115. Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, Feast of the Company of Archers
| Artist | Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, French, Mont-Saint-Père, Aisne 1844–Paris 1925 |
| Title, Date | Feast of the Company of Archers, 1872 |
| Medium | Charcoal and brown chalk on cream paper |
| Dimensions | 11 3/4 × 18 7/8 in. (29.8 × 47.9 cm) |
| Inscriptions + Marks | Lower right: L. Lhermitte |
| Provenance | Atelier of the artist; private collection, Pyla, France; private collection, Paris (1982); [Galerie Fischer-Kiener, Paris; to Weisberg]; Yvonne and Gabriel Weisberg, Minneapolis (until 2021; given to Mia) |
| Exhibition History | "Exposition du blanc et noir," Galeries de l’Art, Paris, 1880, no. 120; "Expanding the Boundaries: Selected Drawings from the Yvonne and Gabriel P. Weisberg Collection," Mia (2008) and Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame, Ind. (2010) |
| References | Monique Le Pelley Fonteny, "Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925): Catalogue raisonné" (Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art, 1991), p. 325, no. 65; Lisa 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), pp. 60, 63, fig. 35 |
| Credit Line | Gift of Dr. Gabriel P. and Yvonne M.L. Weisberg 2021.67.2 |
Born in the Aisne area in northern France, Léon-Augustin Lhermitte came from humble beginnings; his father was a schoolteacher. Just shy of his twentieth birthday, he moved to Paris to train at the École Impériale de Dessin (Imperial Drawing School). He soon began exhibiting at the Salon and by 1880 had achieved professional success and fame. The towering Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is said to have admired Lhermitte’s draftsmanship, as well as his deep familiarity with his subjects.
This elaborate drawing shows a local archers’ guild—note the figures with longbows at the right—assembled to receive a blessing in the parish church. Communities organized companies or guilds of archers in the Middle Ages as forms of self-protection. By 1872, the year given to this sheet, such guilds had outlived their original purpose but remained as fraternal organizations marked by tradition and communal pride. Lhermitte made this work, also called Feast of the Corporation of Constables, in the village of Beauvardes, about sixty miles from Paris and less than a two-hour walk from his hometown of Mont-Saint-Père. Everyone in the church looks warmly dressed. This makes sense because the date is probably January 20, the feast day of Saint Sebastian, whose martyrdom involved being shot through with arrows. He became the patron saint of the archers’ guilds; note the small sculpture of Saint Sebastian beneath the window at the upper left. Though the scene looks realistic, we should be wary of taking it too literally, for Lhermitte cast his father, Jacques Lhermitte, and his uncle (and future father-in-law) Jean-Baptiste Victor Goudard1 as the cantors seated at the big songbook.
Completed while Lhermitte was in his twenties, this drawing shows why he was held in such high esteem. He has capably handled a complex composition that works as a series of vignettes and as a whole. His lighting is subtle and well controlled, the faces of the assembled archers convincingly individualized.
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Notes
Lhermitte married his cousin, Héloïse Goudard, in 1876. ↩︎