Jules Breton

Jules Breton painted French peasant women in the fields: gleaners bent over stubble, harvesters resting, a barefoot girl pausing with her sickle as a lark sings at sunrise. His figures are strong and dignified, often posed against a glowing evening or dawn sky, and his vision of rural life is idealised but deeply felt.

Born in Courrières in the Pas-de-Calais in 1827, he studied in Ghent and Antwerp and then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but his home village and the farmland of Artois stayed his lifelong subject. The Recall of the Gleaners (1859) is in the Musée d’Orsay, and The Song of the Lark (1884) in the Art Institute of Chicago became one of the best-loved paintings in America. He also wrote poetry and memoirs, and his daughter Virginie Demont-Breton became a painter. He died in 1906.

At the Fountain and Afternoon Repast show his favourite subject in quieter moments.