Albert Aurier

G. Albert Aurier (5 May 1865 – 5 October 1892) was a poet, art critic and painter, devoted to Symbolism.

Son of a notary born in Châteauroux, Indre, Aurier went to Paris in 1883 to study law, but soon his attention was drawn to art and literature, and he began to contribute to Symolist periodicals. He reviewed the annual Salon in Le Décadent, later he contributed to La Plume, in 1889 to Le Moderniste, and from its foundation in 1890, to the Mercure de France. There the essays were published, on which Aurier's fame as well as the fame of the artists discussed is founded: "Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh" and "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin".

After a trip to Marseille, Aurier died at the age of twenty-seven in Paris, October 5, 1892, from a typhus infection. The next day, friends, writers and artists accompanied his coffin to the funeral train departing from the Orléans station (today Musée d'Orsay) for Châteauroux, where Aurier's remains were entombed in the family grave.

Six months after his death, in April 1893, his friends published his collected writings (Œuvres posthumes), edited by the Mercure de France.