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Lot Essay
When the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition opened in May 1919 after four years of war it signalled the tentative return of the race meetings, regattas, shoots and formal dress balls of the London Season. For the art world, the Academy was dominated by commemorations of the recent hostilities it had been slow at first to acknowledge.[1] The year of Armistice, followed by the Versailles Treaty, had begun with an exhibition of works for the Canadian War Memorials in January and would end in December with a large display of War Pictures at the Royal Academy, some of which would be destined for the nascent Imperial War Museum. Critics looked for the shoots of recovery in the summer show and in one specific case, the picture that instantly commended itself was Henry Herbert La Thangue’s In the Orchard, prominently placed in the first of the galleries.
Here, wrote the reviewer for the West Sussex Gazette, Mr La Thangue was ‘at his best’.
The strong individuality of the painter is attested, since on entering Gallery 1, and taking a rapid glance over the walls, the eye has but to fall on this picture and, without reflection, its authorship is revealed at the instant. The same could not be said for many painters, however familiar one may be with their work. In the Orchard represents a peasant girl engaged in the pleasant business of gathering cherries. The lighting of the gnarled stem of the cherry tree and of the girl’s arm are the points of interest, artistically considered; the lighting is conveyed in quite the Academician’s old alluring manner.[2]
La Thangue was ‘on form’. His style and subject matter was so distinctive that it immediately seemed right for the occasion. The Times was confident that all three of his works in the exhibition were ‘the best he has ever painted’, while The Morning Post, in finding him ‘faithful’ to his ‘own personality and methods’ admired the ‘accomplishment’ of In the Orchard where he was ‘distinctly at his best’.[3]
Why this painting seemed so appropriate for the moment of its first appearance was not only to do with its celebration of nature’s bounty in the face of man’s wanton destruction, it lay in a realism that in paintings of the war, had seen a rejection of illegible Modernist abstraction. The need to face up to the stark realities of the moment had gone hand-in-hand with the demand for a return to representation, seen even in Paris in the likes of Picasso. What was obvious in the present work was the self-evident truth of appearances in the ‘gnarled stem’ of the cherry tree, and the ‘girl’s arm’, so accurately observed as it bears the weight of a heavy basket of ripe fruit.
Painted at Graffham in West Sussex, where the artist had lived for over twenty years, In the Orchard…, more than La Thangue’s other exhibits, expressed an essential Englishness that was currently emerging triumphant. Its lineage stretched back to the painter’s early days when plein air Naturalism – specifically that of Jules Bastien-Lepage - was a manifesto declaration and a radicalism that had led to the artist’s creative isolation, even at times from his friends.[4] Where others sought the conviviality of shared studios in London, he burrowed into remote corners for contemporary country life – the Broads in Norfolk, and the boggy estuary at Bosham, before settling at Haylands Farm in 1898 (fig. 1).[5]
Around this time La Thangue had famously complained to Alfred Munnings about the loss of community in the countryside, and recognising that great changes were afoot, with the new century, he found solace in deepest Provence, Liguria, Lombardy and the Balearic Islands - avoiding the fashionable watering holes on remote mountain tracks, and clifftop paths.[6] English autumns were, nevertheless, reserved for Haylands when the old labouring gang system reappeared. Only concourse with his country models mattered on these occasions, as in earlier works such as Gathering Plums, 1901 and A Sussex Autumn, 1907 (figs 2 & 3). The present canvas expands upon an essential theme for which the painter was renowned.
In the Orchard, Haylands, Graffham was acquired by Moses Nightingale (1861-1934), La Thangue’s principal patron. By 1919, twenty-three works by the artist hung at Hazeldene, on the Brighton Road in Crawley, the Nightingales’ family home.[7] Painter and patron had similar opinions about community cohesion. An entrepreneur with a number of local businesses to his name, Nightingale made numerous philanthropic donations to the town, including the provision of instruments and rehearsal space for its orchestra – a room hung almost exclusively with works by La Thangue. He was also generous in providing loans to the painter’s memorial exhibition in 1930, where In the Orchard, Haylands, Graffham was particularly admired by a local reviewer for whom it evoked lines from a popular rustic poem by Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, in which a girl pines for a love that might have been, and a ‘yearning “for something better than she had known”’.[8]
La Thangue would have resisted such surface sentimentality, when there was a deeper ‘sentiment of nature’ to be expressed.[9] This only occurred on those occasions when conventional picturesqueness is rejected in favour of ‘a landscape moulded by human sentiment’, when ‘the human figure takes the landscape into itself’.[10] In the Orchard, Haylands, Graffham is one such occasion.
