Amable Gabriel de la Foulhouze 1815-1887

Originally from the Auvergne region, Amable Gabriel de La Foulhouze was a distinctive figure in the nineteenth-century French artistic landscape, working as a painter, writer, journalist and songwriter.

After a brilliant education at the Lycée de Clermont, crowned in 1832 by an honorary prize in rhetoric, he moved to Paris in 1837, determined to pursue an artistic career. He received his earliest lessons from Louis Devedeux before completing his training in the prestigious studios of Paul Delaroche between 1841 and 1842, and Thomas Couture between 1847 and 1853. In Couture’s studio, he formed a close friendship with Alfred Stevens.

La Foulhouze made his Salon debut in 1845 and exhibited there regularly for more than forty years. He presented elegant genre scenes, portraits and landscapes inspired by the Auvergne, the surroundings of Paris, Normandy and fashionable seaside resorts.

Although he settled in Montmartre in 1867, he remained deeply attached to his native Auvergne, becoming one of its most active chroniclers. A contributor to L’Ami de la Patrie and later to the Moniteur du Puy-de-Dôme, he was elected a resident member of the Académie de Clermont in 1858 and published numerous articles devoted to art, literature and regional heritage.

A prolific author of songs, poems and comedies, he achieved considerable success with Le Petit Pioupiou, retour de l’armée d’Italie (“The Little Soldier’s Return from the Italian Campaign”), published between 1857 and 1859 and circulated far beyond France.

His paintings, characterised by a delicate Naturalism and a narrative sensibility inherited from Delaroche and Couture, combine the elegance of genre painting with attentive observation of modern life and landscape. La Foulhouze thus emerges as a distinctive and now rediscovered figure in French painting of the second half of the nineteenth century.