Lot 270: f - Gaston la Touche French, 1854-1913 , Esprits Nocturnes pastel on paper laid on canvas

signed and dated Gaston la Touche / 1897 l.l. pastel on paper laid on canvas

99.5 by 99.5cm., 39¼ by 39¼in.

Private Collection, California
Sale: Butterfields, San Francisco, 18 May 1993, lot 1440
Private Collection, San Francisco (purchased at the above sale)

To be included in the Gaston la Touche catalogue raisonné being prepared by Selina Baring-MacLennan.
Painted in 1897, Esprits Nocturnes relates to the important oil painting by La Touche entitled L'Aube (Musée de Strasbourg), which shows young mothers holding their babies, merging into a column of cherubs drifting upwards into a dawn sky. The day promises a new beginning and symbolises rebirth. The present work, similarly, shows spirits rising from the river mist and vaporising into the warmth of a new day. Yet in its feathery application of pastel and glorious shifts of colour, it inspires a more mediative effect: rather than a narrative to be read, this composition intends to be experienced and pondered.

Both the present pastel and L'Aube bear comparison with the pantheist triptych by the Belgian Symbolist painter Léon Frédéric, The Stream, in which children are depicted as part of the waters symbolising the unity of man and nature.

La Touche's subject matter, palette and technique made a radical shift during the 1890s. The artist moved from more realistic, sombre portrayals of daily life to idealised compositions of peaceful parks and fanciful gardens dotted by fountains, streams and forests populated by swans, water nymphs, fauns and revellers returning home. While certain mythological or spiritual elements of these works are clear in Esprits Nocturnes, the present work is largely mysterious: swirling shifts of purple and blue vapours form the bodies of a group of mist babies rising from the water, as peach-pink tones form their guardian figures. This pastel vision, composed of carefully studied colour complements and contrasts and a harmonious juxtaposition of linear and curved forms, evinces la Touche's experimentation with Symbolism.

La Touche employs a technique reminiscent of Henri Martin (see lot 269) and Henri Le Sidaner, both handled by his dealer, Galerie Georges Petit. Like them, he cloaks his composition with vaporous figures and objects, creating multicoloured surfaces and a magical atmosphere. In so doing, his work is similar to that of the artistes de l'âme (the artists of the soul), a fin-de-siècle group whose works focused on a somnambulant air of detachment and dreaminess, to suggest states of the soul - often to explore the creeping anxieties and unsettling possibilities presented by the approaching new millenium (Dorra, p. 252).