The Reading Lesson, by Léon Augustin Lhermitte

Today we conclude our weeklong look at the life and art of Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844 – 1925), celebrating the 170^th anniversary of his birth. 

Lhermitte’s earliest experience with the arts was copying pictures in popular illustrated magazines and studying the work of other French painters.  His school-teacher father encouraged his work by allowing him to sketch.  As the boy’s talents expanded, his father showed his drawings to Count Walewski, then minister at the École des Beaux-Arts.  Walewski was impressed, and offered the boy a scholarship of 600 francs, permitting him to enroll in the École Impériale de Dessin.  Here he was introduced to a type of study of drawing that was based on memorization, a technique also used by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).  In this way he could view a scene, especially a landscape scene, and employ his memories to more fully execute the painting back in his studio. 

Lhermitte took part in both the Exposition Universelle in 1900, where he served as a member of the jury, and, the Exposition des Pastellistes.  In the latter part of his career, Lhermitte moved away from representing the human figure and concentrated more and more on landscape.  Figures in space lost their individual identity, and became part of the larger landscape composition.  At the same time, though, he also increased his focus on images of mother and child, as seen in today’s picture.

In his older age, Lhermitte stayed close to his home and executed several landscape pastels based on the banks of the Marne, which was near his studio, and other landscapes near his home.  He was decorated with several honors from across Europe, such as the Chevalier of the Order of St. Michael in Germany, and his works were regularly acquired by the state after initial exhibition.  His life and career ended on July 28, 1925 in Paris.  His reputation would wane considerably, but Lhermitte gained new cultural currency in the 1990s, when he was reappraised by an exposition at the Musée d’Orsay.

Here, Lhermitte moves away from the primacy of the landscape and back to the human scale.  With The Reading Lesson, Lhermitte celebrates simple motherhood and even simpler pleasures.  The centrality of the mother as wellspring of a food, support, education and emotion succor was a theme to which he would return regularly.  Did Lhermitte miss his mother… or, perhaps, was his mother absent, and he missed what he never knew?  I have not been able to discover the answer to this question … but many artists (be they writers or painters or musicians) who focus on an idealized past, often do so because they feel as if they had missed some vital emotional connection in early life.  It’s possible that, to Lhermitte, The Reading Lesson is a fantasy painting.

Most critics agree that Lhermitte’s oil paintings are not as aesthetically pleasing as his drawings, and The Reading Lesson is a case in point.

Here, as with his pastel work, Lhermitte renders details vague with a few, loose brushstrokes.  He dapples the hair of the little girl and the bangs of the mother with white to emphasize the golden light which fills the background sky, and washes out the distant hill, as well. 

Also, it seems that Lhermitte’s formidable sense of composition plays him false here.   In other drawings we have seen, the composition is such that it leads the eye around the canvas, taking in the human figures and landscape, alike.  Here, Lhermitte plants his central figures dead-center, and provides no tension for the eye.  It is a very static composition.

For all of its sweetness, I am not nearly as enamored of this painting as I was of the drawings seen earlier this week.  It seems too soft, too diffuse, as if Lhermitte was using a visual shorthand to inspire our emotional response.  In other drawings, the fact that the figures were vague and indistinct added to the mystery of their actions and interactions.  That same indistinctness is markedly unsuccessful when the intention of the picture and the emotions involved are more concrete and precise.  It is almost as if his loose style works well with ambiguity, but descends into disposable sentiment when taking a more defined direction. 

Finally, the two figures lack the humanity-in-all-its-flaws quality of the three drawings we looked at.  These are idealized figures, not actual peasants or laborers.  When a painting would not be out of place on a Hallmark card, we must question its overall success.

The Washers Along the Marne, by Léon Augustin Lhermitte

Today we continue our weeklong look at the life and art of Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844 – 1925), commemorating the 170^th anniversary of his birth. 

Though a celebrated painter, Lhermitte was more importantly one of the great draughtsmen of the era, who created work in charcoal and pastel of deep and profound beauty.  His pastels contributed to the increased use of the medium in the latter half of the 19^th Century, and his work influenced the Impressionists. 

Lhermitte began using pastels in 1885, just one year before he exhibited for the first time at the Société des Pastellistes Français.   He submitted a dozen pastels which depicted daily life in the areas of Mont-Saint-Père and also his travels to Vittel, Berneval, Laren, and Wissant.  These works and public exhibitions were an important step in the acceptance of the pastel.  He became a mentor to a group of young pastellistes; and he grew to love the medium so, that he would almost abandon charcoal drawing.   

Lhermitte became famous in England after traveling there in 1869, and again after the Commune of 1871.  He hit his stride when celebrated art dealer Durand-Ruel bought several of his charcoal drawings and invited him to participate in his “Black and White” exhibition.  This resulted in a great critical success for Lhermitte and a large British client-base. 

