DOI Heft:
No. 72 (March 1899)
DOI Artikel:Mourey, Gabriel: The work of Gaston La Touche
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19231#0091
Gaston La Touche
and the boy had to leave Saint-Cloud and Versailles forced to admit himself beaten. The parents
with its park and its art galleries, where, on the sly, thereupon decide to put the boy into business, but
he used to study; for it was in these lovely gardens, he resists the proposal so violently that they agree
amid the wonderful architecture of the seventeenth to let him remain at home, on the understanding
and eighteenth centuries, that Gaston La Touche that he shall make himself useful; he is to keep
trained his eye ; and we shall see how strong an the house swept, pick the vegetables, and look
influence this early education had on his subse- after the garden, for two francs a week !
quent work. La Touche smiles as he proceeds :
This visit to Normandy, coming at a most im- "Dear, good parents! everything was against
pressionable age, had a marked effect on La Touche, them. By living in the kitchen I was seized with
and helped largely to shape his nature. He grew admiration for the beauties of the still-life around,
to know and understand himself, and his early the gleaming copper pans, the earthenware browned
fancies developed into a genuine vocation. Once by the fire, the play of light on all these inanimate
back at Saint-Cloud, now all waste and ruin, after objects. I kept on painting all the same, with
the Commune, the boy says good-bye to his Latin hairless brushes on stray bits of wood and old
and his literature, and the kindly master, who has box-lids ; and those who knew the family kitchen
been endeavouring to instruct him in the tongue of at that time will remember the walls covered
Virgil and to arouse his interest in the "yEneid," is with my studies of saucepans, skinned rabbits,
"'LA GUERRE" FROM A WATER-COLOUR BY GASTON I.A TOUCHE
80
and the boy had to leave Saint-Cloud and Versailles forced to admit himself beaten. The parents
with its park and its art galleries, where, on the sly, thereupon decide to put the boy into business, but
he used to study; for it was in these lovely gardens, he resists the proposal so violently that they agree
amid the wonderful architecture of the seventeenth to let him remain at home, on the understanding
and eighteenth centuries, that Gaston La Touche that he shall make himself useful; he is to keep
trained his eye ; and we shall see how strong an the house swept, pick the vegetables, and look
influence this early education had on his subse- after the garden, for two francs a week !
quent work. La Touche smiles as he proceeds :
This visit to Normandy, coming at a most im- "Dear, good parents! everything was against
pressionable age, had a marked effect on La Touche, them. By living in the kitchen I was seized with
and helped largely to shape his nature. He grew admiration for the beauties of the still-life around,
to know and understand himself, and his early the gleaming copper pans, the earthenware browned
fancies developed into a genuine vocation. Once by the fire, the play of light on all these inanimate
back at Saint-Cloud, now all waste and ruin, after objects. I kept on painting all the same, with
the Commune, the boy says good-bye to his Latin hairless brushes on stray bits of wood and old
and his literature, and the kindly master, who has box-lids ; and those who knew the family kitchen
been endeavouring to instruct him in the tongue of at that time will remember the walls covered
Virgil and to arouse his interest in the "yEneid," is with my studies of saucepans, skinned rabbits,
"'LA GUERRE" FROM A WATER-COLOUR BY GASTON I.A TOUCHE
80