Lot 256: HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE R.A. (BRITISH, 1859-1929)

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'.