Today we
continue our weeklong look at the life and art of Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844 – 1925).
This
July marks the 170th birthday of the artist, who is currently represented
in museums around the world. His work
can be found in Amsterdam, Boston, Brussels, Chicago, Florence, Montreal, Moscow, Paris, Rheims,
and Washington, DC.
Amazingly, outside of academia and a handful of aesthetes, he is largely
forgotten.
L'hermitte
showed artistic talent as a boy and his upbringing in the rural village of Mont Saiint-Père in Picardie provided
him with the subjects and landscapes that would become the staples of his
oeuvre. In 1863 left his home for the Petit
Ecole in Paris where he studied with Horace
Lecocq de Boisbaudran (1838-1912).
He would also form a life-long friendship with Jean Charles Cazin (1840-1901), and became acquainted with
celebrated artists Alphonse Legros (1837-1911), Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), and Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). He made his debut at the Salon of 1864, where
his charcoal drawings revealed that he had a sure touch in depicting the
natural world. His first work, Bords de
Marne près d'Alfort, caused a sensation, and L'hermitte gained a reputation
for being as capable with oils as with pastel and charcoal.
He would
win many honors, including the Legion of
Honour in 1884, where he was made an officer in 1894 and a commander in
1911. He was elected a member of the Institute in 1905. In 1890 he was one of
the founding members of the Société
National des Beaux-Arts, of which he was later elected Vice-President.
Lhermitte’s
graphic work became more popular after as he exhibited regularly at the Salon,
though he still hadn’t attained his desired level of success. That
changed when one of his paintings, Paying
the Harvesters (1882), was purchased by the state and hung in
the Luxembourg museum before being transferred to the Hotel de Ville
at Chateau-Thierry. This
led to many commissions and established Lhermitte as an artist of rustic
life. As scholar Gabriel Weisberg observed: to Lhermitte, rustic activity embodied
dignity, for he believed workers in the fields seldom complained … Bolstering
these ways of representing workers were the locales in which Lhermitte places
his figures. The countryside was seldom dour or depressing, the
atmosphere often appeared light and airy … and the environment seemed spacious.
Lhermitte
was called the singer of wheat by
critics and devotees, but he was also adept at interior scenes of peasant life
at home, often emphasizing the effects of light in his pictures. He also concentrated on images of mother and
child, as well as women in domestic scenes, such as doing laundry along the Marne. In
these cases, Lhermitte combined each of his interests to create his
compositions.
In
today’s picture, Lhermitte once again creates an almost mystical sense of place
with a few loose strokes of pastel. This
piece, 13x17, conveys the heavy shadows and suggestive lighting of early dawn
or late dusk; the light renders the tree branches indistinct and vague, while
the landscape reflected on the water is almost indistinguishable from the
landscape itself.
And there,
in the corner, almost as if Lhermitte was purposely recreating something pinging the corner of our eye, we see a
figure emerge from the water. It takes a
moment – perhaps one blink – to confirm that it is the figure of a woman,
escaping into the woodland like a mythical figure.
Without being
able to see it in my hand, I believe the paper is blue-toned, which allowed
Lhermitte to create the distant mountains and a reflected sky with nothing more
than blank space. The use of white chalk
on the water, of course, creates a sense of movement and a dappling effect.
This is
no grand scene from a history painting – it is not Dante and Beatrice or the
Death of Caesar. No, this is, instead,
the moment that passes by all to swiftly, and remains locked in our memory. If yesterday Lhermitte managed to make us
know a group of women just by their body language, with this picture he
recreates one of those passing moments that remain, in some uncanny sense,
eternal.
More Lhermette tomorrow!
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