The year 2025 was primarily marked by the encounter—entirely unexpected, as it happens—with Raphaël de la Grillière, a regiment comrade and unconditional supporter of Brouet during his first steps in his artistic career. With La Grillière, the final biographical gap has been filled. Even if it remains as full of holes as the tattered coat of a ragpicker emerging from his Saint-Ouen shack, the biographical panorama of our artist, from 1872 to 1941, is now complete in its broad outlines. All that remains is to recompose it from over ten years of scattered posts... Enough to keep one busy for a few more years, especially since there will undoubtedly be more "patching and mending" along the way!

In a more discreet and pedestrian fashion, the end of 2025 saw the catalog updated to a newer version of the software, which required a frantic rewriting of the site's advanced functions. While the features remain the same, the underlying engines are now more robust. With the catalog thus stabilized, only one final effort remains: the complete census of the illustrations.

I had previously set them slightly aside, but now is the opportunity to reflect on the relationship between these prints and the rest of the work, adopting a different angle of approach. By way of example, here is the diptych invented by Brouet to conclude Gustave Geffroy’s novel L'Apprentie (The Apprentice).   

The two sisters appear at the fulfillment of the brief destiny to which Geffroy has consigned each of them. The unfortunate Céline embodies one of the tropes of realist literature: her material environment, her unequivocally flashy attire, and her physical appearance reveal the irremediable downfall that marked every stage of the narrative. Cécile, by contrast, is portrayed as a naturalist anti-heroine: a sensible, fresh, and industrious worker, she has mastered her own destiny through a patient apprenticeship of practical skills and by respecting the place assigned to her by society, securing her moral and material future away from emotional entanglements. An examination of the sources suggests that Brouet’s own trajectory borrowed a little from each sister; the reality lived by the impoverished artist proved more complex than the dichotomy imposed by a reformist writer in the counter-role of a naturalist novel that was, in the end, resolutely moral and optimistic: he was, therefore, the perfect choice to provide its illustrations.

And on that note, I wish you all an excellent New Year!