Andre Lhote was born in Bordeaux on the 5th of July 1885 and died in Paris in 1962. He was a painter of subjects such as sports, nudes, portraits, still-lifes and was also an illustrator and an engraver. In Bordeaux he studied decorative sculpture for ten years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. This self-taught erudite started painting after reading les Salons de Diderot, the Delacroix Journal and the Curiosités esthétiques de Beaudelaire. In 1905 he gave up sculpture to concentrate on painting and by 1906 he was settled in Paris. He learned how to appreciate the Impressionists, he admired Gauguin and copied Rubens and Delacroix.
His early work was fauvist in spirit but from 1911 he started to adopt cubist mannerisms over a varied assortment of themes from still life to mythology. As early as 1918, he taught in different academies and founded his own in 1922 in rue d’Odessa. He was keen to escape the assumption that has talents lay heavily in writing on art rather than the practice of it, but despite this he published (under the title De la Palette a l’écritoire) some very interesting texts about the great Masters including, Leonardo da Vinci. The essential of his teaching is found in two essays entitled: Traité du paysage and Traité de la figure. He was a remarkable master who managed to extract all the transmissible elements of past and present works of art. He participated at the Salon des Indépendants from 1906, the Salon d’automne in 1907, the exhibition of the Section d’Or in 1912 and in 1910 the Galerie Druet organised his first one man show. He also participated in the first cubist exhibitions. His later work included some large decorative works, notably a set of three panels entitled Gloire de Bordeaux for the faculty of Medicine in Bordeaux.
In 1958, a retrospective of his work was shown in the Musée national d’Art moderne in Paris. Many museums contain examples of his work including Aarau, Bordeaux, Chicago, Geneva, Grenoble, Liege, Los Angeles, Nantes, Paris (12 paintings), Saint-Tropez and Stockholm.