HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE (BRITISH 1859-1929)A SPANISH MILLOil on canvasSigned (lower left); further signed and inscribed 'A Spanish Mill' (on the stretcher)96.5 x 110cm (37 x 43¼ in.)Provenance:Sale, Christie's, London, Victorian & British Impressionist Art, 13 December 2012, lot 54The Collection of The Bowerman Charitable TrustHenry La Thangue was a founder member of the New English Art Club and like many of his fellow artists spent time painting in mainland Europe. He is most associated with Provence and the Liguria coast of Italy. He also sailed down the coast of Spain a far as Andalusia and the Balearic Islands. He worked almost exclusively on the spot, and it is likely that he blocked in the present composition by the roadside in the Mallorcan hills, close to the village of Buger, where the fast-flowing Torrent de Buger irrigated the cereal crops produced in the area, giving rise to the construction of windmills hundreds of years earlier. At least one other work, the smaller Moonrise in Spain (Christie's, 16 December 2009), is known to have been completed at this location. The figure with the heavily laden donkey is a miller setting off for the coast or the local bake-house. Observers noted that the meagre wealth of small island population depended on corn production that fed the expansion of Barcelona, even later in the twenties when the islands were colonized by artists such as Robert Graves, the native Spanish reliant on an agrarian existence.
Henry Herbert La Thangue, RA (British, 1859-1929) A Provençal drying-floor signed 'H.H.LA THANGUE.' (lower right) oil on canvas 77.4 x 69.8cm (30 1/2 x 27 1/2in).
HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE (BRITISH 1859-1929)THE COW GIRLOil on canvasSigned (lower left)140 x 99.5cm (55 x 39 in.)Painted circa 1888.Provenance:John William Smith, Private Collection, Bradford His sale, Christie's, London, 18 February 1905,lot 151 (58 guineas to Sampson)Sale, Christie's, London,19 December 1972, lot 53Leva Gallery, LondonLady Isobel Throckmorton, Private Collection Her Sale, Christie's, London, 6 June 1980, lot 195Acquired from the above sale by the present ownerLiterature:Grant Waters, Dictionary of British Artists 1900-1950, 1975, Vol. 2 (illustrated plate 169)Sunlight strikes the white apron of a young woman who drives a pair of Ayrshire calves to pasture under trees that line the edge of a barley field. Its brightness creates a verdant overhead canopy through which flashes of a clear blue sky can be seen. Confrontation with friendly, curious, but unpredictable creatures within a colourful spatial envelope lifts an otherwise unremarkable scene into something immediately arresting. A few simple comparisons with contemporary paintings of cowherds will instantly convince the spectator that Henry Herbert La Thangue's The Cow Girl is a radical departure from convention. Precedents were exclusively European, where artistic custom and practice dictated that such subjects, tackled in a minor key in the work of Anton Mauve (fig 2), for instance, would appeal to Barbizon and Hague School collectors. Overlaid with a poetic vision in the work of J-F Millet, the peasant cowherd began to step forward and assume more heroic status, but it was only with Jules Bastien-Lepage and Léon Lhermitte that la vie rurale was reassessed in its entirety as a visual source book. Scale was increased, and naturalistic techniques applied to give the powerful sense of brutal reality - that of the école naturaliste. In Pauvre Fauvette (fig 3), Lepage's country child is dressed in sackcloth on a cold, barren hillside under a leafless tree. She was, as George Clausen would later write, 'placed before us ... without the appearance of artifice, but as [she] lives.'Images like these were part of La Thangue's education. Whatever one painted, it had to be realized on-the-spot, in the open air, in order to convey what the artist described as 'the sentiment of nature'. The sensations of the moment should not be faked. For one alive to Impressionist innovation, the advice, in the artist's words, was simply 'to learn to record ... impressions with rapidity' and without preconception. La Thangue encountered these ideas in Paris. He went there in 1880 as a twenty-year-old Royal Academy Schools gold medallist to enter the prestigious atelier Gérôme at the École des Beaux Arts. With such recognized precocity, one might predict the monied career of an establishment classicist. This, however, does a disservice to both student and teacher, and La Thangue swiftly established his own path sampling the artists' colonies in Brittany and travelling south to the Dauphiné. Not long after his