Les Halles (1895)

Léon Augustin Lhermitte: Les Halles

La soupe de l'Enfant (1888)

Léon Augustin Lhermitte: La soupe de l'Enfant

Leon Lhermitte was born in 1844 and was still executing works in the French rural tradition at his death in 1925, making him the last in an illustrious group of artists. He showed artistic talent at a young age and in 1863 left his home at Mont-Saint-Pêre, Aisne for the Petite Ecole in Paris where he studied with Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Lecoq was known for his program of training the visual memory of his students, and his theories had a profound effect on Lhermitte. It was in his studio that Lhermitte formed a life-long friendship with Cazin and also became acquainted with Legros, Fantin-Latour and Rodin. Lhermitte sent his initial entry to the Salon in 1864 when he was nineteen, and continued to exhibit charcoal drawings and paintings regularly, and pastels after 1885, winning his first medal in 1874 with La Moisson (Musée de Carcassone). Other prizes and honors came to Lhermitte throughout his long career, including the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle, 1889, the Diplome d’honneur, Dresden, 1890, and the Legion of Honor. He was a founding member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

Lhermitte’s subject matter rarely deviated from the peasants and rural life of his youth. The most profound influence upon his work was certainly Jean François Millet who, like Lhermitte, was equally adept with pastel as with oil. While one could not characterize Lhermitte as an innovator, it is fair to say that he remained true to his own artistic conscience, creating beautiful, light-filled works in the Barbizon tradition while reinforcing the dignity of peasant life and the glory of the French rural landscape in the face of encroaching technology. He has been accused of simply marrying traditional academic practices to the brighter colors of the Impressionists for the sake of his considerable commercial success, but this criticism is probably unjust. He was a talented artist, much admired by his peers. Van Gogh wrote “He (Lhermitte) is the absolute master of the figure, he does what he likes with it -- proceeding neither from the color nor the local tone but rather from the light - as Rembrandt did--there is an astonishing mastery in everything he does, above all excelling in modeling, he perfectly satisfies all that honesty demands.” [Schiller & Bodo]

The Haymakers (1887)

Léon Augustin Lhermitte: The Haymakers

This enormous painting by the French artist Léon Lhermitte shows a family of peasants resting during haymaking. The work probably has a symbolic element too, evoking youth, maturity and old age. The old man at the front holds a scythe, a traditional symbol of approaching death. This kind of symbolism and the emphasis on the romantic, idyllic side of peasant life made works of this type extremely popular in the late nineteenth century. The Haymakers won the Grand Prix at the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris.

Lhermitte became a famous painter of rural life. According to Vincent van Gogh, the French artist’s secret was ‘that he knows the figure in general – namely the sturdy, severe workman’s figure – through and through, and takes his subjects from the heart of the people.’ [Van Gogh Museum]

Paying the Harvesters (1882)

Léon Augustin Lhermitte: Paying the Harvesters

Léon Lhermitte was born in the Aisne and lived there until he was about twenty, which explains his deep attachment to rural life and the focus of his prolific production on 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. The Cabaret in 1881, this Paying the Harvesters in 1882 and The Harvest in 1883 used the same figures which can be identified from one painting to another. It is easy to recognize, on the left of the scene, the reaper Casimir Dehan, sitting absent-mindedly or resignedly on the bench, after the work is done.

The subject and technique of Paying the Harvesters belong to the Naturalist movement. However Lhermitte did not make this painting into a manifesto against the grinding toil of agricultural laborers as Jules Bastien-Lepage did in his painting Haymaking in 1877, also in the Musee d'Orsay. He was content with a bald statement devoid of polemics in which he uses his great artistic skill, from the remarkably balanced overall composition to the extremely precise rendering of the tiniest details. [Musée d'Orsay]

Motherhood (1876)

Léon Augustin Lhermitte: Motherhood