THE BROTHERS LE NAIN
Of far greater artistic significance are the three brothers, Antoine, Louis, and Matthieu Le Nain, who were born at Laon, and flourished in Paris during the first half of the seventeenth century. Antoine and Louis died in 1648, and Matthieu in 1677. Very little is known of their history, but the splendid array of their works in Gallery XIII. proves them to have had close affinities with the contemporary Dutch and Flemish schools, even if their manner of composition suggests close acquaintance with Spanish art. Their subjects, too, like those of many of the Northern masters of their time, are taken from the daily life of the people, which is rendered with naïve honesty, and at times with a real appreciation of beautiful pigment. So far it has been impossible to distinguish between the works of the three brothers, as even the signatures “le nain, fecit 1647,” on the Portraits in an Interior (No. 543), and “le nain, fecit anno 1642,” on the Peasants at their Meal (No. 548, La Caze Gallery), afford no clue to the solution of the problem. The striking differences in brushwork and colouring, which are to be noticed in the eleven Le Nain pictures at the Louvre, would certainly suggest that the three brothers did not, or did only rarely, collaborate on the same pictures. The painter of The Return from Haymaking (No. 542), with its prophetic suggestion of the plein-air effects of late nineteenth-century art, cannot have had much in common with the painter of the dull and dingy Denial of St. Peter (No. 547).