Achille
LAUGE

Achille Laugé undertook a classical training at the Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, from 1876 to 1881, it is on this occasion that he met the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and the painters Henri Martin and Henri Marre, then he entered the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. This education allowed him to become successively the student of Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Paul Laurens until 1886 and to meet Aristide Maillol. He decided to stay in Paris with his friend Antoine Bourdelle and it was during this difficult life in Paris that Laugé was influenced by Signac, Pissarro and especially Georges Seurat, who introduced him to Divisionism.

He left Paris to return to his family's home in the Carcassonne region where he decided not to apply the lessons he had received and instead applied the divisionist and pointillist style that he had loved so much among the artists he had admired in Paris. 
In 1894, he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants alongside all the artists of modernity such as Louis Anquetin, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Maxime Maufra, Paul Sérusier and Édouard Vuillard. Achille Laugé benefited from the support of certain collector friends such as Achille Astre, who was close to art critics, and Maurice Fabre, who was one of the first to collect him. He also approached Parisian galleries and dealers, notably on rue Laffite, at Bernheim and Georges Petit.

In 1905, after having been refused at the Salons and after phases of sometimes fruitless pictorial research, he decided to get rid of the technique he had used and improved for twenty years. He liberated his painting, his colors were more vivid, his touch broader and his compositions less strict. Nevertheless, he did not abandon the practice of plein air painting, which he maintained by going regularly to Collioure with his friend Henri Martin.

He retired to Toulouse at the beginning of the 1940s, losing his wife two years later before also disappearing in 1944. Achille Laugé will remain as an unclassifiable artist, playing with colors, sometimes juxtaposing them, sometimes combining them in a skilful way, in often very ordered compositions. He will know how to adapt his style to try to ward off his critical bad luck, leading him to new pictorial landscapes.