Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre

Lecture 7: De La Tour, Le Nain, and 17 th -Century Painting
The Le Nain Brothers
Born between 1598 and 1610 in the northern French cathedral town of Laon,
the Le Nain brothers, Louis, Antoine, and Mathieu, were all in Paris by 1630
and worked as painters of rural subjects in the capital until their deaths—
Louis and Antoine in 1648 and Mathieu in 1672. Although various attempts
have been made to distinguish their works into those of three separate
“hands,” this has proven dif� cult, because they remained unmarried, worked
in the same studio, and often collaborated. This does not mean that their
work is stylistically uniform, or that we cannot point to clear subgroups of
stylistically similar works.
The Louvre collection of works by Le Nain is, without question, the greatest
in the world, but major paintings by the brothers are also found in England
and in the United States. The two paintings we discuss are similar in
only one way—they represent people who have always been identi� ed as
peasants with no attempt at historical or religious overlay. The more often
reproduced of the two, the Peasant Meal, represents nine � gures, probably
a family, posed in a humble domestic interior. They seem utterly aware of
the painter-viewer, as if they have adjusted themselves to sit for a portrait.
In this awareness, the work is startlingly original, because the very fact that
they pose gives the � gures the same kind of dignity that is assumed by the
wealthy when they sit for portraits. As viewers, we know that these people
could never afford an expensive painting. The gray and beige tonalities, the
superb still-life elements, the seemingly wise animals—in particular, the little
dog—are completely original to the Le Nain brothers. The Louvre acquired
the painting in 1915.
The second painting, The Car, or The Return from Haymaking, sets three
separate groups of rural workers into a landscape with a tumble-down barn,
a mound of newly-cut hay, and wooden tools. This painting is as visually
disjointed and blond as the interior scene is compositionally uni� ed and
gray, but each represents rural people as if they are posing to be painted.
This work is the bolder and more original of the two and has fascinated artist
visitors to the Louvre since its acquisition in 1879. One cannot imagine the
later rural paintings of Pissarro or Gauguin without it.
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