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" Summer Landscape, 1902"
By: Achille Lauge
About the artist:
ACHILLE LAUGÉ (1861 - 1944)
Much of Achille Laugé’s childhood, and most of his career, was spent in
Cailhau, in the Aude. He began his artistic training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
in Toulouse, where he met his lifelong friend the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle,
before entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1882. Enrolled in the
studio of the painter Alexandre Cabanel, Laugé soon met and befriended another
sculptor, Aristide Maillol, who he introduced to Bourdelle and with whom he
later shared a studio. A pencil portrait of Bourdelle was Laugé’s first
exhibited work, shown at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1884. Two years
later, in 1886, Laugé left Paris and returned to live and work in the South of
France for the remainder of his long career.
Laugé’s early adoption of the pointilliste technique in his paintings
has led to some debate as to its sources. While two childhood friends of the
artist, the journalist Achille Astré and the influential politician Albert
Sarraut, both claimed that Laugé developed the distinctive divisionist
technique on his own, without any knowledge of the work of Georges Seurat and
his circle, this must be seen as highly unlikely. During Laugé’s stay in Paris
between 1881 and 1886 he can hardly have failed to come into contact with the
avant-garde work of the Neo-Impressionists. At the Salon des Indépendants of
1886, for example, Seurat’s great painting of A Sunday Afternoon on the Grande
Jatte was exhibited to immense popular interest and critical attention,
alongside works by Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross and other Neo-Impressionist
artists. It may certainly be said, however, that after his return to the South
Laugé’s style developed independently from that of the Seurat circle in Paris,
and that he came to develop a particular brand of Neo-Impressionism that was
distinctively his own. His pointilliste technique became progressively looser
and broader around the turn of the century, however, and from around 1905
onwards his paintings were executed more rapidly, with larger dots of colour.
Laugé only rarely exhibited his work. In 1894 he sent five paintings –
two still lives and three portraits – to the Salon des Indépendants, while the
same year he was included in a group exhibition in Toulouse, alongside Bonnard,
Denis, Valloton, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Serusier and others. These
contributions to public exhibitions were, however, more the exception than the
rule. Laugé’s paintings were repeatedly rejected by the Salon juries in Paris;
in 1900, for example, the Salon Nationale des Beaux-Arts rejected two paintings
he had submitted; an interior scene now in the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva,
and a portrait of the artist’s wife, today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in
Grenoble. In 1902, however, he was again included in an exhibition in Toulouse,
where among several paintings was a Paysage de la Gardie, now in the Musée
d’Orsay.
Around 1905, to allow himself the opportunity of working directly from
nature, Laugé built a small caravan, with a skylight and large windows, from
which he would paint the Languedoc countryside he knew so well. He worked in
both oils and pastel, with a precise technique and a careful study of tonal
values. His friend Antoine Bourdelle noted that ‘Laugé’s art is one of great
sensitivity and controlled reason; he is a master of light.’ His serene
landscapes were also greatly admired by the critic Gustave Geffroy, who wrote
of his paintings that ‘everything is filled with sunlight, but through a
harmonious prism; to an acute and discerning vision is added the delicate
ethereal quality of imagination.’ Laugé received almost no public commissions,
apart from several designs for tapestries to be produced by the Gobelins factory,
commissioned by Geffroy between 1919 and 1914. In 1919 Laugé obtained what was
to be his only commission for a mural decoration, for a series of landscapes
and floral scenes in several rooms in the house of a M. Castel, mayor of
Lézignon. The project was left incomplete, however, and no trace of the work
survives.
Laugé almost never left the Midi, and only rarely exhibited his
paintings in any of the Parisian art galleries. (After one of these rare
exhibitions, the critic Camille Mauclair noted that ‘Achille Laugé…having at
last decided to show in Paris the works created in the seclusion of regional
life, has had a rightful success.’) His relative isolation meant that Laugé’s
work remained largely unknown to most of the scholars, critics and collectors of
his time. Much the same is true today, although paintings by the artist now
hang in the Musée National d’Art Moderne alongside Neo-Impressionist works by
Seurat and Signac. The largest surviving group of works by Laugé is today to be
found in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Carcassonne, the nucleus of which is a
group of eighteen paintings, pastels and drawings given to the museum in the
1970’s by the artist’s daughter Juliette. (Stephen Ongpin)
Subject: landscape
Technique: oil on canvas
Size: 60 x 89 cm
Condition: see photos
Signed and dated 1902 by the artist
Shipping: 1500$
Att: Jerusalem, Israel, Holy Land,
Jewish, rabbi, Zion, Hebrew, Palestine Art, religion, Bezalel, pointillisme, Seurat