Fernand M. E. Legout-Gérard

Biography of Fernand M. E. Legout-Gérard ( 1854-1925 )

Born in Saint-Lô on 29 October 1856, Fernand Le Gout-Gérard belonged to a generation of artists who, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, revitalised genre painting by basing it on keen observation of reality. A painter, watercolourist and etcher, he died in Paris in 1924 (sources vary between 11 and 14 August). 

His career path is striking, first of all because of its late change of direction. Educated at the college in Saint-Lô, he pursued a career in financial administration (as a tax collector, then as an authorised representative of the Manche Treasury) before deciding, at the age of 33, to give up the security of a government job to devote himself entirely to painting. This was not the choice of a dilettante: from the late 1880s onwards, he became part of the official art world and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1889 onwards, demonstrating his structured professional ambition and rapid integration into the contemporary art scene.

Around 1890, Legout-Gérard discovered Concarneau, a decisive anchor point for his imagination. For him, Brittany was not simply a picturesque backdrop: it became a human theatre, a laboratory of forms and rhythms where markets, ports, fishing returns and processions of silhouettes intersected. In 1903, he settled there permanently in the villa Ty Ker Moor, soon described as a place of encounter and emulation for the “painters of Concarneau”. This centrality in Concarneau earned him the title — already used by local critics — of “painter par excellence of the markets and ports of Brittany”. 

The artist was not content with simply being present: he achieved significant institutional recognition. A member of the Société nationale des beaux-arts and the Pastel Society of London, he was appointed official painter to the Navy on 27 September 1900, a title that confirmed the harmony between his vision and the maritime world, captured not as abstract heroism but as a daily routine of work, waiting and exchanges. His use of colour etching, printed notably by Eugène Delâtre, extended this attention to atmosphere: printmaking offered him equivalents of salty mist, harbour vibrations and changing light — another, more synthetic way of capturing coastal life. 

His style, often described as that of a ‘painter of silhouettes’, is based on the art of capturing collective movement: women in headdresses, children, sailors, market stalls, queues and crowds — all motifs in which the narrative arises from the simple arrangement of bodies. Added to this visual dimension is a civic commitment to Concarneau, which is remembered locally (Fête des Filets Bleus, defence of the ramparts of the Ville-Close). 

Finally, Legout-Gérard's critical and museum posterity has been structured at least since the major retrospective at the Musée du Faouët (12 June – 3 October 2010), accompanied by a monographic catalogue referenced at the BnF — a sign that, beyond its picturesque appeal, his work deserves to be reinterpreted as a sensitive testimony to maritime and rural sociability in Brittany at the turn of the century.