*This painting is sold but the artist is regularly available in our inventory		Jules Breton* Courrières 1827 – 1906 Paris Peasant Girl Gathering Poppies (Petite Paysanne aux Coquelicots) Oil on canvas mounted on panel 12 7/8 x 16 1/4 inches (32.8 x 41.4 cm) 21 3/4 x 25 inches framed Signed and dated lower right: Jules Breton 1855 Provenance: c. 1937, Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam Exhibitions: 1937-1938 - Society of Liberal Arts, Joslyn Memorial, Omaha, Nebraska (loan 28.1937) Literature: Accompanied by a certificate from Annette Bourrut Lacouture and to be included in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné. One of the foremost academic painters of his day, Jules Adolphe Aimé Breton created images that combined realist, peasant subjects with an idealizing sensibility. His iconic images of peasants in the fields captured a poetic, sometimes even heroic aspect of their difficult life and brought him great success in France, America, England and elsewhere. Jules Breton was born in the rural Artois region of northern France and spent his youth in Courrières, a small village in the Pas-de-Calais. His father, Marie-Louis Breton worked for a wealthy landowner whose land he supervised. After the death of his mother when Jules was 4, he was brought up by his father. His maternal grandmother and uncle Boniface Breton, who lived in the same house, also had a deep influence on the young artist's upbringing. All instilled in the young man a respect for tradition, a love of the land and, especially, for his native region, which remained central to his art throughout his whole life and provided him with many scenes for his Salon compositions. He received his first artistic training not far from Courrières at the College St. Bertin near St. Omer. In 1842 he met the painter Félix de Vigne (1806-1862) who was impressed by his youthful talent and persuaded his family to let him study art. In 1843, Breton left for Ghent, where he continued to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts with de Vigne, as well as with the painter Hendrik Van der Haert (1790-1846). About 1846, Breton moved to Antwerp where he took lessons with Baron Gustaf Wappers; he also spent much of his time copying the works of Flemish masters. In 1847, Breton finally left for Paris where he hoped to perfect his artistic training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Once there, he studied in the atelier of the genre painter Michel-Martin Drolling (1786- 1851). He also met, and became friends, with several of the Realist painters, including François Bonvin and Gustave Brion, and his early entries at the Salon reflected their influence, as well as his concerns for the poor brought to the fore by the events of the 1848 Revolution. His paintings Misery and Despair (1848) shown at the Salon of 1849, and Hunger (1850) shown at the Salon of 1850-51, are representative of Breton's artistic preoccupations at the time.  After Hunger was successfully shown in Brussels and Ghent, Breton was encouraged to move to Belgium where he met his future wife Elodie. Elodie, who became one of Breton's favorite models, was the daughter of Félix de Vigne, his early teacher; they were married in 1858. Breton returned to France in 1852. In 1853 he exhibited Return of the Reapers, the first of numerous rural peasant scenes based on his awareness of contemporary themes. Breton's interest in peasant imagery was, from then on, well established and it is the subject for which he is best known today. In 1854, Breton returned to the village of Courrières where he settled. Once there, he began The Gleaners (now in the Dublin National Gallery). This work was inspired by seasonal field labor and the plight of the less fortunate who were left to gather what remained in the field after the harvest. The Gleaners received a third class medal. This award, and the success of the painting among other artists and the public, launched Breton's career; his success continued throughout the Second Empire and beyond. He received commissions from the State and his works were purchased by the French Art Administration and sent to provincial museums. His painting Blessing of the Wheat, Artois (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), completed in 1857 and exhibited at the Salon of the same year, brought a second class medal and was purchased by M. de Nieuwerkerke for the Imperial Museums. In 1861, Breton received the Legion of Honor. At the 1867 Universal Exhibition, where ten of his works were on view, Breton received a First Class Medal. He became a member of the Institut de France in 1886. In addition to being a painter, Breton was also a recognized writer who published a volume of poems and several editions of prose related to his life as an artist or to the lives of other artists that he personally knew. Thus, in several ways, Jules Breton, at the time of his death in 1906, was highly regarded as a painter with a personal vision of rural life. His dedication to a section of the French countryside, his absorption of traditional methods of painting, and the creation of a popular style, helped make Jules Breton one of the primary transmitters of the beauty and idyllic vision of rural existence. In our painting, Breton presents a young peasant girl in a field at the edge of a village.  She stands in a patch of red poppies, running the stem of one delicate flower between her fingers and thumb.  Behind her lays a field of tall grass, and beyond it the red roofs of a number of low houses.  Breton frequently experimented with the depiction of lighting conditions at the beginning and end of the day, when the sun is low, and this painting is an exercise in his skill at rendering the subtle, gray light of a late morning.  We see before us a morning where the sun casts no shadows, but sheds a silvery light that emanates from behind the peasant girl, hiding her face and accentuating the bright, white outline of her bonnet.  The weak sun highlights the tips of the grass in the field behind her, creating a surface of pale green upon a depth of dark grass, and it casts a soft light through the translucent red petals of the poppies, causing them to glow against the verdant background.  This lighting effect lends the picture a poignancy that underscores the girl’s downcast gaze and longing gesture.  The effect of backlighting the scene also lends it a permanence and stasis that is difficult to achieve when depicting the transient effects of natural light.  At a time when many painters made studies out-of-doors to capture the sense of a spontaneous moment, Breton used these same effects to portray an introspective image of the moment of transition from childhood to womanhood. Annette Bourrut Lacouture, remarked on Petite Paysanne aux Coquelicots, “I think this charming painting with a girl among poppies is rather typically treated by Jules Breton, in the fresh and serene spirit of the sketches produced during that 1855 period. Most probably, it has been done in Courrières. It looks very natural and at the same time, the composition is finally quite elaborated in three horizontal regular partitions of space accentuated by the flowers line in the field and behind, the farmhouses. In contrast, on the first plain…a bunch of wild flowers silhouette the figure of the young peasant girl and her white shawl and white cap enhance this green and brown background.” This work was formerly part of the collection of Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam (1891-1963).  Bishop Oxnam served as Methodist Bishop to New York and then Washington D. C., where he was known for his liberal policies.  A friend of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and influential advisor during the Truman Administration, Oxnam is remembered for his campaign for emergency relief and reconstruction after the end of the World War II.  Museum collections: Château Museum, Dieppe, France; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York; Hendrik Willem Mesdag National Museum, Hague, the Netherlands; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Paine Art Center, Oshkosh, WI; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France; John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, PA; Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, MO; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, Louvre, Paris; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; Walters Museum, Baltimore; Antwerp Museum of Art; Arras Museum; Bagneres Museum of Art; Bologne Museum of Art; Calais Museum of Art; Lille Museum of Art; Anvers Museum of Art; various provincial museums.