Jean-Marie Toulgouat

Garden paintings

Above - detail from: La Grande Allee de Manotte, 1998 (no.7)

front cover1. Les Pavots, Giverny, 1995 oil on canvas 80 x 80 cms 311⁄2 x 311⁄2 ins

Garden paintings2016

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Jean-Marie Toulgouat(1927–2006)

CLAUDE MONET and the TOULGOUAT FamilyBy 1977 I had spent several holidays in a large motor yacht cruising on the Seine below Paris. We sought out the positions where Monet had painted and anchored our yacht, as accurately as possible, and painted the same scenes. Monet was our inspiration. Nothing much had altered his scenes in the intervening hundred years, much to our delight!

Monet’s house and gardens at Giverny were being restored by Gérald Van der Kemp, who had already restored the gardens at Versailles. The restored Monet project was opened to the public around 1975.

I made my first visit to Monet’s house leaving my boat at Vétheuil. I entered the house, paid for my ticket, and, knowing that I would be there for several hours, sought the toilets. They were “closed for cleaning”. I said “Oh damn”, not realising that I was being overheard. A little lady directed me to another place in French. I looked down at her and noticed that under her arm she carried a book, which I knew well. I said, in my fractured French, “Madame, ce livre c’est le plus bon livre sur Claude Monet”. She replied in English, “Thank

you monsieur”. “Pourquoi?” I replied. “Because I wrote it”, was her reply!

So we had a long discussion about Monet ending with her telling me that her husband was a painter related to Monet and invited me to meet him in their house nearby.

I spent all day in the house and garden and then visited Monsieur and Madame Toulgouat, (Claire and Jean-Marie). He was the remaining member of the Monet-Hoschedé family and had been brought up from 1939 to 1946 by his great-aunt Blanche Monet, who ran Monet’s house after his wife had died in 1911. She was herself a painter, taught by Monet and she taught Jean-Marie. Blanche was the only student ever to be taught by Monet.

Jean-Marie trained as an architect and then specialised in garden design. It was he who, from his boyhood memories, produced the detailed reconstruction of Monet’s house and garden, which Van der Kemp later relied upon. Sadly, there were no written records kept of the planting in Monet’s garden, but Jean-Marie had a remarkable memory of it.

2. Cascade d’Eté, 1991 oil on canvas 80 x 80 cms 311⁄2 x 311⁄2 ins

3. Les Tulipes Perroquet, 2004 oil on canvas 81 x 65 cms 317⁄8 x 255⁄8 ins

Monet employed eight gardeners working to his overall plans in the gardens and in the great lily ponds. Monet’s elder son, Jean, was a soldier killed in 1914; the second son, Michel, was the sole inheritor when the great painter died in 1926. Michel was to die in a road accident in 1966 at the age of eighty-eight, giving the house, contents and gardens to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Meanwhile the estate fell into disrepair, for only two gardeners were employed and the empty house was seriously neglected.

So Jean-Marie and Claire became the guardians. They welcomed the funds that Monsieur Van der Kemp raised. An initial tranche of $18 million was raised from France and the USA. Ambassador Walter Annenberg spontaneously gave a large sum to connect the gardens and ponds by a tunnel under the main road. Jean-Marie’s plans were vital for all this and the replanting of the garden.

On our first visit to Jean-Marie I summed up courage and ask if I could buy one of his oil paintings, which I did and took it back to the motor yacht, where my crew, both painters,

highly approved of it. So we became great friends with the Toulgouats who asked me to choose twelve paintings and be his London agent, which I became as time went on.

Later they stayed with us in Lymington, London and in my lighthouse in Lincolnshire where he did some painting in my studio. Here they saw my book, the catalogue raisonné for the English marine painter Charles Brooking (1723–1759), published in 1999. They immediately said that I should write a book on Monet at Vétheuil. They said that they knew I had detailed knowledge of that section of the Seine, that they would help me with it, would supply family details and would correct the proofs. This book was published in 2001 by Antique Collectors Club.

Jean-Marie never stopped painting, selling in France, London and in the United States, where he exhibited at the Keny Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. He was also Artist in Residence at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. He died in 2006. Claire survives him and is busy as an arts writer and specialist on Monet.

