The three Le Nain brothers were painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

s in 17th-century France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

: Antoine Le Nain (c.1599-1648), Louis Le Nain (c.1593-1648), and Mathieu Le Nain (1607–1677). They produced genre works, portraits

Portrait painting

Portrait painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to depict the visual appearance of the subject. Beside human beings, animals, pets and even inanimate objects can be chosen as the subject for a portrait...

 and portrait miniatures.

Lives and work

The Le Nain brothers were born in Laon

Laon

Laon is the capital city of the Aisne department in Picardy in northern France.-History:The hilly district of Laon, which rises a hundred metres above the otherwise flat Picardy plain, has always held strategic importance...

 (Mathieu in 1607; Antoine and Louis were originally believed to have been born in 1588 and 1593, respectively, but those dates have since been disputed: they may have instead been born just before and just after 1600), and by 1630, all three lived in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. In 1648 the three brothers were received into the Académie de peinture et de sculpture

Académie de peinture et de sculpture

The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture , Paris, was founded in 1648, modelled on Italian examples, such as the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. Paris already had the Académie de Saint-Luc, which was a city artist guild like any other Guild of Saint Luke...

 on the year of its founding.

Because of the remarkable similarity of their styles of painting and the difficulty of distinguishing works by each brother (they signed their paintings only with their surname

Surname

A surname is a name added to a given name and is part of a personal name. In many cases, a surname is a family name. Many dictionaries define "surname" as a synonym of "family name"...

, and many may have been collaborations), they are commonly referred to as a single entity, Le Nain. Louis is usually credited with the best-known of their paintings, a series of scenes depicting peasant

Peasant

A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...

 life. These genre paintings are often noted for being remarkably literal, yet sympathetic; the subjects are never grotesque or seem ridiculed. There remains some question, however, as to whether some of the assumed “peasants” were truly from the rural class—many seem to be simply the bourgeois at leisure in the country. Their sober execution and choice of colour recall characteristics of the Spanish school. Their choice of subject was unusual for the time: the world of Paris was busy with mythological allegories, and the “heroic deeds” of the king, while the three Le Nain devoted themselves chiefly to these subjects of humble life such as “Boys Playing Cards,” “The Forge,” or “The Peasants' Meal,” three pictures now in the Louvre

Louvre

The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...

.

The brothers also produced miniature

Miniature (illuminated manuscript)

The word miniature, derived from the Latin minium, red lead, is a picture in an ancient or medieval illuminated manuscript; the simple decoration of the early codices having been miniated or delineated with that pigment...

s (mainly attributed to Antoine) and portrait

Portrait

thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...

s (attributed to Mathieu). Mathieu became the official painter of Paris in 1633, and was made a chevalier

Knight

A knight was a member of a class of lower nobility in the High Middle Ages.By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior....

. Among his sitters for portraits were Mary of Medici and Mazarin, but these works seem to have disappeared.

Antoine and Louis died in 1648. Mathieu lived until 1677.

The Le Nain paintings had a revival in the 1840s and, thanks to the exertions of Champfleury

Champfleury

Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson , who wrote under the name Champfleury, was a French art critic and novelist, a prominent supporter of the Realist movement in painting and fiction.In 1843 Fleury-Husson moved to Paris...

, made their appearance on the walls of the Louvre in 1848. Champfleury was a friend of Realist painter Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...

, a theorist of Realism and writer on French popular arts. The “naive” quality of these works, with their static poses, “awkward” compositions and peasant subjects were admired and may well have exercised some influence on many nineteenth-century artists, notably Courbet himself.

External links and sources

• Biography (Web gallery of Art)
• Louis Le Nain (The Artchive)
• Biography of the Le Nain Brothers (CGFA)
• Paintings by the Le Nain brothers (CGFA)