Albert Dubout

Albert Dubout (15 May 1905 – 27 June 1976) was a French cartoonist, illustrator, painter, and sculptor.

Albert Dubout was born in Marseille. After attending school at Nîmes (where he met Jean Paulhan) he studied at the fine arts school in Montpellier where he met his first wife, Renée Altier, and where his first drawings were published in the student journal L'écho des étudiants in 1923.

After moving to Paris, Éditions Kra literary director Philippe Soupault hired him to illustrate his first book, Les Embarras de Paris by Boileau. Dubout continued on to illustrate numerous editions of books by Boileau, Beaumarchais, Mérimée, Rabelais, Villon, Cervantes, Balzac, Racine, Voltaire, Rostand, Poe, and Courteline.

He collaborated on numerous magazines and journals such as Le Rire, Marianne, Eclats de Rire, L'os à Moëlle, Paris-Soir, and Ici-Paris.

He also created movie and theatre posters as well as theatrical sets. He worked in advertising, painted oil canvases (over 70 in total) and illustrated many book covers and record sleeves.

Albert Dubout also illustrated Gargantua and Pantagruel, oeuvres of the famous French satirist Rabelais. One of his favorite and perhaps unwilling models were an obese tobacconist and the small and scrawny tax collector who lived in the forties and fifties in Agde, Herault, France.

In 1953, French president Vincent Auriol awarded him the Legion of Honour. His name also appeared that year in the Petit Larousse dictionary.

In 1965, he illustrated les aventures de San-Antonio at the request of author Frédéric Dard.

In 1967 he married his second wife, Suzanne Ballivet, who was also a painter. He divided his time in this period between Mézy-sur-Seine and Palavas-les-Flots (Hérault) until his death in 1976.

In 1992 a museum about Dubout was dedicated in Palavas-les-Flots.

• In his caricatures, Dubout frequently mocked the "little train of Palavas" (the train from Montpellier to Palavas) and the tourists who visited the little seaside station there.