Achille Laugé

Achille Laugé (1861-1944) was born in Arzens, a small town in the southern part of France in the Aude region, the son of successful farmers. When Laugé was still quite young, the family moved to Cailhau near Carcassonne, not far from Arzens, and it was in this town that the young artist spent most of his youth. In 1878, when Laugé was seventeen, he began his studies in Toulouse, moving next to Paris in 1881, where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. While Laugé was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, his friend from Toulouse, the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, introduced him to the classical sculptor Aristide Maillol, renowned for his large-scale sculptures of women. The two remained friends for many years.

Laugé resided in Paris during heady and exciting times for the artistic community. He was exposed to the work of the Neo-Impressionists, and it is most certain that he saw the exhibition of Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in 1886. In 1895 Laugé moved back to his childhood home of Cailhau, where he would spend the rest of his life. Around this time he began to employ a practice called divisionism, whereby color is separated into individual dots or strokes of pigment. Neo-Impressionist artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, whose work inspired Laugé, applied paint in contrasting dots of color placed side by side so that, when seen from a distance, these dots would blend and be perceived by the retina as a luminous whole.

From 1888 until 1896, Laugé's paintings were similarly, though not quite so scientifically, constructed with small dots of color. After this period, his technique changed, and he began to apply paint in strokes that approached crosshatching. Again in 1905 his style took another turn, and he began to paint in larger strokes that resulted in a thicker impasto application. Such a style brought him full circle to a more Impressionist manner. Working in relative isolation from the Parisian art world during his mature career, Laugé continued to develop his personal version of Neo-Impressionism through his paintings of the landscapes, flowers, and villages of the Aude region. His pictures are held today in French regional museums and in significant international collections, where they are appreciated as distinctive contributions to the French landscape and Neo-Impressionist traditions.