David Joel10 November 2015

Author of Monet at Vétheuil 1878 – 1883

4. Iris Mauves et Jaunes, Chez Monet, 2004 oil on canvas 40 x 40 cms 153⁄4 x 153⁄4 ins

5. Petits Soleil, 2004 oil on canvas 40 x 40 cms 153⁄4 x 153⁄4 ins

6. Dahlias Echeveles, Souvenir d’Estampe Japonaise, 2004 oil on canvas 81 x 65 cms 317⁄8 x 255⁄8 ins

Return to Giverny“I would love to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but I cannot find them the way I want them.”*

In 1884, Claude Monet travelled to the Italian Riviera seeking new perspectives (and possibly a break from the Norman climate), but he found it increasingly frustrating to separate his views from the native vegetation and, in some cases, could barely see the sea for the trees.

Although Monet began to paint the countryside around Giverny around the early 1880s, it was only after 1890 that he began to develop what he would later translate onto canvas as the definitive garden idyll. Using his love and knowledge of horticulture (not to mention a team of meticulously instructed gardeners) Monet spliced the French Arcadian tradition onto the modern idea that artists could determine their own subject matter; at Giverny he almost literally created new worlds to paint.

Born a year after Monet’s death, Jean-Marie Toulgouat (1927–2006) never knew his step-

great-grandfather. Nevertheless, his entire life was coloured by Monet’s legacy and, above all, by Giverny where he was born and spent a good deal of his childhood. There, his great-aunt Blanche Hoschedé, Monet’s daughter-in-law and only assistant, taught him how to paint. His playground was the now world-famous gardens and the banks of the Seine, where, one day, he and a friend decided build a canoe. When they ran out of wood, whether by accident or design, Toulgouat got his hands on a pile of old canvases, which were actually works that Monet had abandoned with the expectation that they be burned. However, Blanche had refused to do so. Instead, Toulgouat and his little friend used the canvases to finish their canoe and paddled it along the river until they tired of it, or it fell apart. The canoe was later burned.

After the War, which, apart from a benign visit by Rommel, left Blanche, Toulgouat and Giverny untouched, he studied architecture before moving to Paris where he established himself as a landscape architect. Following sixteen years spent designing municipal parks and gardens, in 1966, he returned to Giverny and devoted himself

7. La Grande Allee de Manotte, 1998 oil on paper 38 x 53 cms 15 x 207⁄8 ins

8. Peupliers d’Italie près de Marais, 1991 oil on papers 38 x 53 cms 143⁄4 x 207⁄8 ins

9. Les Roses Americaines de mon Grand-Pere, 1997 oil on canvas 100 x 100 cms 393⁄8 x 393⁄8 ins

to painting. He focused almost exclusively on painting floral and garden studies in a loose, calligraphic style that appears more indebted to Fauvism than Impressionism. Some of his work retains aspects of Monet’s palette, echoes of when Blanche first taught him how to pick up a brush, telling him: “You have to use these kind of colours”. (During the War, when everything was scarce, not least oil paints, she even gave her great-nephew some of Monet’s remaining tubes.) However, almost immediately, Tougouat worked towards developing a distinct style influenced by both his former career, and his command of the monotype technique, using rich uniform colours and separating his compositions into distinct registers. His style may have been further influenced by Monet’s late work, or possibly even by Emil Nolde. In any event, Toulgouat’s paintings soon found an enthusiastic audience, and he had several successful solo exhibitions at the Francis Kyle Gallery in London, and at galleries in France, The Netherlands and the United States.

In 1966, following the sudden death of Michel Monet, the house and gardens at Giverny (which

Blanche had continued to manage until her own death in 1947) passed entirely to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris**. By the late 1970s, however, they had fallen into considerable neglect, and the Institut de France asked the esteemed art expert Gérald Van der Kemp to restore Giverny. Aided by his American wife Florence, and with the backing of the Versailles Foundation he had helped establish, Van der Kemp launched a fund-raising campaign and enlisted Toulgouat for not only his professional advice, but also because he was the only living person who had first-hand knowledge of the gardens’ original appearance.

Monet had conceived Giverny as a true planter’s garden and a kind of living paintbox. All but the water gardens generally conformed to a basic geometrical plan, but none had any traditional French formality. The platte-bandes (beds or borders) were composed to grow almost year-round, orchestrated of high notes (irises, lilies, lupins, foxgloves, poppies), melodies (yellow jasmine, nasturtiums, clematis, roses), percussive and basso profundo greens (grasses, ferns, acanthus, rhododendrons), with chords and lines marked by sand-raked allées, lime trees,

10. Dahlias Etoile, 2004 oil on canvas 46 x 38 cms 181⁄8 x 15 ins

11. Les Peupliers, 2000 oil on canvas 50 x 50 cms 195⁄8 x 195⁄8 ins

12. Les Digitales, 1992 oil on canvas 65 x 65 cms 255⁄8 x 255⁄8 ins

yews and poplars, the whole spectacle often seen set against the vine-covered façade of the main house.

