Etude pour enfant: Femme portant la soupe
This pencil drawing relates to the 1882 painting Femme portant la soupe (R1025) in which a young girl struggles to manage a basket of food that she is carrying to the fields for the workers lunch. In this drawing, Dupré works out the awkward balance between the figure and the oversize basket, which reaches from…
Read MoreFemme portant la soupe
Dupré captured this scene of a woman and child taking lunch to field workers near the Folemprise farm in 1882. The setting is curiously empty as the two isolated figures trudge along the path toward the farm fields. Apart from a rather over-large rake that has fallen beside the path, there is no other indication…
Read MoreLe repos
Milkmaid in Normandy
Ombre et soleil
One of Dupré’s last multi-figure compositions was Ombre et Soleil (Shadow and Sun), his Salon entry for 1905. As the title indicates, this is another image with a shaded foreground and a brightly lit landscape in the background. Dappled light filters through the leaves of a venerable tree, creating splotches of light on the clothing…
Read MoreUne faneuse
Femme au soleil – faneuse
Dupré’s increasingly painterly approach to his work is evident in this work from 1896. He chose to depict a specific moment in time when intensely bright sunlight is about to be overtaken by the grey clouds piling up in the distance, thus throwing the colors of the surrounding environment into sharp contrasts. The varied shades…
Read MoreFemme portant à manger
Set in the area around Nauroy, with its windmill visible in the distance, Dupré depicts a young woman carrying lunch to the workers in the field. With a loaf of bread in one hand and a pail of soup in the other, she nonetheless seems lost in thought as she strides through the newly threshed…
Read MoreA Break from the Harvest
Harvesters seated on hay stacks enjoying their meal is a recurring theme. The models who posed for these images reappear consistently throughout Dupré’s compositions of this subject. Presumably they were either members of the Dupré-Laugée extended family or local people who were willing to pose for the painter. Here, the standing man with the mustache…
Read MoreLa glaneuse
The solitary figure of a woman standing in a meadow in this painting differs slightly from other canvases with similar images in that there are no background features such as livestock, haystacks or distant buildings. She grasps a hayfork, but there is no hay field visible nearby, nor are there any other indications of either…
Read More