Louis Le Nain

Louis Le Nain is the least documented of the three Le Nain brothers, and yet the pictures now given to him are the ones that made the family famous, the large, still scenes of country people in grey and brown rooms. Because the brothers signed with the surname alone, historians have had to find him by looking.

One group of paintings stands out for its cool, subdued colour and its thin paint, laid on so lightly that the pale ground shows through in places. The same hand opens landscapes behind religious scenes and paints animals with unusual care, a dog lost in thought, a wary white cat, a donkey. That group became Louis. In 2017 the Louvre-Lens museum in northern France gathered 55 of the roughly 75 pictures credited to the brothers and sorted them by hand, and its curator Nicolas Milovanovic called Louis the most prolific and distinguished of the three.

The edges stay blurred. For the Peasant Family in an Interior, the largest of the brothers' peasant scenes, the Louvre names Louis and adds his brother Antoine with a question mark. The museum dates it to around 1642 by comparing it with the Peasants' Meal, a picture that carries that year. Louis died in Paris six years later, on 23 May 1648.