Louis-auguste Lapito (1803-1874) The Flower Garden

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 student of Watelet and the history painter François-Joseph Heim, Lapito enjoyed success throughout his career, with several medals and state acquisitions (purchases from Louis-Philippe for the castles of Saint-Cloud and Compiègne). He was adept at both outdoor painting and compositions reworked in the studio due to his classical training, in both cases with a precise touch and a very strong sense of color. Among his many critical successes, we can cite that of the Journal des Artistes in 1838: “… Mr. Lapito continues to deserve the votes… His drawing is always accurate; despite a broad and easy touch, its sites always well chosen, its color generally true although a little golden. Mr. Lapito's productions are always noted for their picturesque arrangement, and the spiritual way in which they are touched...". Louis-Auguste Lapito belongs to the second generation of neo-classical landscapers, influenced and trained by artists like Valenciennes, Jean-Victor Bertin or Louis-Etienne Watelet, but who developed a more naturalist sensitivity, sometimes tinged with romanticism and picturesqueness.

Produced at a time when the painter proved definitively hermetic to the aesthetics of the artists of the Barbizon school, with whom he once frequented, the work presented is worth as a precious testimony to the art of living of the bourgeoisie in the countryside under the Second Empire. All that matters is the obsessive precision with which the artist describes the flowerbeds, the size of the rose bushes, the design of the marquise and the green tones used to paint the shutters. Lapito even goes so far as to scrupulously represent the chimney's vacuum cleaner cap, a device having a weather vane effect to place itself in the axis of the wind and encourage the drafting of out of breath hearths... Rare pictorial testimony of this industrial object, entered into a pure image of poetry, which is reminiscent of the tones of Danish painters such as Eckersberg. The touch, the placement of the shadows, the bright light give a particular life to this extraordinary canvas of the landscaper accustomed to the foliage of Bellifontaine. In the foreground the leaves of a young Yucca take us back to the famous composition by Antoine Cazal, produced in 1844, representing this same variety in flower in the Neuilly park, alongside a caged parrot. Add to this postcard the light wind pushing the clouds and caressing the pigeons of the town, and you obtain an ideal moment of middle-class life in the heart of the 19th century.