b Le Havre, 3 June 1877; d Forcalquier, Basses-Alpes, 23 March 1953.

French painter, printmaker and decorative artist. From the age of 14 he was employed as a book-keeper, but at the same time he developed his innate gift for drawing at evening classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre,given by the Neo-classical painter Charles Lhuillier (?1824–98). He discovered the work of Eugene Boudin, Poussin and Delacroix, whose Justice of Trajan (1840; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.) was ‘a revelation and certainly one of the most violent impressions’ of his life (Lassaigne, Eng. trans., p. 16). In 1900, with a grant from Le Havre, he joined his friend Othon Friesz in Paris and enrolled at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Leon Bonnat. At the Musee du Louvre he studied the art of Claude Lorrain, to whom he painted several Homages between 1927 and 1947 (e.g. 1927; Nice, Mus. Massena). His encounter with works by van Gogh at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and with Impressionism at Durand-Ruel is reflected in such early works as Beach at St Adresse (1904; Paris, Pompidou).