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Dimensions: measurements 18 7/8 by 26 1/3 in. alternate measurements 48 by 67 cm

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Provenance: Boussod, Valadon & Cie, Paris (no. 18206)
Foucques Duparc Collection (and sold Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, May 8, 1909, lot 58)
Demange Collection, France
Private Collection, Paris

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Exhibited:

Paris, Exposition des Pastellistes , 1897, no. 9 (as Aôut)

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Literature: La Libre Parole, April 2, 1897
New York Herald, April 2, 1897
H. Guedry, Le Parisien, April 6, 1897
R. Bujon, Le Moniteur Universel, April 8, 1897
F. Polak, L'Art et la Mode, April 10, 1897
H. Dac, L'Univers, April 12, 1897
H. Hubert, La République Française, April 14, 1897
H. Berol, Le Moniteur Général, April 22, 1897
Guyon-Verax, Journal des Artistes, April 22, 1897
Félix de Monnecove, Revue Septentrionale, June 1, 1897
Mary M. Hamel, Léon Lhermitte, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 1974, p. 17, C 232, cat. 22
Monique Le Pelley Fonteny, Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, Catalogue Raisonné, Paris, 1991, p. 226, no. 367, illustrated

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Notes: This summer harvest scene is typical of the large-scale, meticulously crafted pastels that Lhermitte executed throughout his career beginning in the mid 1880s. His newfound success in working with this medium, which gave him more freedom to draw spontaneously in situ, prompted him to exhibit his pastels publicly. He started showing them in 1886 at the newly founded Sociètè des Pastellistes, which frequently mounted its exhibitions at the prestigious Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. Like his contemporary, Jean François Millet, Lhermitte took pastel to a higher degree of completion. While his earliest pastels were studies drawn from nature, his later pastels, including the present lot, evolved into large-scale, finished compositions in their own right. In other words, they had the finish and feel of an oil painting. It may also be argued that Lhermitte's greatest contribution was as a pastelliste, certainly one of the most accomplished masters of his generation. Lhermitte regularly looked to rural life for his inspiration. Scenes of peasants gathered together, often gossiping in the village square or interior scenes in front of the hearth, fill his repertoire of subjects throughout his long career. However, it is his scenes of workers in the fields that came to represent a more intangible concept - that of man's relationship with nature, and his stoicism to endure in the face of hard work and even hardship. This was a point of view also shared by Jean François Millet. Titled Aôut (August) when the pastel was first exhibited in 1897, Lhermitte has depicted one of the busiest months of the calendar year- the harvest, when the wheat needed to be reaped, gathered and stacked. This would have been a scene he observed every summer in the French countryside. His peasants work rhythmically as they carry out their labor set against the windswept wheat fields. Lhermitte devotes as much space to the three workers as he does the golden landscape they occupy; they appear almost as giants in their environment. Additionally the theme of pride in cultivating the land and the theme of man's struggle to tame the vastness of nature both contribute to the sense that the work is not merely a depiction of contemporary life, but a continuation of a higher ideal. Viewers identified with Lhermitte's subjects on both a thematic and a personal level, and as a result, his art became commercially successful during his lifetime. Boussod & Valadon, the Parisian art dealers, sold many of his works to cosmopolitan clients, and, for those who could not afford his original paintings or pastels, printmakers regularly made reproductions of the artist's most well-known works. Upon completion of this pastel in 1897, the work was reviewed in no fewer than ten magazine articles. The subject became such a popular image that a baker on the rue Linne in Paris found inspiration in the work's golden wheat fields and painted a copy for the front of his shop. Lhermitte's depictions of life in the rural countryside allowed his Parisian viewers to momentarily escape the bustle of city life and enter a world more closely engaged with the changing seasons and the rhythms of nature.