Léon-Augustin Lhermitte (French, 1844-1925) Les lavandières, circa 1864 Pastel on paper laid on ca...

Description

Léon-Augustin Lhermitte (French, 1844-1925)
Les lavandières, circa 1864
Pastel on paper laid on canvas
21 x 25 inches (53.3 x 63.5 cm) (sight)
Signed lower right: L'hermitte

PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Private collection, France, acquired from the above;
Galerie Wallis et Cie, Paris, 1902;
Andrew Bishop, Canada;
Thence by descent;
Hampel Fine Art Auctions, Munich, June 27-28, 2013, lot 966;
Hermitage Fine Art, Monaco, July 5, 2019, lot 13;
Private collection, France;
Private collection, Beverly Hills, California.

The authenticity of this work was confirmed by Monique Le Pelley Forteny in 2024.

Les lavandières, executed when Léon-Augustin Lhermitte was in his early twenties, is a remarkably mature work from the artist's formative period. Beneath a vast, turbulent sky, two washerwomen bend beside a quiet stream, their white caps glinting in the filtered light. A massive oak tree dominates the right foreground while a distant line of trees recedes into the haze, their silhouettes uniting earth and sky in a gentle rhythm. Lhermitte renders the scene with a soft, expressive touch, expertly using his pastels to capture diffused light and atmospheric tone. Subtle gradations of brown, green, and blue merge without deeply defined contours, enveloping the figures within the landscape. The composition demonstrates the artist's mastery of light and air, and its subject anticipates later depictions of French peasant life that would earn him international fame.

Dated circa 1864, while Lhermitte was studying under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran at the École impériale de dessin, the present pastel reflects his teacher's emphasis on observation from memory and disciplined tonal study. Its naturalism aligns with the spirit of the Barbizon School—especially Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's poetic plein-air landscapes (see lot 69051) and Jean-François Millet's commitment to depicting rural labor—yet Lhermitte's approach is distinctly personal: intimate, direct, and unsentimental.

Pastel was still relatively unconventional for important landscape art in the 1860s, but Les lavandières provides Lhermitte with an expressive medium of immediacy and luminosity. The work foreshadows both his later Salon successes and his enduring interest in the dignity of rural labor and its connection to the land. His oeuvre proved inspirational to a generation of artists, including his great admirer Vincent van Gogh, who, after admiring Lhermitte's woodcuts, wrote: "then I know very well that a great distance still separates me from making something like that myself. Yet as regards my views and manner of searching—that is, always directly from nature or in the poor, smoke-blackened cottage—seeing his work encourages me for I see...how artists like Lhermitte must have studied the peasant figure not only from a fairly great distance but from very close to, not now, while they create and compose with ease and certainty, but before they did that." (Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, circa March 9-23, 1885, Neunen, letter no. 485).


Estimate: $10,000 - $15,000.

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