AUGUSTE TOULMOUCHE

French 1829–1890

BIOGRAPHY
Auguste Toulmouche was born in Nantes on September 21, 1829, the son of Émile Toulmouche, an affluent broker, and Rose Sophie Mercier. In 1841, Toulmouche began to study drawing and sculpture with the local sculptor Amédée René Ménard.

In 1846 Auguste Toulmouche moved to Paris, and at the age of 17 entered the independent studio of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre (1806–1874) and was reputed to be one of Gleyre’s favorite students. He debuted at the Paris Salon two years later in 1848, receiving an honourable mention.  In 1852 he exhibited La Fille, which earned a third class medal and was acquired by Napoleon III as a gift for Eugénie. The following year, Empress Eugénie purchased the artist’s The First Step.

In 1861, Toulmouche won a second class medal at the annual Salon. In 1862 he married Marie Lecadre, daughter of Nantes lawyer Alphonse Henri Lecadre, and thus became a cousin by marriage of the painter Claude Monet. Monet’s father employed Toulmouche to oversee his son’s art studies in Paris. When Monet arrived in Paris in November 1862, Toulmouche directed him immediately to Gleyre’s studio. Although Monet was unfulfilled by Gleyre’s emphasis on the Academic style, it was in his atelier that Monet met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille.

In 1870, the year in which Toulmouche was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, he joined one of the battalions defending Paris against the German invasion in the Franco-Prussian War. After the war ended, he spent more time at the Abbaye de Blanche-Couronne near Nantes, which was part of a large estate inherited by his wife on the death of her father. He built a workshop on the abbey grounds and frequently hosted friends from Paris to spend time there, including Ernest Reyer, Paul Baudry, Geneviève Halévy, Ignacy Jan Pederewski, and Jules-Élie Delaunay (whose portrait of Toulmouche, illustrated above, is in the collection of the Musée Magnin, Dijon).

John House describes Toulmouche as “one of the best known and most commericially successful of the genre painters who specialized in scenes depicting fashionably dressed young women during the 1860s and 1870s… The dealer Adolphe Goupil purchased much of his work and also ensured its circulation by publishing photographic reproductions of many of his paintings, from the early 1860s onwards.” (Sarah Lees, ed., Nineteenth-Century European Paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, New Haven and London, 2012, vol. 2, p. 782).

Museum Collections:
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Béziers
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE
Louvre, Paris
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA
St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, MO

Mark Murray Fine Paintings is a New York gallery specializing in buying and selling 19th century and early 20th century artwork. 

Please contact us if you are interested in selling your Auguste Toulmouche paintings or other artwork from the 19th century and early 20th century.

AUGUSTE TOULMOUCHE
Paintings for sale

Auguste Toulmouche Paintings Previously Sold