Provenance:
John William Smith, Private Collection, Bradford
His sale, Christie's, London, 18 February 1905,lot 151 (58 guineas to Sampson)
Sale, Christie's, London,19 December 1972, lot 53
Leva Gallery, London
Lady Isobel Throckmorton, Private Collection
Her Sale, Christie's, London, 6 June 1980, lot 195
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Literature:
Grant Waters, Dictionary of British Artists 1900-1950, 1975, Vol. 2 (illustrated plate 169)

Sunlight strikes the white apron of a young woman who drives a pair of Ayrshire calves to pasture under trees that line the edge of a barley field. Its brightness creates a verdant overhead canopy through which flashes of a clear blue sky can be seen. Confrontation with friendly, curious, but unpredictable creatures within a colourful spatial envelope lifts an otherwise unremarkable scene into something immediately arresting. A few simple comparisons with contemporary paintings of cowherds will instantly convince the spectator that Henry Herbert La Thangue's The Cow Girl is a radical departure from convention.

Precedents were exclusively European, where artistic custom and practice dictated that such subjects, tackled in a minor key in the work of Anton Mauve (fig 2), for instance, would appeal to Barbizon and Hague School collectors. Overlaid with a poetic vision in the work of J-F Millet, the peasant cowherd began to step forward and assume more heroic status, but it was only with Jules Bastien-Lepage and Léon Lhermitte that la vie rurale was reassessed in its entirety as a visual source book. Scale was increased, and naturalistic techniques applied to give the powerful sense of brutal reality - that of the école naturaliste. In Pauvre Fauvette (fig 3), Lepage's country child is dressed in sackcloth on a cold, barren hillside under a leafless tree. She was, as George Clausen would later write, 'placed before us ... without the appearance of artifice, but as [she] lives.'

Images like these were part of La Thangue's education. Whatever one painted, it had to be realized on-the-spot, in the open air, in order to convey what the artist described as 'the sentiment of nature'. The sensations of the moment should not be faked. For one alive to Impressionist innovation, the advice, in the artist's words, was simply 'to learn to record ... impressions with rapidity' and without preconception.

La Thangue encountered these ideas in Paris. He went there in 1880 as a twenty-year-old Royal Academy Schools gold medallist to enter the prestigious atelier Gérôme at the École des Beaux Arts. With such recognized precocity, one might predict the monied career of an establishment classicist. This, however, does a disservice to both student and teacher, and La Thangue swiftly established his own path sampling the artists' colonies in Brittany and travelling south to the Dauphiné. Not long after his return to England, the artist was invited to paint portraits of local dignitaries in Arthur Higgins Rigg's studio in Swan Arcade, Bradford. It was a fruitful expedition, for a year later he was elected president of the town's Arcadian Art Club, and found patrons, one of whom was the mayor, Isaac Smith JP. Smith's wealth derived from Fieldhead Mills in Preston Street, a firm of fine worsted spinners, founded in 1848. During the 1880s, through the agency of Arthur Tooth, Smith's collection included works such as Lhermitte's Le Cabaret 1881 (Private Collection) and La Moisson 1883 (Washington University Art Gallery, St Louis) and his outstanding early La Thangue acquisition was the plein air portrait, A Study (Resting after the Game) 1888, held in a private collection.

Time and place suggest that The Cow Girl, in the handling of the calves and the treatment of sunlight, must have been painted around the same time as this in the late summer of 1888 when the La Thangues were living at Horsey Mere in Norfolk. At this point the artist was known to paint on unstretched canvas tacked to a board accentuating the flat single strokes of the so-called 'Square Brush School' of which he was regarded as leader. It was acquired around this time by Smith's son, John William Smith, (b. 1860) a contemporary of the painter. To this young man, there was no jeopardy in selecting one of the artist's most radical early canvases. Most of La Thangue's important works of this period went straight to rival Bradford collectors, some them before they were exhibited - the present example being one.

What then, was significant about this specific painting containing a woman herder and two calves? In essence, it exemplified the belief in modernity that young contemporaries admired. La Thangue had come to Bradford having observed the strong naturalistic current of contemporary painting working its way through the Salon, as the Smiths, father and son, had done. In this he was supported by radicals such as Clausen and Frederick Brown, both of whom, recognizing the unlikelihood of the Royal Academy changing its restrictive practices, shared his views on building a new 'democratic' exhibiting agency. La Thangue had gone into print with his ideas and was creating a stir. 

Looking at Clausen's The Shepherdess in 1885 (fig 4), acquired by John Maddocks, a Bradford rival, the kinship is evident.

Here too, in The Cow Girl, was a figure holding a staff, confronting the viewer, as one found in the work of Millet and Lepage, but where Clausen's subject stands in an even light, La Thangue, in a flash of sunlight, the tilt of a head and in the swing of a tail, is keen to convey movement, both in nature and its inhabitants. These were things that reinforced the feeling of a real-life encounter. Nothing in his world - in the moment - was completely still. Figures and animals were walking towards you and they knew you were there. The central foregrounding, seen in The Return of the Reapers, 1886 (fig 5), then in another Bradford amateur's collection, as in the present painting, made this sense obvious to all.

