Jules Breton
1827–1906 · France · Realism
The story
In 1884 an American collector paid a large sum for a painting of a barefoot peasant girl standing in a dawn field, pausing at the song of an unseen lark. The picture was The Song of the Lark by the French painter Jules Breton, and in the United States it became one of the best-loved paintings of its era, later voted the country's favourite in a 1930s newspaper poll.
Breton had grown up in a farming village in northern France and made rural labour his whole subject. Where his contemporary Millet painted peasants as heavy and worn, Breton gave them a calm dignity, gleaners and harvesters lit like figures in scripture.
He was also a published poet, and the same softly idealised mood runs through both. He kept painting the fields of his childhood almost until his death in 1906, long after younger artists had turned to the modern city.
