Henry Herbert La Thangue, RA (British, 1859-1929) A poor French family A poor French family signed 'H. H. La Thangue' (lower left, strengthened) oil on canvas 114 x 100cm (44 7/8 x 39 3/8in). Footnotes Provenance CH Dancocks Esq, Kensington; sale, Christie's, London, 28 November 1908, lot 32 to Cooling. Wolff & Co, Ltd; sale, Christie's, London, 19 November 1928, lot 119. Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 24 February 1956, lot 78. Count Acquarone, Castello di Giove (Castle Jupiter), Umbria, circa 1960. Charles Band, American film producer, 1985. Antonina dal 1890, Rome, 29 May - 2 June 2004. Private collection, Italy (acquired November 2009). Exhibited London, The Grosvenor Gallery, Summer Exhibition, 1884, no. 262. Literature Henry Blackburn, Grosvenor Notes, 1884, (Chatto and Windus), p. 53. The Grosvenor Gallery, Second Notice, Leeds Mercury, 6 May 1884, p. 8. James Stanley Little 'HH La Thangue', The Art Journal, 1893, p. 171. George Thomson, 'HH La Thangue and his work', The Studio, October 1896, Vol. 9, no. 43, p. 168. James Stanley Little, The Magazine of Art, 1904, p. 3. Adrian Jenkins, Painters and Peasants, HH La Thangue and British Rural Naturalism 1880-1905, exhibition catalogue, Bolton Art Gallery, 2000, p. 73 (quoting Thomson, 1896). Colleen Denney, At the Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877-1890, 2000, (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), p. 174. In the summer of 1883, when his friend Stanhope Forbes returned to Brittany, Henry Herbert La Thangue and the sculpture student, James Havard Thomas, travelled down the Rhone valley, stopping at Donzère, a small town of around 1400 inhabitants. Here he painted two canvases, A Poor French Family and Poverty (fig 1). For one so closely associated with working en plein air, they come as a surprise.υ1 Both are dark interiors depicting peasant families, one of whom is spinning cotton using a distaff. Despite the fact that the famous tissu de Nimes, the modern 'denim', was made in one of the principal towns of the region, the spinner in each case, lives in poverty. Following this intimate, one might say, life-changing experience the painter would never be sucked into bourgeois servitude, nor would he ever patronize or prettify his peasant subjects. In the territory south of Montélimar, uncharted by artist-travellers, he was undoubtedly free to pursue his own path, without being overlooked by others. An unpredictable young artist, of 'magnificent obstinacy' in pursuit of his goals, La Thangue had recently been dabbling in Whistlerian full-length portraiture, admiring its low tones (see present lot).υ2 At the same time he remained one of the strongest advocates of the rural Naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Léon Lhermitte – painters of field-labourers working en plein air. His Study in a French Boat Building Yard, (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) had been praised at the Grosvenor Gallery a year earlier, so this step into the darkness of a labourer's cottage was an unusual one. Why was this necessary? The simple answer is that it would take the painter to a deeper understanding of his French allegiances. The spinner had been an heroic symbol for 'paysannerie' painters such as Jules Breton.υ3 Delving deeper and placing himself closer to the work of earlier Realists such as Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, La Thangue may well have been aware of the former's celebrated, Fileuse endormie, 1853 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Millet was at the same time also addressing the subject and his fileuse formed the basis of an etching distributed after Millet's death as one of twenty facsimilies published by the Fine Art Society in 1881, which La Thangue could easily have seen.υ4 And if this was not the case, there were more recent precedents in the work of Lhermitte, while the 'frugal meal' subject – peasant figures seated around a table placed parallel to the picture plane, in a bare, dark interior - had been memorably treated by Alphonse Legros during La Thangue's student years.υ5 Visual references were however in abeyance when La Thangue set up his easel in the cramped conditions of the labourer's cottage at Donzère. The steep tilt of the floor indicates that he was standing almost as close to his spinner as Courbet had been, and his handling of space was an issue that would challenge viewers. Only in Spanish Caravaggesque painting would they expect to find figures pressed so close to the picture surface.