Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Léon-Augustin Lhermitte
French; 19th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism)
28%
The Gleaners. 1887. Oil on canvas
Beyond the superficial affinity with Monet via that haystack, this painting is instructive, negatively, as to what the real value of Impressionism was. Painters other than Pissarro and Sisley — painters like Lhermitte — were capable of making their surfaces into tumults of brushwork, and of registering the minutiae of light's effects by sensitively but freely placing their pigments. So what separates this guy from the late 19th-century Frenchmen who actually painted good paintings? To a small extent, it's a difference in degree rather than kind: the surface of this painting, though dominant, isn't nearly as pugnacious as those of Impressionism; the nonlocal colors never really kick against the supremacy of the "natural" order of things. But this doesn't quite get at it. What the problem really is is a problem of space and order. Not only do those bent women, so realistically painted, look awkward and academic against the expanse of canvas before and behind them, but they actually manage to subordinate to themselves the significant amount of painting that goes on in this painting. What this amounts to is a retarding of the development of full-bodied pictorial space: that gap between the first and the second woman from the left is worth nothing, that between the haystack and the picture's right edge even less. (TFS, 2026)