Gustave Loiseau 

Biography of Gustave Loiseau  ( 1865-1935 )

Son of a butcher, Gustave Loiseau was born in Paris where he first chose his parents’ commercial activity. Nevertheless at the teenage years the young man was tempted by drawing and watercolor. After a very serious attack of typhoid in 1880 during which he thought he was going to die, he told his parents about his desire to become a painter. And then Gustave Loiseau began his apprenticeship to a decorator’s studio.

When his grandmother died, he received an inheritance and started to have lessons at the School of Decorative Art in 1888, before joining Fernand Quignon’s studio who advised him to settle in Pont-Aven. When he arrived there on May 1890, he stayed to Gloanec’s where he met Maufra, Moret and Gauguin. The latter dispensed him many advices, and the first works of Loiseau showed a real influence of the master. But the young artist quickly found his own style and liked to paint at unusual time to study the impact of light. He liked to represent the modifications of the nature season by season and turn on his material by a thin grid of superimposed lines in every direction.

From 1894, Loiseau was a part of the 6th, 7th and 8th exhibitions of impressionist and symbolist painters to Le Brac de Bouteville in Paris, where he showed landscapes as September morning in Pont-Aven and Rise of the Aven. In 1897 he signed a contract with Paul Durand-Ruel who exhibited his paintings in his gallery in New York by the side of Moret and Maufra. In 1901, Durand-Ruel presented his first solo exhibition in Paris.

Landscapes realised by Loiseau are principally from Brittany, but also from the valley of Oise, Paris, Dieppe or Moret-sur-Loing. He continued to paint as an impressionist, and multiplied works from the same motif under atmospheric variations, just like Monet, taking to him some of his themes of whom a set of poplars, orchards and views of Auxerre’s cathedral. During winter, he realised many views of the Pontoise’s bridge, staging the city under the snow, the freezing of Oise river and then the melt of ices with a style that presented the double influence of Monet and Pissarro. He particularly liked the atmosphere created by hazy light and fog that exalt the beauty of nature.

If Gustave Loiseau realised just a few portraits, he was however interested in persons in their daily activites: dockers on their boats, Bretons with their headdess going out of the church or doing the market in Pont-Aven, cars around the Bastille or the Arc de Triomphe Place in Paris.

The artist realised some still lives too, but with a different technique. His style is completely impressionist in his landscapes, but more classical and geometrical when he did still lives. Firmly independent, Loiseau used to tell : « I work on my own, as I can, and try to express the best I can the impression I receive from nature… This is my only instinct that guides me and I am proud to not look like anyone else...».