Lucien Hector Monod 1867-1957

Lucien Hector Monod was a French painter associated in his early career with the Symbolist movement, as well as a draftsman and printmaker. He was born on July 21, 1867, in Paris and died on July 1, 1957.

He was the father of the Resistance member Philippe Monod and the scientist Jacques Monod, and cousin of the Impressionist painter Wilfrid de Glehn.

The son of Gustave Louis Monod and Louise Catherine Armand-Delille, Lucien Monod came from a Swiss family of Reformed tradition that had settled in France in 1808. The Monod family included many pastors, and Lucien was the first to dedicate himself to the arts. From 1886 to 1889, he studied at the Académie Julian, notably in the studio of Puvis de Chavannes.

From 1891, he joined the Société nationale des beaux-arts and regularly exhibited at the Salon des artistes français. In 1899, La Voix des sources, a lithograph after a poem by Henri de Régnier, was published in L’Estampe moderne. He also contributed to the art magazine The Studio.

He married Suzanne Robineau (1868–1893) in 1892, the daughter of his cousin Hélène Stapfer-Robineau; she died giving birth to their daughter Juliette. Lucien Monod also had a son in 1900, Philippe. In 1896, he married the American Charlotte Todd McGregor, and the couple had a child in 1910, Jacques. The family moved to Cannes in 1917 to a house built by Lucien himself.

Among other works, he produced a portrait engraving of James George Frazer in 1933.

Lucien Monod is also the author of a major nine-volume study on the print market, published by the art publisher Albert Morancé from 1920 to 1931, titled Aide-mémoire de l’amateur et du professionnel : le prix des estampes, anciennes et modernes, prix atteints dans les ventes - suites et états, biographies et bibliographies. This work includes one of the first monographs on the prints of Félix Vallotton.