JULES BRETON | UNE SARCLEUSE

Dr. Samuel Pozzi, Paris (acquired directly from the artist, June 1883) 

Charles Edward Ballard, French Lick, Indiana 

Private Collection (by descent from the above) 

Acquired from the estate of the above

From the 1880s until the end of his career, Jules Breton turned his focus to landscape and light, particularly the unique atmospheric qualities of Artois. With Une sarcleuse, painted in 1883, Breton emphasizes field and sky — the vibrant pinks of the setting sun illuminating the clouds, contrasted with the smooth expanses of shortly cropped green fields. In the present work, a fieldworker searches for short stems (perhaps stems of flax), her hunched form in line with the neatly furrowed rows of plants. Not unlike the French symbolists at the end of the nineteenth century, Breton uses dusk and twilight hours to create an introspective mood, while the great expanse of the landscape, and the fieldworker's relatively small place within it, reflects early nineteenth century Romantics' belief in the sublime power of nature (Hollister Sturges, Jules Breton and the French Rural Tradition, exh. cat., Omaha, 1983, p. 22). As Breton explained, "life is mysterious... and only those, whether poets or artists, who are penetrated deeply with it, have a power to touch the feelings. What is the sky to me if it does not give me the idea of infinity" (Jules Breton, La vie d'un Artiste, as quoted in Sturges, p. 22). The poetry of weeders working the fields had interested Breton as early as 1860 with his celebrated Salon submission of the following year Les sarcleuses (Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, fig. 1). Two decades later, Une sarcleuse, like other notable works of 1883, such as Le matin (sold in these rooms, February 1, 2019, lot 414, for $1,200,000) and the iconic The Song of the Lark (Art Institute of Chicago), reveals an artist who intimately understood and was affected by the land and its people. 

In her diaries, the artist’s wife Élodie noted that in early April 1883 Breton was at work on Une sarcleuse, naming its model Henriette (while someone who Breton’s family seemed to know well, she does not closely resemble Le matin’s female model who shared the same name) and later mentioned its early June delivery to a “M. Pozzi.” Samuel-Jean Pozzi (1846-1918) is remembered as an important pioneer in gynecological medicine. His marriage to Therese Loth-Cazalis, a railroad heiress, brought him wealth, and he also later romanced the French actress Réjane, Sarah Bernhardt, and Emma Sedelmeyer Fischoff, daughter of the famous art dealer Charles Sedelmeyer. Dr. Pozzi moved within intellectual and artistic circles, befriending luminaries from Marcel Proust to John Singer Sargent who painted his portrait in 1881 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, fig. 2). At his home on the Avenue d’léna, Dr. Pozzi displayed his remarkable art collection, where Une sarcleuse hung among antiquities, Renaissance paintings, and works by Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Jean-François Raffaëlli, Breton and other artists of the period. After leaving Dr. Pozzi’s collection, the present work, as with so many other of Breton’s paintings, was acquired by an American, Charles Edward Ballard of French Lick, Indiana. After growing up in poverty, Ballard built a fortune from his 1900 acquisition of the local Brown Hotel, which he would turn into a major casino resort, and his ownership of the majority of travelling circuses in the United States. In 1915, Ballard moved his family into a twenty-one room brick Georgian mansion, and its fine furnishings and collections quickly became the talk of the town.

We would like to thank Annette Bourrut Lacouture for confirming the authenticity of this lot and for providing catalogue information, and Marie-Isabelle Pinet for providing additional research. This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist.