Henry Herbert La ThangueRA (19 January 1859 – 21 December 1929) was an English realist rural landscape painter associated with the Newlyn School.[1][2][3]
In the late 1880s, La Thangue moved to South WalshaminNorfolk. A painting of this period, Return of the Reapers (1886), reflected his interest in photography and photo-realistic depictions. In the early 1890s he settled in Bosham, in Sussex, where he continued his large-scale rural genre paintings, some of which proved to be controversial. In 1896 Tate acquired The Man with the Scythe. In 1898 he was made an Associate of the Royal Academy, becoming a full Member in 1912.
La Thangue eventually made his base at Haylands in Graffham, Sussex, though he also spent much time painting in Provence in France (after 1901), Liguria in Italy (1903–11) and the Balearic Islands. His southern European landscapes were shown in a successful commercial exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London, just before the outbreak of World War I.
In 1929 he was reportedly deeply affected by the loss of two of his paintings when the ship Manuka carrying them foundered off the New Zealand coast. In that same year he died in London on 21 December. On 26 December the paintings were recovered near Long Point, New Zealand, in fairly good condition.[5]
La Thangue's wife Kate died on 22 September 1940 leaving a bequest of 5 of La Thangue's works to Australasian public art collections: Village Fountain, Provençal Fishing Boats, and Plovers on the Marshes to the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in Christchurch, New Zealand and The Weir and The Wood Gatherers to the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.
La Thangue's work regularly reaches high prices at auction. In 2006, his "Packing grapes" was sold for £70,000 and in December 2009 "In the orchards" realised over £285,000.
