Breton, Jules

bre-ton', Jules (1827-1906), a French painter. He was educated at Douai and in a studio in Paris. The subjects of his earlier pictures were taken from the French Revolution. Later, following the example of Millet, he turned his attention to peasant life. Some of his more famous paintings are The Angelus Bells, The Song of the Lark, and The Shepherd's Star. A number of Breton's pictures have been purchased by Americans. The Angelus Bells hangs in the Chicago Art Institute. The Gleaners is owned by James J. Hill of St. Paul; The Evening Call by Thomas B. Walker of Minneapolis. Breton fared well financially. For a time he painted under a contract with a Paris art dealer who took his canvases at $2,500 each. Later, when he could afford to do so, he held his pictures at a still higher price. The Communicants sold lately at $48,000. The pictures painted for the art dealer mentioned, now that Breton is dead, command $25,000 readily. The work of Breton is often compared with that of his friend, Jean Francois Millet, who also painted peasant life. See Millet; Millais; Bonheur

Millet, a peasant himself, showed the life of his people with the feeling of one in whose veins was the blood of peasants; Breton, the man of the middle class, drew them as one who had learned to love these simple people by long meditation on their lives, and worship of nature to which they seem so near.

The dignity of labor, the rewards of toil are in Breton's pictures, the lovely, the ideal side of the lives of these workers. We might write under all his peasant pictures: "From labor health, from health contentment springs;" under those of Millet: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread"--the primal curse.