The Romanian-born American painter and cartoonist Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) moved to New York in 1941 and has been a regular contributor to the “New Yorker” ever since. “My influences”, he once wrote, “range over the whole history of art: Egyptian wall-paintings, graffiti in public lavatories, the primitives, the insane, Seurat, childrens’ drawings, tapestry, Paul Klee.”

During the Seventies, Steinberg developed the theme of human solitude: empty beaches where the human figure is a dot in the distance, pastel-shaded skies where the sun is represented by a trompe l’oeil circle of sealing wax. It is this quirky view of the world that inspired his design for the Mouton Rothschild label of 1983.