It was developed through a series of later works such as The Woodman 1894 (Private Collection), and The Ploughboy 1900 (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and would become the artist's signature compositional strategy. The central motif - twin calves - with its dramatic foreshortening, would also return in The First Meal c. 1894 (Private Collection) and A Sussex Farm 1904.       

Thus, in more senses than one, the present painting marked a watershed. It adopted and elevated a subject long regarded as routine picturesque and approached it with a fresh eye. In terms of 'square brush' handling it was a 'thesis picture'.  Beyond the confines of La Thangue's northern power base, it reached out to Chelsea followers such as Frank Brangwyn and William Llewellyn, and was practiced in Newlyn by Stanhope Forbes, Frank Bramley, Chevallier Tayler and others, while its impact on 'Glasgow Boys', George Henry, Edward Atkinson Hornel and David Gauld remains to be explored.

Beyond the contemporary art networks however, there are simple aesthetic pleasures to be had. In La Thangue's painting of two calves and a 'cow girl' on a summer's day somewhere in England, the innocent and ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Kenneth McConkey

Figure References

Fig 2       Anton Mauve, Changing Pasture, c. 1880, 61 x 100.6, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913

Fig 3       Jules Bastien-Lepage, Pauvre Fauvette, 1881, 162.5 x 125.7 cm, Glasgow Museums

Fig 4       George Clausen, The Shepherdess, 1885, 64.7 x 46 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Fig 5       Henry Herbert La Thangue, The Return of the Reapers, 1886, 119 x 69.5 cm, Tate

References

1. For Millet's celebrated, Femme faisant paitre sa vache, 1859 (Musée de l'Ain, Bourg-en-Bresse), see RL Herbert, Jean-François Millet, 1976 (exhibition catalogue, Arts Council), pp. 90-1.
2. Kenneth McConkey, 'Pauvre Fauvette or petite folle: a study of Bastien-Lepage's Pauvre Fauvette', Arts Magazine, January 1981, pp. 140-3.
3. George Clausen, 'Bastien-Lepage and Modern Realism', Scottish Art Review, vol 1, 1888, p. 114.
4. George Thomson, 'HH La Thangue and his Work', The Studio, vol 9, 1897, p. 177.
5. For a general account of La Thangue's career see Kenneth McConkey, A Painter's Harvest, HH La Thangue, 1859-1929, 1978 (exhibition catalogue, Oldham Art Gallery).
6. La Thangue, whom Stanhope Forbes on one occasion described as 'such an oddity', (letter dated 16 February 1881, Hyman Keitman Archive, Tate), seems to have preferred the isolation of Donzère in the Rhone, to the hothouse atmosphere of the Brittany colonies.
7. La Thangue was being pursued by Bradford collectors from his days in Cancale with Stanhope Forbes. So successful were relationships in Bradford that for the next five years, La Thangue gave his address as 26 Booth Street, Bradford until 1889, even though living on the edge of the Norfolk Broads with a studio and group of followers in Chelsea; see Morley Roberts, 'A Colony of Artists', The Scottish Art Review, vol 2, 1889, 72-77.
8. Others included William Ackroyd, Abraham Mitchell and John Maddocks and all were mill owners. Smith was mayor of Bradford, 1884-1886; he went on to acquire La Thangue's A Study (Resting after the Game) 1888 and By the Duckpond, 1893 (both Private Collections).
9. A Study (Resting after the Game), 1888, represents Kate La Thangue, the artist's wife; see Sotheby's 21 March 2013, lot 261, lot essay by Kenneth McConkey.
10. Roberts 1889, as note 6.
11. It seems likely that the younger Smith exerted a powerful influence over his father - as did Tom Mitchell over his father, Abraham; see for instance, Christine Hopper and Adrian Jenkins, The Connoisseur, Art Patrons and Collectors in Victorian Bradford, 1989 (exhibition catalogue, Bradford Art Galleries and Museums).
12. It appears that in later life, John William Smith abandoned family life and went to live in an artists' colony in Hampstead. I am grateful to the late Gwendoline Smith OBE and he cousin, the late Mrs Margaret Massy, for detail on the Bradford Smiths; private correspondence with the author, October 1980-September 1981.
13. HH La Thangue, 'A National Art Exhibition', The Magazine of Art, Vol 10, 1887, pp. 30-32. For a fuller account of these important developments see Kenneth McConkey, The New English, A History of the New English Art Club, 2006 (RA Publications), pp. 23-45.
14. The Return of the Reapers, 1886 (ex-Arthur Grogan Esq) was formerly in the collection of Tom Mitchell, son of Abraham Mitchell. Tom Mitchell is pictured in La Thangue's portrait of his father Abraham, in The Connoisseur, 1887 (Bradford Museums and Galleries).
15. McConkey, 1978, pp. 10, 11 & 37.
16. For The First Meal 1894 and A Sussex Farm 1904 see Christie's 23 November 2005, lot 13 & 8 June 2006, lot 292, lot essays by Kenneth McConkey.

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Wednesday 13 March, 10.30am GMT
Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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