Arsene Henri began his career as an art student at the Academy Lyon in the early 1950's. This work comes from his student study days when he was assigned the task of creating a painting using old photographs of Paris as inspiration. The color and exact composition was of his own imagination. This may sound to you as a form of plagiarism. But the reality is photographs have been used to inform the compositional structure of paintings since the beginning of photographic technology. The Impressionists especially would take "snapshots" of city scenes or buy ready made photographs and expand them into original painting compositions. Henri did not pursue a typical art career. Instead he used his education to become a museum art conservator at the City Museum of Lyon.