Léon-Augustin Lhermitte: La Famille

Léon-Augustin Lhermitte (Mont Saint-Père 1844-1925 Paris), *La Famille* signed ‘L.Lhermitte’ (lower left) oil on canvas laid down on board 28 x 22¼ in. (71.1 x 56.5 cm.), Image Source: Christie’s

“By the time Lhermitte took up the harvesting themes and country market scenes that would make his name, the wide-spread antagonism that had greeted Jean-François Millet’s paintings of working peasants thirty years earlier had largely disappeared, dissipated by an improving rural economy and by a political climate that deliberately celebrated the peasant as a mainstay of conservative values in France, a more attractive representation of the nation than discontented urban workers. As early as the 1880s, Lhermitte had begun including a nursing mother or older sister watching over a sleeping infant in many of his complex scenes of peasant life. Such a motif was a reflection of real rural custom whereby young women were drafted to field work during the highly pressured harvest season, requiring that their littlest children be brought out to the fields throughout the day by elderly grandmothers or preteen sisters for regular nursing.”
READ FULL ESSAY: Christie’s