L’Hermitage in Pontoise

Gustave Loiseau built his paintings out of small crossed strokes, a technique he used so consistently it became his signature. The French call it en treillis, a trellis of brushmarks laid over the canvas. Up close it looks almost mechanical. Step back and the orchards, cliffs and riverbanks settle into place. He came to painting late and without much formal training, funding himself with an inheritance from his grandmother. Pont-Aven drew him in the early 1890s, where he met Gauguin’s circle, though he never took up their flat symbolic manner. The Impressionist approach suited him better and he stayed with it long after it had stopped being new. Normandy and the Seine valley gave him most of his subjects. He painted the same stretches of water and the same apple trees through every season, often returning to a motif dozens of times. The winter canvases, with snow flattening the colour range, are the ones worth seeking out.