Pierre Aristide André Brouillet was a French academic painter specialising in genre painting, portraits and landscapes.
Born in Charroux, the son of sculptor Pierre-Amédée Brouillet and Élisabeth Leriget, Brouillet began engineering studies at the École centrale Paris in 1876 before entering the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts three years later, where he was a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme. In the year of his reception at the Salon de peinture et de sculpture in 1879, he attended Jean-Paul Laurens' lessons.
During his career, he received numerous exhibition awards and numerous public commissions.
He is best known for his painting A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière which represents the neurologist Jean Martin Charcot examining the hysterical patient Marie Wittman, during one of these famous "Tuesday lessons", which he had made a real show. Charcot is represented there with a large number of his students and collaborators, including Théodule-Armand Ribot, Paul Richer and Gilles de La Tourette. The neurologist Joseph Babinski is also present, supporting the patient.
Brouillet is also the author of La Violation du tombeau d'Urgel par les Dominicains L'Exorcisme - Musiciens arabes chassant le djinn du corps d'un enfant, Le Paysan blessé (Salon of 1886), L'Ambulance de la Comédie-Française en 1870 (1891), Le Vaccin du croup à l'hôpital Trousseau (1895), as well as portraits of personalities of the time, including Joseph Babinski.
Influenced by his master Jean-Léon Gérôme, Brouillet devoted himself to orientalist painting, thanks to his discovery of his wife, Emma Isaac, native country, daughter of a rich Constantine Jewish merchant, cousin of Ferdinand Isaac, whose daughter, Yvonne, born out of wedlock in 1889 in Constantine, he even adopted when his mother, Marie-Louise Travers died 19 December 1892. The following year, in 1893, when he returned to France with his adopted daughter, he raised Yvonne as his own daughter, representing her in no less than fourteen paintings. A student of the singer Louise Grandjean, she was hired on June 25, 1911, at the Opéra-Comique as a lyrical singer, under the stage name "Yvonne Florentz" and married the composer Joseph-Eugène Szyfer [nl] in 1913.
Brouillet visited Greece twice, first in 1901 for a state commission (Renan meditating on his prayer on the Acropolis) and then in 1903 to paint th portrait of the Queen Olga of Greece, in 1901. In 1904, the newspaper Fémina consecrated him as the "peintre de la femme". In 1906, he was made an officier of the Légion d'honneur at the same time as he received the gold medal at the Salon where he presented his great composition for the Sorbonne Les étudiants acclament Edgar Quinet et Edmond Michelet le 6 mars 1848 lorsqu'ils reprennent possession de leur chaire.
He left on an icy road to rescue a convoy of Belgian refugees on 6 December 1914, became congested and died a few hours later. His funeral was held in Couhé-Vérac.
