Léon-Augustin Lhermitte (French, 1844-1925)

La Famille was Lhermitte's single entry to the Salon société nationale des beaux-arts in 1908. Even prior to its exhibition the painting had been acquired by M. Knoedler and Co., who negotiated its sale between the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., with the latter finally purchasing the work on 18 January 1909. The painting was to remain at the Corcoran for the next forty years.

La Famille may be considered as the final supplement to the sequence of monumental works produced by this great pastoral painter. The first in the succession, The Tavern was exhibited in the Salon of 1881. The following, Harvesters' Payday, considered to be the artist's most famous work, was purchased by the French State and is in the collection of Musée d'Orsay. Third in the series, The Harvest, was exhibited at the Exposition Nationale in 1883 and is in the collection of the Washington University in St. Louis. Lhermitte's fourth monumental work, Grape Harvest, was to win him the Légion d'honneur in 1884. Grape Harvest was his first large piece to handle the subject of familial compassion rather than pure physical toil. This work is currently in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Subsequent to the Grape Harvest, Lhermitte produced another colossal work, The Haymakers, in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Eleven years later Lhermitte was to create La Famille, the last piece to complete the series of monumental works.

Throughout his career, Lhermitte remained devoted to his subject matter, the peasant, which to him was the embodiment of the most fundamental and consistent element in human society. Although, Lhermitte was well related in artistic circles and was aware of both revolutionary movements as well as the rapid industrial changes of his time, a favorite subject of emerging Impressionist painters, he established a career depicting the essence of rural life. Lhermitte was not unaccompanied in his choice of the peasant and rural life as the subject matter for his art. Artists, such as Jean Cazin, a close friend of Lhermitte's, Julien Dupré, Jules Breton, and Jules Bastien-Legape, to name a few, communicated as well as idealized, through their work, the pride, integrity and innocence that the rural classes were comprised of. In the present work, the composition simulates almost religious overtones, the figural group reminiscent of the Holy Family.

Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo in 1885, wrote that 'in the work of Millet, of Lhermitte, all reality is also at the same time symbolic. They are different from what are called realists' (The letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Greenwich, 1959, p. 416). In La Famille, not only are the sources of Lhermitte's compositional inspiration his Renaissance predecessors, his technique is also premeditated and rooted in academic training. It is possible to examine his preparatory drawings for La famille, as a group of fourteen are included with this lot.

Sold together with a portfolio of fourteen preparatory drawings.