Henry Cheffer (1880 - 1957)

Son of Émile Cheffer, an engraver from Lorraine, and first cousin of Auguste Rodin, Henry was born in Paris in 1880. The young boy was immersed in an atmosphere favourable to creation and naturally devoted himself to an artistic career. After the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, where he was admitted in 1898, he attended the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1901. There he was a pupil of Bonnat, followed the courses of the portraitist Patricot and became an engraver. In 1906, Cheffer was awarded the first Prix de Rome for engraving and from then on began an official career that brought him all the honours and distinctions. A brilliant career for an artist of great talent who has been unjustly forgotten. A painter of reality, Cheffer is an aesthete sensitive to the beauty of the spectacle that the world offers him. He translates his plastic emotion directly on the motif in numerous sketches and watercolours or refines his engraved work in the secret of his studio. In 1913 he bought a plot of land in Tréboul to build a studio facing the sea. He would come there on pilgrimage 4 months a year, which means that Brittany was at the centre of his artistic life.