Henry Herbert La Thangue

Private Collection (and sold: Sotheby's, Belgravia, October 24, 1978, lot 33)
Christopher Wood, London, 1978
Edmund J. McCormick, Norcross House, Dobbs Ferry, New York (and sold: Sotheby's, New York, February 20, 1990, lot 165, illustrated)
Richard Green, London
Private Collection (and sold: Christie's, London, November 11, 1999, lot 30, illustrated)
Private Collection (and sold: Christie's, London, November 26, 2003, lot 37, illustrated)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

London, Royal Academy, 1906, no. 825
London, Richard Green, Modern British Paintings, May 1990, no. 24

The Times, May 5, 1906, p. 9
Royal Academy Pictures, 1906, p. 3, illustrated
"The Royal Academy," The Illustrated London News, vol. 128, May 12, 1906, p. 689; and May 19, 1906, p. 732
Antiques and Arts Monitor, vol. 1, no. 4, October 1978, illustrated on the cover
Christopher Forbes, "McCormick's Victorian Reapings, An American Collection of British Nineteenth Century Pictures," Nineteenth Century, vol. 6, 1980, p. 40

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting is unlined. It has been cleaned and quite recently restored. The reverse of the original canvas is in very healthy state with no reinforcements. There seem to be no retouches to the surface.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

In the early years of the twentieth century, after having committed himself to the naturalistic recording of rural life in East Anglia and west Sussex, Henry Herbert La Thangue branched out to the coastal regions of Provence and Liguria. La Thangue had first ventured south to Donzère in the val de Rhône in 1883, at the end of his student years in Paris. Twenty years later, with the passing of the Victorian age, the painter had begun to feel that industrialization was destroying the rustic way of life in England. He once asked Alfred Munnings if he knew of a "quiet old world village where he could live and find real country models." Munnings ruefully reflected that although he had built a house at Graffham, he "never found his spot" (Sir Alfred Munning, An Artist's Life, London, 1950, pp. 97-8).

In 1901, La Thangue exhibited the first of a new sequence of Provençal paintings and by 1904 his first Ligurian subjects were shown. By 1906, when Winter in Liguria was exhibited alongside Selling Chickens in Liguria at the Royal Academy, this new inspiration of his work was widely appreciated, one critic even remarking that these canvases restore "the light heart ...  [the visitor] may have lost in the preceding galleries' during a tour of the Royal Academy summer exhibition" (The Illustrated London News, p. 732). This critic preferred the present example to its companion piece and further described Winter in Liguria as, "the most pleasure compelling [of the two], for here La Thangue's powers of selection seem to have crowded into one canvas all the especially delightful accessories of an Italian scene; the well with its whitewashed walls, the well water, the flowers deliciously cool in the shadow – the whole world of colour and contrasts" (p. 689).

These joyous pictures indicate that La Thangue was not a traveller of the classic Victorian type. He eschewed topography and the popular tourist sites in favor of the congenial way of life. Sunny arbors and neglected gardens were eminently paintable, and it was a world that late Victorian travellers tended to miss as they sped by train through Turin and Milan bound for Venice, Pisa, Florence, Rome and Naples. 

Winter in Liguria combines two of La Thangue's most cherished themes. The first of these, figures imbibing at a well or mountain stream, was to recur in future years – most notably in Ligurian Roses, showing a girl stooping to drink from the same well as the one represented in the present work. The artist's second theme, the packing of scented stocks, also provided favorite motifs in later years as is clear from Packing Stocks (Oldham Art Gallery) – which shows a young woman filling wicker boxes with flowers.  This same lucrative work, conducted throughout the winter months, occupies the two young women in Winter in Liguria. Flowers had become luxury goods in Paris and London, as is clear from the work of Childe Hassam and Victor Gilbert, but La Thangue refused to romanticize their production.

La Thangue looked back to the early winters on the Riviera di Levante as a lost domain and, remembering the girl and the old house, he felt compelled to conclude that "all of these regions have been spoilt by the war and still more perhaps by the peace" (as quoted in McConkey, A Painter's Harvest; Henry Herbert La Thangue, 1859-1929, exh. cat., Oldham Art Gallery, 1978, p. 44). By that stage tunnels had been blasted through the hillsides bringing the railway down to La Spézia and the beautiful Liguria of his years of maturity was slipping away. These scenes were so important to La Thangue that the painter staged an exhibition almost exclusively devoted to them at the Leicester Galleries in 1914. Although many of the forty-two pictures on display were landscapes, the critic of The Times, reminded readers that the artist was at his best as a figure painter and, predictably, it was works of this type that lingered in the mind.  In retrospect, the Ligurian canvases, with their preference for color and strong sunlight were considered his lasting achievement.