Biographie

1869–1952

Born in Dieppe, into a wealthy fam­i­ly of shipown­ers, Louis Val­tat grew up in Ver­sailles. Aged sev­en­teen, Val­tat moved to Paris to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He com­ple­ment­ed his aca­d­e­m­ic train­ing with cours­es at the inde­pen­dent Académie Julian, a force behind the devel­op­ment of Mod­ern Art for its accep­tance of women and for­eign stu­dents. Here, he befriend­ed Pierre Bon­nard, his senior by two years. Val­tat also met Édouard Vuil­lard and as a result became close to the young painters Paul Sérusi­er and Mau­rice Denis who adhered to the Nabis, a group whose style was inspired by Paul Gau­guin and who believed that art was a syn­the­sis of metaphors and symbols.

The work enti­tled ‘La Lec­ture’ which Val­tat chose for his first pub­lic exhi­bi­tion at the ‘Salon des Indépen­dants’ of 1893 clear­ly showed the Nabis influ­ence. Affect­ed by tuber­cu­lo­sis, Val­tat moved to the South of France in search for clean air. He sojourned in the Mediter­ranean towns of Banyuls and Col­lioure on the French-Span­ish bor­der, before mov­ing to Arca­chon, on the Atlantic coast.
The works he showed at the ‘Salon des Indépen­dants’ of 1896 caught the atten­tion of the renowned crit­ic Félix Fénéon; their high­ly unusu­al use of colour announced the advent of Fau­vism. Valtat’s vigourous colour palette was shared by Hen­ri Matisse, Hen­ri Man­guin and André Derain amongst oth­ers whose works caused scan­dal at the infa­mous ‘Salon d’Automne’ of 1905, mark­ing the offi­cial birth of Fauvism.
Fol­low­ing anoth­er stay in Banyuls dur­ing 1896–1897, Val­tat set­tled on the French Riv­iera in the town of Agay, near Saint-Raphaël. In 1899 he bought land in near­by Anthéor, and con­struct­ed ‘Rou­cas Rou’, the house where he would spend the autumn and win­ter sea­sons with his wife Suzanne. Look­ing out onto the Red Rocks of the Estérel, Val­tat reached full artis­tic matu­ri­ty. The pro­duc­tion of the so-called ‘Estérel peri­od’, 1899–1913, is indeed remarkable.
In 1900 Val­tat befriend­ed the old­er Auguste Renoir, who lived in near­by Cagnes-sur-Mer and who intro­duced him to Georges d’Espagnat. Val­tat made sev­er­al por­trait draw­ings of Renoir and in 1903, Renoir paint­ed the por­trait of Valtat’s wife.
Val­tat also befriend­ed Paul Signac, whom he vis­it­ed reg­u­lar­ly in Saint-Tropez. Back in Paris in 1914, Val­tat spent his sum­mers in Les Andelys in Nor­mandy. In 1924, Val­tat set­tled tem­porar­i­ly in the Chevreuse val­ley, South of Paris, where he received his friends Georges d’Espagnat and Max­im­i­lien Luce. He con­tin­ued to spend time in Nor­mandy and Brittany.
In 1940 Val­tat ceased to leave his stu­dio on the avenue de Wagram in Paris where he died in 1952. His last can­vass­es were dat­ed 1948.