Bernard Buffet was a French Expressionist painter, born in 1928 in Paris, and committed suicide in 1999 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He was a painter, lithographer, and etcher who studied at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts and gained early critical acclaim and fortune through his prolific output – he painted more than 8,000 works in his lifetime – and immediately recognizable stylistic manner. Active during a time when abstraction was the predominant artistic style, Buffet defended representational art and was an active member of the anti-abstraction group L’homme Témoin (The Witness-Man).