Léon Carré

Léon Georges Jean-Baptiste Carré (23 June 1878 – 2 December 1942) was a French Orientalist painter and illustrator, noted for illustrating the book, The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

Life and career Carré was born in Granville, Manche, of Norman ancestry. He showed an early talent for drawing. He studied in Rennes under Mathurin Méheut. At the age of 19 years, he left Brittany with a good job as a decorator and in Paris studied with Leon Bonnat and Luc-Olivier Merson. He exhibited at the French Salon des Artistes in 1900; at the Salon des Independents in 1905; the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1907 and the Salon d'Automne in 1911. He was the winner of the Abd-el-Tif prize and a two-time winner of the Chenavard Prize.

In 1921, with the painters Louis Ferdinand Antoni and , he decorated the new halls of the Palais d'Eté, designed tourist posters, models of postage stamps for the Bank of Algeria. In 1927, he contributed to the decoration of the liner "Ile-de-France".

He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1936.

Carré died in Algiers on 2 December 1942 at his studio in the rue Dumont-d'Urville, Algiers where he had been living since the war and where he was surrounded by his paintings and those of his wife.

Work Select list of paintings The Coastal, 1903 The Arab Market,1905 Corrida de Toros, [The Bullfight] 1911 The Gitanes of Granada, [Gypsies of Granada] c. 1911 "The Jews of Morocco, 1909-1911 The Courtesans of Biskra, 1909-1911 The Arab in Prayer, 1909-1911 The Woman with the Tambourine, 1909-1911 Pastoral, 1913