Léon-Louis-Antoine Riesener

Sale: Artist’s estate, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, April 1879, lot 1 (as Berger Breton causant avec une jeune paysanne)
Private Collection, France (utill 1977)
Georges Martin du Nord, Paris
Acquired from the above in 1981

Revue de l’artiste, “Un oublié, Riesener,”  vol. VIII, May 1879, pp. 312-314 (as un berger et un paysanne)
Geneviève Viallefond, Le Peinture Riesener, Paris, 1955, pp. 33-34, 113 (listed as "lost")

Hung with Jean-François Millet's The Sower and Gustave Courbet's Burial at Ornans, among others, Shepherd and Shepherdess was part of a truly groundbreaking Salon of 1850.  These works featured realistic depictions of the lives of peasants, elevating their humble status to that of national symbol.  Riesener's work is all the more innovative given its early completion date of 1839. Intriguingly, this suggests that the artist held it privately for years--and over a decade before Courbet's and other's similar compositions (now largely considered the first works of realism) were exhibited. Indeed, Shepherd and Shepherdess is a remarkably powerful and prescient composition for such an early attempt by the artist.  It depicts a scene Riesener may have witnessed at his family's estate of Frépillon, just north of Paris. A swarthy shepherd sprawls on the ground, his sheep momentarily forgotten behind a hill.  Standing to the right the "shepherdess" (more likely a harvester, as suggested by the sickle and sack she carries) taunts the shepherd's dog with a stalk of wheat.  Beyond a realistic portrayal of peasant life, this work possesses a dramatic narrative tension, as the two figures exchange and deny one another's glances. 

Eugène Delacroix was Riesener's first cousin and close friend. The two artists shared ideas and inspiration as similarities shared by the present work and a drawing by Delacroix demonstrate. The drawing, known as Etudes d'après un Paysan de Frépillon, suggests Delacroix found the model for the shepherd equally interesting, capturing his distinctive face in five different perspectives (Raymond Escholier, Delacroix, 1927, p. 285, illustrated).