Unusually for a prominent artist of this period, he also designed pottery for a number of French factories, in an innovative style that marks the beginning of Japonisme in France. He was the husband of the Impressionist painter Marie Bracquemond. He was trained in early youth as a trade lithographer , until Joseph Guichard , a pupil of Ingres , took him to his studio. His work in painting is rather limited. It includes mostly portraits including that of Dr.
Horace Montegre, and of Paul Meurice. Painting interested him less than engraving. In , Edmond de Goncourt became close friends with Bracquemond, and they both shared a love of Japanese art, the engraver having been the first to discover an album by Hokusai. He applied himself to engraving and etching about , and played a leading and brilliant part in the revival of the etcher's art in France.
Altogether he produced over eight hundred plates, comprising portraits, landscapes, scenes of contemporary life, and bird-studies, besides numerous interpretations of other artist's paintings, especially those of Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier , Gustave Moreau and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
He entered the literary milieu thanks to Auguste Poulet-Malassis , publisher of Charles Baudelaire with whom Bracquemond became friends. He greatly helped Manet for his etchings of Olympia and L'Homme mort.
In Bracquemond participated in the first exhibition of Impressionist painters in the workshops of Nadar , Boulevard des Capucines , of artists that would be called the Impressionists. He exhibited again with his friends in He was seduced by this theme that made him the initiator of the vogue of Japonisme in France which seized the decorative arts during the second half of the 19th century. The latter commissioned him the motifs for a table service, for a project destined for the Universal Exhibition of For the first time a European artist directly copied a Japanese artist, reproducing the animal figures of the Hokusai Manga.
