Paintings often have long and sometimes complicated histories and can go missing for various reasons. Poor record-keeping and incomplete documentation can lead to the loss of provenance, making it difficult to trace ownership over time. In private collections, lack of public knowledge and non-disclosure by collectors contribute to the obscurity of certain pieces. Inheritance issues, where heirs are uninformed or uninterested, often result in neglected or forgotten artworks. Additionally, paintings by unknown or lesser-known artists may be undervalued and forgotten, while misattributed works can remain obscure until properly identified. These factors collectively contribute to artworks going 'missing', often rediscovered only through scholarly research, improved cataloging, or chance events. Kenneth McConkey, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Northumbria, did just this when we approached him with Morning on the Lagoons, Martigues: a picture that was harder to 'locate' in more than one way.
The moon is fading as early morning sun strikes the rear façade of the seventeenth century Saint-Genest church on what is now the Canal Galiffet at Martigues in the south of France. The quay is deserted, and carts stand empty at the doorways near a group of small fishing boats that will soon set sail for the neighbouring lagoons of Berre and Caronte. From his viewpoint on what is now the Quai des Anglais, La Thangue was looking across two former canals separated at this point by a narrow causeway – the canal Saint Sébastian and the canal du Roi.
Previously thought to represent one of the churches at Chioggia in the Venetian lagoon, the site of the present painting, after extensive research, has now been positively identified, and Morning on the Lagoons can only be that shown in La Thangue’s exhibition in 1914. Although his annual expeditions to Provence and the Riviera are documented in many works, precise locations are often obscure, and while the present work must pre-date his solo exhibition, we cannot be certain when his first visit to Martigues occurred. While misascribing the location of the present work, Moses Nightingale, its first owner, clearly thought it had been painted in 1913. Scenes painted in the town, for instance A Regatta in the Fountain and Provencal Fishing Boats, were shown in 1917 and 1926 respectively, while other canvases were completed in the immediate vicinity.
An artists’ haunt, from the turn of the century, Martigues attracted avant-garde painters such as Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck and others, while British visitors included Terrick Williams, Joseph Milner Kite, Jessica Dismorr and Augustus John. It is not unlikely that La Thangue was among the first of the British contingent to discover what was dubbed ‘the Venice of Provence’, painting its central square with the fontaine des oiseaux and the nearby church of Saint Marie-Madeleine.
Henry Herbert La Thangue, A Regatta in the Fountain,
c. 1918, 68.6 x 77.5 cm, Private Collection
Martigues’ halcyon pre-first World War days were recalled in 1926 by Captain Leslie Richardson, who noted that ‘many wielders of the brush … bearded, black-clad fellows from Montmartre, and cleanshaven, tweed-clad youths form Britain and the United States’ could still be found along its quays. When he describes, ‘black-hulled boats moored to stakes, at the foot of tall houses that seem to rise out of the canal leading to the opalescent Étang de Berre’, he could almost be describing the calm, crystalline Morning on the Lagoons, La Thangue’s Leicester Galleries painting.
Henry Herbert La Thangue, Provencal Fishing Boats, c. 1920, 51 x 62.6 cm,
Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna O Waiwhetu, New Zealand
‘Pictures by HH La Thangue RA’ at the Leicester Galleries, April-May 1914
In the months leading up to the Great War, La Thangue’s exhibition provided glimpses of light in the gathering gloom, that London critics were only too pleased to seize upon. At this moment the painter found his most sensitive support in the writings of fellowpainter, Walter Sickert. Back in the early days of the New English Art Club, the two artists had gone their separate ways, but in early May 1914, Sickert filed his much-quoted review of the Leicester Galleries show. Keenly aware of the recent upheavals in the London art world with the arrival of Roger Fry’s ‘Post-Impressionist’ exhibitions and that of the Italian Futurists at the Doré Gallery, Sickert took the opportunity to situate La Thangue’s work within the ‘gamut’ of modern painting. Monet had developed a ‘most interesting series of colour relations … between blue and violet’ that others had followed.
The British painter was no acolyte.
It suits Mr La Thangue’s talent to develop a series of colour relations having, as a base, a warm colour, something that may be described as grading from russet towards ruby, and his justification for the choice of this base is that he has been able to build on it a series of beautiful and interesting sensations of nature, which is what he, and not someone else, has to say.
Herein lay La Thangue’s importance and his original take on modern painting – while speaking ‘to many generations to come’. He avoided ‘the gamut of Monet, or to be fin-de-décade, of Cezanne’. The paintings of hillsides in Provence and Liguria, and the mornings on the lagoons and lakes of southern France and northern Italy provided ‘extraordinary evocations’ in which you might ‘light upon a paradise’. Largely absent from Sickert’s reckoning, as from the Leicester Galleries exhibition, was the preceding twenty years of practice when, in the early days of the New English Art Club, La Thangue devoted his energies to the recording of English rural life.
Hardyesque labourers, their only narrative restricted to the task in hand, dominate these years. They tramp towards us in Bracken, 1898 and pipe the cows to their pasture in On Lavington Down, then also in Moses Nightingale’s collection. These time-limited activities alert the painter to grander sequences in the rolling of the seasons, the ‘Mistral’ currents of the upper air, the phases of the moon, and the morning sun that lights the limpid waters of the Provencal lagoons.
Nightingale, (1861–1934) was the son of a brick maker who, in his early twenties, founded and developed a series of businesses in Crawley, Sussex. A coal and corn merchant, he diversified into building and farming supplies and from his fortune made generous philanthropic donations to the town. His talents also extended to the establishment of the town’s orchestra in 1884, and by the mid-1890s he was sufficiently wealthy to construct Hazeldene, on Brighton Road, a spacious villa that is now the premises of the Crawley Club.
Here he built a billiard room that seems to have doubled as a practice room for the regular concerts given throughout the locality. The room served as a gallery devoted for the most part to his La Thangue collection. Nightingale’s earliest work by the painter, On Lavington Down, was acquired after 1901 and hung proudly in his dining room. With its flashes of sunlight filtered through unseen trees, to the left of the visual field, this anticipates the southern European palette that was to follow. Most of these later works glowed with the intense colour and strong sunlight that prompted La Thangue’s lifelong friend, George Clausen, to remark ‘No painter can get everything of what is before him … he can only … get the things that move him … And so, for La Thangue, it was, primarily, the beauty of things in sunlight that excited him …’ Such ‘beautiful and interesting sensations of nature’ passed, in all their richness, to Nightingale and his family, and their rediscovery here confirms the truth of Sickert’s words.
A fully illustrated catalogue for our summer exhibition of British Impressionism is available to buy online and from our gallery in St. James's
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