Gaston LaTouche

Born to well-to-do-parents, Gaston La Touche was a self-taught artist who created both paintings and prints. His home in Saint-Cloud, where he was born, raised, and died, featured a large garden, which La Touche included in many of his works. Versailles was only a few miles away, and the artist was fond of saying that “Je n’ai qu’un seul maître, le parc de Versailles” (Gaston La Touche, exhib. cat. [London: Bury Street Gallery, 1979), n.n.]

In 1879, La Touche provided forty drypoint illustrations for Emile Zola’s novel, L’Assommoir.  His works of the 1880s feature domestic scenes in the style of Dutch seventeenth century painting. After meeting with little success, La Touche burned these early paintings. Encouraged by his friend Félix Bracquemond, La Touche adopted an impressionist palette and short brushstrokes. In fact, La Touche acknowledged the influence in his painting Bracquemond et son Disciple.

In 1890, at the Palace of Industry in Paris, the artists Messionier and Puvis de Chavannes inaugurated the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, splitting with the official Salon. Gaston La Touche was one of the artists in the classical tradition most widely noticed and acclaimed in this split. Greatly admired by all sides in this debate, La Touche’s reputation and accomplishments were only cut short by his death. 

During his career he was a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1890 onward, a member of the Artistes Français since 1883, and won numerous medals and honors, including a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1900.  During the same year, he became a knight in the Legion of Honor and nine years later was made an officer.