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. Most of his work is based on a wide range of paintings, but there are also drawings and very few prints.

The prices at which his works are auctioned range from €20 to €300,000, a substantial 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 its estimate was between €90,000 and €130,000.  

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

Gaston de La Touche's style and technique

Gaston La Touche stands out for a style in which light and color become the real protagonists.

Heir to the Impressionists in his preoccupation with atmospheric effects, he moves away from their raw spontaneity to offer more elaborate, almost theatrical compositions.

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

The palette, often dominated by soft, pastel hues, is enhanced by more vibrant touches, creating 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.

Every element of the painting, from the reflections of a pond to the silky textures of fabrics, is treated with a care that evokes the colorists of the XVIIIᵉ century.

Through this blend of precision and reverie, La Touche creates a pictorial universe where 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 Saint-Cloud in 1854, at a time when French art was undergoing profound upheaval.

From an early age, he showed a marked interest in drawing, encouraged by his parents who supported 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 sweetness of fêtes galantes.

Collectors and critics alike were captivated by his work, and he received numerous official commissions, notably for monumental decors.

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

Its proximity to figures such as Puvis de Chavannes and Alfred Roll or Alexandre de Séon reinforces 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, 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 a festive, dreamlike atmosphere, seems to escape all anchorage in time.

The stage is populated by graceful characters, dressed in costumes evoking the pastoral musings of the XVIIIᵉ century, who blend harmoniously with a garden bathed in light.

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

The choice of hues - deep greens punctuated by luminous pinks, golds and whites - lends 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, contributes to an overall harmony.

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

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

Celebrating the ethereal beauty of nature and simple pleasures, La Danse au Jardin is a veritable ode to idealized life, supported 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 it evokes at times the festive breath of Watteau's fêtes galantes, it is not limited to a simple pastiche of the XVIIIᵉ century.

On the contrary, he infuses these legacies with the vitality of his era, tinged with Impressionist light effects.

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 scenery, where each element seems weighed down to create visual serenity. But La Touche doesn't stop there.

Fascinated by Japanese art, he retained a certain decorative poetry, palpable in his floral arrangements and refined ornamental details.

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

In this way, 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's work is rarely discussed. For, at first glance, his art seems to be a declension of light and color, almost banal in its homogeneity.

But a closer look is needed to see what his painting contributed to his era.

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 on the sidelines of the great artistic revolutions.

 He didn't 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. 

Although 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 is not content to reproduce, but seeks to capture the very essence of light and color in a kind of suspension of time.

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

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

But he integrated them in his own way, without ever submitting to a particular 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 new-found 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 appraisal. When his works are signed, the signature appears in flowing script.

Knowing the value of a work

If you happen to own one of Gaston La Touche's works, ask for a free estimate using the form on our website.

A member of our team of experts and certified auctioneers will contact you promptly to provide you with an estimate of the value of your work, as well as any relevant information about it.

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