υ6 In all this, La Thangue was preoccupied with how we see. In such restricted circumstances, the eye shifts; it scans up and down, and from side to side; it links apparently disconnected stimuli into a single whole, so that we do not stumble as we move around. Working at close quarters meant that there was no single viewpoint, as in Le Repas des Pauvres, and looking up and down, from head to toe, implied distortion – hence the attenuated figure of the seated spinner. There was also the problem of restricted light. On this point, as George Thomson noted, 'The vehemence of his desire to paint sunlight was dissipated into nothing before an enthusiasm to depict the low-toned dwelling room of a poor French family. The blackest thing, as he tells me, he ever painted.'υ7 With figures seated in low light one was almost feeling one's way, observing subtle changes of tone cast into relief by a child's glowing white skull-cap. Recalling the work in 1904, James Stanley Little observed that 'the peasants of the Dauphiné irresistibly attracted him ...' and that this group of pictures '...may be regarded as the forbears, in an artistic sense, of a long series of works dealing with the lives and fortunes of the sons and daughters of the soil, painted in their natural environment...'υ8 While the painter returned to the Rhone to work in full sunlight the following year on the resplendent In the Dauphiné, 1884-6, A Poor French Family was a talisman – both for his work and that of others. In later years he did not avoid the peasant interior, and in Some Poor People 1894 (fig 2), even alluded to the humble living conditions they must endure. He would never avoid poverty, nor patronize the poor. Dark Newlyn School interiors, yet to be painted by Fred Hall, Frank Bramley, Chevallier Tayler, Stanhope Forbes and others, owe something to La Thangue's canvas. How often do we see its format – a principal figure seated on the right, with others grouped around a table – adopted by contemporaries? Universally they incorporate diverting details that reinforce narratives rigorously excluded from La Thangue's work. The only remotely decorative feature that these peasants of the Dauphiné possess is an old grandfather clock the base of which appears in the background of the picture - but this does not detract from the spartan setting, nor, since we cannot see its face, does it allude to the passing of time. However by 1904, the picture was not completely resistant to literary interpretation. James Stanley Little had read Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin and knew that despite their penniless state, the peasants of the region had not lost their spirit, and that the simple honesty of their vie rustique was to be the artist's most important discovery in that dark interior in the Dauphiné. We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. υ1 For fuller accounts of La Thangue's early career see Kenneth McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, HH La Thangue, 1859-1929, 1978 (Oldham Art Gallery) and Adrian Jenkins, Painters and Peasants, HH La Thangue and British Rural Naturalism 1880-1905, 2000 (exhibition catalogue, Bolton Art Gallery). υ2 George Thomson, 'HH La Thangue and his work', The Studio, October 1896, vol. 9, no. 43, p. 176. υ3 Barefoot she sits by the sea in Breton's Young Woman Spinning (Brittany Girl), 1872 (Denison University Art Gallery, Ohio), assuming an almost classical pose. υ4 La Thangue may well have been able to study Courbet's posthumous retrospective exhibition of 150 works at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in May 1882. Millet's versions of Woman Spinning of the mid-1850s are contained in the Clark Institute, Williamstown and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Spinning, famously adopted by Vincent van Gogh, was the final plate in the Fine Art Society selection. υ5 Legros' Le Repas des Pauvres had been shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878, while La Thangue was a student at the Royal Academy Schools. υ6 The Leeds Mercury went so far as to declare that was 'a good picture spoilt by faults of perspective'. υ7 George Thomson, 'HH La Thangue and his work', The Studio, October 1896, vol. 9, no. 43, p. 168. υ8 James Stanley Little, 'Henry Herbert La Thangue ARA', The Magazine of Art, 1904, p. 3.
