Albert Dubois-Pillet 1846-1890

Albert Dubois-Pillet was a career military officer and self-taught amateur painter, closely aligned with the Neo-Impressionists. Though not formally trained, various Salons accepted his still lifes for display as early as 1877.

A friend of Georges Seurat, Dubois-Pillet was a founder of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884, helping to write the statutes of the group and becoming one of the first artists to adopt Pointillism. Dubois-Pillet exhibited regularly with the Indépendants until 1889, and the only one-man exhibition of his work held in his lifetime took place at the Revue Indépendent in 1888.

He graduated from the Ecole Impériale Militaire at Saint-Cyr in 1867 and fought in the Franco-Prussian war. In an effort to camouflage his artistic activities from his military career, in 1884 he began to sign works of art "Dubois" with the addition of his mother's maiden name, "Pillet." Though the military forbade him from participating in art exhibitions in 1886, he remained active until his death.

Perhaps because of this defiance, in 1889 he was posted to Le Puy in south central France as commander of the local gendarmerie. He died there during a smallpox outbreak in 1890.

The next year, 64 of his works were shown posthumously in a show at the Salon des Indépendants, but due to a reported later fire, his work remains rare today.