Henry Herbert La Thangue
Henry Herbert La Thangue (born January 19, 1859 in London , † December 21, 1929 in London) was a British painter of Naturalism and Late Impressionism .
life and work
Henry Herbert La Thangue first attended Dulwich College , where he met fellow painters Stanhope Forbes and Frederick Goodall . He then enrolled at the Lambeth School of Art and went to the Royal Academy Schools in 1874 . In December 1879 he was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Academy of Arts and received a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris . In addition, Frederic Leighton, as President of the Royal Academy , issued him a letter of recommendation for Jean-Léon Gérôme , who then taught La Thangue for three years. Although Gérôme was a representative of the classical style and academic tradition, La Thangue was shaped during this period by outdoor painting , the naturalists of the Salon de Paris and the work of James McNeill Whistler . La Thangue spent the summers of 1881 and 1882 on the coast of Brittany with Forbes in a large circle of outdoor painters, including Jules Bastien-Lepage . A work from this period is Boat Builder's Yard from 1881, which was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1882 and is similar in style to the works of Bastien-Lepage. In 1883 La Thangue and the sculptor James Havard Thomas traveled to Donzère in the Rhone Valley . He exhibited his work at the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters .
After completing his studies in Paris, La Thangue returned to London in 1886, where he soon played a key role in the movement to reform the Royal Academy. La Thangue did not attend the meetings of his fellow painters Stanhope Forbes, Thomas Cooper Gotch, and John Singer Sargent that eventually led to the founding of the New English Art Club , but it was the most controversial exhibitor. At the club's first exhibition in the Egyptian Hall in 1886, he showed a large, unfinished sketch of harvest workers under the title In the Dauphiné , which aroused violent opposition. La Thangue then tried to win the club's members for the ambitious plan to create a national counter-movement to the Royal Academy by radically increasing the number of members. This brought him into conflict with William James Laidlay , who, as a senior member of the club, wanted to restrict membership. Ultimately, the plan failed due to a lack of financial support.
La Thangue lived in Norfolk for some time in the late 1880s, painting scenes of simple country life. The painting Return of the Reapers from 1886 reflects his interest in photography and photorealistic representations. In Yorkshire he created a clientele among wealthy mill owners, many of whom collected contemporary art. In the late 1880s, La Thangue visited Bradford regularly after being elected president of the Arcadian Art Club there. In the summer of 1891 La Thangue exhibited again at the Royal Academy for the first time. During this time he was significantly influenced by the Newlyn School , a major artist colony of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the early 1890s, La Thangue moved to Bosham , West Sussex , where he continued to paint large-format realistic genre paintings that sparked some controversy. In 1896 the painting The Man with the Scythe was bought by the Chantrey Foundation for the Tate Gallery . In 1898 La Thangue exhibited at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers after Whistler had invited him as its president.
In the years that followed, La Thangue showed a growing interest in French Impressionism and traveled to Provence and Liguria . Simple village scenes from these trips increasingly determined his work. Accordingly, he regretted the decline in village life in his English homeland. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I , he staged a one-man exhibition in the Leicester Galleries, where he showed a large selection of landscapes from southern Europe. The exhibition was also considered a great success by art critics. Even Walter Sickert praised in the magazine The New Age from 7. May 1914 La Thangues virtuoso use of pictorial means and effects. After the war, La Thangue stayed in Liguria again and during the 1920s concentrated all of its production on scenes of orange groves and gardens. In the late 1920s, some of his paintings were destroyed in a shipwreck off the coast of New Zealand . The artist died soon afterwards in 1929.
literature
- Adrian Jenkins: Painters and Peasants: Henry La Thangue and British Rural Naturalism , Bolton Museum 2000, ISBN 978-0906585313
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | La Thangue, Henry Herbert |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British naturalism and late impressionist painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 19, 1859 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | London |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 21, 1929 |
| Place of death | London |