Louis, Antoine & Matthieu Le Nains - Peasant Family at the Well, originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.
All three Le Nains brothers were founding members of the French Royal Academy (1648), who developed a distinctive mode of genre painting related to the Bamboccianti in Italy, but with a Virgilian or Horatian admiration for the peasantry that was itself part of seventeenth-century Classicism. Although successful in their time, the Le Nans were later dismissed as going against official academic doctrine.
Confusion surrounds the oeuvre of the Le Nains, and the Peasant Family at a Well suffered the fate of many, being dismissed as the work of a copyist. Recent conservation reveals a work of considerable quality, comparable with works agreed to be by the Le Nains, and with pentimenti showing that it cannot be a copy.
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