(b Paris, June 7, 1876; d Quebec, July 5, 1944). French architect and monk. He was the son of an architect and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He was a brilliant student and obtained his diploma in 1901. After a trip to Spain and Italy, where he produced some beautiful watercolours that earned him a special mention at the Salon in Paris (1901), he decided to become a monk and entered the Benedictine monastery at Solesmes, Sarthe. At this time, religious communities exiled from France needed many new buildings, and Bellot was sent to the Netherlands in 1906 to extend a monastery there. He learnt how to build in brick, a material he used for the rest of his life, and he also became acquainted with H. P. Berlage and Modernist Dutch architecture. Bellot worked in the Netherlands and on the Isle of Wight, England, until 1920, producing many fine yet low-cost buildings in brick. His inventiveness, allied to an admiration for medieval architecture and the rationalist theories of Viollet-le-Duc, led him to develop a style that had neo-Gothic aspects, clearly expressing structure and giving an impression of lightness and balance as much as mass and weightiness, and he used brick to create both structure and decoration....