Lot 20: The First Meal

Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929)
The First Meal
signed 'H.H.LA THANGUE.' (lower left)
oil on canvas
43 x 38½ in. (109.2 x 97.8 cm.)
Painted circa 1894.

VARIOUS PROPERTIES

From time to time, Christie's may offer a lot which it owns in whole or in part. This is such a lot.
Henry Herbert La Thangue's move from East Anglia to Bosham, near Chichester in 1890 was heralded by a return to more optimistic subject matter. In his two preceding years at South Walsham, near Norwich, he had witnessed the decline in the livelihood of Broadsmen, as well as the depopulation of the local farms - graphically portrayed in his New Gallery exhibit of 1890, Leaving Home (fig. 1, sold Christie's, 19 February 2003, lot 19, a world record for the artist, £666,650). Sussex, with its more stable climate, its orchards and more prosperous mixed arable and livestock farming, provided an environment that was less bleak. Works of the early 1890s are correspondingly more colourful, as the sunshine of the south replaces the grey days of the east. The First Meal, a picture of a young woman feeding two Ayrshire calves typifies the work of this period and place.

In the 1890s Ayrshire cattle, with their characteristic brown and white markings, bred originally in the late 18th Century, were prized as good dual purpose milk and meat producers. Within a short time they were to be replaced by Holstein-Friesians, introduced progressively into Britain and North America from the turn of the century onwards. These had a higher milk yield than Ayrshires and their arrival, celebrated in Sir Alfred Munnings's The Friesian Bull, 1920 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), signalled one of the fundamental changes in the British rural landscape which La Thangue found difficult to accept. For the present however, La Thangue's new surroundings gave a sense of hope for the future. Farmers around Chichester, followed the normal practice of grazing young cattle in orchards where they would be nourished on shorter grass and have more protection from the elements and this provided the visual context for The First Meal.

The present work therefore indicates a moment in time, when old practices were still current in British agriculture, and when the Sussex orchard, in full sunlight, suggests a golden age. The First Meal reprises The Cowgirl, circa 1888 (private collection), and could function as a companion to the cooler and more conventional Watering the Cows, (formerly Richard Green, 1995) shown at the New Gallery in 1894. The rich colour of the present work anticipates La Thangue's Provençal and Ligurian genre pieces of ten years later. In this sense it is more akin to 'impressionistic' scenes like In the Orchard, (Bradford Museums and Art Galleries), in his New Gallery exhibit of 1893.1

However, with The First Meal, La Thangue revisits one of the great hieratic themes of western art. Feeding animals was an act of Biblical significance at a time when rural communities along the south coast were undergoing religious revival. La Thangue had depicted this phenomenon in his Royal Academy exhibit, A Mission to Seamen, (Castle Museum, Nottingham) in 1891.2 Tending cows had of course, a rich heritage in western art, having been definitively stated by Jean-François Millet in his Femme faisant paître sa vache (Musée de l'Ain, Bourg-en-Bresse), shown at the Salon of 1859.3 Closer to La Thangue's generation, and of great personal significance to his own work, were the paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Julien Dupré. La Thangue would probably have seen Dupré's La Prairie Normande (unlocated) at the Salon of 1884, and by the time he painted The First Meal, he would have been familiar with Bastien's Pauvre Fauvette, 1881 (fig. 2, Glasgow Art Galleries and Museums).4 Although this latter work presents circumstances - a bleak winter hillside with a child and single cow - that are very different from those of the present work, La Thangue, along with the Newlyn painters of his generation, greatly admired Bastien-Lepage's photographic naturalism. Indeed, in The Art Journal in 1893, he was dubbed by James Stanley Little as 'our English Lepage'.5

Nevertheless, it was the progression towards sunlight and the search for new and more 'picturesque' themes that led the painter to southern climes in the early years of the century. While he retained his Sussex studio, moving to Graffham in 1898, feeding cattle returned for reconsideration in works like A Sussex Farm, (private collection), shown at the Royal Academy in 1904. This canvas, also containing two dramatically foreshortened calves approaching a farm-girl with a bucket of feed, relies heavily upon the precedent set in The First Meal. Such was the confidence of the later work that La Thangue was hailed by the critic of The Speaker as 'the painter of sun, heat and the apostle of outdoor life'.6 The same words could have been used around ten years earlier in connection with The First Meal.

KMc

1 For further reference see K. McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, H.H. La Thangue, 1859-1929, 1978, Exhibition catalogue, Oldham Art Gallery, pp. 28-29.
2 McConkey, 1978, pp. 26-7.
3 R.L. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, 1976, Exhibition catalogue, Arts Council, pp. 90-91.
4 K. McConkey, 'Pauvre Fauvette or petite folle, a study of Bastien-Lepage's Pauvre Fauvette', Arts Magazine, January 1981, pp. 140-143.
5 J.S. Little, 'H.H. La Thangue', The Art Journal, 1893, p. 173.
6 The Speaker, 11 June 1904, p. 247.