Léon-Augustin L'Hermitte

Léon-Augustin Lhermitte (1844-1925) was one of the most celebrated French painters and pastellists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose deeply observed scenes of French peasant life carried the tradition of Jean-François Millet into the modern era. Born in the small village of Mont-Saint-Père in northeastern France, he grew up in the rural countryside that would remain the essential subject of his art for the rest of his life. He pursued his artistic training in Paris under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, the celebrated drawing master whose emphasis on visual memory and careful observation shaped generations of French artists.

Lhermitte purportedly began working in pastels in 1885, the year before his first exhibition at the Société des Pastellistes Français. There at the Georges Petit Gallery in Paris he exhibited twelve pastels which portrayed daily peasant life around his birthplace of Mont-Saint-Père. This exhibition would establish Lhermitte as one of the foremost proponents of works executed in pastel, and he helped to found the Pastellistes and went on to mentor younger artists in the medium. His mastery of pastel gave his rural subjects a distinctive luminosity and warmth that placed him alongside his contemporaries Degas, Renoir, and Cassatt in the great late nineteenth-century revival of the medium.

Alongside his pastels, Lhermitte produced major oil paintings and drawings depicting harvesters, gleaners, shepherds, market women, and the small village communities of the Aisne region. His painting The Wages of the Harvesters, purchased by the French state, is among his most admired works. Vincent van Gogh so admired Lhermitte's compositions that he wrote about them repeatedly in his letters, and the older master's influence is clearly visible in Van Gogh's own peasant subjects. Lhermitte was elevated through the ranks of the Legion of Honor, ultimately reaching the rank of Commander in 1911, one of the highest recognitions available to a French artist. His paintings and pastels are held today in the Musée d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum, and other major international collections. Van Gogh once referred to Lhermitte as "Millet the Second" and wrote of him in the following passage:

"…if every month "Le Monde Illustré" published one of his compositions…it would be a great pleasure for me to be able to follow it. It is certain that for years I have not seen anything as beautiful as this scene by Lhermitte…I am too preoccupied by Lhermitte this evening to be able to talk of other things."

—Van Gogh

L'Hermitte's use of pastels helped to usher in and reinforce the growing acceptance of the use of pastels in art in France.