Eugène Henri Alexandre Chigot (1860–1923) was a post impressionist French painter. A pupil of his father, the military painter Alphonse Chigot, in 1881 he entered the internationally renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he was exposed to the ideas of the realist movement of the Barbizon School and to Impressionism. He settled in Étaples in the Pas-de-Calais in an artists’ colony, later returning to Paris where he became a founder of the Salon d’Automne. An official military painter he painted a series of canvases in Calais and Nieuwpoort recording the destruction caused by the First World War. Chigot's reputation was built on his maritime and landscape paintings that arose from his affinity to Flanders and the Pas-de-Calais. He recorded the lives of the people of Flanders placing them within a landscape of soft opalescent light. Later his paintings show traces of expressionism and a more vibrant pallette. He was also a skilled nocturne painter who travelled extensively within France, Italy and Spain.
Early years
Eugène Chigot was born in Valenciennes in French Flanders on 22 November 1860, the fourth child of six of Alphonse Chigot (1824 – 1917) and Pauline Chigot (née Dubreuil) (1825 – 1910). His father was a former soldier and war artist who had served in the North African campaigns of the 1840s and later studied art in Valenciennes under Julien Potier. Eugène attended the Collège et Lycée Notre Dame des Dunes in Dunkerque where he met and befriended Henri Le Sidaner, who was to become a lifelong friend and supporter. His initial art training was as a pupil with his father Alphonse who operated an atelier in Valenciennes. His Father was not initially supportive of his son becoming a full-time artist but acquiesced to his son's wishes upon the intervention of his artist colleague Alfred Philippe Roll (1846 – 1919), a former pupil of Léon Bonnat. In 1880 Chigot joined the atelier of Alexandre Cabanel and from 1881 until 1886 he attended the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, at which he studied under Bonnat, and Cabanel. The latter's influence on the young Chigot was considerable. Although Cabanel mainly painted in an academic style, that was dismissed derisively as L'art pompier (literally ‘Fireman art’) by some critics, he was a skilled painter with a deep knowledge of nineteenth century French art, in particular impressionism and the naturalism of the Barbizon School from which Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny were significant influences on Chigot. Chigot's interests in the use of colour, softness of form and in atmospheric weather were formed under Cabanel's tutelage.
The Colonie artistique d'Étaples
Following his pupillage in Paris, Chigot searched for an appropriate environment from where he could paint. Initially he travelled to the south of France and to Italy. At this stage in his career Chigot favoured ‘En plein air’ painting, a theory credited to Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) that he expounded in a treatise entitled Reflections and Advice to a Student on Painting, Particularly on Landscape (1800) developing the concept of landscape portraiture by which the artist paints directly onto canvas in situ within the landscape. It enabled the artist to better capture the changing details of weather and light.
Eugène Chigot began exhibiting at the Paris Salon in 1884 and would continue to do so until 1924. He was commended by the jury in 1885 for Portrait des Artistes Français, before winning a third class medal in 1887 for La pêche interrompre and a second-class medal in 1890 for the maritime painting Prière du soir. These successes came with a monetary award which funded a stay in Spain in 1887. He then joined his long-term friend Henri Le Sidaner at Étaples on the Opal Coast, south of Calais where they established an artists’ workshop and regular exhibitions that would eventually develop into a school of art, called the Villa des Roses. Étaples had a tradition of en plein air painting established by Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878), who retreated there from the outbreak of the Paris Commune in 1871 and of the local Deauville painter Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), a leading post impressionist. In the period until the start of World War I in 1914 the area attracted numerous artists from abroad particularly the United States, Australia and the British Isles