The Artist(s): The brothers Le Nain—Louis, usually held to be the most talented; Antoine, who is thought to have specialized in small-scale pictures with portraitlike figures, such as the picture promised to The Met; and Matthieu, who survived his brothers by almost three decades and achieved an elevated social status—emerged into prominence over the course of the nineteenth century as quintessentially French painters who truthfully represented peasant life. Although they enjoyed a solid reputation in the seventeenth century, and were mentioned, albeit with criticism for the lowlife subjects they painted, by André Félibien in his
Entretiens sur les vies … des plus excellents peintres …, the re-evaluation of their art that secured them a respected place among the protagonists of French painting was a direct consequence of the project of nineteenth-century realist painters, spearheaded by Courbet, and the left-wing politics of the 1848 Revolution. Despite the fact that the Le Nains were advocates as well as members of the newly founded Académie (1648)—what was to become the bastion of classicism—and although Matthieu was knighted and received the title of
peintre ordinaire du Roi, the brothers came to epitomize resistance to academic traditions. Perhaps the most extreme statement on their anti-academicism was that of Charles Blanc, the author of
Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles (1865), part of a series of influential books about the history of European art. For him, the brothers “belonged to that humble and patient race of day laborers or peasants who, in the time of Richelieu, secretly prepared their future emancipation; and while the cardinal-minister considered the freedom of the bourgeoisie, they attempted, by their own industry, talent, and entry into the liberal professions, to rise from their harsh, mercenary existence to the dignity of the Third Estate.”[1] This evaluation was, of course, based above all on their peasant pictures rather than their altarpieces. The first monograph on the brothers’ art (1850) was written by Champfleury (Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson, 1821–1889), a friend and supporter of Courbet, who was also, like the Le Nains, from Laon. In 1862, he declared, “Their manner of composing a picture is antiacademic; it escapes the simplest laws … They sought reality even in their clumsy way of placing isolated figures in the middle of the canvas; in this they are the fathers of our contemporary experiments, and their reputation can only grow.” Characteristically—and importantly as an index of his rejection of academic traditions—he added, “It is of little importance to me if a figure is not positioned in correct perspective and that the back of a room seems to be a mile away. This happens in almost every painting by the Le Nains. Such awkwardness becomes their signature.”[2] In fact, Manet admired their work for its “sense of truth,” and his
Old Musician of 1862 (National Gallery of Art, Washington) owes a debt to their work.
Despite their fame, it has been difficult to establish firm biographies for the brothers—aside from Matthieu, who lived longest and was the most socially ambitious. It is known that by 1592, their father moved from a nearby village to Laon, where he achieved social status as royal sergeant of the salt storehouse, a lucrative position, and married the daughter of someone with the same title. He and his wife had five sons, three of whom became painters. When Matthieu died in 1677 (his two brothers predeceased him in 1648), he was said to be seventy years old; thus, he was born in 1607. Antoine’s birth year has been estimated to be around 1598–1600 and Louis’s around 1600–1607, but no records exist. Of potential interest for their sense of agrarian life as it appears in their paintings is the knowledge that their father invested in land, mostly vineyards, and owned a small farm, La Jumelle, that was inherited by his sons. (Matthieu pretentiously titled himself “Sieur de Jumelle.”) To run La Jumelle, a
fermier, or tenant farmer, would have been hired—a widespread practice where indebted peasants sold their land to city dwellers (what Neil MacGregor, in a fundamental study on the Le Nains, referred to as “the proletarianization of the French peasant”[3]).
Who trained Antoine, Louis, and Matthieu is not known, but they seem to have been attuned to leading currents, especially following their move to Paris, where, with a letter of recommendation from the queen, Anne of Austria (thus indicating their recognition and connections), Antoine joined the painters’ guild in 1629, and settled with his brothers in the Faubourg Saint-Germain-des-Prés. There they would have encountered resident painters from the North. Not long afterwards, they were engaged to paint a series of altarpieces for a chapel in the Convent of the Petits-Augustins, a royal foundation. Altarpieces for other churches followed, including three for Notre-Dame Cathedral. One, a
Birth of the Virgin, is still in situ; another, showing Saint Michael dedicating his arms to the Virgin—one of their masterpieces—is in Nevers. In 1632, Antoine received a commission for an official group portrait of the
échevins (aldermen) of Paris, underscoring the importance of portraiture in his work (the picture does not survive). The following year, Matthieu was awarded the civic title of
peintre ordinaire of Paris, and began taking on independent commissions. There are dated genre paintings by the Le Nains from 1641–47, which may have been the period during which most of the peasant pictures were painted, perhaps in response to the popularity of Dutch and Flemish genre pictures, as well as those by Sebastien Bourdon, who returned from Italy in 1638. Nevertheless, these pictures are the ones that have secured the Le Nains an important place in the history of French painting. The figures that inhabit them—whether standing among farm implements and houses in the countryside, or gathered in a simple interior—are depicted with great sympathy and dignity. Gone is the comedic element so frequently found in the genre paintings of the Bamboccianti in Rome and in Dutch and Flemish practice. It is this seemingly new attitude toward rural life that has raised the issues of intent, meaning, and the popularity of these pictures on the Parisian art market.
