Louis Justin Laurent Icart, born in 1888 in Toulouse and died in 1950 in Paris, is a painter, draftsman, engraver and French illustrator.
Art Deco, a term coined at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, had taken its grip on the Paris of the 1920s.  By the late 1920s Icart, working for both publications and major fashion and design studios, had become very successful, both artistically and financially.  His etchings reached their height of brilliance in this era of Art Deco, and Icart had become the symbol of the epoch.  Yet, although Icart has created for us a picture of Paris and New York life in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked in his own style, derived principally from the study of eighteenth-century French masters such as Jean Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean Honoré Fragonard. 

In Icart's drawings, one sees the Impressionists Degas and Monet and, in his rare watercolors, the Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau.  In fact, Icart lived outside the fashionable artistic movements of the time and was not completely sympathetic to contemporary art.  Nonetheless, his Parisian scenes are a documentation of the life he saw around him and they are nearly as popular today as when they were first produced.
In 1914 Icart had met a magical, effervescent eighteen-year-old blonde named Fanny Volmers, at the time an employee of the fashion house Paquin.  She would eventually become his wife and a source of artistic inspiration for the rest of his life.