Louis
Lenen

Louis Leno was born in 1593 in the town of Laon (Picardie) in a family of petty bourgeois. Together with his brothers, Louis moved to Paris. Here, Louis, Antoine and Mathieu opened his own workshop.

Probably with Mathieu Louis Lenno visited Italy. In his early work salient features of caravaggism. By 1640, the artist has developed his own unique style. Best Louis Lenena made in 1640-ies. Died Louis Lenno in 1648, His realistic paintings, devoid of theatrics and drama of the Baroque, almost a hundred years ahead of its time.

French painter, master of group portraits from the life of peasants. Changing tastes in the early seventeenth century that led to the interest in scenes of everyday life, each school has created a special concept. Creativity Louis Lenena and two of his brothers, Antoine and Mathieu, who were originally from Lana in Normandy, basically do not like anybody else. Louis Lenno often portrayed family scenes around the scantily-furnished table, simple peasant life, usually outside the home, on the way home from the field. Louis Lenno treated their subjects with a solemn monumentality. Serious characters in these paintings sitting around low tables, as well restrained as itself the existence of a moderate and frugal. There is nothing from razveselili violent scenes depicted in Haarlem, anything from Italianate snobbery of the Utrecht school. In the guard room is not happening questionable things and exotic entertainment of the soldiery. There is nothing comic or gallant, roguish or patronizing. Little substantive detail that would be found in the picture the presence of a still life; no moralization, as well as anything immoral.

The whole expression is the seriousness portrayed, in the concentration of this shaded space with subdued light. Light incident side, enhances the credibility of modeling in the figures, which are in pensive anticipation, like waiting to write. Embodied working lives in conditions close to poverty, and yet it clearly sounds that philosophical calmness, what is transferred need and restrained extravagance. In other paintings Lenena subjects taken from the Gospels and mythology, presented with a similar restrained tact and impressive same powerful portrait.

There could be the belief that this is a monumental clear and simple as people have been equally remembered or invented, in any and observed in life. It is clear that the consistently sustained equilibrium and classically balanced mood, which features the best pictures of the brothers Lenain (and they all seem to be filled with a brush Louis), it was difficult not only to achieve but to maintain. There are many imitations of the manner of brothers Lenno imitations, which always lacked something, to be as exalted and to achieve the same balance of all elements of the painting and the building. Instead, the children appeared sweetly naivety or deliberate, to create a very different mood.

Characteristically, the idea of simplicity in household and it appears in French painting, sometimes no less meaningful interpretation, but more often with a superficial sense of equilibrium, only superficially consonant with the ideal of the man who taught us Louis Le Nain.