Charles Laval (French pronunciation:[ʃaʁllaval]; 17 March 1862 – 27 April 1894) was a French painter associated with theSynthetic movement andPont-Aven School.

Laval was born in Paris, and was a contemporary and friend ofPaul Gauguin andVincent van Gogh. Gauguin created a portrait of him in 1886 looking at one of Gauguin's ceramic sculptures, entitledStill Life with Profile of Laval.^[1]

Paul Gauguin and Laval both came toPension Gloanec inPont-Aven in 1886 and became friends.In search of an exoticism that could provide the key to art, Gauguin and Laval went to Panama in 1887. To gain some subsidies, Laval performs academic portraits (all lost), using his experience received fromLeon Bonnat. A series of mishaps caused Laval and Gauguin to leave Central America for the island ofMartinique. There he made a small series of landscapes speckled with bright colors, that have been erroneously attributed to Gauguin in the past. Laval died of an illness complicated bytuberculosis in 1894 at the age of 32.

Laval’s self-portrait came about because of an agreement betweenVan Gogh and several of his friends.Van Gogh asked Laval,Paul Gauguin andÉmile Bernard to send him a portrait, in exchange for one of his own self-portraits.

Van Gogh was impressed by Laval's contribution. He included a small drawing of the Laval portrait in a letter toTheo, in order to give his brother an idea of the painting. He described Laval's painting aspowerful, distinguished and precisely one of the paintings that you talk about: that one has in one's possession before others have recognized the talent.^[2]

• John Rewald,Post-Impressionism, from Van Gogh to Gauguin, Paris, 1961
• Wladyslawa Jaworska,Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven, Neuchatel, 1971
• Sophie Monneret,Impressionism and his era, vol. 1, Paris, 1978 1, Paris, 1978
• Karen Pope,Gauguin and Martinique, Austin, 1980
• Welsh-Bogomila Ovsharov,Vincent van Gogh & the Birth of Cloisonism, Toronto, 1981
• Victor Merlhes,Correspondence of Paul Gauguin 1872-1888, Paris, 1984
• John Loiza,How Gauguin made a wonderful discovery of Martinique, Le Carbet, 1990
• Émile Bernard,Commentaries on Art, Volume I, Paris, 1994
• Daniel Wildenstein, Sylvie Crussard,Catalogue raisonné of the work of Paul Gauguin 1873-1888, Paris, 2001

• Charles Laval's paintings
• 
  Women by the sea
• 
  Harvest in Brittany
• 
  Going to Market, Brittany
• 
  Bretons

Wikimedia Commons has media related toCharles Laval.

• Charles Laval paintingsArchived 2018-02-15 at theWayback Machine at theMusée d'Orsay

• 1862 births
• 1894 deaths
• Painters from Paris
• 19th-century French painters
• French male painters
• French Post-impressionist painters
• Pont-Aven painters
• 19th-century French male artists

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