LE NAIN, Matthieu

The Le Nain brothers are considered, above all, painters of peasant scenes. Nonetheless, secular compositions, such as the Bacchus and Ariadne, are painted in the full, solid style typical of the Le Nains.

The Le Nain brothers are considered, above all, painters of peasant scenes. Nonetheless, secular compositions, such as the Bacchus and Ariadne, are painted in the full, solid style typical of the Le Nains.

The Reims Venus and the Forge are close in style, in the latter the artist simply removed Venus and painted a straightforward genre picture in which he could concentrate on the most sympathetic rendering of men working in a forge.

The smith himself looks towards the spectator as if he has been disturbed by the artist and asked to hold the pose while a photograph is taken. The other figures look in different directions, exactly as a group of people will do today when caught unawares by the camera. Especially perceptive is the depiction of the seated old man on the right - he is staring into space exactly as many old people tend to do, particularly when they are preoccupied with something which is not part of the event in front of them. The gazes of the three children are alert but lacking the concentration of the adults. Thus the painters of this picture have observed, for the first time in French painting, a ‘slice of life’.

The depiction of the better-off peasantry is interesting from a sociological point of view because there are so few renderings of that class, but, even more important, it showed that masterpieces could be produced from humble material. This realistic treatment of ‘low’ subjects was not to be found again in French art until Courbet in the nineteenth century.

A series of small pictures, mainly on copper, depicting groups of diminutive figures, painted in strong and rich colours, and naively placed with no great care of calculated composition, is attributed to Antoine Le Nain. Most of these groups are portraits of bourgeois families shown in the surroundings of their own houses.

The early years of the three Le Nain brothers, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu, are ill-documented, and their individual artistic identities are submerged under the surname with which they signed their works. They were born in Laon between 1600 and 1610 and were working in Paris by 1629; Antoine and Louis died within a day or two of each other in May 1648 but Mathieu survived until 1677. All three became members of the French Royal Academy at its formation in 1648. In circumstances which have not yet been clarified, Mathieu seems to have enjoyed the personal protection of Louis XIV for ‘his services in the armies of the King’, and from 1658 aspired to the nobility.

Although the Le Nain first made their reputation with large-scale mythological and allegorical compositions and altarpieces (many of which were lost during the French Revolution) and continued to receive commissions of this type, they are now chiefly known for their small and striking paintings of ‘low-life’, especially those depicting peasants. Recent scholarship has associated their new kind of realistic rustic genre, neither romanticising nor satirising country dwellers, with an emergent class of bourgeois landowners whose ideals of the dignity of agricultural labour and of the partnership between owners of land and tenant farmers they seem to reflect.

Four Figures at Table is one of many ‘peasant meals’ painted by the Le Nain. The strong light falling from the upper left emphasises the darkness and stillness of the humble but respectable interior - brightened only by the well-washed linen - at the same time as it delineates form, texture and expression. It has been suggested that the picture depicts the Three Ages, the old woman’s lined face, marked by resignation, contrasting with the interrogatory glance of the young woman, the wide-eyed eagerness or apprehension of the little girl and the contented indifference of the boy cutting the bread. But an allegorical interpretation seems neither necessary nor probable; the painting speaks to us directly of shared human destiny, borne with dignity.

What looks like a pentimento, a painter’s change of mind, in the face of the little boy has been revealed by X-radiography to be a crimson ornament in the costume of a bust-length portrait of a bearded man painted underneath. This figure is not a sketch, but a finished, or nearly finished, work. He wears a ruff and a grey doublet with cream braiding. Whether the sitter refused the portrait, or was painted in preparation for a larger picture or an engraving, we do not know, but it seems that not long afterwards, and in the same studio, this prosperous citizen was effaced by four country people at their frugal meal.

Four Figures at a Table is among the most celebrated of the Le Nain brothers’ compositions. It is known in many copies, the version in the National Gallery, London is considered to be an original.

