Les Moissonneurs

Julien Dupré is regarded as the leading proponent of the second-generation Realist painters, whose depictions of the toils of the French peasants were true to the ideals of Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton. The Social Realists were academically trained artists who nostalgically turned to the lives of French rural field laborers and farm workers for subjects untainted by the progress of the Industrial Revolution. For the Social Realist painters, the peasant was the embodiment of the most fundamental and consistent element in human society. Julien Dupré’s career was spent depicting this essence of rural life.

Les Moissonneurs is a classic example of Dupré’s unique artistic vision. Unlike Millet and Breton, Dupré paints his figures in action, given further dramatic resonance through varied landscapes and dynamic skies. In the present work, the central figure toils under a sweeping, broadly handled sky, piling hay with her wooden pitchfork while the sunlight falling on the field behind her backlights her profile. The main figure is brought close to the picture plane, emphasizing her monumentality and placing her securely within the landscape. The other figures echo her labor in the background. The changeable atmosphere of her environment, captured in the much looser handling of the clouds rolling across the afternoon sky, and the free handling of the loose pieces of hay blowing across the foreground of the composition is in contrast with, and enhanced by, the more precise Academic brushwork in the figures.