george-gaste

Georges Gaste` was born on August 30, 1869 in Paris. Having lost his father at the tender age of two and being a single child, he experiences a lonely childhood. After following art classes at Colarowssi studio, he is admitted, at just eighteen years old, at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts(School of Fine Arts) in Paris, in the studio of Alexander Cabanel. In 1892, during a trip to Morocco, Algeria and Palestine, he discovers the light of the South and decided to become an Orientalist painter. From 1893, painter Etienne Dinet who has noticed Gaste's talent welcomes him to Bou Saada, Algeria. Gaste' multiplies long-term sojourns in this oasis in the desert whilst traveling across Northern Africa. From 1893 to 1898, he regularly sends his paintings back to the salon of French Artists in Paris and is awarded multiple medals. From 1898 to 1902, he spends four years in Cairo where he words tirelessly, depicting the Egyptian daily life either on canvas or on photographic glass plates. In 1903, after traveling intensively through Spain, Tunisia and Morocco again, he begins to yearn for yet more distant horizons. Those will be, in 1905, “the mystical land of India”, he first settles down in Agra, by the Yamuna River which runs along the Taj Mahal and is seduced by the Muslim side of India which inspires him to create paintings full of humanity. Several of his landscapes and portraits are showcased at the Orientalist exhibition of 1906 where he becomes a subject of discussion and interest. In 1908, at a trip to Venice and Constantinople, the artist return to India, this time to the South, to Madurai, a city devoted to Hinduism, where he opens a studio and trains a few students. That same year, in Paris the Orientalist exhibition confirms his reputation. The majority of his paintings are sold and many articles acknowledge his skill as a portraitist and celebrate his understanding of light, as well as the poetic and mysterious atmosphere of his paintings. In 1909, he paints The Brahmins' Bath, praised by the critics at the Orientalist exhibition of 1910. During his growing success, G.Gaste` died on September 12 of that year, in the solitude of his Indian Studio.