Beschreibung:

HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE (BRITISH 1859-1929) THE COW GIRL Oil on canvas Signed (lower left) 140 x 99.5cm (55 x 39 in.) Painted circa 1888. Provenance: John William Smith, Private Collection, Bradford His sale, Christie's, London, 18 February 1905,lot 151 (58 guineas to Sampson) Sale, Christie's, London,19 December 1972, lot 53 Leva Gallery, London Lady Isobel Throckmorton, Private Collection Her Sale, Christie's, London, 6 June 1980, lot 195 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner Literature: Grant Waters, Dictionary of British Artists 1900-1950, 1975, Vol. 2 (illustrated plate 169) Sunlight strikes the white apron of a young woman who drives a pair of Ayrshire calves to pasture under trees that line the edge of a barley field. Its brightness creates a verdant overhead canopy through which flashes of a clear blue sky can be seen. Confrontation with friendly, curious, but unpredictable creatures within a colourful spatial envelope lifts an otherwise unremarkable scene into something immediately arresting. A few simple comparisons with contemporary paintings of cowherds will instantly convince the spectator that Henry Herbert La Thangue's The Cow Girl is a radical departure from convention. Precedents were exclusively European, where artistic custom and practice dictated that such subjects, tackled in a minor key in the work of Anton Mauve (fig 2), for instance, would appeal to Barbizon and Hague School collectors. Overlaid with a poetic vision in the work of J-F Millet, the peasant cowherd began to step forward and assume more heroic status, but it was only with Jules Bastien-Lepage and Léon Lhermitte that la vie rurale was reassessed in its entirety as a visual source book. Scale was increased, and naturalistic techniques applied to give the powerful sense of brutal reality - that of the école naturaliste. In Pauvre Fauvette (fig 3), Lepage's country child is dressed in sackcloth on a cold, barren hillside under a leafless tree. She was, as George Clausen would later write, 'placed before us ... without the appearance of artifice, but as [she] lives.' Images like these were part of La Thangue's education. Whatever one painted, it had to be realized on-the-spot, in the open air, in order to convey what the artist described as 'the sentiment of nature'. The sensations of the moment should not be faked. For one alive to Impressionist innovation, the advice, in the artist's words, was simply 'to learn to record ... impressions with rapidity' and without preconception. La Thangue encountered these ideas in Paris. He went there in 1880 as a twenty-year-old Royal Academy Schools gold medallist to enter the prestigious atelier Gérôme at the École des Beaux Arts. With such recognized precocity, one might predict the monied career of an establishment classicist. This, however, does a disservice to both student and teacher, and La Thangue swiftly established his own path sampling the artists' colonies in Brittany and travelling south to the Dauphiné. Not long after his return to England, the artist was invited to paint portraits of local dignitaries in Arthur Higgins Rigg's studio in Swan Arcade, Bradford. It was a fruitful expedition, for a year later he was elected president of the town's Arcadian Art Club, and found patrons, one of whom was the mayor, Isaac Smith JP. Smith's wealth derived from Fieldhead Mills in Preston Street, a firm of fine worsted spinners, founded in 1848. During the 1880s, through the agency of Arthur Tooth, Smith's collection included works such as Lhermitte's Le Cabaret 1881 (Private Collection) and La Moisson 1883 (Washington University Art Gallery, St Louis) and his outstanding early La Thangue acquisition was the plein air portrait, A Study (Resting after the Game) 1888, held in a private collection. Time and place suggest that The Cow Girl, in the handling of the calves and the treatment of sunlight, must have been painted around the same time as this in the late summer of 1888 when the La Thangu