return to England, the artist was invited to paint portraits of local dignitaries in Arthur Higgins Rigg's studio in Swan Arcade, Bradford. It was a fruitful expedition, for a year later he was elected president of the town's Arcadian Art Club, and found patrons, one of whom was the mayor, Isaac Smith JP. Smith's wealth derived from Fieldhead Mills in Preston Street, a firm of fine worsted spinners, founded in 1848. During the 1880s, through the agency of Arthur Tooth, Smith's collection included works such as Lhermitte's Le Cabaret 1881 (Private Collection) and La Moisson 1883 (Washington University Art Gallery, St Louis) and his outstanding early La Thangue acquisition was the plein air portrait, A Study (Resting after the Game) 1888, held in a private collection. Time and place suggest that The Cow Girl, in the handling of the calves and the treatment of sunlight, must have been painted around the same time as this in the late summer of 1888 when the La Thangues were living at Horsey Mere in Norfolk. At this point the artist was known to paint on unstretched canvas tacked to a board accentuating the flat single strokes of the so-called 'Square Brush School' of which he was regarded as leader. It was acquired around this time by Smith's son, John William Smith, (b. 1860) a contemporary of the painter. To this young man, there was no jeopardy in selecting one of the artist's most radical early canvases. Most of La Thangue's important works of this period went straight to rival Bradford collectors, some them before they were exhibited - the present example being one. What then, was significant about this specific painting containing a woman herder and two calves In essence, it exemplified the belief in modernity that young contemporaries admired. La Thangue had come to Bradford having observed the strong naturalistic current of contemporary painting working its way through the Salon, as the Smiths, father and son, had done. In this he was supported by radicals such as Clausen and Frederick Brown, both of whom, recognizing the unlikelihood of the Royal Academy changing its restrictive practices, shared his views on building a new 'democratic' exhibiting agency. La Thangue had gone into print with his ideas and was creating a stir. Looking at Clausen's The Shepherdess in 1885 (fig 4), acquired by John Maddocks, a Bradford rival, the kinship is evident. Here too, in The Cow Girl, was a figure holding a staff, confronting the viewer, as one found in the work of Millet and Lepage, but where Clausen's subject stands in an even light, La Thangue, in a flash of sunlight, the tilt of a head and in the swing of a tail, is keen to convey movement, both in nature and its inhabitants. These were things that reinforced the feeling of a real-life encounter. Nothing in his world - in the moment - was completely still. Figures and animals were walking towards you and they knew you were there. The central foregrounding, seen in The Return of the Reapers, 1886 (fig 5), then in another Bradford amateur's collection, as in the present painting, made this sense obvious to all. It was developed through a series of later works such as The Woodman 1894 (Private Collection), and The Ploughboy 1900 (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and would become the artist's signature compositional strategy. The central motif - twin calves - with its dramatic foreshortening, would also return in The First Meal c. 1894 (Private Collection) and A Sussex Farm 1904.Thus, in more senses than one, the present painting marked a watershed. It adopted and elevated a subject long regarded as routine picturesque and approached it with a fresh eye. In terms of 'square brush' handling it was a 'thesis picture'. Beyond the confines of La Thangue's northern power base, it reached out to Chelsea followers such as Frank Brangwyn and William Llewellyn, and was practiced in Newlyn by Stanhope Forbes, Frank Bramley, Chevallier Tayler and others, while its impact on 'Glasgow Boys', George Henry, Edward Atkinson Hornel and David Gauld remains to be explored. Beyond the contemporary art networks however, there are simple aesthetic pleasures to be had. In La Thangue's painting of two calves and a 'cow girl' on a summer's day somewhere in England, the innocent and ordinary becomes extraordinary. Kenneth McConkeyFigure References Fig 2Anton Mauve, Changing Pasture, c. 1880, 61 x 100.6, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913Fig 3Jules Bastien-Lepage, Pauvre Fauvette, 1881, 162.5 x 125.7 cm, Glasgow MuseumsFig 4George Clausen, The Shepherdess, 1885, 64.7 x 46 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Fig 5Henry Herbert La Thangue, The Return of