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Biography
Born in St Cloud, near Paris on 29th October 1854, Gaston La Touche showed an early vocation for an artistic career. From the age of ten he spent every available moment of recreation in drawing and managed to obtain permission from his parents to take lessons from a Monsieur Paul, who quickly discovered his natural aptitude and encouraged the young boy to persevere with his studies. Interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the lessons ceased when the family fled to Normandy. La Touche never received any further formal training, but he came under the influence of two older painters, one of whom in particular was to have a profound and far-reaching effect on the development of European painting. The two were Felix Bracquemond and Edouard Manet. After the Paris Commune and the war, Manet, Degas and a group of painters, critics, poets and authors used to gather regularly at the Cafe de la Nouvelle-Athenes (c.1877-79) to discuss art and other topical matters. La Touche also frequented this café, where those he met included the realist writer Emile Zola; Duranty, a critic, and Theodore Duret, a politician, collector and champion of the Impressionists.
La Touche was not directly influenced by Manet’s style; rather the ideas of the older man spoke to him. Sincerity, candour, integrity and a striving after the truth were the qualities to be sought in both life and art. During this period in his career, La Touche depicted grim scenes from the daily lives of the miners and labourers, whose plight had already been brought to the notice of the general public by the social realism of Zola’s novels, such as L’Assommoir and Germinal. After 1890, however, there was a radical shift in the subject matter, palette and technique of La Touche’s work. During the six years to 1896, he gradually, yet steadily evolved from realism to the idealism that was to be the hallmark of his oeuvre; the creation of a harmonious luminous and charming world of parks and gardens, nymphs and fountains, fireworks and fêtes-champêtres, in which nature is depicted in terms of colour and light, yet with an element of fantasy which sets his work aside from that of the earlier Impressionist Group.
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Without doubt, the single most important influence on La Touche was that of Felix Bracquemond. He was a painter, engraver, ceramist and lithographer and was himself much influenced by Japanese art. He and his talented wife Marie lived not far from the La Touche property and La Touche was a frequent guest at their regular Sunday luncheons, when painters such as Sisley and Fantin-Latour and the critic Gustave Geffroy met at the Villa Brancas, engaging in lively discussion, usually dominated by the fiery tempered Bracquemond. It was he who persuaded La Touche to abandon his sombre palette in favour of the spectrum of colour. He perceived that the underlying influences of La Touche’s art were those of the French eighteenth century: Fragonard and Watteau and encouraged him to pursue the symphonies of colour which typify his work. It is also interesting to note that La Touche destroyed almost all the paintings he had produced during his socio-realist phase; in 1891 he consigned fifteen years work to the flames of a bonfire in a single day.
La Touche’s oeuvre does not fall into a particular category. He attempted his own form of divisionism, but continued to experiment with feathery brushstrokes, each of a different shade, which give his pictures an ethereal serenity, which appear far removed from the everyday world. This ambience carries over even into paintings of more prosaic subject matter, as though the most ordinary event or gesture is somehow transformed under his brush. This other worldly quality is more readily apparent in such works as Le Temple de l’Amour and Soirée d’Eté. La Touche painted many allegorical and some mythological paintings, as well as land and seascapes, and his beloved Versailles, of which he once said “I only have one Master, the Park of Versailles”. In 1899 he exhibited some of his Versailles views in Paris, followed the same year by an exhibition of watercolours at the Fine Art Society in London and a favourable article in The Studio magazine by Gabriel Mourey. The painter was awarded the Legion d’honneur in 1900 and received an official commission to paint a fête at Versailles for the Elysée Palace in 1906.
La Touche exhibited regularly at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Société des Peintres et Sculpteurs as well as at the Société de la Peinture à l’Eau which he had founded in 1906 and of which he was President. A large exhibition at the Galeries Georges Petit was held in 1908 and another at Boussod and Valadon in The Hague, some two months before his sudden death whilst working on a painting on 12th July 1913.
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Selected Works
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Experts
Roy Brindley & Selina Baring Maclennan are the accredited experts on Gaston La Touche and have been researching his work for the last 25 years. In 2009 we published the first monograph on the artist for seventy years and are currently preparing the catalogue raisonné. We also assist auction houses around the world, notably Sotheby’s and Christie’s and will also provide a Certificate of Authenticity upon request.
Selina Baring Maclennan studied languages at La Sorbonne in Paris and has lived and worked in Kenya, Australia, Paris, Brussels, the US and now resides in London. She has comprehensive experience in the auction houses and leading galleries, including Sotheby’s and the Richard Green Gallery in London. She was the Gallery Manager for Berko Fine Paintings in Brussels for seven years, where she also researched and translated several art dictionaries.
Following his 4 years at Bonhams in London, Roy Brindley has been an expert for the Richard Green Gallery in London for over 35 years and has an immeasurable knowledge from Old Master to Impressionist paintings. His particular interest is in French 19thCentury painting and his passion for the artist Gaston La Touche was sparked off when he saw an exhibition of the artist’s works in 1979 in London. Together with Selina Baring Maclennan, he has been researching La Touche for over twenty years and are the recognised experts on the artist.
If you possess a work by Gaston La Touche and would like it included in the forth coming catalogue raisonné, please contact us directly:
+1 212 327 2218
mail@trezza.com
