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Louis-Auguste LAPITO
(Joinville-le-Pont, 1803 - Boulogne-sur-Seine, 1874)
The flower garden
Oil on panel
H. 34 cm; L. 48 cm
Signed and dated lower left. "Ate. Lapito. 1860"
A pupil of Watelet and history painter François-Joseph Heim, Lapito enjoyed success throughout his career, with several medals and state acquisitions (Louis-Philippe's purchases for the châteaux of Saint-Cloud and Compiègne). He was adept at both plein-air painting and the reworked studio compositions of his classical training, in both cases with a precise touch and a strong sense of color. Among his many critical fortunes, we might cite that of the Journal des Artistes in 1838: "... M. Lapito continues to merit praise... His drawing is always exact; despite a broad and easy touch, his sites always well chosen, his color generally true if a little golden. Monsieur Lapito's productions are always remarkable for their picturesque order and the witty way in which they are touched...".
Louis-Auguste Lapito belongs to the second generation of neo-classical landscape painters, influenced and trained by artists such as Valenciennes, Jean-Victor Bertin and Louis-Etienne Watelet, but who developed a more naturalistic sensibility, sometimes tinged with romanticism and the picturesque.
Produced at a time when the painter had become definitively impervious to the aesthetics of the Barbizon school of artists he had once frequented, the work presented here is a precious testimony to the art of living of the bourgeoisie in the countryside during the Second Empire. All that counts is the obsessive precision with which the artist describes the flowerbeds, the size of the rosebushes, the design of the marquise and the green tones used to paint the shutters. Lapito even goes so far as to scrupulously depict the chimney's suction cap, a device that acts like a weather vane to position itself in the axis of the wind and encourage the draught of out-of-breath hearths... A rare pictorial testimony to this industrial object, entered into a purely poetic image, reminiscent of the tonalities of Danish painters such as Eckersberg. The brushstrokes, the placement of shadows and the vivid light give a particular life to this unusual canvas by the landscape artist accustomed to the foliage of Bellifontaine. In the foreground, the leaves of a young Yucca remind us of Antoine Cazal's famous composition of 1844, depicting the same variety in bloom in the Parc de Neuilly, alongside a caged parrot.
Add to this postcard the light wind blowing the clouds and caressing the town's pigeons, and you have an ideal moment of middle-class life in the heart of the 19th century.