the Reapers, 1886, 119 x 69.5 cm, TateReferencesFor Millet's celebrated, Femme faisant paitre sa vache, 1859 (Musée de l'Ain, Bourg-en-Bresse), see RL Herbert, Jean-François Millet, 1976 (exhibition catalogue, Arts Council), pp. 90-1.Kenneth McConkey, 'Pauvre Fauvette or petite folle: a study of Bastien-Lepage's Pauvre Fauvette', Arts Magazine, January 1981, pp. 140-3.George Clausen, 'Bastien-Lepage and Modern Realism', Scottish Art Review, vol 1, 1888, p. 114. George Thomson, 'HH La Thangue and his Work', The Studio, vol 9, 1897, p. 177. For a general account of La Thangue's career see Kenneth McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, HH La Thangue, 1859-1929, 1978 (exhibition catalogue, Oldham Art Gallery). La Thangue, whom Stanhope Forbes on one occasion described as 'such an oddity', (letter dated 16 February 1881, Hyman Keitman Archive, Tate), seems to have preferred the isolation of Donzère in the Rhone, to the hothouse atmosphere of the Brittany colonies. La Thangue was being pursued by Bradford collectors from his days in Cancale with Stanhope Forbes. So successful were relationships in Bradford that for the next five years, La Thangue gave his address as 26 Booth Street, Bradford until 1889, even though living on the edge of the Norfolk Broads with a studio and group of followers in Chelsea; see Morley Roberts, 'A Colony of Artists', The Scottish Art Review, vol 2, 1889, pp. 72-77. Others included William Ackroyd, Abraham Mitchell and John Maddocks and all were mill owners. Smith was mayor of Bradford, 1884-1886; he went on to acquire La Thangue's A Study (Resting after the Game) 1888 and By the Duckpond, 1893 (both Private Collections).A Study (Resting after the Game), 1888, represents Kate La Thangue, the artist's wife; see Sotheby's 21 March 2013, lot 261, lot essay by Kenneth McConkey.Roberts 1889, as note 6. It seems likely that the younger Smith exerted a powerful influence over his father - as did Tom Mitchell over his father, Abraham; see for instance, Christine Hopper and Adrian Jenkins, The Connoisseur, Art Patrons and Collectors in Victorian Bradford, 1989 (exhibition catalogue, Bradford Art Galleries and Museums). It appears that in later life, John William Smith abandoned family life and went to live in an artists' colony in Hampstead. I am grateful to the late Gwendoline Smith OBE and he cousin, the late Mrs Margaret Massy, for detail on the Bradford Smiths; private correspondence with the author, October 1980-September 1981. HH La Thangue, 'A National Art Exhibition', The Magazine of Art, Vol 10, 1887, pp. 30-32. For a fuller account of these important developments see Kenneth McConkey, The New English, A History of the New English Art Club, 2006 (RA Publications), pp. 23-45. The Return of the Reapers, 1886 (ex-Arthur Grogan Esq) was formerly in the collection of Tom Mitchell, son of Abraham Mitchell. Tom Mitchell is pictured in La Thangue's portrait of his father Abraham, in The Connoisseur, 1887 (Bradford Museums and Galleries). McConkey, 1978, pp. 10, 11 & 37. For The First Meal c. 1894 and A Sussex Farm 1904 see Christie's 23 November 2005, lot 13 & 8 June 2006, lot 292, lot essays by Kenneth McConkey.
HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE (BRITISH 1859 - 1929)A SPANISH MILLOil on canvasSigned (lower left); further signed and inscribed 'A Spanish Mill' (on the stretcher)96.5 x 110cm (37 x 43¼ in.)Provenance:Sale, Christie's, London, Victorian & British Impressionist Art, 13 December 2012, lot 54The Collection of The Bowerman Charitable TrustHenry La Thangue was a founder member of the New English Art Club and like many of his fellow artists spent time painting in mainland Europe. He is most associated with Provence and the Liguria coast of Italy. He also sailed down the coast of Spain a far as Andalusia and the Balearic Islands. He worked almost exclusively on the spot, and it is likely that he blocked in the present composition by the roadside in the Mallorcan hills, close to the village of Buger, where the fast-flowing Torrent de Buger irrigated the cereal crops produced in the area, giving rise to the construction of windmills hundreds of years earlier. At least one other work, the smaller Moonrise in Spain (Christie's, 16 December 2009), is known to have been completed at this location. The figure with the heavily laden donkey is a miller setting off for the coast or the local bake-house. Observers noted that the meagre wealth of small island population depended on corn production that fed the expansion of Barcelona, even later in the twenties when the islands were colonized by artists such as Robert Graves, the native Spanish reliant on an agrarian existence.