The present canvas is only the second version to be attributed definitively to the brothers. It is by a different brother than the one who executed the London version. It is largely the work of Mathieu, who often revised his brothers’ pieces.

The painting, an interior scene, features four peasants: a young boy, a small girl, a young woman and an older woman. But this variation contains elements that appear in no other known version of the composition, including the picture in the National Gallery. In all other versions, the interior is entirely bare-bones, but here there are elements of pots and crockery.

This painting belongs to a group of the finest and most original compositions by the Le Nain brothers with which the name of Louis had long been associated. Among the small group of outdoor scenes by the Le Nain brothers, this is perhaps the only true landscape. Even the comparable Landscape with Peasants and a Chapel (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), the focus is on the figures in the foreground, who largely block the view into the distance. In the Landscape with Peasants, on the other hand, the crisply drawn and strongly individuated figures take second place to the compelling view of open fields and sky. Many writers have remarked on Le Nain’s independence from both the convention of classical landscape made famous by Claude Lorrain and Poussin and the formulas of the naturalistic Dutch landscape painters.

Like their peasant scenes, the landscapes of the Le Nain brothers are careful observations of what they saw, rather than derivations from other painters’ works. An example is this painting, in which, although figures dominate the foreground, the main effort has been concentrated on the landscape. In the distance there is a large village with traces of its decaying fortifications, and a small Gothic chapel outside its walls. Such a sight may still be seen today, in the remoter parts of northern and eastern France. Again, the Le Nain brothers have told us what the people and the landscape of the time looked like.

Unlike in contemporary Dutch genre painting, Le Nain’s compositions indicate neither peasant labours and leisure nor the common people’s hard lot. Indeed, the expensive copper churn and clothing evoke prosperity. This family is more a symbolic expression of the unity between the inhabitants of central France and their native land. The contrived combination of a monumental group standing on a hillock as if on a pedestal, with a majestic panoramic view unfolding behind, has a certain elevated pomp.

This painting is the collective work of Louis and Antoine Le Nain. The three brothers produced their work collectively. This is supported by the fact that they never used any other form of signature but ‘Le Nain’, as a kind of studio stamp. It explains the existence of complex pictures where brilliant passages of paintings are to be found alongside mediocre areas executed by assistants or pupils. But there are also others of a high level where the brothers worked alone or with each other, without help from outsiders.

The Louvre has two paintings depicting peasant families by Le Nain, one of them is an austere and virile work. This one, however, strikes a note of profound intimacy, a warmth of spirit, like the atmosphere of a domestic festivity.

The general harmony of greys and browns is in keeping with the spirit of austerity reigning in French painting in the time of Louis XIII. Unlike the Flemings, who made their scenes of rustic life an occasion for depicting the unleashing of the coarsest sensual instincts, Louis Le Nain saw in the peasant soul a profound gravity, even solemnity; the expression of a life of toil whose hard realities have bestowed on it a sense of its own dignity. The paint quality is flowing and rich, with touches of impasto used not simply for effect, as in the work of Frans Hals, but giving proof of a sensitive brush, searching out the modelling with attention and feeling.

Several early copies give evidence of the paintings reputation.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 26 minutes):

Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata BWV 212 (Bauernkantate)

In the pictures of peasant interiors by the Le Nain brothers there is as much diversity as in the exterior scenes, and attempts have een made to group them round each of the brothers. The categories into which they have been divided make sense, even if no name can convincingly attached to each one. Closest to the Dutch models, especially to the art of Jan Miense Molenaer, is the group of peasant scenes painted on a minute scale. One of the best is the Peasant Interior in Washington, signrd ‘Lenain fecit’ and dated 1642.

Although exquisitely painted, the figures seem to be in a very curious spatial relationship with one another; the mother seems far too small and the children far too big. All their expressions are lively and alert and, as usual in Le Nain, they look in different directions, as if caught by surprise.