Henry Herbert La Thangue (British, 1859-1929) Provencal Oaks, Bormes, 1913 signed (lower right) oils on canvas 53cm x 58.5cm. Provenance: Moses Nightingale Esq. (probably purchased from the Leicester Galleries, 1914); thence by descent. Exhibited: London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings by H. H. La Thangue R.A., April 1914, no.9; Brighton, City Art Gallery and Museum, Memorial Exhibition of Works by the Late H. H. La Thangue R.A., September 1930, no.21. Literature: Anon, Watercolours and Oils at Hazeldene, Crawley, Sussex, 1919, no.105 as Provencal Oaks, Bormes, 1913. La Thangue established a studio at Bormes, a village eight miles from HyÞres, during the Edwardian years, just before its 'semi-Moorish streets à mellow with age' began to attract itinerant artists. The New Zealand painter, Sydney Lough Thompson, who visited him in 1915 indicates that he was well established in the village prior to the Great War. Thompson appears to have followed in LaThangue's footsteps, painting in Bormes, St Jeannet and Grasse in the 1920s, one of many artists attracted to the region. A travel writer of the twenties noted that it had 'found favour in the sight of many painters who wish to pursue their art beneath the azure skies of the midi, far from the grey winter of Paris or Brittany' (Capt. Leslie Richardson, Things Seen on the Riviera, 1927, p. 25). Known since 1968 as Bormes-les-Mimosas, the town lies at one end of the 'Mimosa Road' which stretches up the coast to Grasse, centre of French perfume production. As is clear from La Thangue's Royal Academy Diploma picture, collecting flowers for perfume became one of the painter's most important themes (McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, 1978, Oldham Art Gallery, no. 31). Exploring cart tracks to discover neglected hillside gardens became his daily routine in the years preceding his solo exhibition of 1914 and many landscapes resulted. Provencal Oaks, Bormes, included in the Leicester Galleries exhibition in 1914, shows the small evergreen, shallow-rooted Cork or Kermes oaks native to the area (Comerfield Casey, Riviera Nature Notes, 1903, [2004 ed.], p. 47). Other Nightingale acquisitions such as A Provencal Sea, Bormes, shown at the Royal Academy in 1918, and two further works entitled Provencal Landscape, Bormes, show trees of a similar variety. One of these, identical in size to the present work and painted from a slightly more elevated position overlooking the bay, may have been intended as a companion-piece, A Provencal Landscape, Bormes, c. 1913 (sold Christie's 19 June 1997). Commenting on his work in 1905, the critic of The Academy noted that while 'he delights in the brilliant lights and reflections of southern climesàEvery touch appears to have been put on with a heavily loaded spatula andàhe is scrupulous to give the conflicting colours of reflectionà' The effect gave La Thangue's landscapes a characteristically granular quality which, sometimes reminding the viewer of Monet's work, is quite unique. In common with Monet, La Thangue also appears to have been fascinated by the changing light at different times of the day, although he appears not to have painted these phases from precisely the same angles.
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929) Shaking down cider apples signed 'H.H. La Thangue' (lower right), and further signed and inscribed 'Shaking down cider apples H.H. La Thangue' (on the stretcher) oil on canvas 42 x 36½ in. (106.7 x 92.7 cm.)
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (British, 1859-1929) Portrait of a Seated Woman Signed "HLa Thangue" u.r., with a canvas stencil from Lechertier Barbe & Co., London, on the reverse. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm), framed. Condition: Retouch, craquelure, alligatoring, surface grime. N.B. The British art materials supplier Lechertier Barbe & Co. operated under this name between 1859-1897. (1) (1) National Portrati Gallery, "British Artist's Suppliers, 1650-1950-L." http://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/directory-of-suppliers/l.php
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A.,(1859-1929) Veronese shepherdess, Lake Garda signed 'H.H. LA THANGUE' (lower left), and inscribed by the artist 'A Veronese Shepherdess' (on the reverse of the stretcher). oil on canvas 32 x 26 in. (81.2 x 66 cm.)