We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
[1] The first summer exhibition of the war, held in May 1915, had been sharply criticised for its apparent lack of reference to the country’s ‘struggle for existence’ in the fields of northern France; see The Studio, vol. 65, 1915, p. 25.
[2] ‘Royal Academy - H.H. La Thangue’, West Sussex Gazette, 8 May 1919, p. 6. It is likely that this reviewer was none other than James Stanley Little who had written articles about La Thangue in 1893 and 1904; see K.McConkey, A Painter’s Harvest, H.H. La Thangue, 1859-1929, (exhibition catalogue, Oldham Art Gallery), p. 10.
[3] ‘Royal Academy III – Landscapes’, The Times, 9 May 1919, p. 15; ‘Royal Academy - New Associates’, Morning Post, 10 May 1919, p. 5.
[4] Even in his student days, while noting his brilliance, Stanhope Forbes commented upon La Thangue’s truculence, as did his lifelong friend, George Clausen; see for instance, ‘Art Exhibitions: The Fine Art Society’, The Times, 25 April 1931, p. 10.
[5] By the 1920s, Graffham became known principally for La Thangue’s residency. The essayist, EV Lucas, for instance noted that 'Graffham is interesting as being the home of one of our most truthful of living painters, Mr HH La Thangue whose scenes of peasants at work ...and studies of sunlight spattering through trees are among the triumphs of modern English art', (Highways and Byways of Sussex, 1904, MacMillan ed., p. 21).
[6] Sir A.J. Munnings, An Artist's Life, 1950, pp.97-8; quoted in McConkey 1978, pp. 13-14. La Thangue’s other Academy exhibits in 1919 were A Brescian Shore (no. 163) and A Waterway in Provence (no. 228).
[7] Although the Nightingale collection included works by Stanhope Forbes, Lucy Kemp Welch, Hector Caffieri, Robert Walker Macbeth and David Farquharson, La Thangue was clearly the favourite. At the time of the artist’s death, Nightingale owned thirty-one paintings by the artist, including the present example.
[8] Anon., 'The Late Mr H.H. La Thangue - A Memorial Exhibition', Sussex County Herald, 19 September 1930 n.p. (cuttings book, the artist’s descendants). Maud Muller, the fieldworker in the celebrated verses by Whittier (1807-1892), gives sustenance to the local Judge and as he departs, she pines for a better life.
[9] For La Thangue on ‘the sentiment of nature’, see G.Thomson, ‘Henry Herbert La Thangue and his Work’, The Studio, 1896, vol. IX, p. 177.
[10] ‘A Great Sussex Painter – Memorial Exhibition at Brighton’ Brighton Herald, 30 August 1930, n.p. (cuttings book, the artist’s descendants).
Here, wrote the reviewer for the West Sussex Gazette, Mr La Thangue was ‘at his best’.
The strong individuality of the painter is attested, since on entering Gallery 1, and taking a rapid glance over the walls, the eye has but to fall on this picture and, without reflection, its authorship is revealed at the instant. The same could not be said for many painters, however familiar one may be with their work. In the Orchard represents a peasant girl engaged in the pleasant business of gathering cherries. The lighting of the gnarled stem of the cherry tree and of the girl’s arm are the points of interest, artistically considered; the lighting is conveyed in quite the Academician’s old alluring manner.[2]
La Thangue was ‘on form’. His style and subject matter was so distinctive that it immediately seemed right for the occasion. The Times was confident that all three of his works in the exhibition were ‘the best he has ever painted’, while The Morning Post, in finding him ‘faithful’ to his ‘own personality and methods’ admired the ‘accomplishment’ of In the Orchard where he was ‘distinctly at his best’.[3]
Why this painting seemed so appropriate for the moment of its first appearance was not only to do with its celebration of nature’s bounty in the face of man’s wanton destruction, it lay in a realism that in paintings of the war, had seen a rejection of illegible Modernist abstraction. The need to face up to the stark realities of the moment had gone hand-in-hand with the demand for a return to representation, seen even in Paris in the likes of Picasso. What was obvious in the present work was the self-evident truth of appearances in the ‘gnarled stem’ of the cherry tree, and the ‘girl’s arm’, so accurately observed as it bears the weight of a heavy basket of ripe fruit.
