Lot 109: Henry Herbert La Thangue, RA (British, 1859-1929) A poor French family

Henry Herbert La Thangue, RA (British, 1859-1929) A poor French family
A poor French family
signed 'H. H. La Thangue' (lower left, strengthened)
oil on canvas
114 x 100cm (44 7/8 x 39 3/8in).

Footnotes

• Provenance
  CH Dancocks Esq, Kensington; sale, Christie's, London, 28 November 1908, lot 32 to Cooling.
  Wolff & Co, Ltd; sale, Christie's, London, 19 November 1928, lot 119.
  Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 24 February 1956, lot 78.
  Count Acquarone, Castello di Giove (Castle Jupiter), Umbria, circa 1960.
  Charles Band, American film producer, 1985.
  Antonina dal 1890, Rome, 29 May - 2 June 2004.
  Private collection, Italy (acquired November 2009).
  
  Exhibited
  London, The Grosvenor Gallery, Summer Exhibition, 1884, no. 262.
  
  Literature
  Henry Blackburn, Grosvenor Notes, 1884, (Chatto and Windus), p. 53.
  The Grosvenor Gallery, Second Notice, Leeds Mercury, 6 May 1884, p. 8.
  James Stanley Little 'HH La Thangue', The Art Journal, 1893, p. 171.
  George Thomson, 'HH La Thangue and his work', The Studio, October 1896, Vol. 9, no. 43, p. 168.
  James Stanley Little, The Magazine of Art, 1904, p. 3.
  Adrian Jenkins, Painters and Peasants, HH La Thangue and British Rural Naturalism 1880-1905, exhibition catalogue, Bolton Art Gallery, 2000, p. 73 (quoting Thomson, 1896).
  Colleen Denney, At the Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877-1890, 2000, (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), p. 174.
  
  In the summer of 1883, when his friend Stanhope Forbes returned to Brittany, Henry Herbert La Thangue and the sculpture student, James Havard Thomas, travelled down the Rhone valley, stopping at Donzère, a small town of around 1400 inhabitants. Here he painted two canvases, A Poor French Family and Poverty (fig 1). For one so closely associated with working en plein air, they come as a surprise.υ1 Both are dark interiors depicting peasant families, one of whom is spinning cotton using a distaff. Despite the fact that the famous tissu de Nimes, the modern 'denim', was made in one of the principal towns of the region, the spinner in each case, lives in poverty. Following this intimate, one might say, life-changing experience the painter would never be sucked into bourgeois servitude, nor would he ever patronize or prettify his peasant subjects.
  
  In the territory south of Montélimar, uncharted by artist-travellers, he was undoubtedly free to pursue his own path, without being overlooked by others. An unpredictable young artist, of 'magnificent obstinacy' in pursuit of his goals, La Thangue had recently been dabbling in Whistlerian full-length portraiture, admiring its low tones (see present lot).υ2 At the same time he remained one of the strongest advocates of the rural Naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Léon Lhermitte – painters of field-labourers working en plein air. His Study in a French Boat Building Yard, (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) had been praised at the Grosvenor Gallery a year earlier, so this step into the darkness of a labourer's cottage was an unusual one. Why was this necessary?
  
  The simple answer is that it would take the painter to a deeper understanding of his French allegiances. The spinner had been an heroic symbol for 'paysannerie' painters such as Jules Breton.υ3 Delving deeper and placing himself closer to the work of earlier Realists such as Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, La Thangue may well have been aware of the former's celebrated, Fileuse endormie, 1853 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Millet was at the same time also addressing the subject and his fileuse formed the basis of an etching distributed after Millet's death as one of twenty facsimilies published by the Fine Art Society in 1881, which La Thangue could easily have seen.υ4 And if this was not the case, there were more recent precedents in the work of Lhermitte, while the 'frugal meal' subject – peasant figures seated around a table placed parallel to the picture plane, in a bare, dark interior - had been memorably treated by Alphonse Legros during La Thangue's student years.υ5
  