Henry Herbert La Thangue, RA (British, 1859-1929) A Nobleman oil on canvas 61.5 x 50.5cm (24 3/16 x 19 7/8in). For further information on this lot please visit the Bonhams website
Henry Herbert La Thangue, RA (British, 1859-1929) Homeward bound signed indistinctly lower left 'H. H. ...' coloured crayons on paper 27.5 x 43cm Footnote: Provenance: Christie's, London, 5th August 1986, lot 83
HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE, R.A. (BRITISH, 1859-1929) Portrait of a lady, traditionally identified as Gabrielle Réjane signed 'H H LA THANGUE' (lower left) oil on canvas 101⁄8 x 83⁄8 in. (25.7 x 21.3 cm.)
HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE (BRITISH 1859-1929) Water carrier wearing a brown robe and teal apron in a gilt frame Indistinctly signed (lower left) Oil on board, tondo 19 x 18cm
Henry Herbert la Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929) Early snows, Provence signed 'H. H. La Thangue' (lower left) oil on canvas, unframed 36 x 42 in. (91.5 x 106.7 cm.)
Henry Herbert La Thangue RA, British 1859-1929-Spring in Provence;oil on canvas, signed, signed and titled on the reverse of the stretcher, 67x57cmProvenance: with David Messum Fine Art, London, according to the label attached to the reverseExhibited: Royal Academy of Arts, London, Winter Exhibition, 1933, no 193, according to label attached to the reverse of the frame
Henry Herbert La Thangue RA, British 1859-1929-French landscape;oil on canvas, signed, 55x42cmNote: Henry Herbert La Thangue was a British artist, trained in Paris, whose work was inspired by French realist painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage and Gustave Courbet. Like them, he often painted en plein air, outdoors immersed in the scenery he was capturing on canvas. In this and the painting in the following lot, La Thangue has employed a brush technique which allowed him to cover the canvas quickly, capturing the fleeting effects of light and shadow.
HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE (ENGLISH, 1859-1929) Cannara mountains Oil on canvas Worldwide shipping available. It is advisable to send shipping enquiries to shipping@sheppards.ie prior to 26 April 2016.
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929) Tucking the Rick signed 'H.H. LA THANGUE' (lower right) and inscribed as title (on the stretcher) oil on canvas 44 x 36 in. (111.8 x 91.5 cm.) In the original oakleaf frame
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929) Ligurian olives signed 'H.H. LA THANGUE.' (lower right), signed again, and inscribed and titled '"Ligurian Olives"/H.H. La Thangue/Graffham/ Petworth' (on the stretcher) oil on canvas 31 x 32 in. (78.8 x 81.3 cm.)
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929) Winter in the Seaward Alps, St Jeannet signed 'H.H.LA THANGUE.' (lower left) and indistinctly inscribed 'Winter in the ...' (on a fragmentary label attached to the reverse of the frame) oil on canvas 18½ x 21 3/8 in. (47 x 54.3 cm.)
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929) A Provençal forge signed and dated 'H. H. La Thangue' (lower left) oil on canvas 30¼ x 36¼ in. (76.8 x 92.1 cm.)
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A., (1859-1929) Moonrise in Spain signed 'H.H. LA THANGUE' (lower right) and inscribed by the artist 'Moonrise in Spain H.H. La Thangue' (on the reverse of the stretcher) oil on canvas 28 x 31 in. (71.1 x 78.8 cm.)
HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE R.A. (BRITISH, 1859-1929) Fetching water from Lake Garda, signed 'H. H. LATHANGUE' lower right, oil on canvas, 38" x 34 ¢", Royal Academy of Arts Winter Exhibition label verso. (N.B. This work does not appear in the catalogue of the RA Late Members Exhibition, Winter 1933) (see illustration) Provenance: Purchased by Moses Nightingale Esq. (possibly from the Leicester Galleries, London, 1914); thence by descent Exhibited: London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings by H. H. La Thangue, R.A., April 1914, no. 16 as Fetching Water from the Lake Brighton, City Art Gallery and Museum, Memorial Exhibition of Works by the Late H. H. La Thangue R. A., September 1930, no. 3 Literature: Anon, 'The Leicester Galleries', The Academy, 25 April 1912, p. 530 Anon, Watercolours and Oils at Hazeldene, Crawley, Sussex, 1919, no. 8, as Fetching water from Lake Garda, Lake Garda, 1913 During his winter sojourns in Provence, La Thangue painted in the Italian provinces of Liguria, rescia and Verona, arriving on the Adriatic coast, where he produced several canvases on the Venetian island of Chioggia. While many of these works remain untraced and others cannot be securely dated, the present example, painted in the year prior to his solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, typifies the single figure compositions that dominated his production for the Royal Academy. He had, in 1912, been elected to full membership of the Academy and was showing Violets for Perfume, his Diploma painting, at the same time as the Leicester Galleries show (see Kenneth McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, HH La Thangue, 1859-1929, 1978, Oldham Art Gallery, pp. 13-4). It was not surprising then, that the critic of The Times, reviewing this exhibition, should have preferred striking figure subjects such as Fetching water from Lake Garda (The Times, 20 April 1914, p. 12) to pure landscapes. This picture was singled out as one of the high points of the exhibition by The Academy reviewer who praised the, àsplendid eff ct of midday heatàgiven in the finished picture which he terms "Fetching Water from the Lake". In this the costume of the peasant girl in red-brown skirt, with scarlet kerchief tied round her head, and the bright-hued sail of the boat lying on the water against purple mountains beyond, are wonderfully rendered, without exaggeration, yet with no shirking. Lake Garda, where the borders of Trento, Brescia and Verona meet at the southern end of the Brenner Pass, boasted its own 'riviera' coast. The home of the Visconti family and the poet, Gabrielle d'Annunzio, it had long been favoured by travellers in search of the picturesque. Goethe, arriving in Italy in 1786, 'savoured the magnificent natural scenery along its shores', praised the industry of the women of the neighbourhood, and, sailing down the lake, concluded that 'no words can describe the charm of this densely populated countryside' (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, 1995 ed., Penguin, pp. 7-10). In the late eighteenth century, peasant li e in the region was regarded as primitive. By the turn of the twentieth century, there had been few improvements. Even though the Northern Italian cities were the first to industrialize, and, as in Britain, the countryside was depleted, the unification process which saw the explusion of the Austrians in the 1860s, had little immediate effect on living standards for the rural poor. The simultaneous arrival of Cook's tours, if anything, reinforced the link between primitive conditions and the picturesque. The lack of irrigation systems for instance, meant that water was fetched from the lake manually, as depicted in the present canvas. While La Thangue could not be criticized for painting such scenes, Sickert noted that works such as Fetching Water from Lake Garda were 'crowned' with 'a young man's fancy' - ie an attractive female goatherd, milkmaid or in this case, water carrier. This pictorial good fortune may, he feared, give an 'exaggeratedàidea of the universe' (Walter Sickert, The New Age, vol XV, no 1, 7 ay 1914, p. 18). During the nineteenth century, Corot was widely believed to have worked on the shores of Lake Garda, while among La Thangue's contemporaries, John Singer Sargent painted in the village of San Vigilio at the southern end of the lake in 1913. However, unconstrained by precedent, La Thangue indicates the majestic sweep of lake and mountains merely as a backdrop for the more mundane activity of retrieving water. Fetching Water from Lake Garda relates closely to A Veronese Road, (fig 1), a work exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1917, showing the same model. The characteristic fishing craft seen in the present work also appear in A Brescian Sea, c. 1913 (fig 2). We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloging the previous four lots.
HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE R.A. (BRITISH, 1859-1929) An Alpine Village, St. Jeannet, France, signed 'H. H. LATHANGUE' lower left, oil on canvas, 21" x 24" (see illustration) Provenance: Purchased by Moses Nightingale Esq., (possibly from the Leicester Galleries, London, 1914); thence by descent Exhibited: London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings by H. H. La Thangue, R.A., April 1914, no. 22 Brighton, City Art Gallery and Museum, Memorial Exhibition of Works by the Late H. H. La Thangue R. A., September 1930, no. 27 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. 121 as An Alpine Village, St. Jeannett (sic), France, 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 La Thangue was captivated by the p ct resque hill villages of Provence and Liguria. St Jeannet, between Vence and Nice was a particular favourite, being painted from a number of vantage points. Nightingale owned at least six works painted in and around the village, two representing rose gardens. In concept, An Alpine Village reiterates La Thangue's earlier December in Provence, (fig 1, unlocated) shown at the Royal Academy in 1901. Both works portray groves lying at the foot of hillside villages. In the later work, he strategically places the tower of the church Saint-Jean-Baptiste, c.1666, as the focal point of the composition. St Jeannet is built on the slope leading to a precipitous coral crag which La Thangue's viewpoint omits. Like Bormes, this ancient village was renowned for its flower and fruit cultivation - particularly its fine local grapes (Guide to the Riviera from HyÞres to Viareggio, c. 1930, Ward Lock, p. 82). Edwardian botanists who frequented the area admired its rare flora (Comerfield Casey, Riviera Nature Notes, 1903, pp. 16 - 3) and for Captain Richardson, writing in 1927, St Jeannet was simply 'a centre of bucolic bliss' (Richardson, 1927, p. 82). A further work, An Aqueduct, (fig 2) probably dating from the 1920s, continues the idea of foreground figure related to background village. The present canvas, is one of a number painted by La Thangue, not all of which have been identified. His painting expeditions along the Riviera into Liguria, Lombardy and across to Venice, cannot be securely documented and landscape locations often remain obscure. In the present instance however, he discovered a beautiful medieval village which had attracted artists since the seventeenth century. The village's name may not have been known to Walter Sickert when he singled out An Alpine Village as one of his selection of favourite works from La Thangue's Leicester Galleries show. In an article written for The New Age journal in May 1914 he wrote, An exhibition is like a libraryàtake down one of the volumes at random, and settle down comfortabl to read it, and you may light upon a paradise. Take any one of the following picturesàAn Alpine Village (22)àA Sussex Hayfield (41)àTake it home and hang it up in a room where you can see it at breakfast, or while you are dressing. Hang it on a wall at right angles to a window, and more than halfway away from the window. Give it time to convey its message, and you will see how remote that message is from all the din of the aesthetic discussions of the moment. It has taken the whole history of art to produce modern painting, and it has taken the painter more than half a century to develop his skill in self-expression. Such canvases contain a message that will speak to many generations to come, and will certainly last us in pleasure, entertainment, stimulus, for the rest of our short lives. Such pictures were classics. The critics who attacked La Thangue were simply frightened of being despised by Henry Tonks, DS MacColl, Clive Bell or Roger Fry. Yet works like An Alpine Village stood outside the 'din' of 'ae thetic discussions' and were beyond 'the veriest tyro of criticism'. Sickert's eloquent endorsement may well have reinforced Moses Nightingale's confidence in forming his collection.
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929) The First Meal signed 'H.H.LA THANGUE.' (lower left) oil on canvas 43 x 38½ in. (109.2 x 97.8 cm.) Painted circa 1894.
Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A., N.E.A.C. (1859-1929) Hay stacks signed 'H. H. LA THANGUE.' (lower right) oil on board 13¼ x 17 in. (33.7 x 43.2 cm.) with an unfinished sketch to the reverse.
SPRING IN PROVENCE 53x41cm.; 21x16in. signed; further signed and inscribed with the title on the stretcher: oil on canvas PROVENANCE Given to Percy Edward Nightingale as a Christmas present from his father, 1918; Fosse Gallery, Stow on the Wold, March 1986; Private collection
FROM A LIGURIAN SPRING 99 by 83 cm.; 39 by 32 ½ in. signed l.r.: H.H. LA THANGUE and titled on the stretcher FROM A LIGURIAN/ SPRING; further inscribed on the stretcher 'From a Ligurian Spring' and inscribed on an old label: H.H. La Thangue Esq ARA/ Selham Station oil on canvas PROVENANCE MacConnal-Mason & Son, London; Ronald Smolden, by 1978; Exeter, Bearne's, 1 March 2000, lot 439; Private collection EXHIBITED Royal Academy, 1904, no. 297; Oldham Art Gallery, A Painter's Harvest: Works by Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. 1859-1929, November-December 1978, no. 23 LITERATURE The Illustrated London News, 7 May 1904, p.688; The Spectator, 30 April 1904, p. 696; Royal Academy Pictures, 1904, repr. p. 137 NOTE 'It would be difficult to find a more conscientious, consistent, or industrious painter... The pioneer in this country of what is commonly called naturalism in Art - the School of Painting which had Bastien-Lepage for its apostle in France.' (J. S. Little, 'Henry Herbert la Thangue ARA', The Magazine of Art, 1904, p. 1) La Thangue was particularly interested in capturing the rural traditions that were being rapidly consigned to history as mechanisation and mass farming began to destroy the picturesque nature of the countryside. 