Painted at Graffham in West Sussex, where the artist had lived for over twenty years, In the Orchard…, more than La Thangue’s other exhibits, expressed an essential Englishness that was currently emerging triumphant. Its lineage stretched back to the painter’s early days when plein air Naturalism – specifically that of Jules Bastien-Lepage - was a manifesto declaration and a radicalism that had led to the artist’s creative isolation, even at times from his friends.[4] Where others sought the conviviality of shared studios in London, he burrowed into remote corners for contemporary country life – the Broads in Norfolk, and the boggy estuary at Bosham, before settling at Haylands Farm in 1898 (fig. 1).[5]
Around this time La Thangue had famously complained to Alfred Munnings about the loss of community in the countryside, and recognising that great changes were afoot, with the new century, he found solace in deepest Provence, Liguria, Lombardy and the Balearic Islands - avoiding the fashionable watering holes on remote mountain tracks, and clifftop paths.[6] English autumns were, nevertheless, reserved for Haylands when the old labouring gang system reappeared. Only concourse with his country models mattered on these occasions, as in earlier works such as Gathering Plums, 1901 and A Sussex Autumn, 1907 (figs 2 & 3). The present canvas expands upon an essential theme for which the painter was renowned.
In the Orchard, Haylands, Graffham was acquired by Moses Nightingale (1861-1934), La Thangue’s principal patron. By 1919, twenty-three works by the artist hung at Hazeldene, on the Brighton Road in Crawley, the Nightingales’ family home.[7] Painter and patron had similar opinions about community cohesion. An entrepreneur with a number of local businesses to his name, Nightingale made numerous philanthropic donations to the town, including the provision of instruments and rehearsal space for its orchestra – a room hung almost exclusively with works by La Thangue. He was also generous in providing loans to the painter’s memorial exhibition in 1930, where In the Orchard, Haylands, Graffham was particularly admired by a local reviewer for whom it evoked lines from a popular rustic poem by Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, in which a girl pines for a love that might have been, and a ‘yearning “for something better than she had known”’.[8]
La Thangue would have resisted such surface sentimentality, when there was a deeper ‘sentiment of nature’ to be expressed.[9] This only occurred on those occasions when conventional picturesqueness is rejected in favour of ‘a landscape moulded by human sentiment’, when ‘the human figure takes the landscape into itself’.[10] In the Orchard, Haylands, Graffham is one such occasion.
We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
[1] The first summer exhibition of the war, held in May 1915, had been sharply criticised for its apparent lack of reference to the country’s ‘struggle for existence’ in the fields of northern France; see The Studio, vol. 65, 1915, p. 25.
[2] ‘Royal Academy - H.H. La Thangue’, West Sussex Gazette, 8 May 1919, p. 6. It is likely that this reviewer was none other than James Stanley Little who had written articles about La Thangue in 1893 and 1904; see K.McConkey, A Painter’s Harvest, H.H. La Thangue, 1859-1929, (exhibition catalogue, Oldham Art Gallery), p. 10.
[3] ‘Royal Academy III – Landscapes’, The Times, 9 May 1919, p. 15; ‘Royal Academy - New Associates’, Morning Post, 10 May 1919, p. 5.
[4] Even in his student days, while noting his brilliance, Stanhope Forbes commented upon La Thangue’s truculence, as did his lifelong friend, George Clausen; see for instance, ‘Art Exhibitions: The Fine Art Society’, The Times, 25 April 1931, p. 10.
[5] By the 1920s, Graffham became known principally for La Thangue’s residency. The essayist, EV Lucas, for instance noted that 'Graffham is interesting as being the home of one of our most truthful of living painters, Mr HH La Thangue whose scenes of peasants at work ...and studies of sunlight spattering through trees are among the triumphs of modern English art', (Highways and Byways of Sussex, 1904, MacMillan ed., p. 21).
[6] Sir A.J. Munnings, An Artist's Life, 1950, pp.97-8; quoted in McConkey 1978, pp. 13-14. La Thangue’s other Academy exhibits in 1919 were A Brescian Shore (no. 163) and A Waterway in Provence (no. 228).
[7] Although the Nightingale collection included works by Stanhope Forbes, Lucy Kemp Welch, Hector Caffieri, Robert Walker Macbeth and David Farquharson, La Thangue was clearly the favourite. At the time of the artist’s death, Nightingale owned thirty-one paintings by the artist, including the present example.
[8] Anon., 'The Late Mr H.H. La Thangue - A Memorial Exhibition', Sussex County Herald, 19 September 1930 n.p. (cuttings book, the artist’s descendants). Maud Muller, the fieldworker in the celebrated verses by Whittier (1807-1892), gives sustenance to the local Judge and as he departs, she pines for a better life.
[9] For La Thangue on ‘the sentiment of nature’, see G.Thomson, ‘Henry Herbert La Thangue and his Work’, The Studio, 1896, vol. IX, p. 177.
[10] ‘A Great Sussex Painter – Memorial Exhibition at Brighton’ Brighton Herald, 30 August 1930, n.p. (cuttings book, the artist’s descendants).