Brief Biography-Fernand Pelez was from Paris, where he spent his life. His father, a painter, taught him from an early age, and he later graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Paris. He became a teacher in a Paris School. He started as a history painter but came under Jules Bastien-Lepage's influence; the Spanish artist Bartolomè Esteban Murillo inspired his child beggars. His paintings of deprived life and misery may have contributed to his commercial failure as an artist. People were not interested in buying pictures of street beggars and starving people queuing fo bread.