Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859-1929)
Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859-1929)

Sussex Apples

Details
Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859-1929)
Sussex Apples
signed ‘H.H. LA THANGUE.’ (lower right) and further signed and inscribed ‘Sussex Apples/H.H. La Thangue/Graffham/Petworth’ (on the stretcher)
oil on canvas
42 x 35 in. (106.7 x 88.9 cm.)
in the original frame
Provenance
Oliver Quibell, of Shalem Lodge, Newark, and thence by descent to the present owner.
Literature
'The Royal Academy: Third Notice', Athenaeum, 15 May 1909, p. 592.
'The Royal Academy', The Times, 4 May 1909, p. 14.
P.G. Konody, 'A Critical Survey', The Observer, 2 May 1909, p. 23.
Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, 1909, no. 297.
Montreal, Galleries of the Art Association, Royal British Colonial Society of Artists and the Art Association of Montreal, Special Exhibition of Modern British Art, November–December 1909, no. 35.
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Twenty Years of British Art (1890-1910), 10 May-19 June 1910, no. 509, lent by the artist.
London, Royal Academy, Commemorative Exhibition of Works by Late Members, 1933, no. 204, lent by Oliver Quibell, of Shalem Lodge, Newark.

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Clare Keiller
Clare Keiller

Lot Essay

Before us a young woman, shirt sleeves rolled up, is shaking the branches of an apple tree from her perch atop a ladder. It is a scene that might take place on any sunny October day in the Home Counties at the turn of the 20th Century. It contains no Biblical overtones, no symbolism, no classical allusions to nature's reward for good husbandry - just the sense that this is a task to be performed swiftly and economically. After picking, the fruit will be taken to be milled into a juicy pulp, before passing to the press where it will produce the juice from which cider can be made. The vigorous 'shaking down' represented in another of La Thangue's Royal Academy exhibit of 1909 started the cycle.

La Thangue, who had gained notoriety for his youthful radicalism, was no stranger to this subject. He was renowned for his naturalistic treatment of sunlight and shade, developed from early plein air studies under the influence of Bastien-Lepage. By 1909, thirty years into his career, he remained a critical topic of discussion among younger painters. Having exhibited In the Dauphiné, the most important picture at the first New English Art Club exhibition of 1886, he went on to take up the cause of Academy reform. His importance was recognized when in 1896, The Man with the Scythe (Tate Britain), was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest for what was then referred to as the National Gallery of British Art. In the Edwardian years his influence on younger artists was profound, as Munnings recalled, 'At that time it was La Thangue who showed the beauties of sunlight; and his way of life was to keep on with his subjects at hand, there at Graffham, day by day, through the seasons. No better pictures of country life, painted in the open air, were being done then ... His pictures of picking cider-apples or purple damsons, of gleaners in twilight or of a cider-press, were like no others in the Academy in those years; and when we talked of artists and their work, one would exclaim, "But what about La Thangue?" which started us off afresh'.

Orchards had been a significant setting for La Thangue since the 1880s. In 1893 In the Orchard (Bradford Art Galleries and Museums), one of his finest impressionistic pictures, represented his wife conversing with a friend under the apple trees. It was, however, in 1898 that the painter turned seriously to the depiction of the cider-making process in the striking Sussex Cider Press (Private Collection). Fieldworkers, at this point, were still paid partly in cider and it was not unknown for them to refuse a wage increase if it meant the reduction of this allowance. Presses, too, were part of the communal inheritance, being fitted with wheels and dragged from village to village, in a ritual that often lasted up until Christmas.

Having recently moved to Haylands at Graffham on Lavington Down, La Thangue was acutely aware of the rituals and processes that punctuated the labourers' annual round of activities. After harvest, when the fruit had ripened it was necessary for all hands - including children - to attend to the stripping of the trees. This essentially is the stage represented in the present work. The same sitter first appeared in Cider Apples, 1899 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), along with the boy from Shaking down cider apples.

Thereafter the same pair were seen in Milling Cider Apples, 1905 (Private Collection), A Sussex Orchard, 1905 (Private Collection), and again in A Sussex Autumn, 1907 (Toi o Tamaki, Auckland Art Gallery, Mackelvie Trust collection). They were such familiar faces by 1909, that Laurence Binyon noted, 'his rustic figures shaking down apples are admirably painted, but we always seem to have seen them before'. However, from La Thangue's point of view, this was less important than the sense that with the present picture, representation of the entire chain of fruit harvesting and processing was complete.
KMc.

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