La moisson (The Harvest)

Léon Lhermitte

1883

Exhibited at the French Salon of 1883 and the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and reproduced in numerous newspapers and periodicals, Léon-Augustin Lhermitte’s La moisson was the most celebrated of his scenes of rural life. The third in a series of six paintings heroicizing peasant laborers, Lhermitte’s large canvas is executed in a version of the Realist style of painting developed in the mid-nineteenth century that portrayed rural peasantry and the lower classes with the dignity and seriousness of academic historical, allegorical, and religious painting. With a close, monumental focus on the figures absorbed in their work in the field, Lhermitte’s painting meticulously documents the customs, dress, and tools of the region around Mont-Saint-Père at the time. Images like this delighted urban middle-class audiences who envisioned a simple, more “primitive” rural life as a reprieve from their daily routines. Initially political in intention, later realist images such as this one presented a harmonious ideal of a bountiful, peaceful world that overlooks the real hardships and plights of the lower classes. [Permanent collection label, 2016]

Artist Léon Lhermitte (French, 1844–1925)
Title La moisson (The Harvest)
Date 1883
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions unframed | 92 x 104 5/16 in.
Credit line University purchase, Parsons Fund, 1912
Object number WU 2707

Technique oil painting
Work type painting
Theme Workers and Labor
Landscape

Real / Radical / Psychological: The Collection on Display
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 09/09/2016 - 01/15/2017

The Barbizon School and the Nature of Landscape
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 05/02/2008 - 07/21/2008

Beginnings: The Taste of the Founders
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/21/2000 - 03/19/2000

Art in the Age of Revolution
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 09/02/1997 - 10/12/1997

Nineteenth Century Art from the Collection
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/19/1986 - 04/01/1986

Diversity in the Salon: Late 19th-Century French Academic Art
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 06/02/1985 - 08/11/1985

Life and Land in Nineteenth Century Europe
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 11/06/1983 - 04/22/1984

Nature and the Figure
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/09/1983 - 03/06/1983

Parsons Collection
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 05/15/1983 - 08/21/1983

Other than Monet
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 09/01/1978 - 10/05/1978

Charles Parsons: Portrait of a St. Louis Collector
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 12/12/1976 - 01/30/1977

Léon-Augustin Lhermitte Retrospective
Paine Art Center and Arboretum (Oshkosh, Wisconsin), 09/07/1974 - 11/03/1974

Salon de Resserre: Selections of European and American Art of the Nineteenth Century from the Washington University Collections
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 02/01/1970 - 03/06/1970

Salon de 1883
Palais des Champs-Élysées (Paris, France), 05/01/1883

1912
Arthur Tooth and Son

Inscription [LR of canvas, in black paint:] L. Lhermitte / 1883

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