Léon Augustin Lhermitte

Léon Augustin Lhermitte (31 July 1844, Mont-Saint-Père – 28 July 1925, Paris) was a French realist painter and etcher whose primary subject matter was rural scenes depicting peasants at work.

He was a student of Lecoq de Boisbaudran, he gained recognition after his show in the Paris Salon in 1864.

His many awards include the French Legion of Honour (1884) and the Grand Prize at the Exposition Universelle in 1889.

Lhermitte’s innovative use of pastels won him the admiration of his contemporaries. Vincent van Gogh wrote that "If every month Le Monde Illustré published one of his compositions ... it would be a great pleasure for me to be able to follow it. It is certain that for years I have not seen anything as beautiful as this scene by Lhermitte ... I am too preoccupied by Lhermitte this evening to be able to talk of other things."

Lhermitte is represented in the collections of museums around the world, including Amsterdam, Boston, Brussels, Chicago, Florence, Montreal, Moscow, Paris, Rheims, and Washington.

Léon-Augustin Lhermitte's 'The Gleaners" (1887, Philadelphia Museum of Art). A part of the Realism movement and an avid realist painter, Lhermitte depicts the working class poverty in France. Taking very obvious inspiration from Millet, a painting of the same name, Lhermitte in a series of works displayed at the Salon aims to capture this moment in time. When comparing his work to Millet's, even the poses of the women are very similar if not the same. In the foreground there are two women bent over picking up the grains left behind, those that were not added into the hay stack which can be seen in the background. An obvious difference between this work and Millet's is that there is no large crowd of people working in the background.

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