1865 -1935 · Post-impressionism, Brittany, Normandy and series of landscapes

Cliffs, apple trees, rivers and streets of Paris vibrate under the lattice touch of Gustave Loiseau, a painter faithful to the changes of light.

Gustave Loiseau was born in Paris in 1865 into a family of traders. After an apprenticeship with a decorator, an inheritance allowed him in 1887 to devote himself to painting. He briefly took courses at the School of Decorative Arts, then works with the landscaper Fernand Quignon. From 1890, he stayed regularly in Pont-Aven, where he met Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Henry Moret and the artists of the Gloanec inn. Loiseau remembers this from these exchanges freedom of color without completely adopting symbolist solid colors. His temperament remains attached to direct observation. He painted Brittany, then Normandy, Oise, Dordogne and Paris, returning to the same motifs according to the seasons. The cliffs of Étretat, the Seine, the quays, the villages and the orchards thus become series. Its characteristic touch, sometimes described as a trellis or a cross hatch, animates the entire surface without dissolving it landscape structure. In L'Aiguille and Porte d'Aval, the rock, sea and sky remain solidly constructed while vibrating with humidity and wind. Apple trees in bloom in Normandy combine a rustic motif with orchestration refined with whites, greens and roses. Loiseau exhibited with the Impressionists and Symbolists in 1893 and 1894. From 1897, the merchant Paul Durand-Ruel supported his work and offered it lasting stability. Although we classified among the post-impressionists, he remains independent: less analytical than the neo-impressionists, less synthetic than Gauguin, he seeks a personal equivalence of sensation. His urban views of Paris continue there same investigation into atmosphere, traffic and season. He died in Paris in 1935. His work is not based on the spectacular, but on fidelity: reviewing a place, measuring its transformations and letting the key record the passage of the air. The "Gustave Loiseau" selection notably compares The Needle and the Downstream Gate and Mountain Landscape. His reading favors composition.

Loiseau never repeats a landscape: he returns to the motif to grasp what the season, the sky and the time have just changed there.