The Van de Kemps also entrusted Toulgouat to raise funds in France, where benefactors had proved more difficult to find than in the United States or Japan. (Later, Tougoulat also acted as advisor, when Daniel Terra founded the American Museum at Giverny.) By 1980, restoration was complete and the house and gardens opened to the public. Giverny now attracts around half a million visitors a year, and more than a mere nom de lieu, it, like Versailles, is now synonymous with gardens and how they reflect our desire to achieve, however limited, a heaven on earth.

In 1990 and 1999 the Royal Academy mounted major Monet exhibitions and Toulgouat attended the openings and contributed to programmes on British radio and television. By all accounts, a kind, intellectually generous man, he and his wife Claire Joyes, an art historian who published two books on Monet, became friends with David Joel. Eventually, he encouraged Joel to write Monet at Vétheuil (2002), a monograph surveying the period Monet spent there between 1878 and 1993, and gave him access to Alice Hoschedé’s diaries and recorded interviews with Blanche Hoschedé. Finally, Jean-Marie Tougouat took no payment for his efforts and expertise in restoring Giverny, the place where he was born and continued to paint until mere months before his death in 2006.

Andrea GatesDirector of * Monet to Auguste Rodin (Bordighera, 1884).

** The over 400 paintings formerly at Giverny are now in the Musée Marmatton Monet, Paris.

13. Petits Pavots, 2004 oil on canvas 45 x 56 cms 173⁄4 x 22 ins

14. Les Soleils (Manotte), 2002 oil on canvas 46 x 56 cms 181⁄8 x 22 ins

15. Sous Bois, Effect d’Autumne dans mon Jardin, 2004

oil on canvas 81 x 65 cms 317⁄8 x 255⁄8 ins

17. La Allée de Manotte, 1994 oil on paper 61 x 46 cms 24 x 181⁄8 ins

16. Nasturtiums, 2002 oil on canvas 45 x 56 cms 173⁄4 x 22 ins

18. Capucines et Pois de Senteur Sauvage, 1992

oil on canvas 65 x 54 cms 255⁄8 x 211⁄4 ins

19. L’Alée de Manotte, 1997 oil on paper 53 x 38 cms 205⁄8 x 143⁄4 ins

20. La Plate-Bonde près de la Maison, 2001 oil on canvas 46 x 56 cms 181⁄8 x 22 ins

21. Les Rudbekias, 1992 oil on canvas 65 x 65 cms 255⁄8 x 255⁄8 ins

22. Les Grands Dahlias, Prince Noir, 2004 oil on canvas 73 x 60 cms 283⁄4 x 235⁄8 ins

opposite23. L’Arbre Bleu, 1990 oil on canvas 65 x 50 cms 255⁄8 x 195⁄8 ins

above24 Les Tulips Rouges au Printemps, 1991 oil on paper 49 x 61 cms 191⁄4 x 237⁄8 ins

back cover25. Glycine au Jardin d’Eau, 2004 oil on canvas 50 x 50 cms 195⁄8 x 195⁄8 ins

BiographyBorn at Giverny in 1927, Jean-Marie Toulgouat was the grandson of the American Post-Impressionist painter, Theodore Butler and Suzanne Hoschedé, Claude Monet’s stepdaughter by his second wife Alice. Toulgouat spent much of his childhood at Giverny, living in the main house (still hung with many of Monet’s last major works) with his great-aunt Blanche Hoschedé, who was herself a painter, Monet’s only assistant at Giverny and Toulgouat’s first teacher. He first studied painting in Nice and trained as an architect before working in Paris for sixteen years

as a landscape architect and designer of municipal gardens. In 1966 he returned to Giverny to concentrate fully on painting.

During his career, Toulgouat had fifteen solo exhibitions at galleries and venues in France, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. In 1993 his paintings were included in Art in Bloom: Flowers in Historical and Contemporary Painting at the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery. He also enjoyed a successful relationship with the Francis Kyle Gallery in London, which held six solo exhibitions of his work. He died at Giverny in 2006.

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CDVIII ISBN 978-1-910993-00-2 Publication No: CDVIII Published by David Messum Fine Art © David Messum Fine Art

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Detail from: Capucines et Pois de Senteur Sauvage, 1992 (no.18)

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