Michel-Auguste Colle (1872 - 1949)

Michel-Auguste Colle was a neo-Impressionist painter who mainly painted landscapes of his native Lorraine and the Guérande peninsula. 

Orphaned at the age of 13, he was apprenticed to the Cristalleries de Baccarat, his birthplace, as a gilder, then as an engraver of plates for chemical etching. He developed a taste for drawing and painting, encouraged by Charles Pecatte, a painter from Lorraine. An astute art lover, Eugène Corbin, noticed his talent and introduced him to the great Lorraine painters Charles de Meixmoron de Dombasle, Émile Friant and Victor Prouvé. Corbin eventually took him on as a contract painter until 1911, when he painted some 500 canvases or watercolors, mostly inspired by the landscapes of his native region.

From 1903 to 1911, he exhibited at the Société nationale des beaux-arts, the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon des indépendants, then from 1911 at the Salon des artistes français, where he won an honorable mention in 1920 and a silver medal the following year. The Parisian Salons gave him the opportunity to meet Jules Adler, Jean-Paul Laurens and Charles Cottet.

After many trips between France and North Africa, the Colle family finally settled on the Guérande peninsula in 1920 to spend the summer. First in Mesquer, before buying a small house in Kervalet in 1926. This house became their main residence from 1940 onwards.

The Musée de Batz-sur-Mer devoted an exhibition to him from June 14 to November 16, 2014. Michel Colle is in numerous museums, including Rennes, Nantes, Guérande, Batz-sur-Mer, Baccarat, Nancy, the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the collections of the Senate, Paris City Hall and the Collège de France, as well as in Brussels and Pittsburg.