Jules adolphe breton biography of barack

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IN A BIG WIN FOR NEANDERTHALS, a new paper marshals fresh research that they painted stalagmites in a cave near Málaga, Spain, more than 60,000 years ago (before modern humans were in Europe). The theory has been debated since it was proposed in 2018, the Guardian reports; some scholars have maintained the ocher patches occurred naturally on the rocks. Analysis of the pigment showed that it did not originate in the cave. The material, found in clay, may have chewed and applied by blowing from the mouth or through a bone straw (oddly enough, a certain presidential son has also been using a straw to make art). While the abstract markings in Spain are not exactly the drawings of Lascaux, they are the latest evidence that Neanderthals were not the dolts of popular stereotypes. Archaeologists working in Germany’s Unicorn Cave recently discovered a bone carved with a geometric pattern by the now-extinct humans.

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ART CAN DO INCREDIBLE THINGS. Early in his career, the actor Bill Murray was depressed, mulling suicide, and walking around Chicago when he wandered into the Art Institute. There, he came across a painting that saved his life: The Song of the Lark (1884) by the French painter Jules Breton, as he explained at a 2014 press conference that has suddenly begun circulating online. (The event was for The Monuments Men, in which he stars.) The painting shows a girl lost in thought, taking a break from working in a dimly lit field with a sickle. Murray: &l

In my last blog I looked at the life and works of the Social Realist painter Walter Langley and his depictions of the hard life endured by the Cornish fishermen and their loved ones. Today I am looking at an American artist whose paintings could not be more different. Daniel Ridgway Knight chose to depict pretty young women enjoying life. The depiction of these ladies in beautiful countryside setting, lit up by dazzling sunlight  was, although very popular, so different to the work of artists of the Realism genre. So why would people want to buy paintings depicting scenes which in reality were just something we would like life to be? Maybe that is the answer to the question. Maybe whilst enduring real life with all its hardships we hanker after the perfect life even if it is just an imaginary idyll. If you had to choose a painting to hang on the wall of your lounge would it be one which depicts poverty or one which depicts sunny meadows awash with flowers and beautiful women?

Daniel Ridgway Knight was born into a strict Quaker home, on March 15th, 1839, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a town thirteen miles north of Maryland and the Mason-Dixon line. He attended local schools and his family intended that he would either work in a local hardware store or in his uncle’s ship building company, but for Daniel his love of art was his overriding passion and in 1858, at the age of nineteen, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Fellow students at that time included Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, and William Sartain. Knight also became one of the earliest members of the Philadelphia Sketch Club which was founded by six students of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in November 1860 and is still in existence today.

One of the PAFA students who became a friend of Daniel Knight was Lucien Grapon, a Frenchman, and he would often talk to Daniel about his homeland and how Daniel would love to live in France, with its great social life, fin

Before the era of photography and mobile phones, paintings were often bought as  pictorial aide-mémoirs and I am sure it still happens nowadays.  It could be a portrait of a friend, relative or somebody one admires.  It could be a specific landscape or cityscape which one had once visited and wanted to be reminded of.  The completed painting would then adorn a wall in the room of one’s house and be looked at with pleasure every time we passed by it.  Sometimes a painting is placed on display to lift our mood.  Sometimes the painting may be there to remind us of a life we once had or a life we hanker for.  Whatever the reason, artists cater for our wishes to remember.  Of course, one has to decide whether the depiction in the landscape or cityscape painting is topographically accurate or is it an idealised version.  Maybe we want an idealized version, as over time, do we not conjure in our mind just that.

When we look at paintings of rural scenes of the past and focus on the peasant workers, what are we wanting to see?  Do we want to have a painting on our wall which focuses on the difficult times the peasant labourers faced?  Do we want to see the folk poorly dressed, shoe-less and struggling to survive?  If that is what we want hanging on the wall of one of our rooms then we need to search for works by the social realism painters.  However, if we want to see depictions of happy smiling workers then we need to look for works by the rural naturalism painters such as today’s featured painter.  Let me introduce you to the nineteenth-century French painter, Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton, one of the greatest artists who managed to convey the beauty and idyllic vision of rural existence, even if it was an idealised vision of peasant life.

Jules Adolphe Breton was born on May 1st, 1827 to an important family in the small village of Courrieres situated in the Pas-de-Calais department in the Hauts-de-France region of Northern France.  His father, Marie-Lou

The painting Brittany Girl is a classic example of Breton’s peasant paintings. The young girl is spinning flax along the coast of Brittany. She is dressed in regional clothing that adds colorful touches to the composition, with all the attention centered on the figure and activity, rather than the setting. Breton traveled throughout France capturing the people and activities surrounding rural life.

Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton’s (1 May 1827 – 5 July 1906) paintings are heavily influenced by the French countryside and his idyllic vision of rural life of the peasant. Breton was a writer as well as a painter and he became well known in America after his death at the 1934 the Chicago World’s Fair.

“Britany Girl” was a gift by Edmund G. Burke, who put the call out for an ‘Art Treasure Room’ for Denison in the 1940s and later the gift for Burke Hall to found a gallery to hold the expanding collection. The work was acquired by the William Henry Vanderbilt in 1879 and later by Mr. Burke in 1945 through the Cornelius Vanderbilt estate sale in 1945.

The painting has toured around the world, throughout the USA, France, and Ireland.