Born in Paris in 1846, Louis Auguste Albert Dubois-Pillet (1846-1890) was a self taught artist and central figure in the Parisian avant garde. Educated at the military academy at Saint-Cyr, by 1880 he settled in Paris with the Garde Républicaine. Because of his education and military service, Dubois-Pillet is sometimes thought of as an amateur, but his sophistication and intellectual understanding of painting proves that this was not the case. His early work focused on naturalism. After his painting Dead Child (1881) was exhibited in 1884 with Les Indépendants, Emile Zola was moved to include it as a work by his fictional painter, Claude Lantier in L'Oeuvre (1886). It was around this time that Dubois-Pillet befriended Georges Seurat, Charles Angrand and Paul Signac. A founding member of Société des Artistes Indépendants, he wrote the statutes and chaired the group until his early death in 1890. Works by Dubois-Pillet are rare; the artist only lived to the age of 44, and many works in the estate were destroyed the following year in a studio fire.