Jules Breton

London, French Gallery, Eleventh Annual Exhibition, 1864, no. 18 (as Grand-Papa's Birthday)

Lined. Under UV: Inpainting fluoresces along the perimeter, further areas of restoration to the right background, the tray-carrying boy's face, skirt of older, standing daughter in profile, chair and coat of the grandfather, and in the mantle.
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Interior scenes like La fête du Grand-Père are relatively rare in Breton’s oeuvre and its palette and composition (particularly the domestic vignette seen through the doorway of a woman setting a table) demonstrates the artist’s longstanding appreciation of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. While the artist wrote to his Uncle Boniface Breton that he completed the work in March 1864 it is possible that it was started years earlier.  Soon after the painting’s completion it was exhibited in London before being lost, and until recently has been known primarily though a preparatory crayon noir and oil sketch.