(b Pontoise, 29 Aug 1864; d Cormeilles-en-Parisis, 27 Dec 1940). French painter and writer. He was largely self-taught and initially earned his living as an itinerant painter-decorator. In 1881 he met Lucien and Camille Pissarro while painting landscapes near Pontoise and through them met Paul Signac in 1885 and Seurat in 1886. After a year’s military service at Versailles, Hayet moved to Paris in the autumn of 1887. There he began to apply to his paintings Eugène Chevreul’s theories of colour contrast with which he had become familiar by 1881. A gifted watercolour painter, he also experimented with the ancient technique of wax encaustic, painting on a prepared cotton that allowed light to filter through. The paint surface of works such as The Grange (Beauchamp, France, priv. col., see 1983 Pontoise exh. cat., no. 1) retains a vivid tonal freshness, while the subject of crowds of peasants gathered before the Paris agricultural market reveals a debt to Pissarro. During the second half of the 1880s he became obsessed with the notion of passage—the problem of the transitional areas between an object in space and the vibrating field that surrounds it. In an attempt to work out systematically all the tonal gradations possible when one colour is juxtaposed with another, he made at least eight chromatic circles and fifteen colour charts as a guide in his painting.

• Hayet, Louis
  • Neo-Impressionism