Le Nain brothers
 Antoine or Louis Le Nain, Peasant Family in an Interior, Smarthistory
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The three Le Nain brothers were painters in 17th-century France: Antoine Le Nain (c.1599-1648), Louis Le Nain (c.1593-1648), and Mathieu Le Nain (1607–1677). They produced genre works, portraits and portrait miniatures.
The brothers were born in or near Laon in northern France. Mathieu was born in 1607; Antoine and Louis were originally believed to have been born in 1588 and 1593, respectively, but are now thought to have been born later; the National Gallery gives them birth dates of "c. 1600? and c. 1603?". By 1630, all three lived in Paris, where they shared the studio founded by Antoine, who was admitted to the Paris painters' guild, enabling his two brothers to train under him without paying fees. Within a few years they were receiving important commissions, Antoine painting a group portrait of the aldermen of Paris in 1632. In 1648 the three brothers were received into the Académie de peinture et de sculpture on the year of its founding.
Because of the remarkable similarity of their styles of painting and the difficulty of distinguishing works by each brother (they signed their paintings only with their surname, and many may have been collaborations), they are commonly referred to as a single entity, Le Nain. Louis is usually credited with the best-known of their paintings, a series of scenes depicting peasant life; he may have visited Italy, and been influenced by the Dutch artist Pieter van Laer, who was based in Rome but also passed through France in the mid-1620s. These genre paintings are often noted for being remarkably literal, yet sympathetic; the subjects are never grotesque or seem ridiculed. There remains some question, however, as to whether some of the assumed “peasants” were truly from the rural class—many seem to be simply the bourgeois at leisure in the country. Their sober execution and choice of colour recall characteristics of the Spanish school. Their choice of subject was unusual for the time: the world of Paris was busy with mythological allegories, and the “heroic deeds” of the king, while the three Le Nain devoted themselves chiefly to these subjects of humble life such as Peasant Meal (1642), Boys Playing Cards, or A Farrier in His Forge, three pictures now in the Louvre. Their Adoration of the Shepherds in London (National Gallery) is an exception, and many other civic and church works may have been lost in the French Revolution. Ariane in Naxos also appears to be an exception, as it depicts the Greek deity Bacchus and his lover Ariadne.
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