Jules Breton Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

5-1-1827 Courrières, FRA - 7- 5-1906 Paris, FRA

Breton, Jules

Jules Breton first artistic training was not far from Courrières at the College St. Bertin near Saint-Omer. He met the painter Félix De Vigne in 1842 who, impressed by his youthful talent, convinced his family to give him a chance to contemplate art. Breton left for Ghent in 1843 to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts with de Vigne and the artist Hendrik Van der Haert. In 1846, Breton moved to Antwerp where he took lessons with Egide Charles Gustave Wappers and spent some time copying the works of Flemish masters.

In Paris Jules Breton studied in the studio of Michel Martin Drolling. He met and became friends a few of the Realist painters, including François Bonvin and Gustave Brion and his early entries at the Paris Salon reflected their influence.

Jules Breton moved to Belgium where he met his future spouse Elodie. Elodie was the daughter of his initial instructor Félix de Vigne. In 1852, Breton returned to France but he found that he was not destined to be a historical painter, and he returned to the recollections of nature and of the countryside which was impressed him in his early youth. Breton's enthusiasm for peasant symbolism was settled from that point on and what he is best known for now. He started The Gleaners, a work inspired by seasonal field labor and the situation of the less lucky who were left to accumulate what stayed on the field after the reaping.

He kept on showing all through the 1870s and into the 1890s and his reputation grew. His idyllic renderings of single peasant female figures in a landscape, postured against the setting sun, remained very popular, particularly in the United States. Since his works were so well known, Jules Breton delivered reproductions of some of his pictures. In 1880 Vincent van Gogh walked 85 miles to Courrières to pay a visit to Breton, whom he admired, but turned back, put off by Breton's high wall.

In February 2014, actor Bill Murray disclosed at a press event for, "The Monuments Men," that when he saw Breton's painting The Song of the Lark, at the Art Institute of Chicago, it helped turn him away from suicidal thoughts.

Art Movement: Realism.
Artists Influencing Jules Breton: Hendrik Van der Haert, Egide Charles Gustave Wappers.
He Traveled To Belgium.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.

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Jules Breton Museum Art Replicas on Canvas.

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