Paul Herrmann, painter, printmaker, illustrator, and cartoonist, was born in Munich, Germany on 4 February 1864. He attended Max Ebersberger’s School of Painting and then studied architecture with the German painter and architect, Friedrich von Thiersch. Herrmann also studied with Professors Raab and Lötz at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, followed by several semesters at the Royal School of Applied Arts with Ferdinand Barth. In the early 1880s, Herrmann worked as a restorer of frescoes and panoramas in Swabia and Bavaria.

Herrmann visited the United States around 1893 and stayed in New York and Chicago where he supported himself by painting portraits. In 1895, he moved to Paris where he adopted the pseudonym Henri Héran to avoid confusion with the French painter and printmaker Hermann-Paul who was also born in 1864. Héran worked in drypoint, woodcut, and lithography and he experimented with combining lithography and woodcut as early as 1896. His Playful Mermaid of 1897 was created by printing an impression of a lithograph and the overprinting the lithograph with three colors using wood blocks. Héran created cartoons for Le Centaure and Pan. He also contributed work to l’Estampe Moderne. While in Paris he moved within the circles of Edvard Munch, August Strindberg and Oscar Wilde.

In 1906, Paul Herrmann (a.k.a. Héran) moved to Berlin and, in 1907, his illustrated Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en Prose. Upon settling in Berlin, he resumed using his birth name.

The work of Paul Herrmann (Henri Héran) is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the British Museum, London; the University Art Collection, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.; and the Clark Museum, the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Paul Herrmann died on 1 May 1946 in Berlin, Germany.