Jules Breton

Private Collection, England (by 1900)
Thence by descent

Brussels, Salon, 1854, no. 102

Jules Breton, La Vie d'un Artiste/Art et Nature, Paris, 1890, p. 219-20
Marius Vachon, Jules Breton, Paris, 1919, p. 77-8

This work has been recently cleaned and lined. Under UV, few isolated spots of inpainting fluoresce in the upper left, in sparsely scattered spots in the lower third of the composition, and in the seated figure at left.
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An early work of the artist, this previously unknown composition relates to a study that Breton made in 1853, The Ruins of Saint Bavo’s Abbey in Ghent (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent).  Although the study includes only one figure among the ruins—possibly his teacher Félix de Vigne — Breton animates the present work with a camp of colorfully dressed gypsies, which he sketched from clay manikins. Even at this early stage of his career, Breton’s consideration of the arrangement of the figures anticipates the complex compositional groupings of peasants in his later Salon paintings, as in Les Communiantes (see lot 8).