Bilis created a literary, artistic & musical pantheon, crunching his brilliant and precise charcoal line. The French National Library owns his portraits at the famous Cabinet of Prints. His series of portraits – all charcoal drawings – constitutes an extraordinary testimonial of the iconography of our time and covers half a century of cultural, political and scientific life. He drew more than 2 000 French as well as foreign personalities in the most diverse fields of notoriety, such as inventors or scholars.