Lot 37: HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE, R.A.

1859-1929 FETCHING WATER FROM LAKE GARDA signed l.r.: H. H. LA THANGUE. oil on canvas 101 by 85.5cm., 39 by 34in.

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.

'The Leicester Galleries', The Academy, 25 April 1912, p.530; Watercolours and Oils at Hazeldene, Crawley, Sussex, 1919, no.8, as Fetching Water from Lake Garda, 1913

Moses Nightingale Esq., possibly purchased from the Leicester Galleries, London, 1914 and thence by descent

During his winter sojourns in Provence, La Thangue painted in the Italian provinces of Liguria, Brescia 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, 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. It was not surprising then, that The Times art critic, reviewing this exhibition, preferred striking figure subjects such as Fetching water from Lake Garda to pure landscapes (The Times, 20 April 1914, p. 12). This picture was singled out as one of the high points of the exhibition by The Academy reviewer who declared; '… the costume of the peasant girl in [a] 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 and while Sargent had recently painted there, the American artist did not consider the majestic sweep of lake and mountains merely as a backdrop for the more mundane activity of retrieving water. The lack of irrigation systems meant that water must still be fetched from the lake manually, and while La Thangue could not be criticized for painting such scenes, Walter Sickert noted that works such as Fetching Water from Lake Garda were ‘crowned’ with ‘a young man’s fancy’ – i.e. an attractive female goatherd, milkmaid or in this case, a water carrier who also appears in A Veronese Road, shown at the Royal Academy in 1917 (Dunfermline Museum and Art Gallery). This ‘pictorial good fortune’, according to Sickert, contributed to works that would give lasting pleasure to those who acquired them (Walter Sickert, The New Age, vol XV, no 1, 7 May 1914, p. 18.). We are grateful to Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.