PIERRE SAINT BLANCAT

Pierre Chatard was born on August 22, 1926 in Lépaud (Creuse). His house is a hive where his family is active who completed it after 1850 to make it a hotel, a small oil mill and a business of rental of threshing machines. Scandinavian painters, including Allan Österlind from Sweden; this is where his son Anders was born in 1887. All the ancestors of Pierre are from the region. For more than 5 centuries, they are millers, farmers bearing the name of their land, artisans or local noble families before the 15th century. They have in common to be fervent Catholics. In Lépaud, the great-grandfather is the president of the factory in 1905 and must manage as such, the inventory of property of the parish. Related to the republican senator Eugène Parry, his great uncle runs the Byrrh business. Pierre discovers Paris thanks to him during the international exhibition of 1937. His father Henri, teacher of training and veteran, officer of the Legion of Honor, joined the company. His mother Lucie takes him in cure during the holidays, in La Bourboule, Salies de Bearn or Cauteret.

During the exodus in 1940, the sculptor Paul Belmondo, who is a relative of a relative, lives in the house with his wife and their two children, Alain and the future actor Jean-Paul, 7 years old. Paul Belmondo walks on the roads of the town, accompanied by Pierre who draws at his side. The sculptor notices his drawings and suggests that he come to the Beaux-Arts, study with him. Pierre has good results in high school Montluçon. During the war, he takes a group of teenagers on November 11, 1940 to lay a wreath on the monument to the dead of the city which earns him during the Liberation to represent the students at the ceremony of victory. Passionate about medicine, he goes to study in Paris where his parents install him rue de Berne. His talent as a draftsman serves him in the study of anatomy where he excels. He marries in 1954 a colleague met in the paediatric ward of the hospital Bretonneau, niece of glass painter Louis Saint-Blancat: Jeanine is a descendant of ancient lines dating back to the 5th century, including many soldiers, crusaders of 1095, knights of Crécy, of Marignan, as well as a poet celebrated by Dante, Bertrand de Born. The couple decides to settle in Montmartre. Two boys will be born in 1956 (Jean-Pierre) and 1958 (François). Pierre joins the team of Professor Marche in Laennec Hospital. Fervent of Montaigne, whom he will retranslate into contemporary French, he admires intellectual doctors like Henri Mondor and Jean Delay, whose works feature prominently in his library. In the afternoon, he practices medicine in Montmartre. This is how he meets the painter Jean Germain Jacob with whom he begins to work in his studio at each free moment. Germain is then perceived as a conventional artist in the line of Maurice de Vlaminck. The disappearance of Germain in 1972 brings a new stage in the work of Pierre Chatard who abandons oil for watercolour and gouache preferring the light of the Norman skies from 1979 when he spent his August holidays near Granville. Another friendship born in Montmartre at the end of the 1950s, influences the rest of his life: Monseigneur Maxime Charles, rector of the Basilica and godfather of his son Benoît born in 1968. It is an opening to spirituality, the study intensive use of the Latin language and the gradual abandonment of philosophical readings undertaken following the meeting of Gabriel Marcel and long conversations with Jean Granier, the Nietzsche specialist. Aesthetically, Pierre breaks with the formalism of Germain and discovers expressionism through the work of Munch exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1974 and popularized in France in the following years. Deeply marked by the health problems of his eldest son, he illustrates texts by François Mauriac, poems by Paul Valéry, travels to the Czech Republic where his son Benoît emigrated and paints his last watercolours. He dies of cancer in Creuse May 12, 1998 where his agony is accompanied by an intense preparation for the meeting with God. His wife Jeanine keeps her work and shares her life with Benoît's family, which leads her successively to Belgium, Sweden where Marie Chatardova, her daughter-in-law, is ambassador of the Czech Republic, then Prague and finally Paris when Marie is there appointed ambassador in 2010. On February 7, 2013, Jeanine dies while listening to the Lauds and rests with Pierre in the cemetery of Lépaud.