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Lot Essay
Léon Lhermitte painted La Famille around 1908, adapting the central figure group of his immense (and very successful) Salon painting of that year, a complex harvesters resting scene that was also known by the title La Famille (fig. 1; Christie's, New York, 1 May 2000, lot 290). Broadly painted and loosely brushed with Lhermitte's distinctive dry brushwork, the present La Famille may have been undertaken as a large study for that Salon painting - Lhermitte's preparation work for his ten foot canvases was meticulous - or it may have been created after the larger work to satisfy an insistent collector or dealer's demand for a morceau, a 'little bit' of the Salon image.
Lhermitte grew up near Chateau-Thierry in the rich farming lands northeast of Paris, a region that never knew the agricultural disruptions and social strife that shaped so much of an earlier generation's peasant painting. By the time Lhermitte took up the harvesting themes and country market scenes that would make his name, the wide-spread antagonism that had greeted Jean-François Millet's paintings of working peasants thirty years earlier had largely disappeared, dissipated by an improving rural economy and by a political climate that deliberately celebrated the peasant as a mainstay of conservative values in France, a more attractive representation of the nation than discontented urban workers. As early as the 1880s, Lhermitte had begun including a nursing mother or older sister watching over a sleeping infant in many of his complex scenes of peasant life. Such a motif was a reflection of real rural custom whereby young women were drafted to field work during the highly pressured harvest season, requiring that their littlest children be brought out to the fields throughout the day by elderly grandmothers or preteen sisters for regular nursing. But the motif was also timelessly attractive and readily understood, a theme that could open narrowly French rural subjects to a wide international audience which might otherwise disdain scenes of heavy labor or dirty field work.
Lhermitte was at the height of his career in 1908: he had just been elected to the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts, an exceptional recognition for an artist who had not trained in the École des Beaux-Arts; and his international renown was such that the purchase of the Salon painting from which La Famille was extracted was disputed between two of the leading modern art collections of the day, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. which ultimately acquired the work. Lhermitte was represented by Boussod, Valadon & Cie, a French dealer with strong connections to American and English markets, and La Famille was probably sold into an American collection immediately after its completion.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for providing this catalogue entry.
Lhermitte grew up near Chateau-Thierry in the rich farming lands northeast of Paris, a region that never knew the agricultural disruptions and social strife that shaped so much of an earlier generation's peasant painting. By the time Lhermitte took up the harvesting themes and country market scenes that would make his name, the wide-spread antagonism that had greeted Jean-François Millet's paintings of working peasants thirty years earlier had largely disappeared, dissipated by an improving rural economy and by a political climate that deliberately celebrated the peasant as a mainstay of conservative values in France, a more attractive representation of the nation than discontented urban workers. As early as the 1880s, Lhermitte had begun including a nursing mother or older sister watching over a sleeping infant in many of his complex scenes of peasant life. Such a motif was a reflection of real rural custom whereby young women were drafted to field work during the highly pressured harvest season, requiring that their littlest children be brought out to the fields throughout the day by elderly grandmothers or preteen sisters for regular nursing. But the motif was also timelessly attractive and readily understood, a theme that could open narrowly French rural subjects to a wide international audience which might otherwise disdain scenes of heavy labor or dirty field work.
Lhermitte was at the height of his career in 1908: he had just been elected to the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts, an exceptional recognition for an artist who had not trained in the École des Beaux-Arts; and his international renown was such that the purchase of the Salon painting from which La Famille was extracted was disputed between two of the leading modern art collections of the day, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. which ultimately acquired the work. Lhermitte was represented by Boussod, Valadon & Cie, a French dealer with strong connections to American and English markets, and La Famille was probably sold into an American collection immediately after its completion.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for providing this catalogue entry.