mainly by drawing on stone and designing woodcut vignettes for book illustration. The publishing firm of Paulin employed him and in 1833 offered Français the opportunity to illustrate some of the ornate letters in Alain-René Lesage's Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane published in January 1835. The main illustrator of Lesage's work was Jean Gigoux, an eminent painter and illustrator and impressed by Français' potential he invited him to work at his Parisian atelier. Illustrator and printmaker As an illustrator Français had a long career, until 1860, during which he drew vignettes for numerous books and magazines. It was a lucrative occupation and allowed financial security whilst he simultaneously developed his painting techniques. His illustrations for a new edition of Bernardin's romantic novel Paul et Virginie in 1835 were recognised as a high watermark of romantic illustration and began a profitable and prolific collaboration with the engraver Tony Johannot, the culmination of which was around two hundred vignettes, including around fifty landscapes. He worked with his friends Henri Baron and Célestin Nanteuil on illustrations for Les Artistes anciens et modernes. Together they founded the revue Les artistes contemporains and worked in collaboration on numerous engravings for the publishing firm Bertauts, often using the monogram B.N.F. to identify their ownership. A noteworthy commission were the illustrations in L'abbé Jean-Jacques Bourassé's La Touraine. Histoire et monuments where Français provided forty wood engravings, five engraved plates and eleven beautiful ornate letters, for which he and his collaborator Karl Girardet, earned a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1855. Amongst the many prints that he supervised were those done after Corot's landscape, Sunset (1840), Diaz's Bathers (1847) and several of his own paintings. Many prints were reused, for example, Un Chemin (A Road) was first published in Paris by Augustin Challamel for the Paris salon of 1842. Ten years later a second state was published by Marchant for the series, Les Peintres vivants . Painting career In 1834 Français went to live at Barbizon and painted in the nearby Forest of Fontainbleu. He was part of the Barbizon school of artists dedicated to painting directly from nature, often en plein air, who settled in the area around the Auberge Ganne Inn. In a radical departure from formalism in art, nature itself became the subject of the painting. as many artists met at the Inn to discuss ideas and to set forth to paint