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A., (1859-1929) A Hillside village in Provence signed 'H.H. LA THANGUE' (lower right), and inscribed by the artist, 'A Hillside Village in Provence/H.H. La Thangue 10 Netherton Grove London S.W.' oil on canvas 15¼ x 17¾ in. (38.7 x 45.1 cm.)
HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE R.A. (BRITISH, 1859-1929) A Sussex Hayfield at Graffham, 1912, signed 'H. H. LATHANGUE' lower left, oil on canvas, 25 ¢" x 29 1/4" (see illustration) Provenance: Purchased by Moses Nightingale Esq. (possibly from the Leicester Galleries, London, 1914); thence by descent Exhibited: London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Pictures by H. H. La Thangue, R.A., April 1914, no. 41 Brighton, City Art Gallery and Museum, Memorial Exhibition of Works by the Late H. H. La Thangue R. A., September 1930, no. 24 Literature: Walter Sickert, 'Mr La Thangue's Paintings', The New Age, vol XV, no. 1, 7 May 1914, p. 18 Anon, Watercolours and Oils at Hazeldene, Crawley, Sussex, 1919, no. 108 as Sussex Hayfield at Graffham, Sussex, 1912 Osbert Sitwell ed., A Free House! Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert, 1947 (MacMillan), p. 272 Anna Gruetzner Robins, Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, 2002, (Oxford University Press), pp. 364-365 While he spent his winters during the Edwardia years in Provence and the regions of northern Italy, La Thangue returned to England to work in the fields around his home at Graffham in Sussex between hay cutting in June and the grain and fruit harvests of September. He had moved the relatively short distance from Bosham to Graffham in 1898 because the new location offered a greater range of possibilities, and immediately he began a series of striking figure pieces with Love in the Harvest Field, shown at the Royal Academy in 1899 (unlocated). La Thangue first moved to Sussex in 1890, on the advice of James Charles, who also lived at Bosham. Charles, a figure and landscape painter from Warrington in Cheshire, shared La Thangue's early Bradford patrons. Both artists looked to France for inspiration and both were influenced by work of Bastien-Lepage and LÚon Lhermitte, also popular with West Yorkshire collectors. Lhermitte in particular set out to document la vie rustique and by 1900, was in the midst of a long series of harvest scenes that La Thangue ould ave been familiar with (fig 1). Known primarily as a figure painter, La Thangue closely observed the freer and more informal style in Charles' harvest scenes around the turn of the century. Suspicious of the picturesque seductions of his more conventional contemporaries like Alfred East and David Murray, he slowly developed his own approach to landscape painting after he moved away from Bosham. By the time of his solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1914, this process was complete and the rich texture of works like A Sussex Hayfield at Graffham separates it from the looser paint structures of Charles's Windy Weather, (fig 2). Where most landscape painters, including Charles and Lhermitte, favoured open country, La Thangue used foreground trees to help place his figure and take the eye successfully to the hay-cart in the middle distance. Moses Nightingale, a Sussex corn merchant, having purchased two pictures, On Lavington Down and A Ligurian Mill Race, shown at the Royal Academy in 1901 and 905 espectively, returned to collecting around 1914. La Thangue, who by then had secured full membership of the Royal Academy, was staging a solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries. An earlier generation of Nightingales, hailing from Rotherham, had donated a substantial collection to the town, including an early Landscape Study by the artist. However, Moses Nightingale was to become La Thangue's most important patron, listing twenty-three works in a catalogue of the watercolours and oils at Hazeldene, his house in Crawley. Following the painter's death, Nightingale lent generously to his memorial exhibition at Brighton Art Gallery and the Royal Academy 'Late Members' exhibition in 1933. Thereafter he split his collection between members of his family. Coming three and half years after Roger Fry's celebrated Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition, and coinciding with the scandalous exposure of the Vorticists and the Italian Futurists, La Thangue's Leicester Gallery landscapes must have looked tradit ional even by Camden Town School standards. Despite their compositional strength, his landscapes were greeted with faint praise in The Times (20 April 1914, p. 12) and attacked by Laurence Housman in The Manchester Guardian (18 April 1914, p. 10). While reservations were also expressed by The Athenaeum and The Connoisseur, The Academy praised La Thangue's honesty and the 'daring' of his 'handling and mastery of colour' (McConkey, 1978, p. 13). It was Walter Sickert however, who cited the present work in a glowing review that swept away all reference to the current turmoil in contemporary art. What would have appealed to Sickert in the present work? In his review, Sickert referred to Monet and Cezanne, now familiar to British audiences. La Thangue was not their follower, but he did possess their dedication to developing 'a series of colour relationsàgrading from russet towards ruby' on which he was able to 'buildàa series of beautiful and interesting sensations of nature'. This was his unique discovery, and t did ot depend on clever quotation from 'the gamut of Monet'.
