European Art and Old Masters

Note

We wish to thank Mr. Didier Imbert for confirming the authenticity of the present work. A Letter of Authenticity will accompany the Lot.

Although Gustave Loiseau was born in Paris and earned a reputation for his lively depictions of the French capital city, his family was originally from Pontoise, a provincial town north of Paris made famous by Camille Pissarro’s early Impressionist paintings of the 1870s. Loiseau came late to painting, and first learned the butchery trade before shadowing a house decorator. He only fully embraced the career in 1887, after receiving a small allowance from his deceased grandmother. A year following the final Impressionist exhibition, he studied sculpture and design at the École des Arts Décoratifs, and in 1889, he spent six months in the studio of landscapist Fernand Quignon.

At the latter’s suggestion, Loiseau went to visit the faraway Breton village of Pont-Aven and stayed at the famed pension Gloanec, where Gauguin had settled in the summer of 1886. Although Loiseau came back to Paris in the fall, he returned to Brittany every summer and painted many canvases there, including the present work – one of many views of the village’s Grand Place, where the market was traditionally set up in the morning. While his first biographers tried to link his work to that of Gauguin due to the Pont-Aven connection, Loiseau never saw Gauguin as a mentor (in fact they only met once in 1894), and the present work shows it: with its luminous palette, rich impasto and broken brushstrokes, the painting boasts all the hallmarks of the Impressionist movement. The quick dabs of paint which give motion to the scene, its overall abstract quality, paired with the slightly higher-up vantage point in fact strongly resemble the work of Camille Pissarro, whom Loiseau effectively revered, and whose work he studied at length during the artist’s memorial retrospective held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1904.

Executed in 1923, more than fifty years after the first Impressionist Exhibition, the present work denotes Loiseau’s faithfulness to the Impressionist principles throughout his life. It also confirms the strong market at the time for bold Impressionist canvases, which the famous dealer Paul Durand-Ruel promoted heavily, particularly since he signed a contract with Loiseau in 1897 and exhibited his paintings in his affiliated gallery in New York City, alongside works by Henri Moret and Maxime Maufra, long-life Pont-Aven friends.