Jules Breton Gallery
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
viewer |
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| Weeders |
| Brittany Girl |
| Peasant Girl Knitting |
Gleaner |
| Reapers |
| Song of the Lark |
| Vintage at the Chateau Lagrang |
Biography
Bulletin Board
Renowned Art
(home)
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.
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