Leaving Home signed and dated 'H-H-LA THANGUE 89-90' (lower left) oil on canvas 701/2 x 59 1/8 in. (179 x 150.2 cm.) PROVENANCE Isaac Smith, JP, Bradford, his sale; Christie's, London, 15 May 1911, lot 83 (250 gns to Sampson). Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 10 November 1981, lot 95. with The Fine Art Society, London, from whom acquired by the present owner in 1982. LITERATURE H. Blackburn, New Gallery Notes, 1890, London, 1890, illus. p. 52. C. Phillips, 'The Summer Exhibitions at Home and Abroad', Art Journal, 1890, p. 170. Magazine of Art, 1890, p. 306. Anon., 'The New Gallery', The Speaker, 3 May 1890, p. 482. Times, 23 May 1890, p. 13. J.S. Little, 'H.H. La Thangue', Art Journal, 1893, p. 173, illus. p. 171. J.S. Little, 'Henry Herbert La Thangue, A.R.A.', Magazine of Art, 1904, p. 6. K. McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, Works by Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. 1859-1929, Oldham, 1978, p. 24, fig. 23. T. Ayers (ed.), Art At Auction: The year at Sotheby's 1981-82, London, 1982, illus. p. 63. J. Shuckburgh (abridged), The Illustrated Lark Rise to Candleford, a trilogy by Flora Thompson, London, 1983, illus. p. 175. C. Wood, Paradise Lost, Paintings of English Country Life and Landscape 1850-1914, London, 1988, pp. 107, 218, pl. 93. K. Holden, 'George Clausen and Henry Herbert La Thangue Rural painting, urban patronage', Apollo, February 1999, p. 12, pl. 2. The Fine Art Society, Spring 2000, London, 2000, illus. p. 31. G.P. Weiberg, Beyond Impressionism, The Natural Impulse, London, 1992, p. 121, illus. p. 120. EXHIBITION London, New Gallery, 1890, no. 132. Chicago, 1893. Bolton, Museum and Art Gallery, Painters and Peasants: Henry La Thangue and British Rural Naturalism 1880-1905, 2000, no. 35, pp. 126, 189. NOTES There can be no more definitive portrayal of the massive social changes affecting the English countryside in the late nineteenth century than H.H. La Thangue's Leaving Home. The picture graphically records the plight of a young woman leaving her family to go into service probably as a kitchen maid. The aged driver of the horse and cart cracks his whip with a fatalistic stroke. He is the early exemplar of La Thangue's aged harvester passing the garden gate as a sick child sinks into her final slumber in The Man with the Scythe, his Chantrey Bequest picture of 1896 (Tate Britain). The critical rhetoric, which contrasted 'realistic truth' with 'symbolic purpose' in La Thangue's later work seems appropriate here (see Kenneth McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, H.H. La Thangue RA, 1859-1929, 1978, p. 33). For The Speaker, La Thangue's intentions were obvious to all who flocked to see Leaving Home when it was first shown at the New Gallery in 1890. It noted, There was a constant crowd around the Leaving Home of Mr La Thangue, a picture that has both an artistic and an emotional beauty, and the name gave so much information that few made any grave errors ( The Speaker, 3 May 1890, p. 482). Apart from the picture's evident popularity - it was one of the talking points of the 1890 season - within its viewing public there was a social awareness in which its subject matter could readily be understood. It alluded to conditions which left country girls to face a purposeless future if they remained on the land. This dilemma is graphically described in Flora Thompson's classic Lark Rise to Candleford, (1939), in which Laura, the stonemason's daughter, dons her best clothes and mounts the spring-cart to leave her cottage home at Lark Rise to go to work in the post-office at Candleford Green. 