Of far greater artistic significance are the three brothers, Antoine,
Louis, and Matthieu Le Nain, who were born at Laon, and flourished
in Paris during the first half of the seventeenth century. Antoine
and Louis died in 1648, and Matthieu in 1677. Very little is known of
their history, but the splendid array of their works in Gallery XIII.
proves them to have had close affinities with the contemporary Dutch
and Flemish schools, even if their manner of composition suggests close
acquaintance with Spanish art. Their subjects, too, like those of many
of the Northern masters of their time, are taken from the daily life of
the people, which is rendered with naïve honesty, and at times with a
real appreciation of beautiful pigment. So far it has been impossible
to distinguish between the works of the three brothers, as even the
signatures “LE NAIN, fecit 1647,” on the _Portraits in an Interior_
(No. 543), and “LE NAIN, fecit anno 1642,” on the _Peasants at their
Meal_ (No. 548, La Caze Gallery), afford no clue to the solution of the
problem. The striking differences in brushwork and colouring, which
are to be noticed in the eleven Le Nain pictures at the Louvre, would
certainly suggest that the three brothers did not, or did only rarely,
collaborate on the same pictures. The painter of _The Return from
Haymaking_ (No. 542), with its prophetic suggestion of the _plein-air_
effects of late nineteenth-century art, cannot have had much in common
with the painter of the dull and dingy _Denial of St. Peter_ (No. 547).