The brothers enjoyed widespread success and took on apprentices to meet the demand for their work. They also became the models for three painters in
Les galanteries de la cour by Louis Moreau de Bail, a
roman à clef published in 1644. In the novel, we encounter the first description of the relative merits of each painter: one who excelled at portraiture, the second who painted on a small scale, “where a thousand different postures studied from nature surprise and charm the senses,” and the third who not only painted portraits but also large scale works that were much esteemed. This description has served scholars in their attempt to identify which of the brothers might be responsible for which picture. Yet, whatever their particular gifts, the brothers ran a shared workshop, and the possibility of collaboration must always be considered in analyzing their paintings. We may get a glimpse of their close relationship in a picture in the Bute Collection, Scotland (see fig. 1 above), in which three painters are shown: one busy at the easel, one seated and evidently posing for his portrait, and the third who stands and holds a painter’s palette. Two other figures are also present, suggesting a family portrait including all five Le Nain brothers. An unframed canvas with a portrait of an older man is propped against the chair in the right foreground, which could be a depiction of their father, Isaac.[4] The figures are all well dressed and clearly prosperous—completely unlike the artists imagined by Charles Blanc and Champfleury. Indicative of the family enterprise, the brothers signed their paintings exclusively with their surname, Le Nain, thereby resisting individual identity. This lack of specificity has not deterred scholars from attempting to sort out their respective contributions.[5]
The Picture: Prior to 1994, The Met’s painting was unknown in the literature. It has the unique history among paintings by Le Nain of having come from an Italian collection in Lombardy, where, in the eighteenth century, Giacomo Ceruti was to paint some of the most memorable pictures of the poor in Western art. The remarkably portraitlike appearance of the figures in the picture award it a special place among the Le Nains’ works.
In a simply furnished room dominated by a large fireplace, on the mantle of which is arranged an assortment of glass and crockery, stand four children, three boys and a girl, the latter of whom is positioned behind a middle-aged, bearded man who is presumably their father. He sits on a simple rush seat chair, while their pet cat rests on the floor. Significantly, the mother is absent, which cannot help but suggest a lost story. The children, of ages ranging from around six to around thirteen, are described with attention to individualized characters: the sweet, smiling child playing a flute; the confident, eldest boy standing apart from the others, his feet firmly planted, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his red jacket; the youth in the background who is passing through the self-conscious stage of adolescence when physical changes bring about an uneasy sense of awkwardness; the wide-eyed, innocent face of devotion worn by the young girl; the evident pride of the father, who holds on his lap a straw-encased flask of wine—evidently emblematic of the success of his labors, as he holds no glass with which to drink it. Three of the figures (and the cat) look out at the viewer. All convey acute awareness of the act of posing, creating an inevitable analogy with nineteenth-century photography, in which individuals posed in the artist’s studio before a chosen backdrop. The analogy with photography extends to the room, which, it can be said with certainty, is not the family’s, for many of the same features of this domestic setting occur in other paintings by the Le Nains (for example: Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 519 and RF 1941.20; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, AP 1984.22; and Lowther Castle, Penrith). There is a fire in the fireplace, conspicuously costly brass andirons, which also appear in other paintings, and a three-legged ceramic pot for cooking. It is the repetition of these features in other pictures that poses the question of intent, the problem of interpretation, and the degree of fiction.
