Cormorant, Engraving - Mathurin Méheut (1882-1958)

Cormorant
in the series "Studies of animals"
Photogravure

Plate produced by Mathurin Méheut, under the direction of Eugène Grasset
Published by the Central Library of Fine Arts in Paris
Emile Lévy editor

France
1911
dimensions with frame: 34 x 44 cm

Biography:
Mathurin Méheut (1882-1958) is a French painter and illustrator. He was born into a family of craftsmen. In 1896, he apprenticed in Lamballe with Mathurin Guernion, house painter; from which are known his first dated drawings. He entered the Regional School of Fine Arts in Rennes in 1898 and spent a month in Paris in 1900. In 1902, he moved to Paris. He works for the magazine Art & Décoration and publishes illustrations on fish and corals. At the same time, he enrolled at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris. From 1910 to 1912, he stayed and worked at the Roscoff biological station, from where he could observe and draw the marine environment in a scientific context. There he created the foundations of the book Étude de la mer in 1913-1914. An exhibition dedicated to him at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1913 brought together 450 works on marine flora and fauna produced in Roscoff. The magazine L'Illustration publishes several of his paintings in color. The Oceanographic Museum of Monaco and the Luxembourg Museum in Paris acquire some of his works. Mathurin Méheut is a laureate of the "Around the world scholarship" awarded by the Albert-Kahn Foundation. He could thus travel to Hawaii and then to Japan where his stay was interrupted by the mobilization of the First World War. Méheut then returned to France. He made his war sketches showing life in the trenches. He was demobilized in 1919.

After the armistice, Mathurin Méheut returned to his native Brittany and worked as a decorator and illustrator. Become official painter of the Navy in 1921, Méheut demonstrated a diversified activity: between 1924 and 1935, he participated in the decoration of nine liners including the Normandie. He is also a book illustrator, collaborates as a ceramist for the Henriot earthenware factory in Quimper. At the same time, Méheut resumed his teaching post at the Boulle School in Paris until 1928. In 1926, Méheut joined the Society of Decorative Artists and produced his first ceramics for the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres in 1927. Witness of an era , fascinated by the people and the landscapes of his native province, he crisscrosses Brittany from Rennes to Dinan, from Roscoff to Saint-Guénolé in Bigouden country, leaving an abundant production and a precise and multifaceted testimony of Breton life in his time. He taught from 1940 to 1944 at the School of Fine Arts in Rennes. Mathurin Méheut was elected to the Marine Academy in 1956.