  Visual references were however in abeyance when La Thangue set up his easel in the cramped conditions of the labourer's cottage at Donzère. The steep tilt of the floor indicates that he was standing almost as close to his spinner as Courbet had been, and his handling of space was an issue that would challenge viewers. Only in Spanish Caravaggesque painting would they expect to find figures pressed so close to the picture surface.υ6
  
  In all this, La Thangue was preoccupied with how we see. In such restricted circumstances, the eye shifts; it scans up and down, and from side to side; it links apparently disconnected stimuli into a single whole, so that we do not stumble as we move around. Working at close quarters meant that there was no single viewpoint, as in Le Repas des Pauvres, and looking up and down, from head to toe, implied distortion – hence the attenuated figure of the seated spinner.
  
  There was also the problem of restricted light. On this point, as George Thomson noted, 'The vehemence of his desire to paint sunlight was dissipated into nothing before an enthusiasm to depict the low-toned dwelling room of a poor French family. The blackest thing, as he tells me, he ever painted.'υ7
  
  With figures seated in low light one was almost feeling one's way, observing subtle changes of tone cast into relief by a child's glowing white skull-cap. Recalling the work in 1904, James Stanley Little observed that 'the peasants of the Dauphiné irresistibly attracted him ...' and that this group of pictures
  '...may be regarded as the forbears, in an artistic sense, of a long series of works dealing with the lives and fortunes of the sons and daughters of the soil, painted in their natural environment...'υ8
  
  While the painter returned to the Rhone to work in full sunlight the following year on the resplendent In the Dauphiné, 1884-6, A Poor French Family was a talisman – both for his work and that of others. In later years he did not avoid the peasant interior, and in Some Poor People 1894 (fig 2), even alluded to the humble living conditions they must endure. He would never avoid poverty, nor patronize the poor.
  
  Dark Newlyn School interiors, yet to be painted by Fred Hall, Frank Bramley, Chevallier Tayler, Stanhope Forbes and others, owe something to La Thangue's canvas. How often do we see its format – a principal figure seated on the right, with others grouped around a table – adopted by contemporaries? Universally they incorporate diverting details that reinforce narratives rigorously excluded from La Thangue's work. The only remotely decorative feature that these peasants of the Dauphiné possess is an old grandfather clock the base of which appears in the background of the picture - but this does not detract from the spartan setting, nor, since we cannot see its face, does it allude to the passing of time. However by 1904, the picture was not completely resistant to literary interpretation. James Stanley Little had read Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin and knew that despite their penniless state, the peasants of the region had not lost their spirit, and that the simple honesty of their vie rustique was to be the artist's most important discovery in that dark interior in the Dauphiné.
  
  We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
  
  υ1 For fuller accounts of La Thangue's early career see Kenneth McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, HH La Thangue, 1859-1929, 1978 (Oldham Art Gallery) and Adrian Jenkins, Painters and Peasants, HH La Thangue and British Rural Naturalism 1880-1905, 2000 (exhibition catalogue, Bolton Art Gallery).
  υ2 George Thomson, 'HH La Thangue and his work', The Studio, October 1896, vol. 9, no. 43, p. 176.
  υ3 Barefoot she sits by the sea in Breton's Young Woman Spinning (Brittany Girl), 1872 (Denison University Art Gallery, Ohio), assuming an almost classical pose.
  υ4 La Thangue may well have been able to study Courbet's posthumous retrospective exhibition of 150 works at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in May 1882. Millet's versions of Woman Spinning of the mid-1850s are contained in the Clark Institute, Williamstown and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Spinning, famously adopted by Vincent van Gogh, was the final plate in the Fine Art Society selection.
  υ5 Legros' Le Repas des Pauvres had been shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878, while La Thangue was a student at the Royal Academy Schools.
  υ6 The Leeds Mercury went so far as to declare that was 'a good picture spoilt by faults of perspective'.
  υ7 George Thomson, 'HH La Thangue and his work', The Studio, October 1896, vol. 9, no. 43, p. 168.
  υ8 James Stanley Little, 'Henry Herbert La Thangue ARA', The Magazine of Art, 1904, p. 3.