LE NAIN, the name of three brothers, Louis, Antoine and Mathieu, who occupy a peculiar position in the history of French art. Although they figure amongst the original members of the French Academy, their works show no trace of the influences which prevailed when that body was founded. Their sober execution and choice of colour recall characteristics of the Spanish school, and when the world of Paris was busy with mythological allegories, and the “heroic deeds” of the king, the three Le Nain devoted themselves chiefly to subjects of humble life such as “Boys Playing Cards,” “The Forge,” or “The Peasants’ Meal.” These three paintings are now in the Louvre; various others may be found in local collections, and some fine drawings may be seen in the British Museum; but the Le Nain signature is rare, and is never accompanied by initials which might enable us to distinguish the work of the brothers. Their lives are lost in obscurity; all that can be affirmed is that they were born at Laon in Picardy towards the close of the 16th century. About 1629 they went to Paris; in 1648 the three brothers were received into the Academy, and in the same year both Antoine and Louis died. Mathieu lived on till August 1677; he bore the title of chevalier, and painted many portraits. Mary of Medici and Mazarin were amongst his sitters, but these works seem to have disappeared.
See Champfleury, Essai sur la vie et l’œuvre des Le Nain (1850), and Catalogue des tableaux des Le Nain (1861).
LENAU, NIKOLAUS, the pseudonym of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch von Strehlenau (1802-1850), Austrian poet, who was born at Csatád near Temesvar in Hungary, on the 15th of August 1802. His father, a government official, died at Budapest in 1807, leaving his children to the care of an affectionate, but jealous and somewhat hysterical, mother, who in 1811 married again. In 1819 the boy went to the university of Vienna; he subsequently studied Hungarian law at Pressburg and then spent the best part of four years in qualifying himself in medicine. But he was unable to settle down to any profession. He had early begun to write verses; and the disposition to sentimental melancholy acquired from his mother, stimulated by love disappointments and by the prevailing fashion of the romantic school of poetry, settled into gloom after his mother’s death in 1829. Soon afterwards a legacy from his grandmother enabled him to devote himself wholly to poetry. His first published poems appeared in 1827, in J. G. Seidl’s Aurora. In 1831 he went to Stuttgart, where he published a volume of Gedichte (1832) dedicated to the Swabian poet Gustav Schwab. Here he also made the acquaintance of Uhland, Justinus Kerner, Karl Mayer[1] and others; but his restless spirit longed for change, and he determined to seek for peace and freedom in America. In October 1832 he landed at Baltimore and settled on a homestead in Ohio. But the reality of life in “the primeval forest” fell lamentably short of the ideal he had pictured; he disliked the Americans with their eternal “English lisping of dollars” (englisches Talergelispel); and in 1833 he returned to Germany, where the appreciation of his first volume of poems revived his spirits. From now on he lived partly in Stuttgart and partly in Vienna. In 1836 appeared his Faust, in which he laid bare his own soul to the world; in 1837, Savonarola, an epic in which freedom from political and intellectual tyranny is insisted upon as essential to Christianity. In 1838 appeared his Neuere Gedichte, which prove that Savonarola had been but the result of a passing exaltation. Of these new poems, some of the finest were inspired by his hopeless passion for Sophie von Löwenthal, the wife of a friend, whose acquaintance he had made in 1833 and who “understood him as no other.” In 1842 appeared Die Albigenser, and in 1844 he began writing his Don Juan, a fragment of which was published after his death. Soon afterwards his never well-balanced mind began to show signs of aberration, and in October 1844 he was placed under restraint. He died in the asylum at Oberdöbling near Vienna on the 22nd of August 1850. Lenau’s fame rests mainly upon his shorter poems; even his epics are essentially lyric in quality. He is the greatest modern lyric poet of Austria, and the typical representative in German literature of that pessimistic Weltschmerz which, beginning with Byron, reached its culmination in the poetry of Leopardi.
Lenau’s Sämtliche Werke were published in 4 vols. by A. Grün (1855); but there are several more modern editions, as those by M. Koch in Kürschner’s Deutsche Nationalliteratur, vols. 154-155 (1888), and by E. Castle (2 vols., 1900). See A. Schurz, Lenaus Leben, grösstenteils aus des Dichters eigenen Briefen (1855); L. A. Frankl, Zu Lenaus Biographie (1854, 2nd ed., 1885); A. Marchand, Les Poètes lyriques de l’Autriche (1881); L. A. Frankl, Lenaus Tagebuch und Briefe an Sophie Löwenthal (1891); A. Schlossar, Lenaus Briefe an die Familie Reinbeck (1896); L. Roustan, Lenau et son temps (1898); E. Castle, Lenau und die Familie Löwenthal (1906).
[1] Karl Friedrich Hartmann Mayer (1786-1870), poet, and biographer of Uhland, was by profession a lawyer and government official in Württemberg.
LENBACH, FRANZ VON (1836-1904), German painter, was born at Schrobenhausen, in Bavaria, on the 13th of December 1836. His father was a mason, and the boy was intended to follow his father’s trade or be a builder. With this view he was sent to school at Landsberg, and then to the polytechnic at Augsburg. But after seeing Hofner, the animal painter, executing some studies, he made various attempts at painting, which his father’s orders interrupted. However, when he had seen the galleries of Augsburg and Munich, he finally obtained his father’s permission to become an artist, and worked for a short time in the studio of Gräfle, the painter; after this he devoted much time to copying. Thus he was already accomplished in technique when he became the pupil of Piloty, with whom he set out for Italy in 1858. A few interesting works remain as the outcome of this first journey—“A Peasant seeking Shelter from Bad Weather” (1855), “The Goatherd” (1860, in the Schack Gallery, Munich), and “The Arch of Titus” (in the Palfy collection, Budapest). On returning to Munich, he was at once called to Weimar to take the appointment of professor at the Academy. But he did not hold it long, having made the acquaintance of Count Schack, who commissioned a great number of copies for his collection. Lenbach returned to Italy the same year, and there copied many famous pictures. He set out in 1867 for Spain, where he copied not only the famous pictures by Velasquez in the Prado, but also some landscapes in the museums of Granada and the Alhambra (1868). In the previous year he had exhibited at the great exhibition at Paris several portraits, one of which took a third-class medal. Thereafter he exhibited frequently both at Munich and at Vienna, and in 1900 at the Paris exhibition was awarded a Grand Prix for painting. Lenbach, who died in 1904, painted many of the most remarkable personages of his time.
See Berlepsch, “Lenbach,” Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte (1891); Bégouen, Les Portraits de Lenbach à l’exposition de Munich (1899); K. Knackfuss, Lenbach, and Franz von Lenbach Bildnisse (1900).