Rue du Pressoir

With this painting done in the 1900s, Alexandre de Lalobbe leads us to a street in the old Clairac, at the corner of Rue du Pressoir, where he set up his easel, at the crossroads of Rue Anatole-Larrat.

The shadows indicate it's morning. Vines are blooming on the façades, and on the right, the metal circles remind us of a Clairac tradition where coopers had always been established in the Maubourguet district; perhaps even earlier. In his research, Claude Martin had found very old documents concerning them, such as this lease drawn up in March 1618 by the notary Caussines: “M^e Jacques de Vergnes, to David Bachan, to make barrels of a thousand staves paid 9 sous per barrel, for the coming harvest.” The staves are the planks that make up the barrel. At that time, they were used as much for wine as for tobacco. When the census of New Converts was taken in 1699, there were 23 coopers, 9 in Maubourguet and 6 in Longueville. Some of them belonged to the “great families” of Clairac, such as the Martineau family already established in Maubourguet in the 17^th century; they were the ones who built Le Perron, proof of their social and financial success.

But it's another business that we're also talking about here: the cut side of the house on the left reveals to those who know how to see the façade of a butcher's shop. The gate painted red, the protective curtain: this was the butcher's shop where Moureu later settled. A photograph from the 1900s shows the butcher and his family (even the little girl and her doll!) proudly posing next to a beautiful carcass hanging from his gallows. Professional pride that we also see at the Cazenille butcher shop, place Serres, which still kept its grills a few years ago, when it was held by Mr. Galan as well as at the Lacombe butcher's shop on rue Gambetta .

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.