Conférence « Léon LHERMITTE 51844-1925). L’apport de l’artiste à la connaissance du monde rural en voie de mutation »

? Saturday, May 3, 2:15 p.m., La Rotonde social center, rue Robert Lecart

"Léon LHERMITTE 51844-1925). The artist?s contribution to knowledge of the changing rural world"

Xavier de Massary, SHACT vice-president, heritage inspector, general inventory of cultural heritage at the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.

The year 2025 marks the centenary of the death of painter Léon Lhermitte. Famous during his lifetime as a painter of rural life, his works can be found in numerous museums in France, Great Britain and the United States. Unjustly forgotten today, his work deserves to be rediscovered and reappraised, if only to help us appreciate the beauty of his landscapes of the Marne valley.

Xavier de Massary will present another interesting aspect of Lhermitte?s work at the SHACT monthly meeting on May 3. Indeed, the artist was a faithful and attentive witness to the life of the inhabitants of Mont-Saint-Père, where he was born and regularly returned to spend the summers, as well as the surrounding villages. His paintings show the clothing, décor and furnishings of everyday rural life at the end of the 19th century, and we learn a great deal about their living environment.


It has been said that Lhermitte?s paintings have the precision of a photographic lens, and his work has been criticized by some for this: what good is art if photography is enough to preserve the memory of places and people? But apart from the fact that, in the 1880s, photography was still incapable of rendering dimly-lit interiors or gestures captured on the spot, Lhermitte possessed the art of composition, the arrangement of characters and the use of light that make his scenes of rural life testimonies like no other.



Photo caption: Léon Lhermitte, La soupe en famille, oil on canvas, 1880, Burnley Museum (Great Britain) ©? All rights reserved.

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