In this painting the approach is unusually stark for the Le Nain brothers. Instead of a landscape background, there is a two-storey house belonging to the peasants, whose relative prosperity is indicated by the glass in the windows (all over Europe at this time many of the poorer classes lived in conditions far more primitive than those recorded by the Le Nain brothers).

This unassuming picture is one of the most perceptive paintings to be produced in the 1640s. As in the Forge, the treatment of the low-life subject is given a totally unexpected dignity. The boy on the right and the old man next to him stare through us into space, and together they counterbalance the large area of pale stone of the house behind them. Into their expressions the artist have distilled a timelessness as far removed from anecdote as possible. Whereas in Georges de La Tour this timelessness is easier to understand because of the spiritual content of his subjects, in the depiction of a peasant’s face it is rare for the artist not to be interested in telling a story, but simply to be observing what he sees. This approach, which was to preoccupy many of the most important painters of the nineteenth century, from Courbet to the Impressionists, was an anachronism in the seventeenth century and the reason why the Le Nain brothers were so untypical of artists of their time.

Not all the Le Nain genre scenes depict peasants. Some of them show middle-class sitters, even rarer in art than the depiction of the poor. It is one of these larger ‘bourgeois compositions’ which admits the Le Nain brothers into that small group of painters capable of creating a masterpiece. This is the Smokers in an Interior in the Louvre, dated 1643. Its technique must have been learned during the painting of the Forge, but the brushwork is far more precise. The composition is much less original, being closer to the type familiar from the Dutch. The figures are grouped round a table illuminated by a solitary candle, and the figure on the left has fallen asleep at the table.

In this painting it seems that the depiction of low life - here middle-class men smoking in an interior - has risen beyond its normal pictorial limitations to create a masterpiece which is, perforce, unexpected. While Nicolas Poussin was obsessed with the concept of beauty and with the need to be able to paint exactly what he thought, here the painter’s desire arises from an opposite need, the need to observe. Each of the models appears to be a portrait, although it is difficult to explain why the sitters should have chosen to be depicted with such casualness. There is no clue to the possibility of a confraternity, although the curious emblems on the carpet on the table could be symbols of some secret society. The eerie quality of the picture is emphasized by the fall of the shadows on the faces and by the way in which the figures stare into space just like the peasants in other pictures and the seated figure on the right has all the appearance of being under the influence of some drug.

There is no satisfactory explanation for such a picture; it is as if this trio of painters, observers of a small fragment of their times, never intended the meanings of their pictures to be divined.

Each of the models appears to be a portrait, although it is difficult to explain why the sitters should have chosen to be depicted with such casualness. There is no clue to the possibility of a confraternity, although the curious emblems on the carpet on the table could be symbols of some secret society. The eerie quality of the picture is emphasized by the fall of the shadows on the faces and by the way in which the figures stare into space just like the peasants in other pictures and the seated figure on the right has all the appearance of being under the influence of some drug.

This painting is usually attributed to Louis Le Nain who takes the first place with his gatherings of peasants full of simple dignity and restrained energy and his new interest in country people.

The painting is also titled Return from Baptism.

A series of small pictures, mainly on copper, depicting groups of diminutive figures, painted in strong and rich colours, and naively placed with no great care of calculated composition, is attributed to Antoine Le Nain. Most of these groups are portraits of bourgeois families shown in the surroundings of their own houses.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 6 minutes):

Fran�ois Couperin: Pieces de clavicen (excerpts)

The Louvre has two paintings depicting peasant families by Le Nain. This one of them is an austere and virile work. The other one, however, strikes a note of profound intimacy, a warmth of spirit, like the atmosphere of a domestic festivity.

The group of paintings usually attributed to Louis Le Nain generally said to represent peasants, however, to figures in, for instance the Resting Horseman are too well-dressed to be true peasants, who in the 1640s had been reduced to a very low level of existence. They probably represent the members of the bourgeoisie who had begun to buy land near the Le Nain brother’s native town.

