Léon-Augustin Lhermitte

Librairie Artistique Launette, Paris (in 1887)
Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, February 7, 1891
Sale: Christie's, New York, May 1, 2000, lot 284, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Librairie Artistique Launette, Fusains de Léon Lhermitte, 1887

André Theuriet, La Vie Rustique, Paris, 1888, p. 54, illustrated
Helen R. Dole, trans., Rustic Life in France, New York and Boston, 1896, p. 62, illustrated
Marcel Charlot, Paysages et Paysans, Paris, 1898, pl. X, illustrated
Monique Le Pelley Fonteney, Léon Augustin Lhermitte: catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1991, p. 459. no. 771, illustrated

 

Not laid down, tear in margin along upper left edge, image overall is slightly lightstruck.
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Lhermitte drew Le Semeur in 1886 as one of a series of illustrations for La Vie Rustique, a lavish blending of texts and imagery describing rural traditions in France written by the popular poet and folklorist André Theuriet.  During the mid-1880s, Lhermitte was at the heart of a group of artists who were promoting the art of drawing in charcoal and in pastel through special exhibitions and dedicated publications.  His collaboration with Theuriet gave the painter-draughtsman an exceptional opportunity to introduce his works on paper to a much wider public and to influence modern book illustration. 

As a young artist during the 1860s, Lhermitte had studied at the École Impériale de dessin in Paris rather than at the École des Beaux-Arts, the destination favored by most would-be painters.  Lhermitte's experience at the École Impériale, in the studio of Lecog de Boisboudran who emphasized then-controversial methods of seeing and drawing which integrated a figure into its surroundings from the very first marks on the page, was profoundly important for Lhermitte.  From his earliest exhibited paintings of harvesters or washerwomen working near his family home in Mont-Saint-Père in the Champagne region, Lhermitte was admired for his ability to capture the atmosphere and character of the French countryside, qualities that were deemed to be lacking in so much Salon painting of the day.  Lhermitte belonged to the generation of the Impressionists and he was friendly with several members of that group of artists with whom he shared an interest in strong color and in realistic light effects.  But Lhermitte chose a more individualistic path, with a focus on rural rather than urban subject matter and greater emphasis on very personalized descriptive drawing techniques, whether in his charcoals or his large Salon oil paintings. 

Lhermitte had worked with the much-loved Theuriet earlier, providing several illustrations for a Christmas text that Theuriet wrote for the popular magazine Le Monde Illustré in 1884.  The success of those images brought Lhermitte a contract for a series of monthly drawings illustrating seasonal subjects -- works that were much admired by Vincent van Gogh, who discussed them throughout the year with his brother Theo.  The work on La Vie Rustique, however, was a much more demanding project which ultimately required 128 drawings, many of them large scale, full page images, and took much of 1886. For some subjects, Lhermitte recreated smaller black and white equivalents of his popular Salon paintings: La Moisson (The Wheat Harvest) or A la Fontaine, a more intimate scene of a young couple chatting tentatively at the village water source.  For other themes, such as Les Charbonniers or Charcoal Burners, he invented a new wholly new composition.  In a handful of cases, such as Le Semeur (The Sower) or La Lessive (Woman Bleaching Linens), Lhermitte interestingly turned directly back to Jean-François Millet, the premier painter of rural working subjects of the previous generation, and produced slightly more modernized versions of famed Millet images.

 

Millet's influence often underlay Lhermitte's compositions, for both artists were attracted to similar rural activities.  For Le Semeur, Lhermitte followed Millet's well-known painting of The Sower from 1850, with a solitary farmer striding through his field, his right arm flinging a handful of wheat away from the bag of grain at his waist into the heavy, damp ground.  Behind, a second worker leads a team of horses dragging a heavy harrow that closes the soil over the newly sown wheat before circling crows can devour it.  But where Millet's sower wore a timeless tunic and a shapeless cap that might have been pulled from the illuminated manuscripts that both Millet and Lhermitte admired, Lhermitte's sower wears long trousers over his wooden sabots and a lumpy, but contemporary, brimmed hat.  As Theuriet's text stressed the long continuity of rural practices that defined the French countryside, Lhermitte's drawings absorbed old traditions into new arrangements.