Jules Breton

Renowned Art

Jules Breton Gallery Prints. Full biography.

Jules Adolphe Aime Louis Breton (1827-1906)
Jules Breton was born in Courrières, a small Pas-de-Calais village. He painted peasant imagery such as poetic renderings of single peasant female figures in a landscape posed against the setting sun. He studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts with de Vigne in Ghent and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He won medals at the Salon for his paintings in the 1840's and 1850's. He continued to exhibit throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s and 1890s and his reputation grew such that he became one of the best known painters of his period in his native France as well as England and the United States. In 1886, he became a member of the Institut de France.

Weeders

Brittany Girl

Peasant Girl Knitting

Gleaner

Reapers

Song of the Lark

Vintage at the Chateau Lagrang

Viewer

The Gleaner, 1875
oil on canvas

By 1875, when this work was painted, Jules Breton was a highly regarded artist. His paintings had been enormously influential on younger French artists but also on many Dutch painters - particularly those who had worked for extended periods in France, such as David Artz and Vincent van Gogh and perhaps also Jozef Israels. Breton does not idealise the peasant girl's strong features, dark sun-tanned skin and ragged clothes. Her feet are large, her ankles thick. She looks forward at the viewer with an uncompromising, confident expression. It is her heroic dignity that is the overriding quality conveyed.

Acc. No. ABDAG002172

Overall: Height: 73.5 cm, Width: 54.9 cm Frame: Height: 103.3 cm, Width: 83.6 cm

Comments about Breton

Name: J. Higgins
Date: Friday April 30, 2010 11:05:43 am MDT
Subject: Breton Print of mother & child reuntion
Message: I have a print by J. Breeton of parents returning from working in the fields in Courrieres. A small child is running to the mother whose is rushing to greet him with her arms open. Members of the extended family are seated on the left spinning wool. There is a thatched cottage in the background. Does anyone know the name of this print?

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