As his fame with charcoal and pastels grew, he was contacted by another international dealer, Wallis, who had galleries in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.  As scholar Monique Le Pelley Fontenay writes, During his lifetime Lhermitte was very highly regarded in Anglo-Saxon countries where the picturesque and the healthy values celebrated in his painting and pastels were particularly appreciated.  Values of work and family appear frequently in his work.  Like Jules Breton and Rosa Bonheur, Lhermitte was appreciated because he represented the “good old days” … Throughout his life Lhermitte pointedly ignored the Industrial Revolution, fixing instead on the image of society before its disappearance, the vision of a paradise lost for the citizens of big cities, of a time frozen outside the march of history.         

Since we here at The Jade Sphinx have made a life out of pointedly trying to ignore the modern world, we understand Lhermitte’s mission.  In today’s picture, The Washers Along the Marne, we have a deceptively simple composition.  Notice how Lhermitte’s placement of the figures triangulates our gaze from the three figures to the landscape background and back again.  Reading left-to-right, our eye is caught in a loop as it goes from left-most figure to right-most figure, the Marne, and back again. 

Look, too, as his mastery of body language.  Though simple country women, they bear their labors with a stoic dignity; in fact, you can almost feel the continual and routine toil on their shoulders.

And Lhermitte uses his pastel to such economic effect.  We are never bombarded with information, but what he provides us speaks volumes.  The two faces that we can see clearly are not delineated with academic precision, but the lines are suggestive of deep emotion.  Is the seated woman leaning back with a look of fatigue?  Regret?  Or merely making a point?  And the standing figure – is that realization or surrender?  We cannot be sure, but the emotional quotient remains high because the figures are completely human and engaged with one-another.

Equally eloquent is the figure with her back to us; keeping her head down, and almost sheepishly reaching for the next piece of washing, she clearly does not wish to be part of the exchange between the other two.  Or, equally likely, she is listening where she is not wanted.

I admire this picture greatly.  There is so much information and so much economy of style and execution.  There is a sense of dusk, almost an end-of-day (or end-or-era) feel to the picture, that one might be tempted to call it homespun melancholy.  With his muted colors and grave faces, Lhermitte depicts loss by simply illustrating a passing moment.

More Lhermette tomorrow!

Chelles, by Léon Augustin Lhermitte

Today we continue our weeklong look at the life and art of Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844 – 1925). 

This July marks the 170^th 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!

Au Lavoir (The Washhouse), by Léon Augustin Lhermitte

After a brief hiatus, The Jade Sphinx returns with a weeklong look at artist Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844 – 1925).  Lhermitte was a French painter and etcher who primarily depicted rural scenes and peasant workers.  He was born in Mont-Saint-Père, and was student of Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1838-1912).  Lhermitte gained recognition after his show in the Paris Salon in 1864.  His many awards include the French Legion of Honour (1884) and the Grand Prize at the Exposition Universelle in 1889. Lhermitte died in Paris in 1925.

Lhermitte lived in the Aisne until he was about 20, developing a deep and abiding love of rural life, which became the focus of his work – often creating images of the work and daily life in the countryside of his time.

He came from a humble family and for many years earned his living with minor engraving work in France and England, before winning recognition at the Salon from 1874. Fame came after 1880, when the artist successively entered several large paintings depicting the life and people of his native village of Mont-Saint-Père. His pictures The Cabaret in 1881, Paying the Harvesters in 1882, and The Harvest in 1883, used the same figures which can be identified from one painting to another.

Though many 19^th Century artists relied on imagery introduced by earlier generations of painters, they also re-envisioned these older themes by executing them with progressive techniques.  Lhermitte took the recognized imagery of peasant and rural life and revitalized these themes by using more contemporary media, such as pastels.  His impact was felt on artists of the time -- Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) who wrote that, If every month Le Monde llustré published one of his compositions … it would be a great pleasure for me to be able to follow it.  It is certain that for years I have not seen anything as beautiful as this scene by Lhermitte … I am too preoccupied by Lhermitte this evening to be able to talk of other things.

Lhermitte’s passion for the rural landscape was shared by fellow-artists and modern audiences alike, and his work helped perpetuate the image of rural life and landscape into the 20^th Century.    

In today’s picture, Au Lavoir (The Washhouse), we see Lhermette’s masterful command of the rural idiom.  This is charcoal and pastel on paper (19x24), and the artist creates a touching and homey scene with these basic materials.  Four women are doing the chore of cleaning clothes for their families – and from the poses of women, it is clear that this is a regular ritual.  The women position themselves to reduce the wear-and-tear on themselves, and they look at one-another to exchange the latest gossip. 

For this picture, Lhermette’s worked on beige-toned paper, allowing the paper itself to create the clay-colored background of the earth and the stones of the cistern.  The stones are mostly suggested, rather than slavishly depicted, and the trees and sod of the rolling hillside are a few deft touches of charcoal and pastel. 

Lhermette uses white chalk to create a little pathway from the countryside to the cistern, creating a distinctive social space within the countryside.  The Washhouse of Lhermette’s imagination is a social square of the simplest sort, where housework, gossip and simple country connections take place.

What is amazing about this piece is that with these component parts, Lhermette creates a whole life.  We know these women, and their lives, and the day-to-day  routines on which they run.  It is a remarkably human and subtle piece of work.

More Lhermette tomorrow!