A peasant family
Le Nain, Antoine (ca. 1588-1648) (attributed to)
- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
[Museum inv. no.: L.2013.39]
Item location
Description
Excerpt of commentary from the museum website: Prior to 1994, The Met’s painting was unknown in the literature. It has the unique history among paintings by Le Nain of having come from an Italian collection in Lombardy, where, in the eighteenth century, Giacomo Ceruti was to paint some of the most memorable pictures of the poor in Western art. The remarkably portraitlike appearance of the figures in the picture award it a special place among the Le Nains’ works.In a simply furnished room dominated by a large fireplace, on the mantle of which is arranged an assortment of glass and crockery, stand four children, three boys and a girl, the latter of whom is positioned behind a middle-aged, bearded man who is presumably their father. He sits on a simple rush seat chair, while their pet cat rests on the floor. Significantly, the mother is absent, which cannot help but suggest a lost story. The children, of ages ranging from around six to around thirteen, are described with attention to individualized characters: the sweet, smiling child playing a flute; the confident, eldest boy standing apart from the others, his feet firmly planted, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his red jacket; the youth in the background who is passing through the self-conscious stage of adolescence when physical changes bring about an uneasy sense of awkwardness; the wide-eyed, innocent face of devotion worn by the young girl; the evident pride of the father, who holds on his lap a straw-encased flask of wine—evidently emblematic of the success of his labors, as he holds no glass with which to drink it. Three of the figures (and the cat) look out at the viewer. All convey acute awareness of the act of posing, creating an inevitable analogy with nineteenth-century photography, in which individuals posed in the artist’s studio before a chosen backdrop. The analogy with photography extends to the room, which, it can be said with certainty, is not the family’s, for many of the same features of this domestic setting occur in other paintings by the Le Nains (for example: Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 519 and RF 1941.20; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, AP 1984.22; and Lowther Castle, Penrith). There is a fire in the fireplace, conspicuously costly brass andirons, which also appear in other paintings, and a three-legged ceramic pot for cooking. It is the repetition of these features in other pictures that poses the question of intent, the problem of interpretation, and the degree of fiction. (Keith Christiansen, 2019)
Iconclass
42B741father and child(ren), man and child(ren) (family group)
43C7432
children playing musical instruments
Instruments [MIMO Code] (notes)
End-blown flute [3940]RIdIM images
