Louis Henri Jean Charlot (February 8, 1898 – March 20, 1979) was a French-born American painter and illustrator, active mainly in Mexico and the United States.

[3] From an early age Charlot was fascinated with the Mexican manuscripts and art in the collection of his great uncle Eugene, and by the pre-Columbian artefacts of a neighbor and family friend, Désiré Charnay, who was a well-known archaeologist.

Rivera introduced Charlot to other young artists, such as Pablo O'Higgins (born Paul Stevenson Higgins and who came to live in Mexico in 1924, having grown up in Salt Lake City, Utah).

[6] O'Higgins would later recall that he met Charlot at the former's studio, when he was painting a nude of Luz Jiménez, a very beautiful Mexican Indian woman who modeled for Diego Rivera.

Charlot is generally recognized as having brought international attention to José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican printer who had produced more than 15,000 prints and lithographs, devoted mostly to the popular readers of newspapers in pre-revolutionary Mexico, in which he would present political satires using cartoon-like skeletons; these are a variety of calavera.

[11] Posada's skeletons and skulls, rooted in pre-Hispanic religious ritual, were later adapted by Rivera, Frida Kahlo, O'Higgins, and many others, and are now icons acknowledged worldwide as being at the heart of Mexican popular art and handcrafts.

Rivera, however, eventually wrested control of the project, acquiring more space for himself and recasting the other artists in the role of assistants, even painting over one of Charlot's finished murals, Danza de los Listones (Dance of the Ribbons) to create room for his own Market Place.

[13] According to John Charlot, son of Jean, in the beginning only younger artists dared to undertake commissions for large mural paintings.

While Vasconcelos himself preferred non-political allegorical works, he carefully avoided guiding the artists, who increasingly became more political in reflecting the ideas of the revolution.

Hired by Sylvanus Morley of the Carnegie Institution and under the field direction of Earl H. Morris, Charlot meticulously traced and copied bas-reliefs and painted surfaces as they were unearthed, creating an invaluable guide to the reconstruction of some of the key structures of the temple complex.

The work had a major influence on his own art, and led to a long friendship with Earl Morris and his wife Ann, a fellow painter-copyist at Chichen Itza.

The Morrises took care of Charlot after his mother died in New York City in the winter of 1929, and together the three co-authored The Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, Yucatan, published in two volumes in 1931 and considered a classic in its field[4] In the U.S., Charlot executed commissions for the Work Projects Administration's Federal Arts Project, including the creation of murals for Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan during 1934–1935,[15] and, in 1942, an oil on canvas mural for the post office in McDonough, Georgia titled Cotton Gin, 4.5 ft × 11 ft (1.4 m × 3.4 m).

There, he developed a close friendship with the world-famous local artist Madge Tennent and collaborated with Juliette May Fraser, an accomplished muralist in her own right, on several major commissions in and around Honolulu.

Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas praised his 1951 collection of captioned drawings, Dance of Death, as "superlative macabre humor in a welcome modernization of a great ancient art-form.