Albert Dubois-Pillet

Born 1846 in Paris
Died 1890 in Le Puy-en-Velay

Dubois-Pillet, a self-taught artist, served in the military his whole life and belonged to the circle of the Neo-Impressionists.

Dubois-Pillet grew up in Toulouse and attended the military school in Saint-Cyr until 1867. He fought in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71 and participated in the suppression of the Paris Commune. An autodidact, he devoted himself to painting from the 1870s on.

After 1880, he was stationed as an officer in Paris, where his style became more experimental. In 1884, he helped found the Société des Artistes Indépendants along with Georges Seurat and Signac and embraced Neo-Impressionism, applying the technique to the genre of portraiture. In 1886, Dubois-Pillet was prohibited by the French military from exhibiting his work, a proscription he ignored. Probably as a result, he was transferred to Le Puy-en-Velay in the south of France in 1889, where he died shortly thereafter.

Dubois-Pillet in the collection

Albert Dubois-Pillet is represented with one work in the Hasso Plattner Collection, on view in the Museum Barberini as a permanent loan from the Hasso Plattner Foundation. With over 110 paintings of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, including masterpieces by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Gustave Caillebotte, and Paul Signac, the museum in Potsdam is one of the most important centers of Impressionist landscape painting in the world.