Exhibitions
Painters and Peasants: Henry La Thangue and British Rural Naturalism 1880-1905 (Bolton Museum & Art Gallery till 3 June)
French connection
Angela Summerfield
0 ur local authority art collections are peculiarly well suited to staging exhibitions such as this, thanks to regional collectors like John Maddocks of Bradford, and the prescient purchasing activities of art gallery committees, such as at the Walker Art Gallery, which bought Stanhope Forbes's `A Street in Brittany' in 1882. Indeed, such was the national appeal of 'British Rural Naturalism' that the source of loans stretches from Dumfriesshire to Cornwall and Ulster. Bolton itself is represented by a couple of works which include Robert Wylie's stylistically-transitional painting `The Breton Sorceress' of 1872, while Henry La Thangue's 'Portrait of a Girl in White' is on public exhibition for the first time since the 1880s.
The exhibition's curator, Adrian Jenkins, presents a compelling thesis which identi- fies the origins of British Rural Naturalism as both 18th-century British art, and the development of Realism and Naturalism in 19th-century French art. British artists, dis- satisfied with the available art training and the domineering orthodoxy of the Royal Academy in London, flocked to Paris and French art colonies at Cancale, Quimperle, Concameau, Grez and Pont-Aven. First- hand knowledge of contemporary French art was also provided at home through sources such as commercial exhibitions held in London, notably through Durand- Ruel's satellite gallery, and the teachings of Alphonse Legros.
The artist, Henry La Thangue (despite his name he was born in Croydon), was one of the first wave of artists to respond enthusiastically in the early 1880s to the art of Bastien-Lepage, whose French rural fig- ure subjects and square brush technique were then attracting considerable attention. La Thangue initially studied in Paris under. Gerome, as a gold medallist of the Royal Academy Schools, before settling in the Brittany coastal village of Cancale. Follow- ing his return to Britain, La Thangue became a founder member of the New English Art Club, which was established in 1886 as an alternative 'free' exhibition venue to that of the Royal Academy's annual summer shows. His attempts to make this a still more radical national organisation, however, foundered, and by the 1890s even he and co-founders such as Stanhope Forbes and George Clausen were creating exhibition pictures, largely con- ceived or worked-up in the studio for dis- play at the Royal Academy.
In charting the course of 19th-century Naturalism in Britain, the exhibition identi- fies the leitmotifs of single peasant figures, a leaden sky, long grasses, the frozen moment pose and broad fractured brush strokes which identified this new develop- ment. Bastien-Lepage also stressed the need for the artist to identify wholly with his rural setting, and several works in the exhibition show how artists signed their works to include the actual location on the earth itself. Ironically, Bastien-Lepage died in 1884, just when British Naturalism was in the ascendancy. Like the artists associat- ed with French Impressionism, the idea of faithfully recording human activity en plein air became difficult to sustain, while the method of applying paint was re-examined.
Several artists are known to have had recourse to the new art form, photography, famously the collaboration between Thomas Frederick Goodall and Peter Henry Emerson, here represented by their mutual studies of the Norfolk Broads. La Thangue developed a photo-realist style which by the early 1890s was used to create large canvases whose subdued colouring heightened themes of social criticism and death such as 'A Mission to Seamen' and `The Last Furrow'. In sharp contrast, Clausen's canvases became a tapestry of enduring warm light appearing like an echo of both his family's Danish ancestry and Monet's explorations of the coloured enve- lope: an aspect of Clausen's art splendidly represented by 'The Mowers'. Some may quibble about the cut-off date of 1905 La Thangue lived until 1929 and most of the other artists represented here lived well into the 20th century — but it does acknowledge, however obliquely, the emer- La Thangue's 'Portrait of a Young Girl', 1885 gence of the urban subject matter promot- ed by Walter Sickert, who returned to Lon- don in that year.
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