A major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor whose most important contributions to the history of art were in his early alliance with Fauvism and the role he played in the development of Cubism with Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were comparable for many years, yet his quiet nature was partially eclipsed by Picasso's fame.

He originally trained to be a house painter and decorator but also studied artistic painting in the evenings. After moving to Paris, he attended the Académie Humbert in 1903, where he met Francis Picabia. His earliest works were Impressionist, but he adopted a Fauvist style after seeing the work of Henri Matisse and André Dérain and worked closely with Raoul Dufy. In 1907, his work became influenced by Paul Cézanne who had just died. Beginning in 1909, he began to work closely with Pablo Picasso who had been developing a similar proto-Cubist style of painting.

After enlisting with the French Army and being injured during WWI, Braque resumed painting in late 1916 and began to develop a more personal style characterised by brilliant colour, textured surfaces and the reappearance of the human figure.