Louis Foulet (1891-1978)

Born in 1891, Louis Foulet belongs to the third generation of the painters of Villiers-sur-Morin, the one that, after the war of 1914-1918, returned to the valley and carried on a tradition that the conflict had suspended but not erased. His presence is attested in local sources relating to the artists’ colony of Villiers-sur-Morin, notably in the gatherings of artists at Montaigu after the Second World War, where Menon, Rault, Simon, Serveau and Foulet himself came together, a testimony to the enduring vitality of a territory which, since Servin, had known how to hold on to its painters and keep them faithful beyond a mere passing visit. He died in 1978, having lived long enough to see the village pass through a century of transformations without ever ceasing to rest his gaze upon it.

Two of his works appear in the corpus of the Galerie de Crécy: Le Touarte-bas and La rue de la Picardie, canvases that document with precision two places in the village fabric, the lower district of Le Touarte, a narrow street of closely packed houses, and the rue de la Picardie, the main thoroughfare of the village. This choice of the ordinary urban motif, of the street without event or monument, reveals a sensibility close to that of the painters who, at the same moment, had made the French street the subject of painting of a high order. Here it is the Brie street, with its modest facades, its uneven cobbles, its ashen light, that serves as the subject, in the same conviction that beauty is not reserved for consecrated places.

These notes draw on a combination of institutional, documentary and local sources: the artist directory of the Musée d’Orsay; the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP); the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT); Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs (Gründ); art market databases (Artprice, Drouot); the catalogues of the Salon des Artistes français and the Salon d’automne; the Satet-Menon collection relating to the painters of the Grand Morin valley; local sources relating to the Vallée des peintres (the commune of Villiers-sur-Morin, Coulommiers Pays de Brie Tourisme); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Madame Lili Grenier, portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec, 1888); the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka (work by Yuzō Saeki).