The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (269 page)

(1618–80).
Painter of Dutch origin who spent almost all his career in England and was naturalized in 1662. His family name was originally vander Faes, and the name Lely is said to have come from a lily carved on the house in The Hague where his father was born. Lely was born at Soest in Westphalia (where his father, a captain of infantry, was stationed) and trained in Haarlem. He came to England in the early 1640s (early biographers say 1641 or 1643), and although he first painted figure compositions in landscapes (
Sleeping Nymphs
, Dulwich College Picture Gallery), he soon turned to the more profitable field of portraiture. Fortune shone on him, for within a few years of his arrival the best portraitists in England disappeared from the scene; van
Dyck
and William
Dobson
died in 1641 and 1646 respectively, and Cornelius
Johnson
returned to Holland in 1643. In 1654 he was described as ‘the best artist in England’. Lely portrayed Charles I and his children, Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard, and other leading figures of the Interregnum, but he is associated chiefly with the Restoration court of Charles II. He was made Principal Painter to the King in 1661 and was able to enjoy a lavish lifestyle, described in Samuel Pepys's
Diary
. With the aid of a team of assistants he maintained an enormous output, and his fleshy, sleepy beauties clad in exquisite silks and his bewigged courtiers have created the popular image of Restoration England. Van Dyck was the strongest influence on his style, but Lely was more earthy and less refined. Much of his work is repetitive (it is sometimes hard to tell sitters apart), but he was a fluent and lively colourist and had a gift for impressive composition. He completely dominated portraiture in his time, and the tradition of the society portrait which he consolidated, developed by
Kneller
,
Jervas
, and
Hudson
, endured for almost a century until it was challenged by
Hogarth
. He amassed one of the finest collections of Old Master drawings ever assembled, which was sold after his death.

 
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Lemoyne
.

Family of French sculptors.
Jean-Louis Lemoyne
(1665–1755) was a pupil of
Coysevox
and is remembered mainly for portrait busts in his master's manner. His brother
Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Elder
(1679–1731) was a figure and portrait sculptor of no great distinction. Jean-Louis's son,
Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger
(1704–78), was the outstanding member of the family, becoming official sculptor to Louis XV. He did much large-scale work at Versailles and elsewhere, but is renowned particularly for the vivacity of his portraits. Among his pupils were
Falconet
,
Houdon
, and
Pigalle
.

 
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(1688–1737).
French painter. He was one of the leading decorative artists of the day, continuing the grand tradition of
Lebrun
but adapting it to the lighter taste of the court of Louis XV, to whom he became official painter in 1736. Much of his work can be seen at Versailles, notably in the Salon d'Hercule. He was a man of wide pictorial culture, learning from
Rubens
in his use of colour and from Bolognese painters (see
CARRACCI
) in his clarity and grace of drawing. The easy fluency of his style belies his disturbed personality; he committed suicide a few hours after completing
Time Revealing Truth
(Wallace Coll., London, 1737).

 
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(1898–1980).
Polish-born painter active in Paris and the USA. She was born Tamara Gorska in Warsaw to wealthy parents and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Lempicki , a Russian lawyer and socialite. In 1918 they fled the Russian Revolution to Paris, where she studied with Maurice
Denis
and André
Lhote
. She quickly established a reputation as a painter of portraits, mainly of people in the smart social circles in which she moved—writers, entertainers, the disposed nobility of Eastern Europe. Her style owes something to the ‘tubism’ of
Léger
, but is very distinctive in its hard, streamlined elegance and sense of chic decadence—better than anyone else she represents the
Art Deco
style in painting. Apart from portraits, her main subjects were hefty erotic nudes and still lifes of calla lilies. She received considerable critical acclaim and also became a social celebrity, famed for her aloof Garboesque beauty, her parties, and her love affairs (with women as well as men). In 1939 she moved to the USA with her second husband Baron Raoul Huffner, repeating her artistic and social success in Hollywood and New York. By the 1950s, however, her work was going out of fashion. She tried painting pictures in a different, much looser style, but these were coolly received. Interest in her earlier work began to revive in the 1970s and by the 1990s she had again become something of a stylish icon, with her paintings fetching huge prices in the saleroom and featuring in television advertisements as a symbol of the high life.

 
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(d. 1648), Louis (d. 1648), and Mathieu (
c.
1607–77).
French painters, brothers, who were born at Laon but had all moved to Paris by 1630. The traditional birth-dates for Antoine and Louis are 1588 and 1593 respectively, but it is now thought likely that they were born shortly before and shortly after 1600, so that all three brothers were of much the same generation. Mathieu was made painter to the city of Paris in 1633, and all three were foundation members of the
Academy
in 1648. Apart from this, little is known of their careers and the assigning of works to one or the other of them is fraught with difficulty and controversy, for such paintings as are signed bear only their surname, and of those that are dated none is later than 1648, when all were still alive. The finest and most original works associated with the brothers—powerful and dignified
genre
scenes of peasants—are conventionally given to Louis; Antoine is credited with a group of small-scale and richly coloured family scenes, mainly on copper; and in a third group, attributed to Mathieu, are paintings of a more
eclectic
style, chiefly portraits and group portraits in a manner suggesting influence from Holland. The brothers are also said to have collaborated on religious works. Examples of all these types are in the Louvre. In 1978–9 a major exhibition in Paris brought together most of the pictures associated with the brothers, but it raised as many problems as it solved. It also, however, confirmed the stature of ‘Louis’, whose sympathetic and unaffected peasant scenes are the main reason why the Le Nains have attracted so much attention. It has recently been proposed that the traditional description of the figures in these paintings as ‘peasants’ is a misnomer (they are said to be too well dressed for that) and that in fact they represent members of the bourgeoisie.