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Lot Essay
The Little Goose Girl of Mézy is Léon Lhermitte's most important single-figure painting, a work that forthrightly declares its modernity in the directness of the young goose girl's interaction with the viewer and in the slashing knife and brushwork that so tangibly conveys the stubbled grain field on which she stands. Lhermitte exhibited The Little Goose Girl of Mézy at the breakaway Salon of the new Société nationale des beaux-arts in 1892 along with his L'Ami des humbles, a retelling of Christ's Supper at Emmaus in modern dress (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), capping a decade of extraordinary success marked by government purchases, international recognition and popular acclaim.
Tending geese was one of the responsibilities assigned to a farm child, and many French painters used the activity for light-hearted pictures emphasizing the mischievousness of animals and children alike. Lhermitte, however, focused on the goose girl herself, giving her features a portrait-quality immediacy, and using the flock behind this attractive young country girl simply to explain her solitary presence in the field. With her small bundle of grain, Lhermitte underlined her industriousness, indicating that this goose girl has been doing double-duty, gathering up stalks of wheat missed by the departed reapers as well as watching her feathered charges. Although her tattered apron may suggest poverty, the plump geese and massive grain stack incorporate her into a prosperous farm; and she looks out at the observer with a quizzical nonchalance that bespeaks settled confidence, not victimhood. In such circumstances, the shredded garment seems to be merely protective field wear, a well-worn hand-me-down. By 1892, the wide-spread antagonism that greeted Jean-François Millet's paintings of working peasants thirty years earlier (see lot 9) had largely disappeared, dissipated by an improving rural economy and by a political climate that deliberately celebrated the peasant as a mainstay of conservative values in France, a more attractive representation of the nation than discontented urban workers.
Lhermitte used both palette knife and wooden brush-end to scrape and carve out the bristling stubbled field in The Little Goose Girl of Mézy. He worked soft pinks, lime greens and bright yellows into the plumage of the geese and then used stronger tints of these same sharp colors to organize the sweep of field across the background. Together with a landscape composed to rise up around the figure instead of moving progressively backward, these techniques acknowledge the impact Impressionism had made even on artists working at the heart of the official system in France.
During the 1880s, Lhermitte had occasionally included children in the small harvesting and laying scenes which were his signature themes for the private collector market, but he employed them as subsidiary characters -- water-carriers or silent observers tucked in the middle ground -- clearly subordinated to the muscular reapers and handsome farm women around whom he built his compositions. With a life-size young girl placed assertively at the picture's edge in The Little Goose Girl of Mézy, Lhermitte moved into a new territory: the large scale, single-figure picture which merged the format of grand portraiture with the closely observed attributes of genre painting. This scheme had been virtually invented by the leading academician, William Bouguereau, some twenty years earlier, and Bouguereau still dominated this lucrative segment of the art market aimed at especially wealthy collectors with large wall spaces to fill (see lots 18 and 22). The Little Goose Girl of Mézy marked an aggressive effort by Lhermitte to step beyond his dependence on large scale pictures destined for state purchases -- an area where he had been quite successful during the 1880s -- toward greater reliance on the highest levels of the private market.
Mme. Le Pelley Fonteny's Catalogue raisonné illustrates three preliminary sketches for The Little Goose Girl of Mézy (fig. 1) and provides an invaluable listing of the many contemporary critical reviews that discuss the painting in newspaper and magazine articles.
We are grateful to Alexandra R. Murphy for providing this catalogue note.
Tending geese was one of the responsibilities assigned to a farm child, and many French painters used the activity for light-hearted pictures emphasizing the mischievousness of animals and children alike. Lhermitte, however, focused on the goose girl herself, giving her features a portrait-quality immediacy, and using the flock behind this attractive young country girl simply to explain her solitary presence in the field. With her small bundle of grain, Lhermitte underlined her industriousness, indicating that this goose girl has been doing double-duty, gathering up stalks of wheat missed by the departed reapers as well as watching her feathered charges. Although her tattered apron may suggest poverty, the plump geese and massive grain stack incorporate her into a prosperous farm; and she looks out at the observer with a quizzical nonchalance that bespeaks settled confidence, not victimhood. In such circumstances, the shredded garment seems to be merely protective field wear, a well-worn hand-me-down. By 1892, the wide-spread antagonism that greeted Jean-François Millet's paintings of working peasants thirty years earlier (see lot 9) had largely disappeared, dissipated by an improving rural economy and by a political climate that deliberately celebrated the peasant as a mainstay of conservative values in France, a more attractive representation of the nation than discontented urban workers.
Lhermitte used both palette knife and wooden brush-end to scrape and carve out the bristling stubbled field in The Little Goose Girl of Mézy. He worked soft pinks, lime greens and bright yellows into the plumage of the geese and then used stronger tints of these same sharp colors to organize the sweep of field across the background. Together with a landscape composed to rise up around the figure instead of moving progressively backward, these techniques acknowledge the impact Impressionism had made even on artists working at the heart of the official system in France.
During the 1880s, Lhermitte had occasionally included children in the small harvesting and laying scenes which were his signature themes for the private collector market, but he employed them as subsidiary characters -- water-carriers or silent observers tucked in the middle ground -- clearly subordinated to the muscular reapers and handsome farm women around whom he built his compositions. With a life-size young girl placed assertively at the picture's edge in The Little Goose Girl of Mézy, Lhermitte moved into a new territory: the large scale, single-figure picture which merged the format of grand portraiture with the closely observed attributes of genre painting. This scheme had been virtually invented by the leading academician, William Bouguereau, some twenty years earlier, and Bouguereau still dominated this lucrative segment of the art market aimed at especially wealthy collectors with large wall spaces to fill (see lots 18 and 22). The Little Goose Girl of Mézy marked an aggressive effort by Lhermitte to step beyond his dependence on large scale pictures destined for state purchases -- an area where he had been quite successful during the 1880s -- toward greater reliance on the highest levels of the private market.
Mme. Le Pelley Fonteny's Catalogue raisonné illustrates three preliminary sketches for The Little Goose Girl of Mézy (fig. 1) and provides an invaluable listing of the many contemporary critical reviews that discuss the painting in newspaper and magazine articles.
We are grateful to Alexandra R. Murphy for providing this catalogue note.