Cottet studied at the
École des Beaux-Arts, and under
Puvis de Chavannes and
Roll, while also attending the
Académie Julian (where fellow students formed
Les Nabis school of painting, with which he was later associated). He travelled and painted in
Egypt,
Italy, and on
Lake Geneva, but he made his name with his sombre and gloomy, firmly designed, severe and impressive scenes of life on the
Brittany coast. Cottet exhibited at the Salon of 1889, but on a trip to
Brittany in 1886 he had found his true calling. For the next twenty years he painted scenes of rural and harbor life, portraying a culture Parisians still found exotic. He is especially noted for his dark seascapes of Breton harbors at dawn, and evocative scenes from the lives of Breton fishermen. He was close friends with
Charles Maurin, and his group included the painter
Félix-Émile-Jean Vallotton. Cottet has often been associated with the picturesque seaside
symbolism of the
Pont-Aven School, though Vallotton famously painted Cottet as a leader of
Les Nabis, beside
Pierre Bonnard,
Édouard Vuillard, and
Ker-Xavier Roussel, in his
Five Painters (1902–3;
Kunstmuseum Winterthur). Cottet was more explicitly the leader of his own small movement, the
Bande noire of the 1890s, which included
Lucien Simon and
André Dauchez, all influenced by the realism and dark colours of
Courbet. ==Selected works==