Teasing of tiny tabby
The cat’s whiskers... John Vincent looks at the enduring popularity of an influential painter of Yorkshire ancestry.
Sir Edwin Landseer set the tone, his animal pictures captivating Victorian Britain and encouraging other artists to paint pets in the home alongside their well-to-do owners. Dog-loving Queen Victoria herself commissioned Landseer to paint her children as babies, usually in the company of a pooch. Cats were also included in the new spirit of anthropomorphism and one such example is found in this study by Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859-1929). His ancestors came from Yorkshire and he lived briefly in Bradford, where he painted portraits and attended meetings of the Arcadian Art Club in the Swan Arcade, of which he was president.
The oil, A Fireside Study, which is listed to fetch £15,000-£20,000 at a live behind-closed-doors art sale at Bonhams in London on Wednesday, depicts his wife, actress Kate Rietker, stretching somewhat awkwardly from her creaking basket chair in the lamp-lit drawing room to tease a kitten with a white stick.
It was something of a diversion for La Thangue, an avant-garde and highly influential painter who helped introduce the ideals of French plein-air painting to Britain and led the “Square Brush School”, a technical method of making choppy strokes. The outspoken La Thangue did himself no favours with the Royal Academy, where he trained and won a gold medal in 1879, by describing it as “the diseased root from which other evils grow” and becoming one of the leading figures in founding the New English Art Club in opposition to it. Many years later he reconciled with the RA and was elected an associate member in 1912.
After returning from France in 1884, La Thangue made frequent trips to Bradford, where he became friends with John Maddocks, chairman of the Bradford Manufacturing Company and an amateur artist, who introduced him to prominent members of the community, leading to portrait commissions.
One such portrait was of mill owner and art collector Abraham Mitchell. Entitled The Connoisseur and painted in 1987, it shows Mitchell and his family in their own home, Bowling Park in Rooley Lane, Bradford, with Mitchell giving serious attention to a recently acquired painting. It can now be seen in the city’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery.
The work of La Thangue – said to fall between the cracks of Naturalism and Impressionism – is widely exhibited in public galleries across Britain, including the Tate in London and, in the North, in places like Rotherham, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Blackburn.
His work, which influenced local artists such as Walter Foster and Herbert Royle, regularly fetches large sums when it comes up at auction. In 2006, his Packing grapes sold for £70,000 and in 2009 In the orchards realised £285,000.
He was deeply affected by the loss of two of his paintings when the SS Manuka carrying them foundered off New Zealand on December 16, 1929.
He died in London just five days later, aged 70. Ironically, on Boxing Day, the paintings were recovered near Long
Point, New Zealand, in fairly good condition.
La Thangue’s work is said to fall between the cracks of Naturalism and Impressionism.