'As Polly [the horse] trotted on', Thompson wrote, 'Laura turned to look across... to the huddle of grey cottages where she knew her mother was thinking about her, and tears came into her eyes' (Century Publishing ed., 1983, p. 176). Later historians have shown that the traditional cottage industries of lace-making, straw-plaiting and glove-making were in sharp decline in the face of industrialisation and cheap imports, providing the daughters of farm labourers with little alternative but to leave home to seek work. Even the Small Holdings Acts of 1892 and 1908, designed to retain the rural population on the land, were of no avail, or were too late to stem the tide (see for instance G.E. Mingay, Rural Life in Victorian England, 1977, Futura ed., 1979, pp. 120-142). In placing his female harvester in the forefront of earlier compositions like The Return of the Reapers, 1886 (Tate Britain), the artist was drawing attention to country practices which were now under threat and to the role of women within them. Focussing more particularly upon the tearful farewell, a subject which emerges from a quite specific visual context, La Thangue's canvas spoke unequivocally and left little possibility for 'grave errors' of interpretation. For its readers The Art Journal provided the definitive description of the work, The grey-and-green tonality and the open-air effect of the whole are evidently derived from French sources; but the types of rustic personages and the aspect of the bare landscape which frames them are sufficiently national to exonerate the painter from the charge of slavish imitation of foreign models. The scene is a high road in an uninviting country, upon which a trap, driven by a rustic and drawn by a shaggy white pony, has drawn up; it bears away from her home - evidently to service - a weeping village girl, at whom her family sadly take a last look ere she departs. Boldly and skillfully designed is the white horse, which stands absolutely facing the spectator and stepping right out of the picture; but it forms inevitably an ugly and unpictorial element in the design ( The Art Journal, 1890, p. 170). What falls between the cracks of most literal descriptions, but is alluded to here, is the conscious stagecraft of Leaving Home. No one could avoid its message. Its viewpoint is carefully managed to give the sense that our space is being invaded. The conventional Claude Phillips, who penned The Art Journal critique regarded the horse as 'ugly and unpictorial', forgetting that Lady Butler had employed similar strategies to convey the urgency of a cavalry charge. The poor were allowed to be seen, their emotions could even be portrayed, but they must not be threatening. The horse should not be allowed to bring them out of the picture into the spectator's space. Surprisingly the social context of Leaving Home tended to be overlooked by critics who preferred to comment upon the French naturalist syntax implied in La Thangue's confrontational composition. La Thangue's career was, as George Thomson later pointed out, synonymous with 'the history of the naturalistic movement in England' ('H.H. La Thangue and his Work', The Studio, IX, 1896, p. 163). He was one of the leading Francophile painters of the 1880s, having left the Academy Schools to study in Paris under Jean L‚on G‚r”me with a letter of recommendation from Frederic Leighton. There, he was particularly close to Stanhope Forbes, Arthur Hacker and the sculptor, James Havard Thomas. When he returned to England, fired with youthful idealism, La Thangue set out to overhaul exhibiting practices and he was immediately in conflict with the Academy cartel. He sought to use the New English Art Club as a vehicle for bringing a 'bigger movement' into being, based upon the recently reformed Paris Salon. In this, his principal comrade 'conspirators' were George Clausen and Frederick Brown. After a good deal of heated debate, which led to La Thangue leaving the club, the plan for a National Art Exhibition collapsed. La Thangue's importance as the standard bearer of radical practice during these years should not however be underestimated. He consorted with photographers like Peter Henry Emerson whose images of East Anglian life often repeat the stark confrontations we see in La Thangue's works. In 1889 Morley Roberts recorded that La Thangue 'had an incalculable effect upon all with whom he came in contact by the earnestness of his personality, and his love of truth and directness' ('A Colony of Artists', The Scottish Art Review, 2, 1889, p. 73). Based in the Trafalgar/Wentworth studios in Manresa Road, he was, before his departure for South Walsham, near Norfolk, surrounded by young painters who included Philip Wilson Steer, James Jebusa Shannon, James