The figures in The Met’s picture are unquestionably not well-to-do, city-dwelling bourgeois, such as those who appear, for example, in
The Musical Reunion (inv. 1067) or
Portraits in an Interior (RF 519) in the Louvre (the latter is set in the same room; see fig. 2), but neither are they the peasants of a picture like
The Peasant Family (Louvre, RF 2081). Their economic security becomes apparent when a comparison is made between their apparel and the patched clothes and wooden clogs worn by the figures in Jean Michelin’s
The Baker’s Cart (
27.59). The figures in The Met’s picture wear leather shoes—something that is not true in either
The Peasant Family or
The Peasants Meal in the Louvre (MI 1088; fig. 3), where bare feet are conspicuous. The choice of footwear has been thought important, as leather shoes were extremely costly. In The Met’s picture, the young boy standing before the fireplace wears clothes particularly unlikely to have been owned by an impoverished peasant (for example, his laced doublet). In the painting known as
The Cart (Louvre, inv. 258), which shows a mother with an infant seated on the ground and seven children of various ages among a dilapidated farm building and cart, the figures also wear shoes. This has been taken to indicate that they are not peasants but the children of the tenant farmer. The same has been thought true of the adult male figure in
The Resting Horseman (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; CAI.17). We are thus confronted with the question of the implications of class distinctions, the presumed veracity of the Le Nains’ depiction of peasant life, and the relationship of their pictures to the dynamics of the Parisian art market where, inevitably, they were sold. Was the intention of these pictures documentary, as nineteenth-century scholarship assumed, or did their appeal reside in an idealizing vision of peasant life?
Given the individualized characterization of the five figures in The Met’s painting, it is also worth asking whether some of the paintings were intended not as genre paintings of rural life but as family portraits, staged either in the studio of the artist or against a fictionalized interior of the artist’s invention. Or, did the presumed market appeal of such works reside in their highly particularized image of a peasant family, with—in the case of The Met’s picture—the suggestive narrative implications of the absent mother?
Attribution: Of the three brothers, Louis Le Nain is generally considered the finest painter and the author of such remarkable pictures as
The Peasants’ Meal (fig. 3) and
The Forge (inv. 6838) in the Louvre, as well as the marvelous, life size
Rest on the Flight into Egypt (private collection). Louis’s figures are perhaps less insistent on the detailed, portrait-like particularity of those in The Met’s painting, and are distinguished by their greater pictorial refinement, attention to the effects of light, and universality. By contrast, to Antoine are ascribed the small-scale genre scenes, often on a copper support, with figures painted with a high degree of individual characterization amounting to portraiture. These differences find accord with two of our only early sources relating to the artists—the novel of 1644 mentioned above, and a 1726 history of Laon that derived its information from a great-nephew of the painters. These sources extoll Antoine for his mastery of portraiture, imitation of nature, and his excellence at painting “miniatures and small portraits.” The Met’s picture belongs with the works that modern scholarship ascribes to Antoine, as recognized by Milovanovic (see Refs.). However, as was remarked when the picture was exhibited in the Le Nain exhibition at The Kimbell Art Museum in 2016, the picture displays “a technical virtuosity that surpasses many of the other small coppers in that group.” In his review of the exhibition, Jean Pierre Cuzin (2016) allowed that, although the picture is probably by Antoine, its quality is of a level normally associated with Louis. This overlap is another characteristic of the art of the three brothers and their common workshop. Like others, Cuzin has commented on the fact that in view of the setting, dominated by the enormous fireplace and the ceramics, the figures are unlikely to be peasants. As noted above, this observation takes us to the crux of the problem of interpreting not only The Met’s picture, but other peasant paintings by the Le Nains.
Some thoughts regarding the conflicting interpretations of the Le Nains’ work: From their interpretation in the nineteenth century as straightforward depictions of peasant life, to more recent discussions regarding their possible evocation of acts of charity or their relationship to the transfer of landownership from peasants to city dwellers, the Le Nains’ genre paintings continue to inspire debate. In looking at these so-called peasant pictures, it is important to recall that they belong to a much broader European current than was imagined in the nineteenth or even the early twentieth century. They relate not only to the paintings of the still anonymous Maître des Corteges and Jean Michelin in France, but also to those of Michael Sweerts in the Netherlands and Italy, the recently identified pictures ascribed to an anonymous Master of the Blue Jeans, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's well-known depictions of street urchins.[6] Who are the people that inhabit the Le Nains’ paintings? What social group(s) do they actually represent? Who were the patrons, and what was the motivating factor in the marketplace for these works? There can be no doubt that they are carefully staged fictions rather than records of particular scenes. But what are the theme and significance of their variations?
