Léon Augustin LHERMITTE

The Lhermitte scholar Monique Le Pelley Fonteny has written of the artist that, ‘In his drawings he achieved a masterful subtlety between light and shadow, white and black, about which Théodore de Banville once remarked: “In his hands charcoal and black chalk are like magical tools.”’ The artist's charcoal drawings, or fusains, were avidly collected in France, England and America. 

Lhermitte produced finished charcoal drawings of peasant interiors throughout his career, and the present sheet can de compared with a number of drawings of this type, such as a Sheep Barn in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and an unsigned drawing of The Interior of a Forge in the Musée Jean de La Fontaine in Château-Thierry.