Elder Christie, Frank Brangwyn, Percy Jacomb Hood and the sculptor, Stirling Lee. La Thangue was regarded as the leader of the 'square brush school', a technical method which puts paint on canvas in a particular way with a square brush, which many of the older men never use. Those who practise it in its simplest form leave brushmarks, and do not smooth away the evidence of method, thus sometimes insisting on the way the picture is painted, perhaps at the sacrifice of subtleties in the subject (M. Roberts, p. 73). Thus the principal tenet of this school, associated with naturalism, lay in a very dramatic and deliberate application of paint to convey the immediacy of lived experience. We obtain a sense of this from A.D. McCormick's contemporary drawing of the artist at work (fig. 1). The most ambitious constructions, like Leaving Home, were rooted in these rapid plein air studies. They were deployed with mental rigour eliminating the excesses and discontinuities of spontaneous on the spot recording in favour of an ensemble which was carefully contrived. In the present case, a Landscape Study (fig. 2, Rotherham Art Gallery), shows a back view of a farm maid driving ducks up the lane towards the farm. James Stanley Little described the cast of mind which emanated from this reading of Naturalism, Mr La Thangue's art is eminently the art which carries with it the sentiment of good breeding; the dignity and reticence which went with it from its inception are manifested in what we usually speak of as quality and style. Formal perhaps, Mr La Thangue may occasionally be, but he is never vulgar. It is, perhaps, true to say of him as has been said of Bastien-Lepage, that to him the literary and aesthetic sides of life appeal almost equally, and it is this fact which renders his pictures singularly free from extravagance. His outlook on the world is that of a man who has trained his brain as well as his eye and his hand. He rarely commits an error of taste... ('H.H. La Thangue', Art Journal, 1893, pp. 173-4). These are the essential qualities of Leaving Home. Its formality is expressed in the strongly centralised composition which draws the eye consistently to the main motif, that of the tearful country girl and her aged driver. Grouped around these figures, the delapidated farm buildings and tearful family members all speak eloquently of an England which could no longer support its population, an England in which the trees are leafless and the well-worn clothes of the peasantry hint at decay and disillusion. The ducks innocently go about their business on the dyke off to the left. The dramatically foreshortened white horse, an aged animal, complies with the general mood. La Thangue used this motif again in 1895 in The Last Furrow to express what George Moore described as 'mute sympathy' with the ploughman's plight. All are enveloped in the grey beauty of a bleak East Anglian day. Works of this type, like Leaving Home, appealed particularly to La Thangue's northern patrons. In this case the buyer was Isaac Smith, JP (1832-1909), mill owner and Mayor of Bradford. While Smith and his kind were caught up in the very processes to which La Thangue's picture alluded, the general character of his collection was, as the present work confirms, far from escapist. He owned important recent Salon paintings by L‚on Lhermitte and Edouard-Joseph Dantan, as well as works by Clausen, Charles, Holl, Tissot and an early non-Pre-Raphaelite work by Waterhouse. In short, he favoured pictures which were naturalistic representations of contemporary subjects, reflecting the 'democratic' tastes of the period in which the great public municipal and colonial collections were formed. In depicting the state of the poor in this stark, original and objective way, La Thangue was working within a tradition of social reporting going back to the 1870s in the work of illustrators like Frank Holl and Hubert von Herkomer. These and others, in their Academy canvases showed the effects of rapid industrialisation upon the countryside, Holl depicting the tearful farewells of emigrants and Herkomer, the privations of the itinerant workforce. La Thangue treated the theme of the rootless rural