page_title: Jules Breton
section_title: Fame
hierarchical_section_title: Jules Breton / Fame
caption_attribution_description: English: Pardon at Kergoat, an oil painting on canvas depicting a pardon ceremony at Kergoat in Brittany, France
context_page_description: Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton was a 19th-century French Naturalist painter. His paintings are heavily influenced by the French countryside and his absorption of traditional methods of painting helped make Jules Breton one of the primary transmitters of the beauty and idyllic vision of rural existence.
context_section_description: He continued to exhibit throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s and 1890s and his reputation grew.  His poetic renderings of single peasant female figures in a landscape, posed against the setting sun, remained very popular, especially in the United States.  Since his works were so popular, Breton often produced copies of some of his images.  He was extremely popular in his own time, exhibiting numerous compositions at the Salons that were widely available as engravings.  He was one of the best known painters of his period in his native France as well as England and the United States. 
  In 1886, Donald Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, bid $45,000 at a New York auction for Breton's work The Communicants (1884). At that time, the price was the 2nd highest price paid for a painting by a living artist.  This same painting changed hands again in 2016 and commanded $1.27 million.  That figure is very close to the 1886 auction price after adjusting for inflation. Also in 1886, Breton was elected a member of the Institut de France on the death of Baudry.
  In 1887 New York art dealer M. Knoedler, ordered two paintings from Breton, commissioned Charles Waltner to etch the grand Salon work the Recall of the Gleaners (1859) and then held a special exhibition of his works in 1888. 
  
  In 1889 Breton was made commander of the Legion of Honor, and in 1899 foreign member of the Royal Academy of London.  His brother Emile, an architect by training, and his daughter Virginie were also painters. 
  He also wrote several books, and was a recognized writer who published a volume of poems (Jeanne) and several editions of prose relating his life as an artist and the lives of other artists that he personally knew; among them Les Champs et la mer (1876), Nos peintres du siècle (1900), Delphine Bernard (1902), and La Peinture (1904).  Breton died in Paris on 5 July 1906.
  Breton was essentially a painter of rustic life, especially in the province of Artois, which he quit only three times for short excursions: in 1864 to Provence, and in 1865 and 1873 to Brittany, whence he derived some of his happiest studies of religious scenes.  His numerous subjects may be divided generally into four classes: labour, rest, rural festivals and religious festivals. Among his more important works may be named Women Gleaning, and The Day after St Sebastian's Day (1855), which gained him a third-class medal; Blessing the Fields (1857), a second-class medal; Erecting a Calvary (1859), now in the Lille gallery; The Return of the Gleaners (1859), now in the Luxembourg; Evening and Women Weeding (1861), a first-class medal; Grandfather's Birthday (1862); The Close of Day (1865); Harvest (1867); Potato Gatherers (1868); The Weeders (1868); A Pardon, Brittany (1869); The Fountain (1872), medal of honour; The Bonfires of St John (1875); Women mending Nets (1876), in the Douai museum; A Gleaner (1877), Luxembourg; Evening, Finistère (1881); The Song of the Lark (1884); The Last Sunbeam (1885); The Shepherd's Star (1887); The Call Home (1889); The Last Gleanings (1895); Gathering Poppies (1897); The Alarm Cry (1899); Twilight Glory (1900).
caption: A Pardon in Kergoat (1891). Breton visited Brittany several times, believing he had (as his name implied) Breton ancestry.
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