Gaston La Touche - The Boat - Watercolor And Gouache On Paper

Gaston LA TOUCHE (1854-1913)
The Boat
Watercolor and gouache on paper
31.5×23.1 cm / 45x36.5cm framed
Signed lower left "Gaston La Touche / GD"
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After a first naturalist period, Gaston La Touche developed from 1890 a more decorative and whimsical production, which earned him to be related by the critics of his time to the painters of the 18th century. His plastic universe is marked by certain motifs, such as the boat or the branches of foliage in this composition, treated in a chromatic palette dominated by browns, greens, blues and golds.

Characteristic of his singular production, this watercolor testifies to his interest in this medium from the end of the 1890s. In 1897, he exhibited his first watercolors at the Salon de la Societe nationale des beaux-arts and joined the Societe des aquarellistes français. He left the latter in 1906 to found and preside over the Societe internationale de la peinture a l’eau, whose vocation was to "give more development and freedom to watercolor and [to] take an interest in all processes of water-based paint whatever they are"[1]. His work, mixing watercolor and gouache, has earned him recognition as one of the renovators "of the genre of water-based painting, giving it more solidity, consistency, through the use of gouache, while keeping its qualities of freshness, by reserves of watercolor. »[2]

[1] Article 1 of the statutes of the society, Première exposition de la société internationale de la peinture à l’eau, Paris, 1906
[2] Anonymous, “The work and life of Gaston La Touche », The New York Herald, Art Supplement, June 7, 1908, p. 9.