poor in later canvases like Travelling Harvesters, 1897 (Private Collection) and Harvesters at Supper, 1898 (Bradford Art Galleries and Museums). Among the painters of his own generation, Fred Hall in Adversity (fig. 3, R.A., 1889, no. 676, unlocated), depicted a dejected labourer's family and horse and cart, dramatically foreshortened, trudging down a country lane in the rain. The rain has ceased in Leaving Home, although the evidence of a recent downpour remains in puddles in the cart-tracks. The picture's immediate iconic status was matched only by George Clausen's The Girl at the Gate, 1889 (Tate Britain), a work which addresses a similar theme - in this case the plight of the forlorn young woman imprisoned in the countryside with aged parents or grand parents. Like these other 'thesis' pictures, Leaving Home had numerous successors. Not only were there echoes in La Thangue's own work of the nineties, but aspects of his unique approach to assembling the mise- en-sc‚ne are to be found in the work of younger painters such as Harold Harvey and Alfred Munnings. Munnings' The Vagabonds, 1902 (private collection), for instance, in general terms looks back to the present picture. Yet within fifteen years of the appearance of Leaving Home, these grand naturalistic pictures of social dilemmas were outmoded. British agriculture might remain in a parlous state in the middle of the Edwardian era, but in the jovial rustics and rumbustious squirearchy of James Pryde and William Nicholson, new archetypes played to the transcendent bawdiness of the British character. There is no doubt however, that H.H. La Thangue, and Leaving Home, were central to the remaking for its day, of the image of rural England. Early writers on La Thangue refer to his austerity. Thomson quotes Clausen's reference to his 'magnificent obstinacy', which could be compared to that of the American painter, Thomas Eakins. La Thangue sought isolation. He left London to paint Leaving Home. He worked in remote places and identified with peasants who scraped a living in distant fields. Munnings records this restlessness in later years, He [La Thangue] was unhappy about where to live and wanted a change. He asked me if I knew a quiet old world village where he could live and find real country models... Again and again when we met in the club there was the same unsettled, unhappy look in his eye - the same question - and a tinge of sadness in his voice... Although young looking, age was gaining on La Thangue and I believe he never found his spot ( The Artist's Life, Bungay, 1950, pp. 97-8). The irony is that like his female protagonist, the painter himself would be compelled to leave home. In the early years of the new century he was one of the first British painters to set up his headquarters in the south of France. We are grateful to Kenneth McConkey for his help in preparing this entry.
A Proven‡al Landscape, Bormes signed 'H.H. LA THANGUE' (lower left), signed again and inscribed '"A Proven‡al landscape"/H.H. La Thangue' (on the stretcher) oil on canvas 20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm.) PROVENANCE Doris R. Blaber, September 1934. EXHIBITION Brighton, Public Art Galleries, Memorial Exhibition of Works by the late H.H. La Thangue, R.A., September 1930, no. 26. NOTES Discussing the three extensive landscapes A Proven‡al Morning (Oldham Art Gallery), A Ligurian Valley (Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston Upon Hull), and A Mountain Frontier (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery), Kenneth McConkey comments: 'These three landscapes were all shown at La Thangue's one-man exhibition at the Leicester Galleries [April 1914] which was evident of a desire to renovate his style. They mark a new departure in that they abandon the familiar mosaic of flat touches for a more grainy texture suited to conveying a sense of humid atmosphere. In addition they present us with the first wide vistas to be seen in his work and their conventional landscape formats in some instances recall Corot and Constable' ( A Painter's Harvest Henry Herbert La Thangue 1859-1929, Oldham Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1978, p. 47).
