Femme portant à manger

Femme Portant a Manger - Julien Dupre

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…

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A Break from the Harvest

man and woman eating in the field

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…

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La glaneuse

woman with rake in the field

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…

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Le ballon

Le Ballon - Julien Dupre

Dupré’s large Salon painting, The Balloon (Le ballon), takes the subject of hot air balloon flight as the focal point of his narrative. Although not a typical theme in French painting, the subject was nevertheless popular in the nineteenth century. France was home to the inventors of the hot air balloon, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740-1810) and…

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