Lot 258: HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE R.A. (BRITISH, 1859-1929)

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.