LOISEAU, Gustave

French painter. He was apprenticed first to a butcher and in 1880 to a house painter. It was not until 1887, when he received a small inheritance, that he was able to devote himself to painting. He spent a year studying modelling and design at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and then entered the studio of the French landscape painter Fernand Just Quignon (b. 1854) for six months in 1889.

After setting in 1890 in Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he met the painters Maxime Maufra and Henry Moret, he produced such carefully executed works as the Green Rocks (1893; Geneva, Petit Palais). It was not until 1894, however, that he met Gauguin on the latter’s return from Tahiti, and though he did not accept Gauguin’s synthetist ideas the encounter led to a stronger structure and freer brushstrokes in his subsequent work.

He exhibited with the Neo-Impressionists between 1891 and 1895. His views of Paris are famous. He travelled frequently in Normandy, along the Seine, on the cliff coast of Dieppe and in the Dordogne. He stayed often in Pontoise where he visited Gachet.

In 1901 Loiseau had a large single exhibition at Durand-Ruel.