French painter🎨 Pierre Auguste Cot (17 February 1837 - 2 August 1883) was born in Bédarieux, and initially studied at l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse before going to Paris.
In 1863 he made a successful debut at the Salon, and from the 1870s, his popularity grew quickly.
Cot enjoyed the patronage of the academic sculptor Francisque Duret, whose daughter he married, and of William-Adolphe Bouguereau▪, with whom he had also worked.