Louis Barillet

Louis Joseph Pierre Barillet was born on 13 February 1880 in Alençon, France. He studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the atelier of Jean-Leon Gerome, before beginning his professional career as a medal engraver and then turning to stained glass. The exact years of his studies and any formal degree are not documented in available sources.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, Barillet became a leading practitioner of modern French stained glass, working from his own Paris studio and collaborating closely with architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, including on a Paris house and studio for Barillet whose exact completion date is not confirmed in available sources. He worked alongside fellow glass artists Jacques Le Chevallier and Theodore-Gerard Hanssen and with glass ateliers such as Atelier Duchemin. His documented commissions include windows for the church of Notre-Dame-des-Missions and for Saint-Sauveur de Bellême, though these ecclesiastical attributions rest on a single accessible source and should be treated as provisional pending further confirmation.

Barillet died on 11 December 1948 in Clamart, France, at the age of 68.

Dealers and auction-house specialists consistently describe Barillet as a leading theorist and practitioner of the modern stained-glass revival in France, credited with renewing both religious and secular vitrail through geometric, architecturally integrated compositions. His sustained collaboration with Robert Mallet-Stevens and his membership in the Union des artistes modernes from its founding in 1929 place him within the core network of French Art Deco design. No verbatim quotations from named critics writing in major press outlets could be confirmed for this profile.

Barillet's auction market is thin and specialized, concentrated in decorative-arts and design sales rather than major evening auctions. According to the LotSearch price database, the highest price recorded for a Barillet lot is approximately EUR 162,250 (about USD 187,915 at the time of that sale); the specific work, auction house, location, and exact date behind that figure could not be independently confirmed from the sources available and should be treated as provisional. Other public auction listings, including Artprice, Invaluable, and MutualArt, show the bulk of his results well below that level, generally in the range of a few thousand to several tens of thousands of euros. No gallery or estate could be identified as currently representing his market.

Barillet's market is small, illiquid, and specialist. Works surface mainly at decorative-arts and design auctions rather than major postwar or contemporary sales, and public price data is thin enough that any single result, including the highest figure identified here, should be treated with caution pending fuller primary verification. No catalogue raisonne has been identified for the artist, and no current gallery or estate representation could be confirmed, so provenance and attribution are best checked directly with specialist dealers in French Art Deco glass, such as Galerie Marcilhac, or against the architectural records of the buildings his windows were made for.