Take the fireplace depicted in The Met’s picture: as noted above, it recurs in
Portraits in an Interior (fig. 2). Like The Met’s, the picture is also painted on copper, and is probably by Antoine. However, it includes figures from two separate social classes. A well-dressed man in bourgeois garb stands at the extreme left. He must be the father of the two fashionably dressed young girls, one of whom has a feather in her hair, while the other wears a pearl necklace. Their mother is presumably the woman with carefully coiffed hair and a pearl necklace standing behind a more modestly dressed older couple seated at a table with a tankard and glass of wine. The social distinctions seem clear and intentional, and suggest a narrative. Are these out-of-place city dwellers visiting their tenant farmer, as has been suggested? Or are they on a mission of charity (in which case, we might wonder at their assertion of social superiority through their dress)? In the picture at Lowther Castle we once again find the same room and crockery—a kind of modest backdrop—as the setting for a children’s dance, in this case presumably peasant children. The picture exists in three versions, underscoring the market demand for such a subject. There can be no doubt that what we are seeing in these various pictures is, on some level, a fiction—an invention of the artist(s). One is reminded of Gainsborough’s later pictures of the poor (
89.15.8 and
50.145.17), which were admired as “fancy pieces,” by which was understood a painting depicting a scene of everyday life but with elements of imagination, invention, and/or storytelling. The manner in which the Le Nains varied the components of what we might think of as the stage props is made clear in
The Peasants’ Meal (fig. 3), where we find the identical fireplace in an expanded room viewed from a different angle with its furnishings further elaborated. A costly lead-paned window is shown as well as an elegant columned bed with an embroidered and fringed silk valence. These furnishings are totally at odds with the rough-hewn, three legged stool, common in peasant dwellings, on which a barefoot man demurely sits, hunched over, with his hands politely or reverentially folded.[7] Adding to the apparent anachronism of the scene, two of the figures drink wine from glasses and a youth holds a violin (rather than the more common and less expensive flute). The central figure—the one holding a stemmed goblet and not wearing patched clothes—strikes a dignified pose, unlike the deferential ones around him.
In the nineteenth century, the picture was seen to have religious overtones, and its theme is now commonly related to the Catholic reform and its encouragement of acts of charity. In the American catalogue of the 2016 Le Nain exhibition, it was proposed that paintings such as this one may have something to do with the Société du Saint Sacrament and its charitable activities.[8] To understand how pictures such as this one related to charitable work is a line of research that has also been pursued in understanding Murillo’s paintings of poor children as well as those of Giacomo Ceruti in the eighteenth century.[9] An alternative line of research goes back to a groundbreaking essay of 1979 by Neil MacGregor, who remarked: “If we are to explain these paintings and the attitudes they embody, one must look, I believe, not to courtly fashion, but to a totally different literature, related to the wide-reaching economic and social changes which affected the whole of the region in which the Le Nains were born and lived.”[10] He noted the widespread phenomenon of the transfer of ownership of farmland in the seventeenth century from indebted peasants to city-dwelling investors, and the subsequent running of these farms by the tenant farmers. He further suggested, as a conditioning factor for their appearance, the influence of certain classical texts dealing with agriculture on their owners (especially Varro’s
On Husbandry of the 1st century BC), remarking, “If these paintings were commissioned—or at least bought—by readers of these books, who shared the ideals of family life led soberly on a country estate, then the problems of sensibility and patronage would largely be resolved.” The pictures, he imagined, show an emerging, upwardly mobile social class: the tenant farmers. It is, indeed, true that the peasants depicted in some of the pictures—for example, the Peasant Interior with
Old Flute Player in Fort Worth—are depicted with great dignity, while those shown in outdoor settings convey an almost Virgilian sense of solidarity with nature. Following the alternative lines of reasoning proposed, we might imagine the central figure in the Louvre
Peasants’ Meal as a member of the Saint-Sacrament making a charitable visit to a peasant family. (The bread and wine on the table have been viewed as carrying a sacramental meaning.) Or, alternatively, it may be the landowner who, as described by MacGregor, had lent money to the peasants and then seized ownership of their property when they could not repay their debts, turning the previous owner-peasants into his tenants: happy tenants, the owner of their former property may have wished to believe, grateful (and deferential) to their new master for rescuing them from their debts. The Met’s picture offers yet a further variation on the possible interpretations of these paintings because of its apparent emphasis on portraiture. The anachronisms seen in some of these pictures, such as the inclusion of a bichon, a prized breed of dog, suggest that what may have been at issue was both the suggestion of a narrative component as well as the occasion for demonstrations of pictorial mastery aimed at seducing a potential buyer.[11] In other words, as argued by Nicolas Milovanovic, these are pictures responding to market dynamics but are incorporating a particular vision.
