Boy and Girl in Spring Landscape
Maker
Léon-Augustin Lhermitte
(French, 1844-1925)
Daten.d.
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions35 1/2 x 43 1/2 in. (90.2 x 110.5 cm)
Framed: 46 1/2 × 54 5/16 in. (118.1 × 138 cm)
Framed: 46 1/2 × 54 5/16 in. (118.1 × 138 cm)
Credit LineGift of Mrs. Susan B. Rubnitz
Object number2002.49
Status
Not on viewA painter and printmaker, Léon Augustin Lhermitte was also a skilled draftsman who exhibited drawings at the Paris Salon over a period of twenty-five years. Edgar Degas was interested in recruiting him into the Impressionist group, but Lhermitte never exhibited with them—perhaps because his preferred subject matter, rural labor, was at odds with the Impressionist emphasis on urban and suburban bourgeois leisure. Lhermitte championed the peasant, and his monumental paintings of agricultural workers prompted Vincent van Gogh to call him “Millet the Second,” after Jean-François Millet, a leading mid-19th-century realist painter. Many of Lhermitte’s works focus on varieties of peasant labor—such as the twenty-eight illustrations that were used in André Theuriet’s book La vie rustique (Rustic Life). The Smart’s charming landscape painting is unusual in Lhermitte’s oeuvre because of its emphasis on carefree, perhaps even amorous, leisure. In a soft light, the boy and girl sit on a rise with flowering trees, while a broad pastoral landscape stretches behind them.
