Landscape painting was transformed in the late nineteenth century by the plein-air painters who worked directly before their subject, and among the Post-Impressionists who carried that practice forward, Gustave Loiseau is one of the most accomplished. Born in Paris in 1865, the son of a butcher, he turned to art in his teens and - after an inheritance allowed him to study - enrolled at the School of Decorative Art in 1888 before joining the studio of Fernand Quignon who advised him to settle at Pont-Aven. Arriving there in 1890, he lodged at the Pension Gloanec and met Maufra, Moret and Gauguin, whose early influence is visible in his first works. He soon found his own manner and became known for painting at unusual hours to study the fall of light and for returning to a single subject through the changing seasons. Like Monet, he painted the same motif again and again under shifting weather, among them poplars, orchards and the bridge at Pontoise, and he was drawn above all to the effects of hazy light and fog.

Ma Voile Blanche, au Bord de la Rivière shows Loiseau where he was most himself: at the water’s edge. Rivers were not merely a subject for Loiseau, they were his address. His studio at Pontoise stood on the quai du Pothuis, directly on the bank of the Oise and he painted the river in flood, under frost and in the first leaf of spring, rising before dawn to catch the mist coming off the water. The blossoming chestnut places this canvas in that first flush of the year, the season in which the river valleys of northern France turn from grey to green and the picture distils what he found there.