Auguste ALLONGÉ
Paris 1883 - Bourron-Marlotte 1898
Biography
Auguste Allongé was a pupil of Léon Coignet and Louis César Ducomet at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and initially began his career as a painter of history subjects, competing unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome. He then turned his hand to landscape painting, with which he had more success. He made his Salon debut in 1855 with a forest scene, and continued to exhibit regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français. Allongé travelled widely throughout France, painting landscapes in Brittany, Burgundy and Provence, and along the valleys of the Marne, Oise and Isère rivers. Early in his career he produced a number of lithographs, which were never published, while in his later years he provided numerous illustrations for the pictorial journals Le Monde Illustré and L’Illustration, as well for several books. Allongé’s contemporary fame rested mainly, however, on his finished charcoal landscapes. As one contemporary writer noted, ‘Allongé c'est le dessin au fusain, et le dessin au fusain c'est Allongé.’
By 1875 Allongé had settled in Marlotte (today Bourron-Marlotte) in the Île-de-France. As the 19th century painter and art critic Émile Michel described the artist, ‘One of the most ardent painters of the forest, Allongé, whose charcoals and watercolours executed in an easy and broad manner made his name popular, spent the major part of his life in Marlotte, and all year round, by all weathers, one was assured to find him sitting on the Bourron plain, or in the forest near the Mare-aux-Fées, where he never tired of discovering new motifs.’ In 1879 the artist published a small book entitled Le fusain, a practical guide to drawing in charcoal that was translated into several languages.