Notes
Surveying the village of Graffham in Sussex in 1919, E.V. Lucas remarked that one of its inhabitants was Henry Herbert La Thangue, 'one of the most truthful of living painters'.1 Even though he was away for extended periods working in the south of France, Graffham remained the artist's English bolt-hole. He had moved there in 1898 in a mood of restlessness occasioned by what he saw as the decay of village life in England. His ambition at this time was to provide viewers of his work with a complete record of rural activity from dawn to dusk, throughout the seasons - painting itinerant harvesters, animal husbandry (see lot 13), woodland clearance and country crafts like cider making. Dawn, with its stooping foreground girl, was to be his only representation of mushroom gathering.
In formal terms, La Thangue's first essay on female land labour showing bowed figures, had been Gleaners, (fig. 1, unlocated). This important canvas was a reworking of Jean-François Millet's Les Glaneuses, 1857 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), a work which La Thangue could have seen as a student or at the Paris Exposition of 1889.2 He would certainly have been familiar with the French artist's widely circulated etching of the subject (fig. 2).3 Millet, with his contemporary Jules Breton, were the inspiration to a large number of artists in the years following the Franco-Prussion War when naturalist painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, Léon Lhermitte, Julien Dupré and Léon Pelouse emerged as the young lions of the Salon. These painters sought to disentangle the Biblical aspects of Millet's compositions from contemporary fact. Like the Impressionists they wanted to create the sensation of actual experience.
As a student in Paris in the early 1880s, La Thangue was profoundly impressed by their work. After his return to England, when not preoccupied by art politics and the reform of the Royal Academy, he devoted his attention to grand rural narratives which, like The Man with the Scythe, 1896, (Tate Britain) were calculated to attract the attention of those who selected work for the national collection.4 It was only after the success of this picture and his election as Associate of the Academy, that La Thangue felt free to tackle simpler subjects in which country lads and lasses go about their everyday activities. This new departure won praise from the critic of The Speaker who wrote, 'Mr La Thangue is the master of what he wants to do. A great impression of natural truth is given by his work. The world as it is, a place that is ever beautiful to him who understands... The straightforward juxtaposition of solid mixtures of colour which the practice of truthful painting from nature necessitates gives great clearness and sweetness of tone.'5
'Truthfulness', 'accurate observation of nature' had always been La Thangue's objective, but there was now a step-change. After Gleaners, La Thangue gave much more prominence to the mise-en-scène and this canvas which provoked obvious Millet-esque comparisons, gave way to Dawn, in which a farm girl occupies the foreground, but does not dominate the composition. La Thangue would play with these simple ingredients. In Cider Apples 1899 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), for instance, the relative positions of the figures are reversed and the male farm hand, pushed to the background in Dawn, was brought to the foreground and observed tipping apples onto a cloth to be taken to the cider press.
Taken alongside his other two Royal Academy exhibits in 1900 - The Ploughboy, (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and The Watersplash, (Victoria Art Gallery, Bath) - La Thangue's presence constituted a show of force. Referring to all three works the critic of The Graphic noted that, 'Many painters are at best illustrators after all, and derive their ideas from song, story and drama; but the painter of whom we write inspires himself - he paints his own poem and brushes his own ballad'.7
For MacColl, the particular appeal of Dawn lay in the fact that La Thangue had found the right size of canvas to convey the sentiment of the picture. This he favoured in comparison with the 'huge figure pieces of late years'.8 Frank Rinder, writing in The Art Journal, was more specific. Describing Dawn, he noted that, '... we see a couple of children gathering pearl grey mushrooms into big baskets before the sun has risen to disperse the morning mists. The sentiment of opening day, something between solemnity and serenity, lies upon the meadow and the farmstead behind.'9
La Thangue's immediate rival in the Academy exhibitions of the 1890s was George Clausen, a painter with whom he was frequently compared.10 The two artists were friends, Clausen commenting at the time of La Thangue's death that his view of the world was 'clear and reasonable... expressing something of a beauty that is perhaps already passing away'.11 Around 1900, Clausen was preoccupied with the more heroic aspects of field labour and in works like Setting up Sheaves (fig. 3, unlocated), he coincidentally depicted a labourer bending forward to bind a wheatsheaf, his arm out-stretched. However, where Clausen looks up at the sky and the surrounding landscape in full sunlight, La Thangue is focussed upon that mysterious moment of half-light before sunrise in which his figures move across a flat field at the edge of the farm. The stooping figure with right arm extended and holding a basket in her left hand, will follow a trail of mushrooms laid for her by the painter. So successful was this motif that La Thangue repeated it with minor variations and from different angles in Gathering Plums, 1901 (Manchester City Art Gallery) and A Sussex Autumn, 1907 (fig. 4, Auckland Art Gallery, McKelvie Trust Collection).
