Jean Charlot

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charlot
• https://www.jeancharlot.org/jean-charlot-artist-and-scholar

Louis Henri Jean Charlot (February 8, 1898 – March 20, 1979) was a French-born American painter and illustrator, active mainly in Mexico and the United States.

Charlot was born in Paris. His father, Henri, owned an import-export business and was a Russian-born émigré, albeit one who supported the Bolshevik cause. His mother Anna was an artist. His mother's family originated from Mexico City; his grandfather was a French-Indian mestizo. His great-grandfather had immigrated to Mexico in the 1820s shortly after the country's independence from Spain, and married a woman who was half-Aztec. This was likely the source of a myth which developed around Charlot casting him as a descendant of Aztec royalty.

Born in Paris, Louis Henri Jean Charlot (1898-1979) was descended from those he would later refer to as "sundry exotic ancestors" (Charlot 1954:99). His father, Henri, was a French businessman, free-thinker and Bolshevik sympathizer born and reared in Russia. Anna, his mother, an artist and a devout Catholic, was the daughter of Louis Goupil, a native of Mexico City. Charlot admiringly describes his maternal grandfather in his earlier years as ". . .a fine rider, a coleador who could hold a running bull by passing its tail between his knee and the saddle of his galloping horse" (Charlot [1963] 1967:178). Goupil, of French and Mexican Indian stock, married Sarah Louise (Luisita) Melendez, a Jewish woman of Spanish descent and subsequently moved from Mexico to Paris in the late 1860s.

• Reference: Geneanet Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jul 27 2023, 19:57:35 UTC