The land of monsters. Léopold Chauveau (1870-1940)

Chronology

Portrait of Léopold Chauveau

19 February 1870

Birth of Léopold Chauveau in Lyon.

1894

After studying medicine to please his father, Léopold became a doctor at 24 and worked in a Parisian hospital.

1897

Aged 27, he married Renée.

1899

Aged 29, he became a father for the first time with the birth of his son Pierre. Michel was born two years later in 1901.

1902 - 1905

From the age of 30, Léopold sculpted his first monsters. He met Georges Lacombe, a painter and sculptor who became his friend.

1906

He was 36 years old when his third son Renaud was born

1910

Aged 40, Léopold left Samoëns in Haute-Savoie to settle in Switzerland and began to draw his first monsters with ink.

1912

Aged 42, he became a father for the fourth time, of a boy named Olivier

1914

Léopold was 44 when the First World War broke out. He looked after the wounded soldiers.

1915 puis 1918

During the war, Léopold lost his eldest son Pierre, his wife Renée, and his third son Renaud

1921 - 1923

At 50, Léopold decided to stop practicing medicine. He moved to Paris to devote himself to drawing and writing children's stories.

1924 - 1939

Aged 53, he remarried with the nurse Madeleine. They lived in Paris in the XIVth arrondissement. Until the end of his life Léopold drew several series of Monstrous Landscapes in watercolor and gouache and continued to publish books for children and adults.

Leopold was almost 70 years old when the Second World War started. He left Paris to stay with his friend the writer Roger Martin du Gard in the département of Orne in Normandy. Very weak, he died on the 17th of June 1940.