Apart from painting, La Thangue's interests were listed in Who's Who as cricket, chess and cultivation of fungi. Gathering Mushrooms may therefore have had a special significance for him, since even at this time, uncultivated mushrooms freshly picked at dawn in September and October would be part of the yeoman farmer's diet. However, working a small holding was increasingly becoming an 'economic impossibility - the mere dream of an idealist'.12 Within a year his project to document the English pastoral was overtaken by a new enthusiasm for the village life of Provence. Having painted In the Dauphiné 1886 (sold Christie's, London, 26 November 2003, lot 26) as a young artist, he was already familiar with the simple, changeless existence of French peasants of the val de Rhône. He now made annual visits to the south of France, establishing a studio at Bormes-les-Mimosas that he used as a base for forays into Liguria to the east and Northern Spain to the west. Although he returned regularly to Graffham up to the Great War, he took memories of favourite motifs away with him. It is not surprising then to discover that in A Provincial Spring, 1903 (Bradford Art Galleries), one of his first French canvases, the central figure with arm outstretched, returns, albeit in a straw hat and the lighter clothing of a French peasant child.
KMc
1 E.V. Lucas, Highways and Byways in Sussex, 1919, p. 21.
2 Millet's Gleaners having been exhibited at the Salon of 1857, was re-shown in 1883 in Paris in Cent chef-d'oeuvres dans les collections parisiennes, at the Georges Petit Gallery and again in 1889 at the Exposition Universelle.
3 Millet's etching of The Gleaners dates from 1856-57. As has been pointed out in a number of studies, Millet's treatment of the subject was a simplified verson of an earlier portrayal of gleaners by Jules Breton (National Gallery of Ireland), although his own first drawings for the composition date from shortly after his arrival in Barbizon. The picture was for instance reproduced in David Croal Thomson's The Barbizon School, 1891, opposite p. 252.
4 For further reference see K. McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, H.H. La Thangue, 1859-1929, 1978, exhibition catalogue, Oldham Art Gallery, pp. 36-37.
5 The Speaker, 8 May 1897, p. 518.
6 His fourth exhibit was the portrait of Margaret Frances Greaves.
7 The Graphic, 12 May 1900, p. 698. The Illustrated London News, 5 May 1900, p. 597, also referred to the 'high level of distinction... skilful draughtsmanship and thorough knowledge of subject', found in all three of La Thangue's Academy exhibits. M.H. Speilmann in The Magazine of Art, 1900, p. 339 also noted that La Thangue was one of a number of artists who were currently 'at their best'.
8 D.S. MacColl, 'The Academy II, The Poor Man's Tea', The Saturday Review, 19 May 1900, p. 615.
9 F. Rinder, 'The Royal Academy of 1900', The Art Journal, 1900, p. 176.
10 See for instance, The Athenaeum, 20 May 1900, p. 603, where the writer compares Clausen's and La Thangue's current academy submissions and concludes that there was 'an increase in refinement and some lightening of the hand' in the work of both artists. See also J. Stanley Little, 'Henry Herbert La Thangue ARA', The Magazine of Art, 1904, p. 1, who includes in his group of pastoral painters, James Charles and Edward Stott, as well as Clausen and La Thangue.
11 George Clausen, 'H.H. La Thangue RA' in Memorial Exhibition of the works of the late H.H. La Thangue ARA, 1930, exhibition catalogue, Brighton Art Gallery, n.p.
12 Little, 1904, p.2
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