Albert Dubois-Pillet

Albert Dubois-Pillet (28 October 1846 – 18 August 1890) was a French Neo-impressionist painter and a career army officer. He was instrumental in the founding of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, and was one of the first artists to embrace Pointillism.

Louis-Auguste-Albert Dubois was born on 28 October 1846 in Paris. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Toulouse, where he was raised. In 1867, he graduated from l'Ecole Impériale Militaire in Saint-Cyr and began his career as a military officer. He remained in the army for the rest of his life.

From 1870 to 1871, he served in the Franco-Prussian War, during which the Germans captured him and held him in Westphalia, Prussia as a prisoner of war. After his release, he resumed a post in the Versailles army. Throughout the 1870s he was stationed at several different provincial posts. He received an appointment in 1879 or 1880 to la Légion de la Garde Républicaine (the Republican Guard) in Paris.

Although self-taught, with no formal art education, he proved to be a talented artist. The official Paris Salon accepted one of his still lifes in 1877, and another one in 1879. However, after his arrival in Paris, he created paintings which were somewhat more experimental, and his submissions were rejected by The Salons from 1880 to 1883.

Beginning in 1884, he attempted to hide his art-related activities from the military by disguising his name – he added "Pillet", his mother's maiden name, to his name, signing his artworks "Dubois-Pillet".

His painting Enfant Mort (Dead Child), completed in 1881, was displayed at the May 1884 Tuilleries Exhibition, where it caught the attention of Émile Zola, who used it as his inspiration for a scene in his 1886 novel L'Œuvre. In the book, artist Claude Lantier, distraught over his son's death, finds himself compelled to create a painting of his dead child.

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