Working in the sharp and distinct light of a late winter’s day, a hedger stands with his right hand poised, the hooked blade held against the sky. The tool is a billhook, the English hedger’s bill: a single-curved cutting edge on a short wooden handle that had been the national instrument of the agricultural labourer for three centuries. Both hands are encased in heavy leather hedger’s gauntlets that cover the wrists. In his left hand he holds a single cut hedge stem with its pale severed tip visible, echoed in the hedge behind which has been severed towards the base. In the upper right corner in a striking compositional device, is a faggot-gatherer. Her face too catches the setting light, as does her blouse, filled in blocks of bright white paint between the hedge stems. In the distance to the left, another labourer is seen walking with a full basket upon his back.

The painting is a record of a rural craft that, even at the date of execution in 1888, was beginning to retreat before cheaper alternatives. Faggot-gathering too, which had been a longstanding occupation for rural woman was changing. Wives, widows and daughters of agricultural labourers would gather the dead-wood and off-cuts for household fuel and to sell, exercising an ancient customary right on common and manorial land. By the late 19th century, that right was being eroded by enclosure and the hardening of property law against gleaning and gathering, and the long agricultural depression of 1879 to 1893 was driving rural labour into the towns. La Thangue’s Leaving Home, painted two years after the present picture, would dramatise that movement directly (private collection, sold Christie’s, 19 February 2003, lot 19).

In subject and technique, The Hedger reveals the development of French Naturalism in English painting in the 1880s, and La Thangue’s central place within the movement. Despite his French name, La Thangue was born in Surrey and studied at Lambeth School of Art from 1874-9, followed by the Royal Academy in London, through which he earned a prestigious scholarship to study within the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There he encountered the work of the Barbizon School of plein-air landscape painters led by Jules Bastien-Lepage, who adopted rural subject matter, often with a socialist angle, and applied paint with a distinctive square brush technique, typically setting the figures against a high horizon to flatten the picture space. Bastien-Lepage’s Haymaking (Les Foins) from 1877 in the Musée d’Orsay is an exemplary work.

La Thangue remained in France through the early 1880s before returning to England in 1886; it was a dynamic time in British art circles as new painting ideas competed with tradition. La Thangue was a driving force in attempts to overhaul existing practices, becoming a founding member of the New English Art Club, created by contemporary artists in opposition to the conservatism of the Royal Academy. His fellow painters and friends, George Clausen and Frederick Brown, were other principal ‘conspirators’. Clausen’s Winter Work (1883-4, Tate Britain) and La Thangue’s The Return of the Reapers (1886, Tate Britain) were radical new works indebted to French Naturalism and pushing a new direction in British painting.

Dating to 1888, The Hedgers stands as another prime example. What marks La Thangue’s paintings from those of his contemporaries however is his bolder use of colour. Where the tradition of Naturalism favoured more muted, tonal colours, La Thangue embraced the impact of light and the contrasts it created. In The Hedger, he casts the surface in a luminous, dappled light evoked by a patchwork of broad paint marks - the back trouser leg of the hedger one high-note – and punctuated with bright greens, blues and whites. It is strikingly modern, and further so when one looks to the left edge of the painting and sees how La Thangue has pulled the paint across the surface to create a blurred motion effect. La Thangue was interested in photography practices, and it seems evident here how he sought to apply learnings from it in his painting.

The work belongs to a progressive time in British painting of the 1880s, and reveals a daring painter exploring new ideals at the height of his abilities. Although it is executed on a smaller scale than some of his larger works, it is as technically assured and no less impactful. By the early 1890s, La Thangue moved from Norfolk to Sussex and in subject, his works shift towards the orchard and southern garden following extended travels in France and Italy; and the bold use of square brushwork gives way to more feathery Impressionist application of paint. The radical Norfolk works from 1886-1890 was a brief but exceptional period, exemplified in The Hedgers.