Eugène Henri Alexandre Chigot was a post impressionist French painter. A pupil of his father, the military painter Alphonse Chigot, in 1881 he entered the internationally renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he was exposed to the ideas of the realist movement of the Barbizon School and to Impressionism. He settled in Étaples in the Pas-de-Calais in an artists’ colony, later returning to Paris where he became a founder of the Salon d’Automne. An official military painter he painted a series of canvases in Calais and Nieuwpoort recording the destruction caused by the First World War. Chigot's reputation was built on his maritime and landscape paintings that arose from his affinity to Flanders and the Pas-de-Calais. He recorded the lives of the people of Flanders placing them within a landscape of soft opalescent light. Later his paintings show traces of expressionism and a more vibrant pallette. He was also a skilled nocturne painter who travelled extensively within France, Italy and Spain.

Alphonse Charles Chigot was a French historical painter and soldier, particularly associated with the city of Valenciennes where he had a studio for over sixty years. A former soldier in the French army he saw action in the first Franco-Moroccan War of 1844 and served until 1849. In 1853 he entered the Academies de Valenciennes to study art for three years. Chigot favoured military themed subjects and his works include large canvases such as le Duel and Le Salut a la Vierge, numerous portraits of soldiers and drawings and sketches of the Valenciennoise. He favoured epic subjects which he approached in an academic style, influenced by Neoclassicism and Romanticism. As a long-standing teacher of painting his pupils included his son Eugène Chigot, Charles Paris and Henri Le Sidaner, who painted him in 1881. Chigot first exhibited in provincial exhibitions and from 1877 until 1914 at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français to which he was admitted in 1884.