SEMPÉ ORCHESTRE

Jigsaw Puzzle 1000 pieces with its large design for model. Dimensions of the puzzle once completed is 68 x 49 cm. 

After Paris, New York is the city of choice for Jean-Jacques Sempé's drawings. Uniquely for a Frenchman, he drew 101 covers for the New Yorker, fulfilling his teenage dream. Who could capture the poetry and irony of the megalopolis with such subtlety, if not this artist of detail with a humorous eye? With Sempé, New York is a festival of colors and styles, through its communities, its rituals and its incessant movement.

Sempé was born on August 17, 1932 in Bordeaux. His studies were not very good and he was expelled for indiscipline from the Collège moderne de Bordeaux. He then started his working life as a handyman for a wine broker, a summer camp instructor and an office boy... At eighteen, he anticipated the call and went to Paris. He scoured the newsrooms and, in 1951, sold his first drawing to Sud-Ouest. His meeting with Goscinny coincided with the beginning of a dazzling career as a "press cartoonist". Rien n'est simple, his first album of drawings, appeared in 1962. About forty would follow, masterpieces of humor that wonderfully translated his tenderly ironic vision of our shortcomings and the world's failings. Sempé is one of the few French cartoonists to illustrate the covers of the very prestigious The New Yorker, and today he makes thousands of readers smile in Paris Match.

In 1992, Martine Gossieaux opened a gallery dedicated to her passion since childhood: humor drawings. The one that interests her most is the timeless, elegant drawing. She is the agent and editor of Sempé, with whom she has collaborated since the 1980s. The gallery exhibits the cartoonist's original drawings every year at 56 rue de l'Université in Paris, publishes original engravings and prints, books and regularly organizes the large-scale exhibitions dedicated to him all over the world in museums and cultural venues. In 2018, the Jean-Jacques Sempé Endowment Fund was created by the cartoonist to diffuse and promote his work.

Our products are 100% French, handmade and assembled in our Parisian workshops.