83. Louis Welden Hawkins, Peasant Woman in a Landscape

ArtistLouis Welden Hawkins, French (born Germany), Esslingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany 1849–Paris 1910
Title, DatePeasant Woman in a Landscape, c. 1880
MediumWatercolor and gouache
Dimensions14 7/8 × 9 5/8 in. (37.8 × 24.4 cm)
Inscriptions + MarksLower left: HAWKINS
ProvenanceSale, Dessins, tableaux et sculptures des XIXe et XXe siècles, Piasa, Drouot-Richelieu, Paris, April 10, 2002, no. 81; [Chantal Kiener, Paris, until 2005; to Weisberg]; Yvonne and Gabriel Weisberg, Minneapolis
Exhibition History"Expanding the Boundaries: Selected Drawings from the Yvonne and Gabriel P. Weisberg Collection," Mia (2008) and Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame, Ind. (2010); "Reflections on Reality: Drawings and Paintings from the Weisberg Collection," Mia, 2022–23
ReferencesLisa Dickinson Michaux with Gabriel P. Weisberg, "Expanding the Boundaries: Selected Drawings from the Yvonne and Gabriel P. Weisberg Collection" (exh. cat.), Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Minneapolis, 2008), p. 48, fig. 28
Credit LinePromised gift of Gabriel P. and Yvonne M.L. Weisberg, Minneapolis

Before he became a major figure in the symbolist movement in the 1890s and beyond, Louis Welden Hawkins had established himself as a naturalist.1 In 1881 his painting The Orphans, depicting two children in a cemetery presumably visiting their parents’ grave (fig. 1), won a bronze medal at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français and was purchased at auction in 1887 for the Musée du Luxembourg, then France’s premier museum of contemporary art. The present watercolor, made at about the same time, has a similar somber mood, earthbound subject, and low-key tonality.

Figure 1Louis Welden Hawkins, The Orphans (Les orphelins), 1881, oil on canvas, 125 x 160 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF 1034, LUX 353 P).

Peasant Woman in a Landscape is one of Hawkins’s innumerable watercolors, many exhibited in Paris in the mid-1880s. The artist found a ready clientele for these images, which collectors saw as portraits of workers from his hometown of Esslingen, Germany, and the nearby countryside. The dignified form of the profile portrait, whose history can be traced to ancient coinage of Roman emperors and later to Renaissance luminaries, suggests Hawkins’s respect for his sitters. Hawkins made other images of this same model, each with the meticulous attention to detail on display here.

GPW

Notes

  1. For further information on Hawkins, see Lucas Bonekamp, Louis Welden Hawkins 1849–1910, 19th-century Masters, 2, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders, 1993). ↩︎