'The mere dream of the idealist suffice it to say that there are among us some who wish to cherish these scenes so clearly that to be banished from them, condemned to pass our days in witches' cauldrons of vulgar vice, meretricious glitter. And sordid activity... is to be doomed to a living death, spiritually considered; to be, in fact, cheated of life itself. To the nature worshipper, then, the work of such men as Henry Herbert la Thangue makes a most forceful appeal.' (ibid Little, p. 2) Although la Thangue painted the rural idylls he sought in Norfolk and Sussex, it was not until he travelled to the Mediterranean, firstly in Provence and later at Liguria, that he found the simple peasant lifestyle that he had wanted to paint his whole career. It was in France and Italy that he painted a 'series of work dealing with the loves and fortunes of the sons and daughters of the soil, painted in their natural environment of beasts and fowls, field and farm.' (ibid Little, p. 3) The Ligurian coast lies on the fringe of north-western Italy close to the border with France. The fertile soil and warm climate of the Alpine foothills at Liguria were clad with groves of olives and oranges and fields of flowers grown for perfume. It was along this idyllic coast that la Thangue found inspiration for a delightful series of paintings in the early twentieth century. As with the earlier paintings made in Sussex, la Thangue took his subjects from the reality of the lives of the Ligurian peasants, the farm-girls, goatherds and fruit pickers. Bathed in dappled sunlight and coloured by the sun-baked landscape, the paintings are inhabited by people and animals which are not glorified or artificially posed but appear to be going about their lives unaware of being observed by the keen eye of an observant artist. La Thangue 'discovered' Liguria following a series of visits to Provence between 1901 and 1903 where his paintings became essays in dappled, refracted sunlight and concerned with the rural traditions of the French peasants. He found in Provence, and later in Liguria, that the congenial rural way of life was still strong, whilst in the English counties it was waning with the increased reliance upon mechanisation. Here tourism had failed to spoil the rural idyll and although a few hotels had opened in the hill towns and villages along the coast, there was little effect upon the farms and plantations. Unlike many painters and travellers who passed through Liguria on their way from the French Riviera to the artistic centres of Rome, Naples, Florence or Venice la Thangue lingered in the countryside, taking his subjects from the rugged landscape and local people. La Thangue's first Ligurian subjects were exhibited in 1904, A Ligurian Cradle and From a Ligurian Spring offered here, in which a young girl rests momentarily from her work to refresh herself at a spring whilst another girl loads a mule with oranges. The same young model appears to have been used for both 1904 pictures and probably also for the figure of the little girl drinking from the torrents of A Ligurian Mill Race and Selling Oranges in Liguria, the subjects of his 1905 exhibits. La Thangue was fascinated and greatly inspired by the women who packed the fruit grown in the orchards and groves and the flowers dried for the perfume industry. Their traditional costumes and sun-tanned beauty added to the picturesque charm of the paintings in which the women are not idealised or caricatured. The subject of women and girls drinking from springs and wells was one which la Thangue painted on several occasions, A Provencal Fountain (Manchester City Art Gallery), Goats at a Fountain (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), Winter in Liguria (sold Christie's, 26 November 2003, lot 47), and A Ligurian Mill Race (unlocated). 'Since the traditional way of life for peasants was now even rarer than when La Thangue had first tackled rustic subjects, it appears that after the turn of the twentieth century he was happy to simply document life in the countryside around him. Having renounced a photographic analysis of his peasant figures, he concentrated increasingly on exploring the effects of light in his rustic themes.' (Adrian Jenkins, Painters and Peasants -- Henry La Thangue and British Rural Naturalism 1880-1905, 2000, pp. 142-143) The present picture treated a similar subject to that painted a year earlier in France, A Provencal Spring (Bradford Art Galleries and Museum) in which a young girl also stops to drink from a babbling brook. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1904 From a Ligurian Spring was described by the Illustrated London News as 'the most beautiful of all' La Thangue's Ligurian pictures. Little shared the same sentiment regarding La Thangue's contemporary paintings when he wrote his article for the Magazine of Art in 1904, concluding the article thus; 'He has given us in a permanent form, and in a form that must always give delight to the aesthete, as it will supply material to the historian the local industries of the country. Such subjects as goat herding, orange growing, the culture of the violet, have employed his energies and improved his art. Such work as this surely deserves the highest honour... He may safely assume that his achievements will always be held in high esteem by posterity.' (ibid Little, p. 6)
SPRING IN PROVENCE measurements note 53 by 41 cm., 21 by 16 in. signed l.r.: H. H. LA THANGUE; further signed and inscribed with the title on the stretcher: oil on canvas PROVENANCE Given to Percy Edward Nightingale as a Christmas present from his father, 1918; Stow on the Wold, Fosse Gallery, March 1986; Private collection
