Let's walk around the square together. At the end of Puzoque street, the old house of the Boulle family: a name remembered by all those who have been pupils of Mr. Boulle at the municipal school; This house replaces the one that the Lartigues had acquired in 1742 and which collapsed in the Lot around 1800! At the corner of rue Larrat, the house of Dr. Reilhac, whose young son Eugène was appointed Compagnon de la Libération by General de Gaulle, after his disappearance on a mission in 1943. It was previously the home of Dr Anatole Larrat who gave the street its name. Further down, the imposing house with a courtyard was that of Dr Jacques Pucheran, nephew of Serres, head of the Paris Museum; his ancestors were tanners, which is understandable when you know that several springs emerge under the house. The semi-detached house belonged for a long time to the Desmazes family and, in the 20th century, to Gajac, a wheat and plum merchant; who still remembers Marie-France Garaud, Jacques Chirac's occult adviser at the beginning? As a child, she used to come here for holidays, at her uncle Gajac's house… Dominating the square, firmly seated on the remains of the rampart, the house which was in the 17th century that of the Bar de Lunel, and in the 18th of the Bacalan. During the Second World War, Dominique de Ménil, born Schlumberger, lived there before moving to the United States and creating in Houston one of the most important collections of contemporary art in the world.
But back to our picture; doesn't something surprise you? Alexandre de Lalobbe erased the bridge with a brushstroke! Contemporary photography of the work shows us that it was necessarily in the painter's field of vision…
A few years ago, the tree you see in the painting and in the photograph was removed; it was becoming too imposing and dangerous. In another painting, done at the same time, Lalobbe turned his easel towards the Lot, favouring the view of Longueville and the trees on the riverbank in autumn hues.
It was through his marriage that Alexandre Canelle de Lalobbe (1848-1919) from Champagne arrived in Clairac, where he bought the Sinange property in 1909. A former officer, he had left the army following his wounds at the famous Battle of Woerth in 1870. As a young man, he had taken lessons from the painter Cals, husband of one of his cousins. From 1881, he exhibited regularly at the Salon des artistes français in Paris. A painter of nature, he travelled around with his easel but also worked from the many photographs he took. In Clairac, he found a light that he had probably sought all his life, in the line of the work of the Impressionists two decades earlier: in his paintings, he played with the sparkling sky of the Lot valley, the reds of the tiles and shutters, the greens of the vines but also of the cypresses, the pastel shades of hollyhocks which were one of his favourite motifs. On the eve of his death in January 1919, he was still painting the effects of light on snow in Sinange.
