Quai au Sable, Chartèves (1904): Art, History and Details

Quai au Sable, Chartèves (1904) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Léon Augustin Lhermitte (French, 1844–1925).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Like many of Léon-Augustin Lhermitte’s pastels, this drawing shows the Marne River in northeastern France. Such artworks were created both because of the artist’s attraction to the subject and due to their marketability. Drawing from memory, Lhermitte worked in his studio, producing a complex range of marks with pastel crayon on densely textured paper and even manipulating the powdery material with brushes and sponges. Although his comparatively traditional style did not align with artistic movements of his time, it was hugely popular around 1900—especially in the United States, where the hardworking laborers that populated his landscapes appealed to industrialist collectors.

Object facts

• Title: Quai au Sable, Chartèves
• Date: 1904
• Creator attribution: Léon Augustin Lhermitte (French, 1844–1925)
• Culture: France, 20th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pastel on gray wove paper
• Dimensions: Framed: 94.3 x 124.2 x 8 cm (37 1/8 x 48 7/8 x 3 1/8 in.); Overall: 69 x 99 cm (27 3/16 x 39 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1980.269

A detail from the museum

Lhermitte received a stipend from his hometown Mont-Saint-Père to study in Paris.

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• 19th Century European Paintings. New York: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1976.
• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1980." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (1981): 163-219.
• Le Pelley Fonteny, Monique. Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925): Catalogue raisonné. Paris: Éditions cercle d’art, 1991.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.