Georges Gasté

Constant-Georges Gasté was a painter and photographer who lived and worked in Algeria, Egypt and India. Born into a family of art dealers from Chablis, Georges Gasté entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the age of 18, first in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel and then in those of Jules Delaunay and Raphaël Collin.

From 1892, his trips to Morocco and his stay in Bou Saâda in Algeria led him to orientalist painting and photography. He befriended the painter Etienne Dinet, whom he considered "a clear-sighted initiator", and met the influential director of the Musée du Luxembourg, Léonce Bénédite, whose vocation was to present all the developments in modern art. Two of his paintings, exhibited at the Salon des Champs-Élysées in 1897, were bought by the State.

In 1898, after a few months in Paris, he explored Tunisia, Palestine, and the Holy Places before settling in Cairo for a few years. There he began a period of intense production which quickly became a success with the high society of Cairo he frequented.

He returned to Paris in 1903, exhibited at the Salon des Orientalistes Algériens in Algiers the same year, and went onto visit Spain, which became the starting point for new journeys to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia between 1905 and 1908.

The painter then embarked for India, stopping off in Ceylon and visiting South India, Delhi and Benares before settling in Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, which inspired the works of his Indian period. From 1906 onwards, his regular submissions to the Salons des Orientalistes made a great impression and were frequently all bought by amateurs. Despite these successes, Georges Gasté committed suicide in his studio in Agra in September 1910.

He benefited from several posthumous individual retrospectives in Paris, first in 1911 at the Grand Palais, then in 1913 at the Salon des Peintres Orientalistes Français, in 1930 at the Petit Palais and more recently in 2013 at the Musée du Montparnasse and in 2018 at the Musée Lambinet in Versailles.