Paysage à Saint Cyr du Vaudreuil, circa 1926 by Gustave Loiseau

Provenance:
Private Collection, Montreal

Literature:
Christophe Duvivier and Claude Cornu, "Gustave Loiseau: Paysages d’Île-de-France et de Normandie" [online publication], Paris, 2018, accessed 15 April 2025

As one of the foremost Post-Impressionist painters, Gustave Loiseau was profoundly influenced by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. An adept of "plein air" painting, he nevertheless adopted a personal and abstract pictorial language by painting at unusual times of the day to capture the changes of light. Born in 1865 in Paris, Loiseau’s interest in art developed when his parents moved back to their hometown of Pontoise in 1884, a region that had also fascinated Pissarro and Paul Cézanne. After joining the artist colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1890, Loiseau became friends with Henry Moret, Maxime Maufra and Paul Gauguin, which led him to adopt bolder colours and expand his Impressionist repertoire.

Here a lone figure is depicted standing in a courtyard with lush greenery in shades of green, brown and ochre. Buildings rise on the periphery, with their gable roofs and brick chimneys. While the lower register is intensely colourful, the viewer’s eye is inevitably drawn to the tree branches stretching upward in the background to the atmospheric sky represented in shades of white, blue, pink and grey. Under Loiseau’s brush, the paint is dynamic, animated by a fine network of superimposed and crossed hatches, fully rendering the transparency of the air, sky and the rich texture of the natural landscape.

Saint-Cyr-du-Vaudreuil was an old French commune in Normandy, which Loiseau visited in 1899 and 1932. It regrouped two neighbouring communes separated by the Eure river, thus offering the perfect setting for Post-Impressionist artists who were drawn to the waterscapes and the changing effects of light upon the environment. French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, celebrated for championing the Impressionists, started buying Loiseau’s paintings in 1897 and exhibited them regularly the following year in Paris and New York. In 1901, Durand-Ruel devoted a solo exhibition to the artist in Saint-Cyr-du-Vaudreuil alongside a show of Georges Manzana-Pissarro, the third of Pissarro’s seven children. With Durand-Ruel’s financial support, Loiseau travelled extensively to various regions outside Paris, to Normandy and Brittany, recording the changing seasons and the play of natural light on his surroundings.

We are grateful to Didier Imbert for confirming the authenticity of this work.