Hélène Feillet (paris 1812 – Biarritz 1889) “basque Honor Guard” Watercolor 26 X 21 Cm

Hélène FEILLET (Paris 1812 – Biarritz 1889) “Basque Guard of Honor” Watercolor on paper signed lower left Framed under glass  H: 26.5 cm x L: 21,5 cm  (paper dimensions) Biography of Hélène Feillet - Text credit: Musée Basque et de l'histoire de Bayonne Hélène was born in Paris on November 2, 1812. Her first teacher was her own father Pierre Feillet, who abandoned his military career for art and engraving. But her real master, in Paris, was the Dutchman Ary Scheffer, who trained her in portrait technique. With her sister Blanche, Hélène Feillet accompanied her father to Madrid in 1829. When the family settled permanently in Bayonne in 1834, Hélène continued to work for Spanish magazines. She provided five plates to the most emblematic magazine of Spanish Romanticism in Madrid, El Artista. Some of her engravings are among the most beautiful and representative of Iberian romantic imagery. In the years 1835-1840 in Bayonne, Hélène illustrated with six lithographs the work of Félix Morel, Bayonne, vues historiques et descriptives. Then, she illustrated with her sister the work of her brother-in-law Charles-Henri Hennebutte the Album des deux frontières ou le Guide du voyageur de Bayonne à Saint-Sébastien. Hélène and Blanche prepared these publications by traveling in the provinces to carry out the preparatory surveys and draw the subjects necessary for this work. They produced a series of lithographs, mainly representing landscapes but also some ethnographic subjects. Despite this great activity as an illustrator, Hélène remained a painter above all. She exhibited for the first time, in 1836, at the Paris Salon a portrait of Juana Cano which made the Gazette de France write: "Here is another beautiful, almost Spanish artist, Mlle Hélène Feillet, whose works were exhibited at the Madrid Museum in 1934. […] She exhibited at the 1845 Salon a subject that was both historical and local: Embarkation of La Fayette in 1777 at the port of Passages during his first voyage to America, and at the 1848 Salon: View of Irun, of Fontarrabie and of the mouth of the Bidassoa in the Ocean. The success of her paintings gave her financial ease which allowed her to buy in 1851 for her father a plot of land adjoining the Grande Plage in Biarritz and to build two large houses there, including the villa "Feillet". She acquired the Daguerre estate in Brindos in the territory of Anglet where she lived with her father. She died at her home in the Villa Léonard, rue de l'industrie in Biarritz, on December 9, 1889. A street bears her name in Bayonne.