La forêt

Literature

Louis Valtat was a French painter, printmaker and stage designer.  He spent much of his youth in Versailles before moving to Paris in 1887 where he studied under Gustave Boulanger, Jules Lefèvre, and Benjamin Constant at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  He also studied under Jules Dupre at the Academie Julian where he met Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Albert Andre.  Interested in both artistic precedents and contemporary trends, he absorbed in the mid-1890s the chief tenets of Impressionism, Pointillism and Van Gogh’s style before developing his own.  In 1895 he collaborated with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Andre on the set of a French play.  Under Toulouse-Lautrec’s influence, his own works darkened both in color and sentiment before turning to scenes of contemporary French life with a sunnier and more optimistic air by 1896.

Between 1897 and 1898, initiated by Renoir’s recommendation, the French dealer Ambroise Vollard brought almost his entire production, an arrangement that lasted for the next decade.  From 1899 to 1914, Valtat divided much of his time between Paris and a house in Antheor, near Le Lavandou.  He also traveled and considerably broadened his contacts with other artists.  In 1894 and early 1895, he spent time with Aristide Maillol in Banyuls and Collioure.  He visited Auguste Renoir several times between 1900 and 1905 at Magagnosc, near Grasse.  He also visited Signac at St. Tropez in 1903 and 1904 and recorded North African street life in several oil sketches.  He also spent time in Normandy in 1907.

As early as 1893 Valtat exhibited at the Salon des Independants, La Libre Esthetique in Brussels in 1900, and the groundbreaking Salon d’Automne in 1903.  Among the reproductions in Louis Vauxcelle’s review of the Salon d’Automne of 1905, in which the term ‘Fauve’ was first used, was a loosely brushed marine scene by Valtat. Valtat, however, always remained detached from and on the fringe of the Fauvist movement.  His palette may have been similarly bright, but the distortions of color and line were not quite as bold or reductive as those achieved by leader of the Fauves, Henri Matisse.