Gaston LECREUX
Bouquets, around 1905
Oil on canvas
Signed lower right
Size: 81 x 61cm
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Gaston Lecreux represents bouquets of buttercups, snowballs, carnations and lilacs, which he frames through a window. The transparency of a curtain lets the day filter through, bathing the painting in a soft luminosity. The pastel colors blend into a harmonious gradation of white, pink and purple. The painter, who specializes in painting flowers, enriches the vocabulary expected of a still life through his delicate work with light. Here, the artist chooses to represent several bouquets. Should we see a symbolism there? That of a renewal, perhaps, since the flowers of the end of winter cohabit with those of the beginning of spring.
Gaston Lecreux is a painter of flowers, landscapes, watercolourist and decorator. He is a pupil of Alfred Boucher and Noël. His career began at the Salon of 1877, he obtained a medal for his still lifes. Quickly, it is recognized and celebrated for its floral specialty. For this reason, he was appointed jury of a Salon at the end of his career.
Bibliography:
• Bénézit Dictionary of Artist – Oxford Art Online.
• Emile Bellier de la Chavignerie, Louis Auvray, General dictionary of artists of the French school from the origin of the arts of drawing to the present day; architects, painters, sculptors, engravers and lithographers , Paris, Renouard, 1882-1885.
• Léonce Bénédite, The Masterpieces of the Luxembourg Museum, Paris, Lapina, 1818-1937.
Museums:
• Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Four paintings are exhibited in the national collections. Buttercups (1910), Iris (1906) and Nature Morte (1910), held at the Center National des Arts Plastiques. A fourth painting is listed in the inventory of the Regional Fund for Contemporary Art in Paris.
• Reims, Museum of Fine Arts (two paintings, named Flowers ).
• One of his etchings, Fleurs de Pommier , is kept in the library of the National Institute of Art History.
