Lot 415: c - HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE 1859-1929

signed l.r.: H. H. La Thangue

oil on canvas

161 by 125 1/2 cm., 63 1/2 by 49 1/2 in.

London, Royal Academy, 1893, no. 595

London, Pyms Gallery;
Private collection

Henry Herbert La Thangue's work was greatly influenced by the work of the Barbizon artists and the French Realists, Dagnan-Bouveret, Lhermitte, Breton and Bastien-Lepage, whose work he had first seen whilst studying in Paris from 1879 to 1882. The paintings he exhibited on his return to London demonstrated an interest in the hardships of the agricultural worker and the age-old traditions of farming life. La Thangue was a close friend of Stanhope Forbes and the two artists shared similar sympathies in their work. Although La Thangue painted the manual labourers in the fields and farms around his home in Bosham in Surrey and Forbes painted the fisherfolk of Newlyn, they were concerned with he same subjects. His most famous painting is the rather morbid The Last Furrow of 1895 which depicts an aged farmer fallen dead at his plough (Oldham Art Gallery).

La Thangue began to exhibit at the Royal Academy from 1891 by which time his work was very much associated with that of the Newlyn artists. His painting style was already fully formed by the mid 1890s which Kenneth McConkey has described; 'In all his work it is possible to see a regular square stroke laid down in opaque impastose pigment, much as it is described by Morley Roberts in 1889 when he hailed La Thangue as the leader of the "Square Brush School". 'It is a technical method', Roberts wrote, 'which puts paint on canvas in a particular way... Those who practice it in its simplest form leave the brush marks 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.' (Kenneth McConkey, A Painter's Harvest; Works by Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A., 1859-1929, exhibition catalogue for Oldham Art Gallery, 1978, pg. 10)


Gathering Wool is one of La Thangue's earliest Royal Academy exhibits and an early example of a theme that preoccupied him for many years; female field workers involved in back breaking work. Later examples include A Sussex Autumn of 1906 which was a reworking of a figure in the background of Cider Apples of 1899 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), Cutting Bracken of 1899 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne), Dawn of 1900. Although similar poses appear in the contemporary work of John William Waterhouse in which vaguely classical women gather flowers (see also lot 387), apparently derived from Burne Jones' painting Marsh Marigolds it would appear that La Thangue was thinking more of Millet's famous image of toil The Gleaners. In 1897 La Thangue painted his own Gleaners in which the poses of the two women recall those of Millet's painting and in 1907 he painted another picture entitled The Gleaners (Aberseen Art Gallery). Millet's picture encapsulated all the qualities of symbolism which La Thangue expressed in his own work and he was fascinated by the lives of the men and women he encountered in his own locale. McConkey has explained La Thangue's subjects of the 1890s '... he concentrated in his big pictures on producing a record of Sussex farming activities. The harvesters were followed and painted; gleaning, harrowing and tucking the hayricks became familiar tasks.' (ibid. pg. 12) These were the same interests which George Clausen examined in his work of the same period (see lot 406).