"Louis Auguste LOUSTAUNAU (1846 – 1898) - "View of the garden of Versailles and the Grand Trianon"
Oil on canvas, signed at the bottom right.
Dimensions: 49.5 x 78.5 cm, with frame 61.5 x 84.5 cm
Louis Loustaunau depicts a view of the gardens of Versailles. It represents a nature tamed by the century of Louis XIV, and takes architecture as its subject. The foreground offers a path on which the viewer is about to embark, in the distance, architecture is emerging. The morning sun magnifies the white stone and the lines of the royal apartments. The play of light and shadow serves the perspective and the learned composition. The painter invites the viewer to reflect on the morning walk.
The young painter is trained at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. He joined the workshops of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Eugène Barrias. He is noted for his talents as a landscape painter. He debuted at the salon of 1869, exhibited a view of Brittany. He exhibited regularly at the Salons until 1875, sending landscapes and genre scenes. He completed his training with Edouard Detaille. The latter opens him to military and historical painting. Loustaunau painted "Cavalier in the park of Versailles", whose landscape in which the riders are inscribed is inspired by the present painting.(Lambinet Museum)
Louis Loustaunau gradually breaks away from the noble genre to find his youthful loves, the painting of anecdote and domesticated nature. France reaches a period of relative peace, her painting becomes humanized. The painter returns to landscape and genre painting and exercises himself with finesse in their execution.
Museums, galleries: In Versailles: Lambinet Museum, National Museum of the castles of Versailles and the Trianon, barracks of the 5th Genie. In Paris: Galery Ary Jan. Municipal Museum of Pontarlier, Museum of Fine Arts of Rennes. Private collections.
Bibliography:
. "Notice of paintings, watercolors, pastels and old and modern drawings, old engravings, old and modern books, earthenware, bronzes", Paris, ed. Sortais, 1894
. Émile Bellier de La Chavignerie, Louis Auvray,"General dictionary of artists of the French School from the origin of the drawing arts to the present day: architects, painters, sculptors, engravers and lithographers, 1882-1885", work, Volume II and Volume III, Paris, ed. n.r., 1885