Francis Kyle Gallery

Jean-Marie Toulgouat


Le flamboginant de l'automne, Giverny, oil 1999	Le cote de la maison
9.5 x 13in 24 x 33cm	9.5 x 13in 24 x 33cm

	Biography JEAN-MARIE TOULGOUAT, (1927 - 2006) was born in Giverny, Eure, the grandson of pioneer American Post-Impressionist painter, Theodore Butler and Suzanne (neé Hoschedé), the daughter of Claude Monet's second wife Alice. Brought up in the Monet house still hung then with some of the great painter's last major works, Toulgouat went on to attend the Academy of Painting at Nice (1948-1949), where he lived with his great-aunt Blanche Hoschedé Monet, herself a painter and the companion of Claude Monet's old age. From 1949 to 1950 Toulgouat studied architecture in Vernon, practicing in Paris for the next sixteen years with landscape architecture as his speciality. In 1966 he returned to Giverny to concentrate on his first love, painting. Since then he has held seventeen one-man exhibitions in France, Holland, the USA and Britain. In 1993 paintings by him were included in Art in Bloom: Flowers in historical and contemporary painting, Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery. He was represented by Francis Kyle Gallery from 1984 and held nine one-man exhibitions there, most recently in 2001. Jean-Marie Toulgouat died in 2006.

	Jean-Marie Toulgouat In the course of nine exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery, the distinguished French painter Jean-Marie Toulgouat brought together paintings celebrating the two principle themes in his art: aspects of his garden at Giverny, Normandy and the woodland avenues and glades around his other home situated in southwest France in the countryside between Bordeaux and Toulouse, where he would spend his summers. The garden at Giverny, in particular, may be the artist's own creation, fondly nurtured over some thirty years, but Toulgouat sees it less with the eye of a gardener or botanist than with that of a painter, as he composes 'in a liquid fluent calligraphy that can… weave a dense tapestry of leaves and flowers that stresses the surface of the picture, offering neither distance nor horizon… Often the pictures work both as a sea of colour and as an organized pictorial distance, as bright abstraction and the reality of summer heat. Nothing is left to accident or serendipitous disorder - the limited palette and the underlying discipline of the technique ensure that the effects are precisely predictable, and that no picture expresses more or less than Toulgouat intended, in spite of the impression of breadth, speed and spontaneity implied in the handling.' (Brian Sewell) Recalling his earliest years growing up in Giverny in a community whose way of life had been largely shaped by the presence of his forbear Claude Monet, Jean-Marie Toulgouat wrote movingly of a village where everyone, whatever their profession, aspired also to be an artiste-peintre: 'there was no more natural means of expression for all of us. As a child I hung on these painters' every word and gesture, I busied myself arranging their materials, I bombarded them with questions. Grandfather (the American Impressionist painter, Theodore Butler who married Suzanne, Monet's stepdaughter) fashioned for me a miniature easel, which I attacked fiercely, following his advice at age seven to paint just what I saw.' Where this experience would lead Jean-Marie Toulgouat, after studies at the Nice Academy of Art under the watchful eye of Blanche Monet, companion of Monet's last years, was to an involvement first with the Cobra movement, to his friendship with the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle and to a kind of explosive abstraction in his painting, though already he was showing a preference for nature's palette. Full cycle for Toulgouat came with the end of his years in Paris, and the rediscovery of his roots at Giverny through a return to nature as his chief source of inspiration, anchored by the creation of his garden along 'English' lines, as well as the pivotal role he assumed in helping to orchestrate the renaissance of the great Monet garden. Deeper fulfilment, too, as a painter would come with the addition of his other home and studio in the southwest with the challenge it brought of a different, contrasting environment, expressed in a strong group of paintings.


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