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Le retour des champs signed and dated 'Jules Breton 1867' (lower right) oil on canvas 273/4 x 41 in. (69.5 x 104 cm.) Painted in 1867 PROVENANCE Mary J. Morgan, New York. Scott and Fowles, New York. Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1964. LITERATURE M. de Montifaut, 'Salon de 1867', Revue du XIXe siŠcle, 1 May 1867, p. 254. E. About, 'Le Salon de 1867', Le Temps, 22 June 1867. M. Du Camp, 'Le Salon de 1867', Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 July 1867, pp. 667-8. P. Mantz, Gazette des beaux-arts, 23 October 1867, pp. 319-45. A. de Calonne, 'Exposition internationale et universelle de 1867', Revue contemporaine 1867, vol. 91, p. 729. Henriet, 'Salon de 1867', Revue Moderne, vol. 41, 1867, p. 629. J. Clar‚tie, Peintres et sculptures contemporains, Paris, 1874, pp. 141-5. M. Vachon, Jules Breton, Paris, 1889 (illustrated). A. Bourrut Lacouture, Jules Breton, Painter of Peasant Life, New Haven, 2002, p. 129, no. 54 (illustrated fig. 95). EXHIBITION Paris, Salon, 1867, no. 212. Jacksonville, Florida, Cummer Gallery of Art, Artists of the Paris Salon, January-February 1964, no. 7 (illustrated). Arras, Mus‚e des beaux-arts; Quimper, Mus‚e des beaux-arts; and Dublin, National Gallery of Scotland, Jules Breton, La Chanson des bl‚s, March-December 2002, no. 54. NOTES Jules Breton was born in Courrieres in Artois in 1827. His artistic education began in Ghent in 1843 at L'Academie des Beaux Arts under the tutelage of Felix de Vigne (1806-1860) and continued in Paris in the studio of Martin Drolling (1796-1851). He also studied with Ingres and Horace Vernet at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. His first attempts at humanism, MisiŠre et desespoir (1848) and La ferme were destroyed in the uprisings of 1848. His love of nature drew him to landscape painting, and he returned to CourriŠres after his family went bankrupt, where he devoted his talent to the depiction of life in the fields; painting moments of labor, moments of rest, the dramas and the rituals of peasant life. His rapid success earned him the Legion d'Honneur in 1861 and also enabled him to become a member of the jury of the Salon in 1865. Also in 1865, the collector and dealer Samuel P. Avery, introduced Breton's work to the United States, where it was very well-received, along with the works of Millet and Daubigny as well as the more academic painting of the period. This appreciation of Breton's work in the United States grew considerably in the last decades of the century. In 1886, Breton became the first "peasant painter" to gain entry to L'Academie des Beaux Arts. Often associated by the critics to Jean-Francois Millet, he had a distinct influence upon the next generation of painters of rural life such as Leon Lhermite, Julien Dupre and Jules Bastien-Lepage, all of whom also adhered to the tenets of the Realist movement. This influence, enhanced by the work of contemporary poets and writer, went beyond the borders of France, and impacted both European and American artists. When Breton died, in 1906, his work had been dispersed throughout the world, and especially throughout the United States. Breton's success in the Salon was based foremost upon his ability to synthesize the real and the ideal, and thereby create a "style" that did not detract from the naturalness of the scene. Between 1860 and 1870, Breton was focused on this duality in his art. Le retour des champs belongs to this important period in the artist's career, and a good number of critics placed alongside that of the work of Jean-Francois Millet. In Le retour des champs, a serenity and idyllic sense of contemplation dominate. The serene slowness of the central characters brings to mind a processional, an image that pervades many of Breton's works from this period, such as La promenade apres la moisson (Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum), painted in 1860. In addition, as in Le rappel des glaneuses of 1859 (Paris, Musee D'Orsay), there is a certain gravity and austerity which appears in the bearing and expressions of the three women, who walk towards the viewer in the hour when the sun yet sheds some dusky light on the figures and the fields. One of the women turns around and extends her hand to a child, partially hidden by the wheat, who has stopped to gather a bouquet of flowers. The oblique line of the path through the wheat serves to relieve a stasis to the composition that is otherwise dominated by regular horizontal and vertical lines. The sky, created through the use of an extremely subtle and delicate palette, contributes to the atmosphere of grave serenity. The critic Phillippe Henriet was particularly struck by Le retour des champs : "Des paysannes reviennent de leur travail. Elles sont vrais, simples, grandes, d'un bel aspect, presque sculptural. Cet art bienfaisant et sain comme l'air des champs et les plantes rustiques...( Salon of 1867, Revue Moderne, p. 629) Few prepartory documents for Le retour des champs have been located. One study, Dans les oeuillets, le soir (Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Catalogue de Vente de l'Atelier de J. Breton, 2-3 June 1911, n. 193, p. 72, illustrated) demonstrates the artist's reworking of the landscape for the Salon painting, but is much less descriptive in regard to the figures. A charcoal drawing of the three central figures (fig. 1) in a pose practically identical to those in the painting, shows Breton's usual technique of simplifying the silhouettes of the figures, thereby enhancing their natural nobility and their tacit comraderie, before placing them into the harmony and peace of the encroaching dusk. This drawing was most likely enlarged and transferred to canvas, as was Breton's habit. We are grateful to Annette Bourrut Lacouture for her assistance in preparing this catalogue note.