Charles Augustin Lhermitte

  • Bretagne, femme gardant des cochons #1

  • Bretagne, femme gardant des cochons #1

  • [Brittany, woman keeping pigs #1]
  • (c. 1911–1913), sepia tone photograph
  • 4.5 x 3.4 in. (11.2 x 8.5 cm.)
  • Musèe d’Orsay
  • 691 x 889 (73 KB)
  • Bretagne, femme gardant des cochons #2

  • Bretagne, femme gardant des cochons #2

  • [Brittany, woman keeping pigs #2]
  • (c. 1911–1913), sepia tone photograph
  • 4.5 x 3.4 in. (11.2 x 8.5 cm.)
  • Musèe d’Orsay
  • 691 x 889 (65 KB)

Editor’s Note:

I have included these two photographs from Charles Lhermitte in the museum in preparation for a up coming Exhibition: “Le Porcs de Bretagne Exhibition” that is planned for the Fall of 2008. These photographs were made so close in time to the painted works of the Impressionists that, to me, they call up an alternate view of Brittany from the same time period that the impressionist saw it.

Lhermitte’s photographic work tended towards realism, which here becomes pleine air as he captures a passing moment in the life of some pigs of Brittany, so favored as subjects by the Impressionists.

And the woman… Twenty years earlier, could she have actually been the same young girl with her pigs that was the subject of a work painted by Bernard or Gauguin or Moret?…

A book of Lhermitte’s photographs of Brittany is still available for sale used and is in many libraries: Lhermitte, Charles, and Louis Guilloux. Souvenirs de Bretagne: photographies de Charles Lhermitte, 1911–1913. Paris: Chêne, 1977.