Breton, Jules Adolphe, << bruh TAWN, zhool ah DAWLF >> (1827-1906), was a French painter known for his sentimental scenes of peasant life. He painted rural subjects about the same time as the noted French artists Gustave Courbet and Jean Francois Millet. But the conservative French public of the Second Empire (1852-1870) rejected the work of Courbet and Millet as too realistic. They preferred Breton’s idealized version of the peasant as healthy and satisfied with the social order. Breton’s The Gleaner (1872) and The Song of the Lark (1884) are among his best-known pictures.
Breton was born on May 1, 1827, in Courrieres, near Lens. In 1866, he was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts, a great honor for a painter of common rural themes. He died on July 5, 1906.
