Trinity House he met members of the avantgarde Stéphane Mallarmé, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon and Emile Zola. In 1894 he painted Three Servant Girls, now in a private collection, the first of his plein-air pictures. From then on he applied transparent colours to capture fleeting effects of light. His oils were painted in flat broad strokes. For the rest of his life he employed his very personal Impressionist style, which emphasized the interplay of light, colour, line and movement.
La Touche, Gaston French, 1854-1913
La Touche showed an early vocation for a prodigal artistic career. When he finally managed to obtain permission from his parents to take lessons from a M. Paul, he quickly discovered his natural aptitude and was ushered to continue his studies. La Touche never received any further formal training, but he came under the influence of two older painters, Félix Bracquemond (1833-1914) and Edouard Manet (1832-1883). He also frequented the same cafés as Manet and Degas after the Franco-Prussian War – among those he met there were Emile Zola, Duranty and Theodore Duret. It was Bracquemond who largely 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 (1732-1806) and Watteau (1758-1823), and encouraged him to pursue the symphonies of colour which typify his work. In 1891, La Touche burned many of his first socio-realist paintings – almost fifteen years of work up in flames. La Touche’s oeuvre does not really fall into any named category. His feathery brush strokes, each of a different shade give his pictures an ethereal serenity which seems far removed from the everyday world. Compared to his contemporaries who focused on the life of the Parisian
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Gallery Catalogue flaneur, street and café scenes, La Touche depicted prosaic subject matter transformed to magical feel. It seems as though the most ordinary event or gesture transforms under La Touche’s brush.
whether they are landscapes or still lifes result from both his delicate style of painting and his choice of subjects.
His works were often inspired by the gardens at the Versailles Palace. In 1889 he exhibited some of these Versailles views in Paris. That same year he exhibited watercolours at the Fine Art Society in London. In Paris, 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 a l’Eau which he had founded in 1906 and of which he was President. He also had a gallery show in the Netherlands, some two months before his sudden death while working on a painting on 12th July, 1913.
Born in northwest France at Champigné in Maine-et-Loire, Henri Lebasque started his education at the École des BeauxArts d’Angers, and moved to Paris in 1886. Here, Lebasque started studying in the academic studios of Léon Bonnat (1833-1922), a painter who had lived in Spain and stressed the importance of drawing. In Paris, Lebasque also met Camille Pissarro and Auguste Renoir, who later would have a large impact on his work. He was a contemporary of the Fauvist movement, and showed at the first Salon d’Automne with his friend Henri Matisse in 1903, but he always retained his own personal painting style rather than taking up the theories of the fauves. Furthermore his acquaintance with pointillists Georges Seurat (1859-1891) and Paul Signac (1863-1935) developed into an understanding of colour theory, emphasizing the use of complementary colours in shading (as opposed to black).
Le Sidaner, Henri French, 1862-1939
Le Sidaner travelled extensively throughout his life, visiting Holland, Belgium, Venice, London and New York; he also travelled throughout France. During his lifetime, he exhibited at the Paris Salon, the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris and the Goupil Gallery in London. In 1900 he visited the tiny village of Gerberoy (Seine-et-Oise) where he later bought the house which became the inspiration for many of his paintings and where he painted many of his beautiful still lifes. Although the work of Henri Le Sidaner appears to be very personal to the artist, and (as he primarily painted at home) seems impervious to the artistic changes taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was not totally unaffected by the development of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. He worked in the realist style, but his love of penumbra and twilight create a poetic and dreamy quality to his technical expertise. There is also undoubtedly an influence of optics on Le Sidaner’s work. The atmosphere of his paintings,
Lebasque, Henri French, 1865-1937
In contrast to these aggressive painters and strong theorists, Lebasque’s vision ran parallel to movements and continued forwards. His pieces were coloured by the soft tenderness with which the younger generation from the Nabis and the Intimists painted. One can compare to Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), founders of the aforementioned movements, who often focused on the calm and quietude of domestic subject matter. After 1905, at the aforementioned Salon d’Automne, Lebasque met Henri Manguin (1874-1949), who introduced him to the south of France. This time visiting the Mediterranean coast led to a radical change in Lebasque’s colour palette. He painted warm and welcoming environments, with strong compositions often based on very recognisable places.
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