Lot Essay
This is one of the few large-scale landscape paintings that Breton sent to the Salon. He was very familiar with the setting which was located only a short distance from his home in Courrires. He described the Souchez River in Un Peintre paysan and in the opening stanza of his poem Jeanne. In a letter to Selmer Hess dated 21 October 1904, he wrote the following: "It is the river of my childhood. Later on I walked there with my fiance, and afterwards with my wife, Elodie de Vigne...You perceive that very tender remembrances are associated with this charming river....I knew it when it was hardly seven or eight meters wide; afterwards it was widened and canalized by the progress of industry. A continual train of boats serves some large factories." (quoted in Jules Breton and the French Rural Tradition, exh. cat., p. 103, no. 52). In 1859, Breton painted a more romantic view of the river before it showed the marks of industry and modernization (present whereabouts unknown).