Auguste Toulmouche (21 September 1829 – 16 October 1890) was a French painter known for his luxurious genre paintings of upper middle class Parisian women in domestic scenes.
Biography
Auguste Toulmouche was born in Nantes to Émile Toulmouche, a well-to-do broker, and Rose Sophie Mercier.[1] The composer Frédéric Toulmouche was his cousin.[1] He studied drawing and sculpture locally with the sculptor Amédée Ménard and painting with the portraitist Biron before moving to Paris in 1846 to study with the painter Charles Gleyre.[1][2] He was said to be one of Gleyre's favored students,[1] and he exhibited his first paintings at the Paris Salon in 1848 when he was just 19.[2] He exhibited again in 1849 and 1850, at which time he was specializing in portraits.[1]
Rose Caron, c. 1880
Toulmouche painted in an idealizing version of the dominant academic realist style, and his subjects were frequently Parisian women who belonged to the upper bourgeoisie.[2][3] His work was popular in both France and America, and the emperor Napoleon III bought one of his paintings, La fille (The Girl), for his future empress Eugénie in 1852,[3] with further purchases by the imperial family the following year confirming Toulmouche's status as a fashionable painter.[1] He was generally approved by critics, winning medals at the Paris Salon in 1852 and 1861, and he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1870.[2] During his heyday, his reputation was comparable to that of artists like Alfred Stevens and Carolus-Duran.[1] However, with their emphasis on sumptuous clothing and richly furnished domestic interiors, his paintings were also dismissed by some critics as "elegant trifles", and the writer Émile Zola referred somewhat dismissively to the "delicious dolls of Toulmouche".[2][4] With the rise of Impressionism in the 1870s, his popularity suffered a decline from which it never recovered.[1]
By his 1861 marriage to Marie Lecadre, daughter of Nantes lawyer Alphonse Henri Lecadre, Toulmouche became a cousin by marriage of the painter Claude Monet.[1] Toulmouche sent the young Monet to study with Gleyre.[1][5]
In 2023, his painting La Fiancée hésitante (The Reluctant Bride), not among his best-known works in its time, became a widely spread illustration for women's anger on TikTok.[7]
