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Gaston La Touche
French, 1854-1913Le Conflit
Oil on panel
11.8 x 15.7 inches (30 x 40 cm)
Signed lower leftLiterature:
To be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist by Selina Baring MacLennan and Roy Brindley.Provenance:
Private Collection, FranceGaston La Touche, painter, watercolorist and pastelist was born in Saint-Cloud, Paris in 1854. A self-taught artist, he was from childhood determined to be a painter and this ambition was supported by his well-to-do parents. His earliest paintings from the 1880s were domestic scenes inspired by seventeenth century Dutch genre paintings. They were vigorous, harsh and somber works met with little success and subsequently destroyed by the artist.
In the late 1880s, his friend Felix Bracquemond prompted him to discard his early style and to use the colors favored by the Impressionists. Along with a new palette, La Touche adjusted his brushwork to small, petal-like strokes. In 1890, he showed Phlox and Peonies, both colorful scenes of women, children and flowers, at the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which brought him immediate success. These works represented the beginning of a radical shift in his subject matter, palette and technique. During the next six years, he gradually and steadily moved away from realism to a grater sense of idealism, which became a hallmark of his oeuvre. He created luminous and charming works of parks and gardens, nymphs, and fetes-champetres.
La Touche participated in shows mounted by the Societe des Artistes Francais in the 1880s and 1890s, receiving a Third Class Medal in 1884 and a Second Class Medal in 1888. In 1889 he was awarded a Bronze Medal at the l'Exposition Universelle and later received a Gold Medal at the 1900 l'Exposition Universelle. In 1900, he was decorated with the Legion d'honneur and was made an officer of the Legion in 1909. In 1908 an impressive retrospective featured over 300 of his works at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris. In 1909 his paintings were exhibited in another large show at Boussod and Valadon in The Hague.
At this time La Touche was awarded several official commissions for large-scale decorative schemes for various French ministries. These large canvases and murals are characterized by glowing colors and broad brushstrokes. His most well known works remain his light-filled garden and fetes-galants paintings, all completed with his trademark delicate brushwork and beautifully vivid palette.
Our painting by La Touche was painted in conjunction with a large decorative panel of the same subject and title that was commissioned by the collector, Emile Chouanard, for the vestibule of his house on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris now in the collection of the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland. The title is in reference to the conflict between the monkey in the foreground and the bird to the right. The playful scene centres around a fountain in a garden. Characteristic of some of La Touche’s best-known works, the composition is a harmonious union between a strong palette, here highlighted by reds and oranges and a delicate petal like brushwork evoking an Impressionist style.
La Touche’s work is represented in the following European museums: Paris (Musée d’Orsay, Musée du Petit Palais, Musée de Saint-Cloud),Tourcoing, Rouen, Reims, Evreux, Flers, Alencon, La Roche sur Yon, Strasbourg, Marseilles, Versailles, Cambo, the Singer Museum (Laren), Brussels, Krefeld, Magdeburg, Prague, Genoa, Barcelona, St Petersburg and Odessa.
In the Unites States, La Touche’s work is in the collections of the the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee, The Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland, The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, The New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana, Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut and the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, Connecticut.
