Albert Joseph Penot

Penot was born on 28 February 1862 in Xermaménil, France. At some point before 1896 his family moved to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under the academic and Orientalist painter Gabriel Ferrier; the exact years of study and any formal credential are not documented in available sources.

He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français, earning an honorable mention in 1903 and a third-class medal in 1908, and in 1906 he was honored with the Palmes de l'Instruction Publique. His painting is generally described as Symbolist and academic in character, centered on female nudes and genre and allegorical scenes; his best-known surviving image, La Femme chauve-souris (The Bat Woman), pairs an academic nude with a fantastical, bat-winged silhouette typical of the era's taste for the erotic and the uncanny.

Penot died in Paris in 1930. Sources disagree on the exact day: English Wikipedia, the Art Renewal Center, and an Instagram biographical caption give 16 October 1930, while Czech Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons metadata give 17 October 1930. No primary civil record has been located to resolve the discrepancy, so the exact day of death is treated here as unconfirmed.

Sustained critical or scholarly literature on Penot is limited. He is discussed mainly within academic and Symbolist revival contexts, notably the Art Renewal Center's online archive, which groups him with other late nineteenth century academic and Symbolist painters and documents a small set of his works. No exact, attributable critic quotations from major outlets have been located to date.

Penot's market runs almost entirely through auction houses and secondary-market platforms rather than through gallery or estate representation. No gallery or estate currently representing his work has been identified as of this writing; Artprice, Artsy, MutualArt, Invaluable, and LotSearch each track his auction history independently. Recent activity includes a 2026 example, Idle Moments, which sold for GBP 4,200 at Sotheby's on 2 July 2026, alongside smaller European sales in the low thousands of euros.

The best-documented high result is La Femme chauve-souris, reported sold for GBP 137,500 at Sotheby's in 2018; multiple independent sources agree on the house and price, though the exact sale date is not documented in available sources. A separate, higher figure of USD 297,082 for an unnamed painting appears in a market database's summary statistics, but without a work title, house, or date to verify it; it is not treated as the confirmed record here.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Penot, and no confirmed major public museum collection holding his work has been identified in the sources reviewed; the fullest documentary record available is the Art Renewal Center's online archive. Given the thin and sometimes conflicting record, including disagreement over his exact death date and the historical gaps in auction sale-date documentation, collectors should treat any single reported price or provenance claim with caution and seek independent verification, particularly for higher-value works.