Jean Lachaud – Modernist Breton Still Life With Needlefish And Onions. France, 1930s

1930s French still life with needlefish and onions. Signed oil by Jean Lachaud, painter and ceramicist active in Brittany.
Jean Lachaud (1882–1952) Les Aiguillettes, signed lower right Oil on cardboard Dimensions: 50 × 60 cm (without frame); 77 × 67 cm (with frame) Original painted wood frame
Two long, slender needlefish lie across a bold yellow tablecloth, flanked by onions, garlic, and spring shallots. Everything is balanced, intentionally placed, shaped with the precision of a ceramicist’s eye. The palette is bold yet harmonious, the forms flattened and stylised—an artist’s game of volume and silence. This is not a traditional still life, it is a composition orchestrated, almost choreographed.
Les Aiguillettes speaks of a joy of life, of everyday subjects elevated through line, colour, and clarity. It flirts with Art Deco, nods to the Paris School of the 1930s, and recalls the formal logic of someone who designed ceramic services as much as he painted. There is rhythm here. There is humour. And there is a deep knowledge of pictorial structure, transformed into something generous and modern.

The Artist

Jean Lachaud was no outsider. He was very much part of a world. A friend of Max Jacob, close to Marguerite Sérusier, he lived and worked in Quimper, where his mother and sister ran a family restaurant frequented by artists. Lachaud decorated the plates, designed the interiors, painted the fish he saw every day, and transformed them into stylised motifs—on canvas, and in clay.
He exhibited regularly at the Salon d’Automne in Paris from the 1920s onwards. He later became director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Brest and curator of the city’s museum, where he played a key role in protecting the collections during the Second World War.
His ceramics—produced in collaboration with the famous HB-Henriot manufactory—are now sought after by collectors, particularly his tableware sets adorned with marine motifs from the 1930s. His works are held in the museums of Brest, Quimper, and in private collections focused on 20th-century Breton art.