PAINTER'S TOPICS

Throughout his career, Auguste Durst's favorite themes have been rural and picturesque landscapes, with a clear preference for Norman landscapes, peasants and farm animals, which have been his true source of inspiration. Faithful to his classical training, he also made many portraits. The subjects treated by the painter are the expression of his mobility, naturally oriented towards Normandy, England and the Isle of Jersey or if he exiled himself during the Commune, but the cities of western Paris also attract his attention. These travels take her to more distant lands, in Gironde, where her sister married and settled; to Marseille and the countryside near Toulon in the Var. The landscapes, the light and colours he encounters there, the people of these regions, their lifestyles, recur in a recurrent way in all his production.

NORMANDY

Although he received studio training, Durst is part of this generation of artists who worked outdoors, even though many of his paintings are used in the studio. Apart from the very large canvases (made for the job in the workshop, the standard format he used during his career leads us to believe that he paints on the motif. Normandy offers a living environment and bucolic scenes sought after by many Parisians and artists, who flee from the industrial nuisances and emerging urban planners in Paris and the suburbs. The painted scenes are thus peaceful and family-friendly. They show the settings and living conditions without any pretence or make-up. They are naturalistic representations par excellence without too much idealisation.

Nevertheless, he manages to make the freshness of the grass, the light of the sky and up to the temperature, by immersing it in a nature taken from the living. The artist manages to communicate the pleasure of a pastoral walk. The characters become anecdotal, pretexts for chromatic scale games. The paintings are distinguished by the poetry of the places as much as by the accuracy of the execution. Often a worked sky, a window of blue in a dense vegetation allow him to open the horizon, in the classic way. Everything then seems to blend together in a concert of colours and light. Behind the views of Norman farms or other picturesque landscapes showing rural or urban life, there are mainly visual problems, where the main focus is on colours and light, the layout and balance of spaces. Thus we see the emergence of chromatic series: green, grey, brown. He uses monochromes or coloured monochromes or monochromes to create subtle harmonies.

The portraits

Like many painters of his time, Auguste Durst also devoted himself to portraits. The two masters who trained it - Hébert and Bonnat - are the great "academic" representatives of the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Whether male, female or young children, the artist treats the portrait in a classical way, on brown backgrounds, blocked especially at the beginning of his career. Very few male portraits of him are known. It is mainly portraits of women that he executes. Gradually, he integrated them into open funds in the heart of nature. Several representations of peasant or bourgeois women

landscapes of gironde

The painter began to frequent Gironde and Aquitaine around 1885. Her sister Helene's marriage to a Bordeaux doctor, Dr Mauguin, and her move to this region seem to be the reason for her frequent stays in the region. Since then, he has regularly participated in the salons des amis des arts in Pau and Bordeaux. It is in Pau, during the Salon de la société des Amis des Art, that his painting Matinée de Printemps, which had caused a sensation the previous year, established itself as a first-rate canvas and aroused the enthusiasm of the public. The city of Pau buys this work thanks to the donation of a patron, Mr. Loubidos.

The landscapes selected by the artist are located in the south-east of Gironde, near the Porte de la Benauge, on the slopes of the Graves, then descend towards the banks of the Garonne and sink into the Entre-Deux-Mers. The farms, the typical mills of the region, the hilly landscapes of vineyards and forests of oaks and chestnuts around villages such as Arbis, Escoussans, Podensac, Gonac make it a delight. The subjects treated by Durst reflect the particularities of this Gironde countryside: a more calcareous soil, different tree species, and a less white light than in Normandy.

landscapes of ENGLAND AND SOUTH

As we have said, Auguste Durst was forced to go into exile in England between 1870 and 1872. Moving to London, then to Jersey, he won many images of these tormented and tenebrous landscapes upon his return to France. We don't really know if he paints there on the spot and in the open air. The artist had to make many sketches, especially on notebooks, which he used at different times in his career. Reading the exhibition catalogues, it turns out that the artist produces no less than a dozen works with this maritime landscape. What interests him here is more the power of the sea, the meteorological conditions - like the Phare de Jersey, created in 1886 - than the picturesque character of the English architecture or villages. During his career, the painter has painted a number of canvases on the hinterland of Marseille, the hills of Toulon and Var or the valleys of Lozère. To his family on the side of his mother being from Aix-en-Provence, it is easy to imagine that the artist had to visit some members of his family, and take the opportunity during long stays to paint the surrounding countryside. In addition, the wife of her brother Marius, Marie Jouve, is originally from Chanac, in Lozère. Several works by 4auguste Durst are landscapes of Lozère. The artist has probably stayed several times in this family branch.

Thus so-called Mediterranean works were presented in 1892, then in 1905, in the various exhibitions in which he participated.