beside the easel

La paye des moissonneurs, 1882 Born July 31, 1844 in northern France, Léon Augustin Lhermitte was a French Realist painter. His work is characterized by rural scenes of peasant farmers much like his contemporaries such as Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton . Lhermitte, in contrast to these great painters, is lesser known yet his approach is more Classical and he had a much greater understanding of anatomy and body language. In the above painting, La paye des moissonneurs , translated as the pay of harvesters, peasant farmers are given a day's wages for hard work from their landowners. You can tell by the way the figures to the left are seated on a concrete bench how defeated and tired they are yet eager for their pay, a biting comment on labor that we can all understand today, even with our modern conveniences. The man on the left is seated with his giant scythe, staring into space while his wife breastfeeds their child as the owner pays them in coins. The younger bache...

Breton Women at a Pardon, 1887 An Acedemic genre painter from France, Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret was born in Paris on January 7, 1852. Pascal had a style reminiscent of Adrien Moreau and Émile Friant in that he captured the natural everyday, especially fascinated with the customs and rituals of people from different walks of life. Looking at Pascal's body of work we see a very eclectic and often inconsistent rhythm, at times amazing and yet occasionally odd, especially in his religious-mystical work. Pascal is also noted for his pioneering work in the use of photography as reference material, a practice that many artists of the day were discovering to be a highly useful and time-saving tool. Read more about this on a post by James Gurney . Bretons are a subculture of historically Celtic-based French who live in Northwestern France. In the Breton Women at a Pardon , Pascal uses grays and muted tones to convey a peaceful, Amish-like quality, with the women in full co...

The Gleaners, 1857 The icon of Barbizon and Naturalism (see my post on Breton ), Jean-François Millet was born October 4, 1814 in Northwestern France. Millet represents a triumph of political as well as artistic achievement in that he was among the very first to depict rural society with dignity and sympathy in their social rank, which was quite low. After the French Revolution society began to modernize and the rise of the middle-classes was a success in sharp contrast to the crushing poverty under the monarchy, and it seemed that society wanted to ignore their rural origins. Millet noticed how factories had changed the landscape of France and how less people lived in the countryside, leaving hard working peasants to toil in their fields. In The Gleaners , Millet depicts peasant women gleaning the last traces of a wheat harvest, faces downcast, and the meager remains are a scathing commentary on the poverty of the lower classes. In the distant background we see massive piles o...