Abstract EN:

Born in Lille in 1843, Alfred Agache was destined to make a career inthe family business. He soon lost interest, however, as his artistic sensibility was being developed by the assiduous study of music. His vocation as a painter became apparent during a voyage he made between 1872 and 1874, ending in the Far East. The encounter with cultures that were rich in art and history was to form an inexhaustible source of inspiration. On his return, a brief time spent in academic pursuits directed him definitively toward painting. In 1879, he submitted to the Salon in Paris a landscape of his native region ; but the following year his genre was abandonned for representations to the human figure. He proved to be particularly gifted for portaits, most of which were feminine, presented in somber, enigmatic settings accentuated by symbols copied from the allegorical style. A regular exhibitor at the Salons of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts – of which he was one of the founders – Agache met esteem, success, honors and renow from the critics, the public and his peers. His talent as well as the originality that pervades his canvases, making tem unclassifiable and novel, were acknowledged by all. Inspired of the idealism that was, in reaction to naturalism, impregnating art at the end of the Nineteeth Century, Agache's paintings raise questions and fascinate but defy analysis as well as all attempts at aesthetic categorization. Placed within the historico-artistic context, the first part of this thesis recounts the life and career of Alfred Agache ; the second, analyses the aesthetic features of his work which seems to have succeeded in joining itself with pictorial symbolism.