Lot 92: Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929)

Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929)
Spring in Provence
signed 'H. H. La Thangue' (lower left)
oil on canvas
20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm.)

London, Leicester Galleries, Pictures by HH La Thangue RA, April - May 1914, no. 37.
Brighton Art Gallery, Memorial Exhibition of Works by the Late HH La Thangue RA, 1930, no. 12.
London, Royal Academy, 1933.
London, The David Messum Gallery, British Paintings from Three Centuries, 1998, no. 63.

Moses Nightingale by 1930; thence by descent. with David Messum, London, circa 1998 (where purchased by the present owner).

Dismayed at the increasing mechanisation of British farming, Henry Herbert La Thangue visited Provence in the winter of 1901-2.1 In the previous decade he had moved from the south coast to Norfolk and then returned to Sussex, living first at Bosham before his final move to Graffham in 1898. Although these peregrinations refreshed his painting and set new challenges, he recalled his student years of the early 1880s when he worked in the fields of the Dauphin near the village of Donzre. The Rhone valley had been virgin territory for the young painter - unlike Normandy, Brittany and the immediate environs of Paris, there were no artists' colonies in these remoter regions.

Provence, at the turn of the century, had a different reputation. Behind the glittering resorts of the côte d'azure, popular with British tourists, including the Royal Family, lay a hinterland of untouched villages nestling in the hills and accessible only by dusty paths.2 In successive visits during the early years of the century, La Thangue explored these ancient tracks and bridle-paths, some of which date from Roman times, pitching his easel by the roadside, sometimes facing a distant view of a ruined fort or hilltop village.3 In the present instance a donkey and cart, a favourite motif, makes its leisurely way up the hill - indicating the slow pace of peasant life that greatly appealed to him.4 By the time of La Thangue's death in 1929, such tracks were being transformed by asphalt and 'macadam' to take 'thirty CVs', the automobiles in which the likes of 'MM Othon Friesz and Matisse exchange reminiscences as to their climbs into the Provencal hinterlands in search of churches that should contain votive pictures'.5 Even these remote retreats would not escape the ravages of modernity. However, for the pre-war present, the dusty roadway with its donkey cart merely provide points of interest in one of the painter's most striking compositions - a scene in which sous bois on the right, gives way to vista on the left, the two daringly separated by the trunk of a foreground tree. Spatial drama was one of La Thangue's strongest suits.

The painter was not concerned with topographic exactness so much as atmospheric truth. To this he brought a method, developed in rapport with Impressionism, but quite unique. In 1914, Walter Sickert described this as an 'opaque mosaic for recording objective sensations', a characteristic manner that in the present canvas, enabled the painter to build up a convincing picture from tiny touches of the brush - what Cezanne would refer to as 'petits sensations devant la nature'. Yet the painter did not give us 'over again, the gamut of Monet, or to be fin-de-décade of Cezanne'. For Sickert, the painter's 'message' was 'remote from the din of the aesthetic discussions of the moment'. La Thangue's pictures transcended the passing fashions in painting and, he believed, would 'speak to many generations to come'.6

1 Kenneth McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, Henry Herbert La Thangue, 1978, (exhibition catalogue, Oldham Art Gallery), pp. 12-14.
2 Queen Victoria visited Aix-les-Bains and Nice during the 1890s.
3 La Thangue for instance exhibited An Ancient Provencal Road, (Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull) at the Royal Academy in 1924. 4 A work also entitled Spring in Provence, different from the above, was sold Sotheby's Olympia, 20 March 2007, lot 107. Since Moses Nightingale is known to have purchased La Thangue's work from the Leicester Galleries exhibition and loaned extensively to the Brighton Memorial Exhibition, it is certain that this version, and not that in Sotheby's is the one exhibited in 1914.
5 Ford Madox Ford, Provence, 1935 (Ecco Press ed, New Jersey, 1979), p. 244.
6 Walter Sickert, The New Age, 7 May 1914, p. 17-18, quoted in McConkey 1978, p. 13.

K Mc