Louis Paul Dessar

Louis Paul Dessar devoted himself to painting pastoral landscapes only after establishing himself as a successful portraitist. Dessar was born in Indianapolis but as a child moved with his family to New York City. His father, an attorney who had immigrated from his native France, at first discouraged the young man’s plans to make a career in art. By 1883, however, Dessar had begun three years of study at the National Academy of Design school. In 1886, he went to Paris for further training, studying both at the popular Académie Julian under figure and portrait painters William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) and Tony Robert-Fleury (1837–1911) and at the official École des Beaux-Arts. He spent his summers traveling widely, working especially at Étaples, a picturesque artists’ destination on France’s northwestern coast, where he painted the local fisherfolk.

Following his marriage in 1891 on a brief return visit to New York, Dessar and his wife worked in the international artists’ colony in Giverny, a Normandy village some ninety kilometers from Paris. After only eight months in Giverny, Dessar returned to Étaples, built himself a modest house, and made a specialty of painting local fishermen, peasants, and shepherds, typically showing them homeward bound at twilight. These romantic, idealizing works earned Dessar honors at prestigious annual exhibitions in Paris, New York, and Pittsburgh, and at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. During the 1890s the artist generally spent his winters in New York, painting commissioned portraits. Apparently while working on one such work in a wealthy client’s home, Dessar was deeply impressed by a collection of moody, romantic landscape paintings of the French artists known as the Barbizon School, and subsequently decided to specialize in landscape painting.

In 1901, Dessar sold his house in Étaples and purchased Becket Hill, a property in Old Lyme, in coastal Connecticut. Populating the place with sheep, the artist intended to create both a working farm and a convenient source of artistic subjects. In addition to landscapes, he painted rural interiors with an emphasis on light flooding through windows and women engaged in humble domestic tasks. For the remainder of his long career Dessar divided his time between Old Lyme and New York City, where he occupied a succession of studios. Influenced by the somber, evocative landscape paintings of Henry Ward Ranger (1858–1916), founder in 1899 of the Old Lyme art colony, Dessar began to work in a style known as tonalism, using a limited range of muted colors and emphasizing dark tones and shadows for a dreamy, romantic effect.

An extremely private person who resisted having his art judged by exhibition juries, Dessar stopped showing his work publicly for many years. His popularity also suffered as brilliant light, bright color, and dramatic brushwork increasingly dominated American mainstream painting, notably in the Old Lyme art colony. Dessar was forced to sell his failing farm in the 1920s, but he remained in Old Lyme for the rest of his life, impoverished and largely forgotten.