DOING THE LAUNDRY OUTDOORS

DOING THE LAUNDRY OUTDOORS

by Joan K. Yanni

Though he was active at the time of Monet and Renoir, Leon-Augustin Lhermitte was not an Impressionist. He chose instead to remain a traditional academic painter, and his pictures of rural French life remained favorites of the public and the Salon.  MAG’s Les Laveuses, The Washerwomen (37.2), is an ideal example of his work.

Les Laveuses

The painting pictures three women washing at a stream. One is bending over with her hand in the water, probably rubbing her wash on one of the protruding rocks. A second is kneeling and looking up at the third, who is standing, perhaps to stretch a bit to rest her back. The women are relaxed, seemingly enjoying their work.

The surrounding landscape is sunlit, with patches of light illuminating the grass and highlighting the textures of foliage and rocks.  The trees are reflected in the bright water, and white garments are spread out in the grass to bleach as they dry.

The artist was known for his theme of peasants at work: harvesters, gleaners, shepherds and washerwomen. These subjects had been treated before him by Jean François Millet, but while Millet pictured the laborers as rugged and weary, Lhermitte shows them as industrious, contented figures, the bedrock of French society. His bright colors and fluid brushwork create a happy, glowing painting.

Lhermitte was born in 1844 in the village of Mont-Saint-Pere, Aisne. The only son of the village schoolmaster, he showed skill in drawing at an early age and won a grant from the state for study in art. At the age of nineteen he went to Paris and became a student of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who was known for teaching his students to draw from visual memory. Jean-Charles Cazin, a fellow pupil, became a lifelong friend, and Lhermitte got to know Henri Fantin-Latour and Auguste Rodin.

Lhermitte was always a superb draughtsman, and the first work he exhibited at the Salon was a charcoal drawing, Banks of the Marne near Alfort. He continued to exhibit drawings there until 1889. In 1866 his first painting was exhibited at the Salon, and in the same year he produced his first etchings and did illustrations for a book on insects.  On a visit to London, he got to know the artist Alphonse Legros, who introduced him to an art dealer, Durand-Ruel. After examining Lhermitte’s work, the dealer agreed to sell his drawings. Recognition of his work grew. He won a third-class medal in the Salon of 1874 for his painting The Harvest, which was bought by the state.

In the mid 1880s, as Lhermitte noted the new techniques of the Impressionists, he began to use pastels, adapting his drawing style to the creation of brilliantly-colored landscapes. This medium suited him, and he participated in the annual exhibits of the Société des Pastellistes Français. Favorable reviews of these exhibitions, and of Lhermitte’s works in particular, attracted public attention and added to his reputation. In 1879 Edgar Degas noted in a sketchbook his intention to invite Lhermitte to exhibit with the Impressionists, but Lhermitte never participated in any of their shows.

Lhermitte’s subject matter rarely deviated from the subject of rural life, and he continued to produce pictures showing the beauty of the French countryside and the dignity of peasant life. In his earlier works, his figures seem impersonal, a small part of the surrounding landscape. Later on they took on personalities of their own, as the artist began to focus on the peasant’s identity. Many of his works after 1890 are among the most realistic, with detailed depictions of country costumes, tools, and activities. It is as though Lhermitte saw the coming of machines which would take over hand labor and make the laborer less and less important. He needed to present the rural scene with accuracy before it was no longer a prevailing way of life.

As his reputation grew, he was commissioned in 1886 to do two large portrait groups to decorate the Sorbonne, and in 1894 he was commissioned to do a huge painting. Les Halles, which depicted workers at the market, to decorate the City Hall. He continued to exhibit in the first decades of the twentieth century, though he was often seen as rooted in the past.

Lhermittre produced a prodigious number of works in his lifetime, most acclaimed by both the public and the Salon. Many honors came to him during his long career, including the Grand Prix at the Exhibition 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. He died in 1925.

In an article in Porticus,1994-96, Grace Seiberling, Associate Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester, sums up Lhermitte’s place in the Gallery: “Lhermitte’s The Washerwomen with its heightened color, loosened brushwork, and strong light effects, is an example of a work by an  ‘official’ artist who was attempting to incorporate Impressionist innovations while maintaining more exacting standards for drawing the figures.”

Source: Curatorial files, Grove Dictionary of Art