was both tender and biting, as well as the British magazine Punch. This obsessive perfectionist, who admitted to redrawing his panels up to twenty times to achieve the desired lightness, breathed new life into the press of the time with his airy compositions and expansive settings.

International recognition came in 1978, when he fulfilled his childhood dream: joining the prestigious New Yorker. He would go on to create more than a hundred covers for the American magazine, showcasing his masterful style in which tiny figures seem lost in the vastness of grandiose urban settings. His cyclists and passersby—whether strolling through Paris or Manhattan—capture the solitude and grace of modern life. Until his passing in 2022, Sempé remained a cartoonist of universal elegance whose pen strokes bridged the two sides of the Atlantic.