Modern scholarship has revealed that there is no sufficient information to differentiate between the works of the three Le Nain brothers, Louis, Antoine and Mathieu, and prefers instead to consider their work thematically under the surname of Le Nain. This small painting on copper illustrates one of the themes for which the Le Nain brothers were famous: a genre scene without a specific narrative content representing a street musician surrounded by urchins. The subject is surprising if one considers French painting of the seventeenth century primarily as the reflection of the grandiose taste of the royal court. Such intimate works were nevertheless executed in response to a growing demand from an appreciative middle-class clientele.

The representation of a group of children is frequent in the work of the Le Nain brothers. These small-format paintings depict children singing or playing, arranged in simple compositions such as the present one. Here the figures are all standing, arranged almost in a straight line.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 17 minutes):

Jean-Baptiste Lully: Le bourgeois gentilhomme, suite

It is unusual for this often repeated mythological subject to be treated as a genre piece, although this occurs in Vel�zquez’s celebrated picture in the Prado, Madrid.

The problem of collaboration of the three Le Nain brothers is highlighted in the Venus at the Forge of Vulcan. It is dated 1641 which was during the last period when all three brothers were alive. In this painting the figure of Venus herself seems an uneasy adaptation of a Renaissance model. Perhaps including an obvious quotation was the artist’s way of making it plain to the client that the picture had a well-known precedent.

The rest of the picture, however, reveals great powers of observation. Especially perceptive are the two figures in the background, silhouetted against the light of the furnace. In all the French art of the seventeenth century, this is the first time that a painter has been able to observe nature without adding mannerisms of his own: even Georges de La Tour at his most realistic created an artificial world in which everything was secondary to his fascination with candlelight. Here, the figure on the left glances towards Venus in a completely natural way, and it is this naturalism, which occurs again and again in parts of their pictures, that sets the Le Nain brothers apart from all their French contemporaries.

You can view other representations of Venus and Vulcan in the Web Gallery of Art.

Louis Le Nain was one of the three painter brothers who worked together, mainly on commissions from the Parisian aristocracy. In the 1640s they turned their hand to peasant scenes that had then come in fashion. Devoid of technical luster, their interiors are striking for the interweaving of several melodic threads: approaching and retreating figures, illuminated and shady areas, and the glances the personages seem to give each other before turning a common hospitable gaze to the viewer and the world.

Contemporaries of Rembrandt van Rijn and Diego Vel�zquez, the Le Nain brothers – Antoine, Louis, and Mathieu – created some of the most beautiful and enigmatic paintings of the seventeenth century. These rosy-cheeked children appear to play cards innocently, however they are actually trying to cheat the well-dressed boy, second from right. While the Le Nains did not individually sign their works, recent scholarship has suggested that Antoine preferred to work on smaller, rigid supports like panel or copper.

Within the work of the Le Nain brothers, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu, their genre paintings are the most appreciated, although they also produced religious and mythological compositions and portraits. As genre painters their most popular subjects were those that depicted the world of the French peasant, who is presented as poor and humble but dignified.

Le Nain brothers used their family surname on the works that they signed, but did not include their names or initials. The results of this practice have been widely debated by art historians, who have attempted to distinguish between the styles and hands of the three brothers. According to contemporary sources, Antoine, to whom the present panel is attributed, was outstanding for his miniatures and small-format portraits.

This type of painting of a group of children is frequent in the work of Antoine Le Nain. These small-format paintings depict children singing or playing, arranged in simple compositions such as the present one. Here the figures, which are all standing, are arranged almost in a straight line, with the three boys slightly more to the foreground occupying the centre and right half of the composition. Two of them are playing a small tambourine and a stringed instrument while the one in the middle is singing. Slightly behind them and on the left are two girls. The greys, browns and earth tones that prevail in the foreground and in the clothes of the children contrast with some areas of bright, strong local colour such as the red of two of the jackets and the blue apron.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 20 minutes):

Fran�ois Couperin: Les Nations - La Fran�aise