Biographie
1862–1907
Born in the Jura mountain range in Eastern France, Louis Roy met Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven in 1889, whilst being a young professor in drawing at the Lycée Michelet in Vannes, Brittany. Their mutual friend, Neo-Impressionism painter Émile Schuffenecker had arranged the meeting and Gauguin promptly painted Roy’s portrait entitled ‘The Painter Roy’. During the summer of that year Roy showed at the legendary Volpini exhibition, organised by Gauguin at the Café des Arts to show off publicly the revolutionary new style called Synthetism during the Universal Exhibition, which had its own official academic art pavilion.
In 1891 Roy returned to Brittany to visit his friends whose influence he now underwent. Roy gave up his Impressionist technique in favour of painting flat areas of colour, filling in simplified forms, akin to the process of ‘cloissoné’. This technique as well as the discovery of Japanese woodblock prints had led Gauguin to devise this style which became known as Synthetism.
In 1894, Gauguin commissioned Roy an original edition of his woodcuts which were to be the limited supplement of the edition of his Noa Noa travel journal.
Roy also worked as an engraver for the Symbolist magazine L’Ymagier of Rémy de Goncourt and Alfred Jarry. Roy was a professor at the Lycée Buffon in 1894, and at the Lycée Voltaire as of 1895. Roy was also active as a respected art critic for the magazine Mercure de France, in which he was the first to publicly recognise the talent of Le Douannier-Rousseau. Roy died in Paris in 1907.