JULES DUPRÉ | INTÉRIOR DE FERME DANS LE BERRY

M. Susse, Paris (acquired in 1834)

M. Barroilhet, Paris (and sold, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, April 12, 1866, lot 16)

Le Comte d'Aquila, Paris (and sold, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, February 21, 1868, lot 12)

J. -B. Faure, Paris (and sold, 26, Boulevard des Italiens, Paris, June 7, 1873, lot 21, illustrated)

M. de Camondo, Paris (and sold, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, November 18, 1910, lot 21, illustrated)

Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired at the above sale)

Sale: Sotheby's, Monaco, December 6, 1991, lot 141, illustrated

Sale: Christie's, New York, May 27, 1992, lot 161, illustrated

Acquired at the above sale

Louis Cabat, Souvenirs, n.d., p. 364 (unpublished manuscript quoted in Pierre Miquel, Le Paysage Français au XIX siècle, 1975, vol. II)

Alexandre Decamps, Le musée: revue du Salon de 1834, Paris, 1834, pp. 93, 101

Charles Lenormant, "Les Artistes Contemporains, Salon de 1834," Les Temps, Paris, March 1834

Philippe Burty, Catalogue de la collection de M. Le Comte d'Aquila, Paris, 1868, p. 6-7

James Claretie, Peintres et graveurs contemporains, Paris, 1881, p. 183

A. Hustin, "Jules Dupré," L'Art, vol. XLVIII, 1890, p. 263-72

Paul Mantz, "Jules Dupré," Catalogue de l'atelier Jules Dupré, Paris, 1890, p. 12-13

Robert L. Herbert, Barbizon Revisited, exh. cat., California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; The Toledo Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, September 27, 1962-April 28, 1963, p. 26

Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Jules Dupré, 1811-1889, catalogue raisonné de l'Oeuvre peint, dessiné et gravé, Paris, 1974, pp. 16, 53, no. 41, illustrated p. 69

Pierre Miquel, Le Paysage Français au XIX siècle, 1975, vol. II, p. 364-65

Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Jules Dupré, catalogue raisonné, Supplément, Paris, 1982, p. 185

Jules Dupré painted the present work in 1833, just as a new interest in naturalistic landscape painting was taking hold in Paris. Shown at the Salon of 1834 – a landmark exhibition in the broader Romantic movement – this beautifully lit and wonderfully disordered glimpse into a cottage interior deep in central France confirmed Dupré's importance among the new school of painters, which quickly came to be centered on Dupré himself and his close friends Théodore Rousseau, Louis Cabat and Paul Huet.

Dupré was just twenty-two and only three years away from his first career as a porcelain painter (a career into which he had been born by virtue of his father's position as manager of a small porcelain factory in Limoges) when he painted Intérieur de ferme dans le Berry following a summer trip to the remote Berry region with Cabat. But very importantly, in the short time since he had arrived in Paris, determined to make a more independent future for himself, Dupré had also visited London to study print-making. There he had been memorably exposed to the work of John Constable and modern English landscape painting, as well as to the English art world's deep fascination with seventeenth century Dutch realism in all its genres. That experience of painting achievements outside the direct French tradition would deeply imbue Dupré's work when he returned to Paris in 1832.

Dupré first glimpsed the rugged, beautiful countryside of the Berry from the diligence (a long distance public carriage) on which he had escaped from Limoges to Paris in 1829. In 1832 and later in 1834, Dupré undertook long working trips back to the little-known terrain around Tendu, a tiny village near the Creuse River in Berry, producing a few completed paintings and numerous drawings and studies as he labored with Cabat to master the real landscape. During the winters back in Paris, Dupré turned those smaller works into larger, more finished paintings for the spring Salon exhibitions. In 1831 and 1832, Dupré's submissions to the salon juries had all been landscapes of either English or Berry inspiration. But in 1833 he also entered a small composition of a cottage interior titled L'heure de la soupe (now lost), which he himself described for the catalogue as a "sketch from nature" – artists often included studies and sketches along with their major works at the Salon as a way to demonstrate the breadth of their interests or to attract collectors of modest means.  L'heure de la soupe had won Dupré a positive reaction from a critic and that probably encouraged the artist to undertake the more complex Intérieur de ferme dans le Berry the following year.

From Cabat's unpublished memoirs and from remarks Dupré made to friends as he basked in the pleasure of his 1834 success, we know that he executed the painting as something of an afterthought for his Salon submission. Completed in only a few days, Intérieur de ferme dans le Berry was based upon a drawing made the previous fall, and Dupré pressed his sister Marguerite into posing for him in costume he had brought back from Berry. For this new foray into genre and still life painting, Dupré certainly looked for guidance to the example of Dutch masters such as Ostade and Teniers, both of whom had frequently depicted cottage interiors and kitchen scenes, and to the Dutch still life tradition more generally, famed for its skills in rendering all manner of tools and materials. But Dupré almost certainly found encouragement closer to home as well, in the work of Antoine Watteau and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, eighteenth century French masters whose realistic subject matter had pushed them out of favor in Paris during the past fifty years. During the 1830s and 1840s, as Dupré and his circle of friends struggled through to invent a new form of French realism, they often found their only encouragement amid a small group of collectors and scholars who were simultaneously trying to revive the reputations of those older French masters who had been pushed aside in the post-revolution return to strict classicism. The glorious abundance of Dupré's cabbages and carrots and celery across the foreground of Intérieur de ferme dans le Berry, as well as the sheer variety of metal pots, crockery jugs, and basketry piled to either side, gives the painting a very Dutch appearance. But Dupré's young écureuse (woman scouring) seems to deliberately recall a similar model by Watteau, L'écureuse de cuivre (now in Strasbourg, Musée des Beaux-Arts, fig. 1) while the beautifully mellowed copper soup pot at her feet is virtually synonymous with Chardin's still life painting – and he, too, had featured an écureuse in small genre scenes.  

Dupré told his friend Alfred Sensier that he based Intérieur de ferme dans le Berry on a drawing made in Tendu, and there seems no reason to doubt that account, although no such drawing is known today. In 1996 a small oil and gouache painting, signed and dated 1833 by Dupré, appeared at auction in Barbizon, depicting much of the background composition for the Intérieur de ferme dans le Berry. Dupré preserved several details from that small sketch in the final work, such as the figure stretched out on the bed in the corner, smoking; the écureuse at the heart of the final picture replaces two children whom Dupré moved to the background. But very tellingly, Dupré suppressed the right side of his original study, removing two work horses tethered to a grain bin, a record of the enduring practice of many rural families to share their housing quarters with their animals. That was a custom which remained in practice through France well past mid-nineteenth century; but it also was a custom that Dupré probably realized would be too startling for his Paris audiences. When he merged his pot-scouring scene into his Berrichon interior, he left only a heavy horse collar hanging on the wall above his pretty scouring girl as a reminder of the real reality. Madame Aubrun records that Dupré made a carefully worked replica in watercolor of the final composition, unlocated today.

Intérieur de ferme dans le Berry passed through several of the most prominent collections of contemporary painting in mid-nineteenth century Paris during the years of the Second Empire. As its value rose with every auction appearance, the painting became a much-remarked upon landmark in the validation of modern French painting, the Barbizon school in particular, and in the growing fascination with speculating in modern art as a financial investment.

This catalogue entry was written by Alexandra Murphy.