Chercheurs d’écrevisses (Flusskrebsfischer). Wohl 1857.
Oil on canvas.
Signed lower left. Verso on the stretcher with a hand-written number and a label of the Galerie Bühler, Munich. 98 x 71 cm (38.5 x 27.9 in).

• Rare work from the artist's early period of creation
• One of the first paintings presented at the Paris Salon in 1857
• His contemporaries honored Harpignies as the “Michelangelo of trees and peaceful landscapes”.
• Works by the artist can be found in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

We are grateful to Dr. Jean-Pierre Cappoen, Université de Lille Laboratoire IRHIS, for his kind expert advice.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Dr. Hans-Peter Bühler, Munich.
Private collection Lower Saxony (acquired from the above in 1984).

EXHIBITION: Salon des Artistes français, Paris 1857, no. 1310.
Visions de la nature en France du XIXe siècle, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie Besançon, April-Mai 1986.

LITERATURE: Hans-Peter Bühler, Henri-Joseph Harpignies. Michelangelo der Bäume, in: Weltkunst, year 54, no. 9, 1984, pp. 1243-1247.
Jean-Pierre Cappoen, Henri Harpignies (1819-1916) et les salons. Leurs roles dans sa carrière, dans sa réception et la fortune critique de son œuvre (doctor thesis at. Université de Lille, in preparation), no. 1310, illu. 9.
"I can absolutely understand that there are people like Daubigny and Harpignies and Ruysdael and so many others who are irresistibly taken with landscapes, entirely satisfied by their work, as they are simply happy with the air, the soil, a pond and a shrub."
Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo van Gogh, between February 5 and 16, 1885, letter no. 483.