The Song of the Lark
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Art Institute of Chicago, Henry Field Memorial Collection |
| Location History: | The Song of the Lark was painted in Courrières, a rural village in northern France, in 1884. Jules Breton was born and raised in Courrières, and the agricultural landscape and peasant communities of the region became an important subject throughout his work. The painting is signed at the lower left “Jules Breton / Courrières 1884,” directly indicating the place and year associated with its creation. After being completed, the painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1885, where it entered the wider French art world. It was subsequently acquired by the American collector Henry Field in Chicago in 1885. Following Field’s death, his widow Florence Lathrop Field donated the work to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1916, where it remains today as part of the Henry Field Memorial Collection. |
Song of the Lark by Jules Breton, 1884 The work depicts a young country girl, barefoot and standing still in the dew-filled field in the early morning, holding one end of a farm machine, having momentarily stopped her hard day's work to listen to the bird. The girl's head is turned away from her work, and although she seems to be gazing into the distance in a still radiance, her face is tilted in an angle which implies she is watching the sky and listening to the song of the lark. The entire scene with the village, haystacks and fields and a solitary woman appears almost as a syncopated and quasi-lyrical commonplace image. The mundane scene is rendered more idyllic, poetical, and lyric through Breton's introduction of the larks and their singing into the composition. The image is constructed by the number of components, that is, the village with the haystacks, the fields, and the single and solitary woman figure, into a vibrant-picture of untroubled melody and song. Although the scene is wholly rustic or rustic-sized and common, the attributes such as the morning sky and the presumably singing lark's effects on the viewer's mood are realized. The beauty of the morning is turned into a sense of comfort and hope through the perspective of the girl's head and the overall peaceful solitude of the scene.