Rating and value of paintings by Gaston La Touche

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Rating and value of the artist Gaston de la Touche  

A French academic painter par excellence, Gaston de la Touche devoted himself mainly to portraits. The bulk of his work is based on a wide range of paintings, but there are also drawings, on the other hand very few prints.

The prices at which his works are auctioned range from €20 to €300,000, a consequent delta but one that speaks volumes about the value that can be attributed to the artist's works.

In this case, his oil on canvas Les Pivoines, measuring 140 cm x 143.5 cm, sold for €300,000, whereas it was estimated at between €90,000 and €130,000.  

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

Style and technique of Gaston de La Touche

Gaston La Touche is distinguished by a style in which light and color become the real protagonists.

Heir to the Impressionists in his concern for atmospheric effects, he nevertheless departs from their raw spontaneity to offer more worked, almost theatrical compositions.

His technique is based on the use of subtle glazes, which give his canvases a bewitching transparency and refined brilliance.

The palette, often dominated by soft, pastel hues, is enhanced by more vibrant touches, establishing a delicate dialogue between nuance and intensity.

The female figures and bucolic scenes he favors seem bathed in a diffuse light, where contours lose their sharpness to give way to a hushed ambience.

Each element of the painting, whether the reflections of a pond or the silky textures of fabrics, is treated with a care that evokes the colorists of the XVIIIᵉ century.

With this blend of precision and reverie, La Touche creates a pictorial universe in which reality is transcended, leaving the viewer with the impression of a world suspended between grace and poetry.

The life of Gaston La Touche

Gaston La Touche was born in 1854 in Saint-Cloud, at the heart of a period when French art was undergoing profound upheaval.

From an early age, he showed a marked interest in drawing, encouraged by his parents, who supported him in his artistic vocation.

Although he began with dark, naturalistic scenes, influenced by his admiration for Édouard Manet and François Bonvin, his style soon evolved towards brighter painting, inspired by the XVIIIᵉ century.

From the 1890s, his career took off again when he adopted a delicate aesthetic, evoking the gentleness of fêtes galantes.

His works seduced collectors and critics alike, and he received numerous official commissions, notably for monumental decors.

Installed in Champigny-sur-Marne, he divides his time between his elegant compositions and the constant search for ideal light, captured in the gardens and landscapes that surround his studio.

His proximity to figures such as Puvis de Chavannes and Alfred Roll or Alexandre de Séon strengthens his position in the artistic circles of the time.

Until his death in 1913, he remained a painter appreciated for his ability to combine modernity and refinement, offering an ideal and timeless vision of life.

Focus on La Danse au Jardin

In La Danse au Jardin, Gaston La Touche reveals a virtuosity where visual brilliance and subtlety meet. This canvas, imbued with an atmosphere both festive and dreamlike, seems to escape any temporal anchorage.

The scene is peopled by graceful characters, dressed in costumes evoking the pastoral reveries of the XVIIIᵉ century, who blend harmoniously into a garden bathed in light.

This interplay of light shadows and shimmering hues reflects a rare mastery of chiaroscuro, while the artist's vaporous touches evoke a gentle fragility. 

The choice of tonalities - deep greens punctuated by luminous pinks, golds and whites - lends the whole a chromatic balance that exalts the elegance of the moment captured.

La Touche doesn't just freeze a scene, he orchestrates a pictorial symphony in which every detail, from the movement of fabrics to the texture of foliage, participates in an overall harmony.

This painting illustrates his attachment to a painting that sublimates reality, flirting with symbolism through the evocation of a timeless celebration. 

It also echoes his influences: the memory of Watteau and the fêtes galantes, or the diffuse trace of Impressionist lightness.

By celebrating the ethereal beauty of nature and simple pleasures, La Danse au Jardin embodies a veritable ode to idealized life, carried by a pictorial technique as delicate as it is precise.

Gaston La Touche's stylistic influences

The web of influences that runs through Gaston La Touche's work has not been sufficiently explored. While at times he evokes the festive breath of Watteau's fêtes galantes, he does not limit himself to a simple pastiche of the XVIIIᵉ century.

On the contrary, he infuses these heritages with a vitality specific to his era, tinged with Impressionist plays of light.

This way of capturing reflections in an almost musical radiance, where each nuance seems to dialogue with its opposite, is reminiscent of Renoir's chromatic delicacy. 

Where Puvis de Chavannes joins him is in this quest for balance: a meticulous arrangement of figures and settings, where each element seems weighed to create visual serenity. But La Touche didn't stop there.

Fascinated by Japonism, he retained a certain decorative poetry, palpable in his floral arrangements and in the refinement of ornamental details.

All these influences, far from being disparate, are unified in a personal style where modernity and reminiscence respond harmoniously.  

Thus, Gaston La Touche, while adhering to an artistic filiation, emancipates himself from it to weave a universe that is both singular and deeply imbued with the resonances of his time.

Gaston La Touche's imprint on his period

This aspect of Gaston La Touche has rarely been dwelt upon. For, at first glance, his art seems to be a declension of light and color, almost banal in its homogeneity.

But you have to take a closer look to perceive what his painting contributed to its time.

At a time when the world was modernizing, when art was divided between avant-garde and tradition, La Touche carved out a very special path for himself, that of a quiet aesthete, almost aloof from the great artistic revolutions

 He did not seek to shock or unbalance, but rather to soothe, to offer a breath of fresh air in the often tense atmosphere of the late 19th century.

While his scenes of parks, gardens and festivals seem almost frozen in an ideal of the past, they nevertheless reveal a subtle modernity: that of an art that doesn't simply reproduce, but seeks to capture the very essence of light and color in a kind of suspension of time.

This is where his imprint lies: in this ability to redefine the perception of the everyday, to render the ephemeral eternal, without resorting to the artifices of novelty.

His influences are manifold: Impressionism with its taste for changing light, Symbolism in the search for atmosphere, and even a touch of realism in the precision of landscapes.

But he integrated them in his own way, without ever submitting to a school or movement. 

In short, his work, far from being a simple retrospective, is a subtle commentary on his era, a gentle response to the violence of social and artistic change, echoing the quest for a rediscovered harmony so characteristic of the late 19th century.

Recognizing Gaston La Touche's signature

The painter didn't sign all his works, which doesn't make for easy expertise. When his works are signed, the signature appears in flowing script.

Know the value of a work

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