Léon Pourtau
French painter and musician (1868-1898)
Léon Pourtau (23 November 1868 – 4 July 1898) was a French painter and musician.
At the age of 15, an apprentice typesetter, Pourtau left Bordeaux for Paris. He worked in a small restaurant on the Rue Lafayette, where musicians gathered Orchestre Lamoureux. Thanks to them Pourtau got a job as a concert clarinetist in a Café-chantant. He toured with a circus band where he would help set up the tent and bathe the elephants. Back in Paris he entered the Conservatoire de Paris. During this period he married, had two children, and become a professor at the Conservatoire de Lyon at the age of 22 – the youngest ever.
He met Georges Seurat, himself also a musician, who taught him the impressionist technique. He took the opportunity of a concert tour in the US, which, after two years, earned him 20,000 Francs. He also became principal clarinetist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1894 at the invitation of conductor Emil Paur.
“Léon Pourtau” enters the record as french painter and musician (1868-1898). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Léon, Pourtau and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Léon Pourtau” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Léon, Pourtau and French provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3271273. VIAF identifies the subject as 96163844. The Library of Congress control number is n2016035166. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1868, 1898 and 1894.
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This entry incorporates text from “Léon Pourtau” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.