Vocation : Art : Fine art artist

Louis Pierre Mouillard (September 30, 1834 – September 20, 1897) was a French artist and innovator who worked on human mechanical flight in the second half of the 19th century. He based much of his work on the investigation of birds in Algeria and Cairo. Around the early 1900s he was considered the father of aviation.
Mouillard's most famous work, L'Empire de l'Air, in which he proposed fixed-wing gliders, was published in France in 1881 and soon became a widely recognized classic. It was translated into English by the Smithsonian Institution in their annual report of 1892 and reprinted in 1893 as The Empire Of The Air.
Mouillard studied at the School of Fine Arts at Lyon and Paris but settled in Algeria at Mitidja after the death of his father. Here he constructed several gliders before returning to France in 1865. Around this time he managed to glide 138 feet at about 30 feet height. He also described the use of a screw to provide lift and propulsion to a glider in 1890. He was appointed a professor of drawing at the Cairo Polytechnic in 1866 during which time he took a lot of interest in the flight of vultures. He studied the requirements of gliding flight in birds. In 1897 his design was patented in the United States of America by Octave Chanute. His biographer Arthur Henry Couannier posthumously published a book on gliding flight in 1912 titled Le vol sans battement (flight without flapping). He foresaw the use of aluminium as the metal of choice for aircraft and was possibly the first - with the possible exception of British engineer M.P.W. Boulton in 1868 - to introduce control surfaces to the wing.
Mouillard realized the importance of wings, gliding and the future of aviation at a time when balloons were considered the only practical way to carry humans and flapping machines had failed. He inspired the work of many others including Octave Chanute and Otto Lilienthal. Mouillard was described by Wilbur Wright as one of the greatest missionaries of the flying cause. Mouillard believed that flight would unify the world, that the empire of the air would be for all humanity to own and that it would eliminate the need for boundaries and armies. He has been termed as a utopian:
C'est même la suppression, dans un temps très court, des nationalités: les races seront rapidement mélangées ou détruites, car il n'y aura plus de barrières possibles, pas même ces barrières mouvantes qui se nomment les armées. Plus de frontières!... plus d'îles!... plus de forteresses!... où allons-nous? Il faut bien avouer que nous sommes en face de la plus large expression de l'inconnu ... Nous pouvons donc nous rasséréner et contempler ce but avec calme: ce phare, c'est cette immense loi de la nature qui se nomme le progrès; et progrès est synonyme de bien.
Translated: "This will result in the rapid removal of nationalities: races will be mixed or quickly destroyed, as there will be no barriers, not even these moving barriers that are called armies. No more borders! ... or islands! ... or fortresses! ... Where are we going? We must admit that we are facing the great unknown [...] But we can reassure ourselves of the results, this is the law of nature we call progress, and progress is synonymous with good."

Mouillard died, largely unrecognized and in poverty, at Cairo in 1897. In February 1912 a statue was erected in Cairo to his memory. The statue was made by Guillaume Laplagne and was erected on a black basalt base and was located near the Heliopolis Grand Hotel but this no longer exists. The base of the pedestal bears the word Oser! meaning "dare" which he had printed on the cover of his book. The vulture in front of the pedestal is based on his illustration used in his 1881 book. Rue Pierre-Mouillard is a Paris street named in his honour.

Gustave Brion (1824–1877) was a French painter and illustrator. He was born at Rothau in the department of Bas-Rhin on 24 October 1824. In 1841, in Strasbourg, he entered the studio of Gabriel Guérin, with whom he remained three years; he also received tuition from Andreas Friedrich, the sculptor; but he soon afterwards went to Paris, where his first work appeared at the Salon in 1847; it was entitled Interior of a Farm at Dambach. Six years later he gained a medal of the second class for his 'Schlitteurs de la Foret-Noire' and the Potato Harvest during an Inundation, the former of which was subsequently burned at Strassburg by the Prussians. His fame was further established by his Le Train de Bois sur le Rhin in 1855, and from that time his works continued to increase in public favour, and gained considerable praise and recompense for their author. Brion received numerous medals in 1853, 1863, 1867, 1868, &c., and the decoration of the Legion of Honour in 1863. He died in Paris 3 November 1877.
With few exceptions, such as the 'Siege of a Town by Romans under Julius Caesar, painted on commission for Napoleon III, and at the cost of much research to the artist, Brion rarely indulged in historical subjects. He delighted to represent peasants in their natural avocations: here they gather in their potatoes or chat by the village well; there they conduct barges laden with wood down the river; now we see them at a marriage, now hearing mass or attending a burial. Putting aside several subjects drawn from Normandy and Brittany, from the Basque Provinces, and from a stay in Italy, Brion remained true to his love of
Alsace, and it is of the doings of her peasantry that he tells us in his paintings.
Brion also worked as a book illustrator. His most famous designs are those for the first edition of Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, for which he created the first portrayal of Inspector Javert. He also illustrated Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, in which he depicted Quasimodo and Esmeralda.
Brion was a nephew of the legendary Friederike Brion.

François-Raoul Larche (1860 in Saint-André-de-Cubzac – 1912 in Paris) was a French Art Nouveau sculptor whose work included several figures of Christ, but who may be better known for his numerous female figures, both nude and draped.
He was one of several artists inspired by the dancer Loie Fuller; one of his best-known statues depicts Fuller dancing with part of her drapery billowing above and behind her head like a flame.
Another well-known sculpture, Les Violettes, depicts a group of nude children with an older girl who may be their mother or older sister. Their bodies are entwined with flower stems and leaves and they are all wearing petal bonnets, suggesting that they are meant to represent the spirits of flowers.

The artist André Hambourg (5 May 1909 – 4 December 1999) was a French painter of romantic compositions of Venice, luminous seascapes, and beach scenes.

Robert Delandre (6 October 1879, Elbeuf - 2 June 1961, Paris) was a French sculptor. He was a student of Alexandre Falguière and Denys Puech.

Alain Jacquet (22 February 1939 – 4 September 2008) was a French artist representative of the Nouvelle Figuration movement that was linked to the American Pop Art movement.
Jacquet lived in New York and Paris and taught at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. He was married (1992) to Sophie Matisse, great-granddaughter of the French Fauvist artist Henri Matisse. They had one daughter, Gaïa Jacquet-Matisse. Jacquet's art is displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, in Paris. Jacquet died of esophageal cancer in Manhattan.

Théophile François Marcel Bra (23 June 1797, Douai - 1863) was a French Romantic sculptor and exact contemporary of Eugène Delacroix. He was deeply involved in the Romantic era through his uncompromising personality and complex spirituality. His fantastical inspiration evokes the universes inhabited by Goya, William Blake or Victor Hugo - he was at one and the same time a Bonapartist and an anglophile, a passionate Christian disciple of Swedenborg and an admirer of Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism.