Apple Merchant From Plonéour Trez By Louis-henri Nicot - Henriot Factory - Brittany

Henriot manufacture in polychrome earthenware, circa 1930. Signature of the author in relief on the terrace. Height 22 cm, width 12 cm

Louis-Henri Nicot (1878-1944) followed his artistic education at the Beaux Arts in Rennes with Coquelin, Lenoir, Ronsin then in Paris with Falguière, Mercié, Peter. During these years of very academic teaching, the artist was frequently honored. He completed his studies in 1909. Very quickly the Breton theme appeared in his work. After the war of 14-18 Nicot became one of the major Breton sculptors. From the outset, he was not among the artists who conveyed the greatest modernism. He created many war memorials in Brittany: Pleurtuit 1920, Guéméné-Penfao 1921, Montfort-sur-Meu 1923. But also outside Brittany, such as the Monument to the Army of Occupation of the Rhine located in Mainz. In 1922, he became a professor at the School of Applied Arts in Industry. His collaboration with the Manufacture Henriot was through Mathurin Méheut, a long-time acquaintance, and began in 1924. He created extremely local subjects for them that played on the permanence of a certain staid image of Brittany, unless it was an ethnographic approach, so obvious was the precision of the costumes. Thanks to Nicot, Brittany regained its reassuring and very conservative image that artists, adept at more modernity, tried to make it abandon through the decorative arts. Regular exhibitions, numerous busts, steles and commemorative works, a continuous presence at the Salon des artistes français recognized by a gold medal in 1933, the official recognition of a title of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor the same year, all contribute to making Louis-Henri Nicot an artist as recognized as consensual. The artist died in 1944, while he was preparing the edition of new ceramic works in Quimper.