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Provenance: Private Collection, Gand, since 1915

While the majority of paintings which Jules Breton exhibited at the French Salon in Paris presented grand and glorifying scenes of the country's rural population at work in the field, the artist equally produced a small number of single studies of figures on a more reduced scale, performing their daily chores. An insight into these smaller works reveals the artist's overt interest in issues of domesticity to which he had become somewhat more sensitive following his marriage to the young Elodie De Vigne in April 1858. In fact, Breton began painting these subjects very shortly after his wedding; his beautiful Couturière (private collection) was executed during the couple's honeymoon in Holland, in April and May. While Dutch seventeenth-century painting may certainly have inspired the artist to portray young girls and women carrying out work in the home and outside, not all of Breton's smaller portraits carry such direct northern lineage.
With the present painting, Jeune fille tricotant, Breton recalls his French predecessors on the theme, particularly Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot - whom he admired greatly. It is perhaps in the use of the monochrome and anonymous background that Breton aligns himself most with his traditional past. Indeed, by setting the young girl against an undesignated background, the viewer's eye focuses more intensely on the regular profile and delicate handwork. Only the table and chair furnish the space. Only the knitting needles interrupt the working silence. As a result, the sitter - probably a young village girl from Breton's native Courrieres (Pas-de-Calais) - is totally absorbed in her work. A strong source of light, originating from the right, illuminates the girl's skin, headdress and shawl, allowing the artist to display a skilful use of tonal gradations: lighting effects on the pinks, the coral-reds and the blue-greys.
By 1860, Jules Breton had established his reputation in the art world. Having returned to the rural surroundings of his village of Courrieres in 1853, Breton continued to exhibit regularly at the Paris Salon. It was in this public sphere that Breton gained and maintained his position as a leading member of the French realist movement. However, Breton's form of realism never brought him to depict scenes of forceful rural or urban industry and his works, although certainly realist in subject, always contain an underlying degree of aesthetic sensitivity per se. Here, in depicting the Jeune fille tricotant, Breton reveals his poetic sensitivity to the modest beauty of his young model.
Jeune fille tricotant, one of Breton's rare scenes of a single figure in an interior, has just been brought to light and will be published, for the first time, in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the paintings of Jules Breton. In the certificate accompanying this painting, the author and specialist Madame Annette Bourrut Lacouture comments: "In its modest dimensions, this painting is one of the most remarkable works on this theme of the tricoteuses which the painter undertook throughout his lifetime."

We are very grateful to Madame Bourrut Lacouture for her kind assistance in cataloguing this lot.

For further reading on Jules Breton and genre painting, see:

Lacouture, Annette Bourrut, Jules Breton, Painter of Peasant Life, 2002, p. 102 (Une couturière), p. 51 (Paysanne enfilant une aiguille)

Weisberg, Gabriel P., The Realist Tradition / French Paintings and Drawings 1830-1900, The Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, p. 100, no 70 (Une Couturière), p. 104, no. 73 (Paysanne enfilant une aiguille)