Henry Herbert La Thangue

Background

Henry La Thangue was born on January 19, 1859 in Croydon, United Kingdom, into a middle class family.

Education

Henry was educated at Dulwich College, then at the Lambeth School of Art in 1873, entering the Royal Academy School in 1874, and winning a gold medal there in 1879. Having been recommended by Lord Leighton himself, he then went to study in Paris in the studio of the celebrated artist Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he came under the influence of the French plein air school of painters, especially Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Career

In 1881 after completing his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, La Thangue travelled to Brittany, a popular region with landscape painters, and worked alongside the English landscape painter, Stanhope Forbes. Whilst here, he met the renowned master of rustic realism, Jules Bastien-Lepage. That year, he visited the small coastal commune of Concale, east of St Malo and completed his painting entitled "The Boat Builder’s Yard." He remained in Brittany until mid 1882 and the following year he travelled south to the Rhone Valley commune of Donzère with his friend, the sculptor James Havard Thomas.

After returning to England he settled near the Norfolk Broads for a while, and helped found the New English Art Club, which put on its own exhibitions in competition with the Royal Academy. He caused controversy with his exhibit in its first show, a brightly coloured impressionistic scene of haymakers, "In the Dauphiné"; this does not seem to have survived. Equally or more controversial was his "Leaving Home", which shows a farmer's daughter weeping as she leaves home to go into service in the city, and has a more obvious social message. His paintings could be seen at the New Gallery which was founded in Regent Street in 1888 by Comyns Carr and Charles Edward Hallé who had once been co-directors of the Grosvenor Gallery but because of all the Grovesnor Gallery problems, had resigned and set up this new gallery.

In the summer of 1886, La Thangue moved home to the Norfolk countryside and the small fenland village of South Walsham. During these years La Thangue produced head studies of farm hands and fisherfolk and it was whilst living here that he completed his landscape painting entitled "Return of the Reapers." This was a typical example of La Thangue’s rustic realism style. La Thangue, who had moved to Sussex by 1891, was sad to see rural life changing under the impact of greater urbanisation, and this went further with him than mere gentle nostalgia for the past. Lionel Lambourne describes another painting of this period, "In the Orchard" as "characteristic painting from the Club's heyday." In 1896 he completed a work "The Man with the Scythe", which is now housed in the Tate Britain gallery in London.

However, the "formidable rustic naturalism of La Thangue's early maturity" when he had his "maximum impact" was coming to an end. Not finding much of rural England left, La Thangue often painted in Provence at this time, and later in northern Italy and Spain as well. The works of these later years were described in his obituary as "welcome at the Academy for their masculine outlook and intensity of colour", but "somewhat monotonous in range and mechanical in execution." From 1903 to 1911 he spent much of his time in the Italian region of Liguria building up a large collection of work. Despite La Thangue’s earlier outspoken criticism of the Royal Academy he became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1898 and became a full Member in 1912. His diploma work for the Royal Academy was one entitled "Violets for Perfume." All through his artistic career La Thangue developed his subject matter from labourers working in fields, vineyards and orchards.

In 1914, just prior to the beginning of the Great War, the Leicester Galleries in London staged a one-man exhibition of La Thangue’s southern European landscape works, which concentrated on his paintings completed whilst he was in Provence and Liguria. One of the works exhibited was entitled "A Mountain Frontier" which La Thangue completed around 1910. The exhibition was a great success and praised by the critics. He returned to England at the end of the 1920s, making Sussex his home but dying in London at 20 Wimpole Street, Marylebone, on December 21, 1929.

Achievements

• Henry La Thangue was highly famous as the artist of outstanding rural paintings "Mowing Bracken", "Leaving Home", and "The Man with the Scythe."

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Ligurian Artrobus

  • In the Dauphiné

  • Farm Near Horsey, Norfolk

  • Ligurian Bridle Path

  • The Plough Boy

  • The Return of the Reapers

  • At the Well

  • An Old Italian Garden

  • The Boat Builder's Yard, Cancale, Brittany

  • Gathering Wool

  • Gathering Bracken

  • Going out with the Cows

  • Nightfall (The Gleaners)

  • Ancient Provençal Road

  • A Ligurian Gulf

  • A Veronese Road

  • John Maddocks

  • A Provençal Stream

  • Study of the Bust of a Young Cornishwoman, with a Window behind

  • Packing Stocks

  • A Provençal Morning

  • Portrait of a Young Girl

  • Nude Study

  • A Mission to Seamen

  • An Andalucian

  • The Young Farmhand

  • Violets for Perfume

  • A Ligurian Shepherdess

  • Trellised Vines

  • Roman Campagna

  • Crying Fish in Spain

  • Landscape Study

  • The Festa

  • Gathering Oranges

  • Packing Cherries in Provence, France

  • Portrait of the Artist's Wife

  • In the Orchard

  • A Mountain Frontier

  • Leaving Home

  • The Appian Way

  • A Sussex Farm

  • The Watersplash

  • A Hillside Village in Provence, France

  • R. H. La Thangue (Portrait of the Artist's Father)

  • Stumping the Cow

  • A Provençal Castle

  • The Harvesters' Supper

  • A Provençal Fountain

  • The Man with the Scythe

  • A Ligurian Flower Girl

  • The Aqueduct

  • A Ligurian Valley, Italy

  • Mowing Bracken

  • Study of a Boy in a Black Hat, before a Cornfield

  • Selling Chickens in Liguria

  • The Connoisseur

  • A Ligurian Bay

  • Some Poor People

  • Gathering Plums

  • The Last Furro

  • Goats at a Fountain

  • On the Ramparts

  • The Mulberry Tree

Views

La Thangue was a radical thinker and believed fervently that the Royal Academy had to change. La Thangue proposed that it should be a more democratic society open to all and based on the principles of "universal suffrage."

Membership

• Royal Institute of Oil Painters

  1883

• New English Art Club

Interests

• Artists

  Whistler, Jules Bastien-Lepage, and Gustave Courbet

Connections

In 1885 Henry married the actress Kate Rietiker.

Spouse:

Kate Rietiker

References

• 63 Amazing Color Paintings of Henry Herbert La Thangue - British Realist Rural Landscape Painter (January 19, 1859 - December 21, 1929) eBook: Jacek Michalak, Henry Herbert La Thangue: Books