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拍品專文
Daughter of the well-known Barbizon painter, Jules Breton, it is no surprise that both Virginie and her brother Emile trained as painters under their famous father. Exhibiting regularly at the Salon until 1934, she won numerous awards for her entries. At the 1883 Exposition Universelle in Amsterdam, she was awarded the prized Médaille d'or and served as the President of the Society of Female Painters and Sculptors. She would be later nominated for the Legion d'honneur.
While her subject matter ranged from religious compositions, genre scenes and landscapes, she had a particular penchant for her heartfelt depictions of family life. The present composition, exhibited in the Salon of 1889, features a peasant family. In a simple and rustic interior, a mother sits with a baby cradled in her lap, wistfully gazing into the fire waiting for her husband to return from his seafaring expedition. Many Barbizon school painters had earlier visited the tender scene of mother and child. Jean-François Millet painted a similar composition in 1870-73 entitled Maternity presently in the collection of the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati that could have inspired the young Breton.
With its prominent position at the Salon, Breton's painting captured the attention of Vincent Van Gogh who must surely have read about it. The work so inspired Van Gogh that he copied it the same year in October in Saint-Remy (fig. 1). In a letter to Theo he wrote, "I have copied that 'Woman with a Child Sitting by a Hearth' by Mme. Dumont-Breton almost all in violet. I am certainly going to go on copying, that will give me a collection of my own". (The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, New York, 1959, Vol III, no. 610).
(fig. 1) Vincent Van Gogh, L'homme est en Mer, 1889, Private Collection.
While her subject matter ranged from religious compositions, genre scenes and landscapes, she had a particular penchant for her heartfelt depictions of family life. The present composition, exhibited in the Salon of 1889, features a peasant family. In a simple and rustic interior, a mother sits with a baby cradled in her lap, wistfully gazing into the fire waiting for her husband to return from his seafaring expedition. Many Barbizon school painters had earlier visited the tender scene of mother and child. Jean-François Millet painted a similar composition in 1870-73 entitled Maternity presently in the collection of the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati that could have inspired the young Breton.
With its prominent position at the Salon, Breton's painting captured the attention of Vincent Van Gogh who must surely have read about it. The work so inspired Van Gogh that he copied it the same year in October in Saint-Remy (fig. 1). In a letter to Theo he wrote, "I have copied that 'Woman with a Child Sitting by a Hearth' by Mme. Dumont-Breton almost all in violet. I am certainly going to go on copying, that will give me a collection of my own". (The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, New York, 1959, Vol III, no. 610).
(fig. 1) Vincent Van Gogh, L'homme est en Mer, 1889, Private Collection.