Description
This drawing is one of more than 50 related to the artist's elaborate painting The Apple Market at Landerneau, exhibited at the Salon of 1878 (see photo). The scene is one of several that Lhermitte made focusing on peasants from Brittany, a region in northwestern France that was known for its picturesque traditional dress and its religious piety.
Provenance
Studio of the artist (?-?); (Galerie Kiener-Fischer, Paris, sold to Mrs. Muriel Butkin) (?-1984); Mrs. Muriel Butkin, Shaker Heights, OH, bequeathed to the Cleveland Museum of Art (1984-2008); Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (2008-)
Accession Number
2008.356
Medium
pen and brown ink over tracing in red chalk
Dimensions
Sheet: 27.2 x 38.9 cm (10 11/16 x 15 5/16 in.); Image: 26.6 x 27.7 cm (10 1/2 x 10 7/8 in.)
Classification
Drawing
Credit Line
Bequest of Muriel Butkin
Tags
Drawing Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Ink French Color: Brown Color: Gray
Background & Context
Background Story
The Apple Market at Landerneau is a preparatory drawing for a painting, rendered in pen and brown ink over a red chalk tracing—a working method that reveals Lhermitte's process from initial composition to finished design. The apple market at Landerneau, a town in Brittany, gave Lhermitte a subject that combined his interest in rural working-class life with the specific regional character of Breton markets. The composition shows the market stalls, the vendors, and the buyers arranged in a carefully organized space that demonstrates Lhermitte's skill at constructing complex multi-figure compositions—a skill that distinguished his genre paintings from the simpler rural scenes of his contemporaries.
Cultural Impact
Lhermitte's market scenes are among his most popular works because they combine the documentary realism of his rural genre painting with the compositional sophistication of academic figure painting. The apple market at Landerneau is not just a scene of commercial activity but a constructed composition in which every figure has a specific role in the overall design. The pen and ink drawing over red chalk tracing reveals this compositional sophistication in its most revealing form.
Why It Matters
The Apple Market at Landerneau is Lhermitte's compositional process made visible: the red chalk tracing for the initial layout, the pen and brown ink for the final design. The drawing reveals the craft behind the realism—that Lhermitte's apparently spontaneous market scenes are carefully composed constructions, not casual observations.
