French Harbour in the Morning Light

Jacques Marie Omer Camoreyt was born on 11 September 1871 in Lectoure, Gers. He was a French painter, printmaker, and illustrator active from the late nineteenth century through the mid twentieth century.

He was the son of Julien Camoreyt, a practitioner and business agent, and Marie Ernestine Barennes, a dressmaker. He was likely encouraged in his artistic ambitions by a relative, Eugène Camoreyt, founder of the Lectoure museum and drawing teacher at the local collège. He moved to Paris to study painting under Léon Bonnat, Fernand Cormon, and Albert Maignan. During this period he also provided artistic training to his cousin Pierre De Maria (1896–1984).

A member of the Société des Artistes Français, Camoreyt regularly exhibited at its official Salons and received several distinctions, including the Brizard Prize in 1899 and medals in 1899, 1900, and 1905. His painting focused on two principal subjects: genre scenes featuring women, interiors, and dolls, and marine views with ports and coastal landscapes. He traveled widely and painted not only in France but also in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Turkey, where he produced views of Istanbul and the Bosphorus in 1894 and 1895.

Alongside his painting career Camoreyt worked extensively as an etcher and illustrator. His graphic style, shaped by academic training, combined clarity of composition with a refined treatment of light and shadow. He contributed to illustrated periodicals such as La Vie au grand air in 1905. He created images for Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Mystery of the Dancing Men, later published in France as Les Danseurs in the magazine Je sais tout in 1905, and also illustrated Arsène Lupin stories by Maurice Leblanc for the same journal. His watercolor depictions of aircraft during the First World War were widely reproduced.

He died on 22 April 1963 in Ivry-sur-Seine, Val-de-Marne. His works are held in several institutional collections. The Musée Bonnat Helleu in Bayonne owns a large scale seascape titled Marine dated 1899, oil on canvas measuring 177 by 210.9 centimeters. The former commercial museum of the Dunkirk Chamber of Commerce preserves an etching titled A Dutch Fisherman. In the United States, the Nichols School in Evanston near Chicago houses a mural painted in 1929 after compositions by Francesco Guardi and Félix Ziem, representing a view of the Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute in Venice. Executed in France, the canvas was later mounted onto the library wall behind a double pointed arch.

As a book illustrator Camoreyt collaborated on a number of notable editions, including Pierre Loti’s Ramuntcho published by Carteret in 1922 in an edition of two hundred copies, Anatole France’s Les Dieux ont soif in its first illustrated edition issued by Carteret in 1924 with four hundred fifty copies, and Noël Guy’s La Marine française with color illustrations published by Nathan in 1939.