Champfleury, writing in 1860, accepted the Le Nains as “historians” who “teach us more about the customs of the time than do historians.” What the pictures may actually teach us is the inventive capacities of the Le Nains in constructing paintings that appealed to a new landowning class, themselves included. These very beautiful works have become sentimentalized through literary conventions as well as our own nostalgia for the imagined virtues of an agrarian culture. The influential 1934 exhibition "Les Peintres de la Realité" canonized this quasi-hagiographic approach, eliciting
la vraie France, and in the catalogue of the 1978 landmark exhibition in Paris, Jacques Thuillier poetically placed the roots of French identity in the world of the peasant,
la paysannerie. It is important to remember that these marvelously evocative paintings by the Le Nains find a place in a long tradition extending back to the labors of the months on the portals of Gothic cathedrals in the
Très Riches Heures of the Limbourg brothers, to the backgrounds of countless depictions of the Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds. The transformative event was the rise of an urban clientele. As already noted, what the Le Nains downplay in their genre paintings is the comedic condescension that characterized so much lowlife painting throughout Europe. We understand why the Le Nains’ work, with peasant scenes as its subject, would have been criticized by André Félibien, the biographer of Poussin, for the absence of an elevated subject, and why the same pictures would have so appealed to Champfleury—the friend of Courbet, with leftist political views and a commitment to a truthful rendition of the rawness of rural life that soon became a staple of the realist novel. Champfleury found in the Le Nains a historical link or precedent for the new realism. But that should not keep us from probing the possible social and religious contexts that provided the catalyst for these eloquent pictures. We need to understand them as pictorial fictions that came into being in response to a particular demand by the art market of their day and that, because of the originality with which the brothers responded to that demand, had an enduring influence on subsequent generations of painters.
Keith Christiansen 2019
[1] For a survey of nineteenth-century views of the Le Nains, see Emerson Bowyer, “The Brothers Le Nain: Painters of Nineteenth-century France,” in Dickerson and Bell 2016, pp. 79–89. I have taken the quotes from this study. Equally: Luc Piralla-Heng Vong, “Les frères Le Nain: Peintres de la réalité au XIXe siècle,” in Milovanovic and Vong 2017, pp. 21–33. The exhibition, although co-organized, had two very different presentations in the United States and in France and two decisively different catalogues.
[2] The translation is from Bowyer 2016, p. 85.
[3] Neil MacGregor, “The Le Nain Brothers and Changes in French Rural Life,”
Art History, vol. 2, no. 4, 1979, p. 403.
[4] These identifications are reviewed in Dickerson and Bell 2016, pp. 216–18, no. 29.
[5] Very different conclusions regarding the division of works among the three brothers were proposed in the French versus the American catalogue for the 2016–17 Le Nain exhibitions in San Francisco, Fort Worth, and Lens. I tend toward the divisions proposed in the French catalogue.
[6] For the Maître des Cortèges and Michelin, see Frédérique Lanöe, “Autour des Le Nain: Quelques peintres de la réalité au XVIIe siècle,” in Milovanovic and Vong 2017, pp. 91–99. For the fascinating, recent creation of the Master of the Blue Jeans, who seems to have exclusively painted images of the poor, see Gerlinde Gruber,
The Master of the Blue Jeans: A New Painter of Reality in Late 17th century Europe, exh. cat., Gallerie Canesso, Paris, 2010. The social, religious, charitable, and literary contexts for viewing Murillo’s paintings is reviewed by Benito Navarrete Prieto in
El Joven Murillo, exh. cat., Bilbao, Seville, 2009, pp. 252–57 (English trans. pp. 536–37), who makes reference to the work of Yun Casalilla,
La historia imaginada: Construcciones visuals del pasado en la Edad Moderna, Madrid, 2008.
[7] For a detailed study of peasant life in seventeenth-century France based on detailed analysis of archival sources, see Pierre Goubert,
Les paysans français au XVIIe siècle, Paris, 1982, ed. 2013. In the chapter titled “Maisons: dehors dedans,” he describes the furnishings of a “typical” peasant dwelling.
[8] Alain Tallon, “The Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement: Organized Charity in the Paris of the Le Nains,” in Dickerson and Bell 2016, pp. 59–67.
[9] For Murillo, see note 6; for Ceruti, see the fine essays by Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti, in Francesco Porzio, ed.,
Da Caravaggio a Ceruti: La scena di genere e l'immagine dei pitocchi nella pittura italiana, exh. cat., Brescia, 1998.
[10] MacGregor 1979, p. 402.
[11] Milovanovic and Vong 2017, p. 172.
