Léon-Augustin Lhermitte

Boussod, Valadon & Cie, 27218

John Levy, New York

Sold to M. Philipson

Sale, Christie's, New York, May 24, 1985, no. 174

Collection George Marciano, Beverly Hills

Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-arts, 1901, no. 581

M.M. Hamel, A French Artist: Léon Lhermitte, 1844-1925, diss., St. Louis, M.O., Washington University, 1974, p. 250, no. 247

Monique Le Pelley Fonteny, Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, Catalogue Raisonné, Paris, 1991, p. 139, no. 176, illustrated pp. 53 and 139

Lhermitte was a student in the atelier of Lecoq de Boisbaudran, the prized teacher of many Academically trained painters including Legros and Fantin-Latour. He studied the works of fellow painters, who sought to establish their atelier outdoors, such as Corot, Millet, Daubigny and Breton, with whom Lhermitte often stayed during the summer. Inspired by their compositions, Lhermitte developed his own facility for rendering physical form by varying the gradations of light and dark, maximizing the effect of shadow in modelling his subjects.

Lhermitte's first entry to the Salon was in 1864 and he exhibited there with great acclaim throughout his career, winning his first medal for La Moisson in 1874. Influenced by the large-scale, proud peasants of Breton, Lhermitte further ennobled his peasant subjects by painting a cycle of monumental paintings in what Mary Michele Hamel describes as his 'grand manner.' With Le Cabaret of 1880, Lhermitte began rendering his subjects, robust field-hands and farm laborers, as epic figures at the forefront of idealized compositions. Les Glaneuses illustrates this stylistic preference for substantial figures that are close to the viewer and have considerable weight in comparison to their surroundings. Hamel likened this corporeality to the sculptural rhetoric of Rodin (Hamel, ed., p. 17), another artist who attempted to capture the proud likeness of specific people. Unlike Millet, Lhermitte painted identifiable persons, the residents of Mont-Saint-Père, and is often quoted saying, ''I never invent. All my characters are portraits of someone'' (Hamel, ed., pp. 17-18).

Painted in 1901, Lhermitte likely completed part of this canvas while staying with Breton in July at Wissant. The poses of both women are similar to earlier depictions of gleaners, peasant women who picked over the harvested fields in search of remaining grain; their arms and faces reflect the arduous nature of their labor but, rather than displaying features ravaged by nature, the women's faces reflect years of working harmoniously with the land. Through their grand scale and pyramidal shape, the women seem to rise out of the fields, larger than the massive surrounding haystacks, with features created in such detail as to evidence the passing of time but with an air of eternal permanence.