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Overview

Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton was one of the early painters to turn his attention to the rural landscape and its cultivators, celebrating the beauty and nobility of rustic life.  Although his favored themes—gleaners, harvesters, and communicants—were popular subjects for realistic artworks and illustrations of genre types during this period, in Breton’s images, they are treated in an academic style traditionally reserved for classical figures.  In his 1896 memoir Un Peintre Paysan, Jules Breton reflected upon the period during which he began to articulate his mature aesthetic, confessing, “I was no longer dreaming of anything but the grand style.  I was wondering if the rustic genre could lead me to it.”[i]  This “grand style,” to which the artist aspired and which he enlisted in his archetypal depictions of the peasant, was evolved from the academic tradition and infused with the principles of realism to effect something modern.

 

Breton was born in Courrières, a village in the agriculturally rich Artois region of northern France.  His father managed the estate of a local nobleman and his Uncle Boniface, who was responsible for the artist’s early education, authored a history of the area.  The young Breton’s intimate relationship to the land and the peasantry engendered in him a certain sympathy and tenderness that would characterize his interpretations of rural customs throughout his career.  He received some formal artistic training in Belgium under Félix de Vigne and Baron Gustave Wappers, who introduced him to the rigors of academic studio practice and the examples of the Old Masters and the Flemish School.  In 1847, he moved to Paris to join the atelier of Michel-Martin Drolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but abandoned his course during the social upheaval of the Revolution of February 1848 and returned to Courrières.  A revolutionary attitude inspired his first submissions to the Paris Salon, which were realist in their subject matter though academic in style.  And while these paintings earned him official recognition, and perhaps most importantly, affiliation with the emerging school of Realism, it was with paintings of rural subjects taken up in subsequent years and the establishment of a rural studio practice that would effectively install him among the acknowledged master painters of nineteenth-century France. 

 

Combining realistic detail with a poetic sensibility, Breton’s works appear both particular and universal, contemporary and timeless.  As one critic so aptly summarized, “he is an idealist, but an idealist who depends most thoroughly on reality.”[ii]  While this idealized vision of the reality of rural life led some critics to regard Breton’s paintings as an appeal only to bourgeois tastes and official recognition, more recent scholarship has suggested that his masterful combination of real and ideal is exemplary of the complexities of nineteenth-century Realism.[iii]

 

[i]Jules Breton, Un Peintre Paysan: souvenirs et impressions (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1896), 122.

[ii] Garnet Smith, “Jules Breton: Painter of Peasants,” The Magazine of Art (1893): 409.

[iii] Taylor J. Acosta, “Real and Ideal: The Realism of Jules Breton” (PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2018).

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Overview

Lauded during his lifetime as the successor of David, Ingres, and Delacroix, Cabanel began his artistic studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1840.  In 1845, he was awarded the Prix de Rome, the first of numerous honors and medals that he would receive during his long and prolific career.  His prowess as a portrait painter earned him the favor of Napoleon III and the patronage of the doyens of Gilded Age America.  His appointment first as a member of the Institut de France in 1863 and, the following year, to a professorship at the Beaux-Arts impacted an entire generation of artists; together with Gérôme, Cabanel would teach more students than any of his colleagues or contemporaries.  Cabanel was bestowed a permanent position at the Beaux-Arts on the jury responsible for admissions and awards in that same year.

 

Cabanel’s relationship with the annual Paris Salon was equally important.  A regular exhibitor from 1843 of historical, religious, and classical subjects painted in the academic style, the artist received a silver medal in 1852, gold in 1855, and medals of honor in 1865, 1867, and 1878.  For seventeen years between 1868 and 1888, Cabanel was elected to serve on the Salon jury. It was in this capacity, and in collaboration with William Bouguereau, that the artist would refuse to accept 2783 paintings to the Salon, thus compelling the creation of the Salon des Refusés in 1863 and deepening a growing rift between academic and avant-garde art.

 

These academic affiliations were countered by Cabanel’s success as a muralist and decorative painter, a career that began in 1852-3 with a set of twelve pendentives depicting seasonal aspects of each calendar month for the Paris city hall, the Hôtel de Ville; later large-scale works can be found in public and private buildings throughout France, including at the Hôtel Chevalier de Montigny, the Hôtel Say, the Louvre, Château de Vincennes, and the Panthéon.  Cabanel’s largest and most important commission abroad was for Le Paradis perdu (1867), a monumental painting created for King Maximilian II of Bavaria as part of an elaborate interior iconographic program in Münich’s Maximilianeum.  

 

Cabanel’s best-known painting is La Naissance de Venus (The Birth of Venus) (1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), a picture that both reflected Cabanel’s debt to the Italian Renaissance masters and forecast his dedication to the idealistic perfection – and, contemporaries felt, the eroticization - of the female nude.  Like so many of his works, it was purchased directly from the artist (in this case by Napoleon III), with several preparatory studies, sketches, and reductions created for additional sales.  The success of these works led to relationships with several French and American dealers and printmakers, thus ensuring Cabanel’s enduring popularity in the United States, England, and further abroad.  Two of Cabanel’s reductions of The Birth of Venus are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Dahesh Museum in New York.  A répétition of Paradis perdu is included in the inventory of Gallery 19c.

 

This biography was written by Emily M. Weeks, Ph.D.

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