Gustave Loiseau was an early adopter of the Impressionist technique. Born in Paris 1865 to a family of merchants, he first picked up a brush in 1880 when he was a house decorator before dedicating himself to fine art some seven years later. Loiseau moved to the artistic hub of Montmartre in Paris where he was fully immersed in the community of artists that gathered there.

In 1890 he travelled to Pont Aven in Brittany where he quickly became friends with Maxime Maufra and Henry Moret, and would have first encountered the village’s most famous visitor, Paul Gauguin. It was at this time that Loiseau first began to exhibit with the Socitété des Artistes Indépendants and was included in the exhibit of Impressionist and Symbolist painters.

In the present painting Loiseau depicts the road to Versailles in the commune of St Fiacre in Marly-le-Roi to the west of Paris. This route inspired many artists including Pissarro with examples of his depictions of the Route de Versailles now in the collections of Musée d’Orsay (‘La Route de Versailles, Louveciennes’, 1872) and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (‘Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Winter Sun and Snow’, c. 1870). Influenced by the older Impressionist artist’s approach, in ‘St Fiacre - La route de Versailles’ Loiseau adopts plein-air painting, with the sky captured in vibrant sweeping brushstrokes. The work is loosely painted with life and movement encapsulated in the figures and trees bending in the wind.

Paintings by Gustave Loiseau are now in a number of public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (‘House in Winter’, 1911) and Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, Tokyo (‘Road on Prairie, St Cyr-du-Vaudreuil’, 1900).