Louis Nallard

Louis Nallard, born in Algiers on June 17, 1918, his mother carried away a few months later by the Spanish flu, found himself brought up by his maternal grandparents, teachers, and began from the municipal school to practice drawing and watercolor. Far from the Mediterranean, he goes to Dombes each summer, where his father's family is from: "Perhaps a good part of my work is made up of the landscapes of my childhood, to which I have never ceased to refer" , said Nallard to Pierre Descargues. It was at the age of sixteen that he presented in 1934 at the gallery of Thomas Rouault, the painter's nephew, his first exhibition of portraits and landscapes (watercolors and gouaches), at nineteen the second. To free himself from his military obligations, Louis Nallard enlisted in the air force in 1936: when the war broke out, he remained, more or less continuously, for seven years in uniform. Demobilized for a while, he became friends with Marcel Bouqueton with whom he produced a new exhibition in 1940, on which Max-Pol Fouchet reported, then in 1941 attended the Beaux-arts in Algiers. He thus met Marcel Fiorini, Robert Lavergne who would later serve as an introducer to the Galerie Jeanne Bucher and Maria Manton with whom he married in 1944. In 1946 he became friends with the painter Georges Ladrey, passionate like him by the work of Pierre Bonnard.