Marcel Thomas (1909-2000) - portrait de Gérard Philippe - cachet de l'expert Gérard Gagnepain au verso

Very beautiful photograph by Marcel Thomas, depicting Gérard Philippe, a French actor, a major figure in theatre and cinema of the 1940s-1950s.

Marcel Thomas is a French photographer with an atypical career. It was after World War II that he settled in Paris, working in garment-making. From 1947 to 1990, thanks to the help of doormen and friends in the great Parisian hotels, he photographed, with their consent, hundreds of French and international stars. He approached them with a friend who asked for an autograph, then who proposed that his companion take a photo of them; hence the 'posed' aspect and not 'stolen' about it.

Marcel Thomas took these photos as a hobby and did not commercialize them, but he accumulated several thousand. Shortly before his death in August 2000, he bequeathed his photos to his friend the writer Gérard Gagnepain, whom he charged with making his collection known.