Gustave Loiseau French, 1865-1935

Description

At the turn of the twentieth century Loiseau found a lasting source of subjects in the villages north of Pontoise. Ennery, a few kilometres away, was one he returned to repeatedly, its wheat fields, farmhouses and wide skies giving him room to work through the changing effects of light. This was working countryside rather than picturesque France: the Vexin plateau was, and remains, arable land, and its rhythms of ploughing, harvest and haymaking gave Loiseau a calendar of subjects that renewed itself each year, the fields recording the labour of the seasons as plainly as any diary. The haystack carried a particular weight as a subject. Monet’s well-known haystack series exhibited in 1891 was sold almost as soon as it was shown. Loiseau takes it up in his own way, less as a systematic study of a single motif under changing conditions than as a record of an unspoilt countryside in which the turn of the seasons can be read in the plainest details of rural life.
The en trellis brushwork that became Loiseau’s signature built a picture in layers of fine strokes laid across one another at angles, frequently over several sessions before the motif itself. Each visit added a further webb of cross-hatching rather than blending colour wet into wet. The consequence is that light appears to reside within the weave of the paint rather than upon its surface, constructing a screen of paint between the viewer and the motif, lending itself naturally to mist and haze. In the present canvas that screen is made to carry the heat of Summer; a painter of mist, working at the hottest hour of the year, and the picture shimmers for it.