Redefining the Context

Throughout his career, Julien Dupré maintained a reputation as an artist of merit and integrity. For thirty-five years, he never once failed to submit his work to the annual Salon of the Socitété des Artistes Français, and his efforts were recognized with a number of medals and honors. In addition, he formed productive relationships with several art dealers who represented his work both in France and abroad. His work received international recognition as well as ample attention from private collectors, the result of which was a comfortable degree of financial security. In his personal life, he was happily married and generally untroubled by family discord. In short, he was a successful professional painter, committed to his art and aspiring to create redoubtable paintings without engaging in unnecessarily theatrical behavior. It may be, however, that Dupré’s decision to pursue his career within accepted social structures—and without excessive public fanfare—has overshadowed his contributions to the history of art.

Dupré’s oeuvre has long been appreciated, but rarely studied. He has been characterized as an animalier, a student of Jules Breton, and repeatedly—and erroneously—as the nephew of Jules Dupré. To set the record straight, Dupré was never a student of Jules Breton and, in fact, the two painters approached their work from quite different perspectives. Breton’s sentimental images of rural life are essentially a continuation of an eighteenth-century genre tradition, influenced by nineteenth-century Realism, but far less grounded in its social themes and aesthetic ideas than Dupré’s work.

The conflation of Jules and Julien Dupré, however, is a more serious issue. Even Vincent van Gogh thought that Julien was related to Jules, asking parenthetically in a letter to his brother Théo “(is this a son of Jules Dupré???)”.^[1] Kudos are due to the Dutch artist for asking a question about it rather than assuming a relationship based solely on a common surname. Others have not been so thoughtful, but simply presumed a relationship—usually cited as that of uncle and nephew—and repeated the falsehood in auction catalogues, journal articles and sales sheets. The fact is that there is no relationship between the painters whatsoever.^[2]

The problem persists even today, reinforcing an uncertainty about who Julien Dupré was and when he worked.^[3] Paintings are often incorrectly attributed, typically with the work of Jules being assigned to Julien, thus obfuscating the work of both artists. One result of that particular error has been the categorization of Julien as a Barbizon painter, and while it is true that he was a beneficiary of the Barbizon painters’ work, he was not a practicing artist until the 1870s. Further, the Barbizon artist he is most closely aligned with is Millet, not the landscape painter Jules Dupré.

The description of Dupré as an animalier is a more complex subject stemming from his presumed association with Barbizon and the incomplete definition of his work that exists as a consequence of that misunderstanding. Without reservation, his oeuvre includes many canvases featuring domesticated farm animals, but Dupré is not an animal painter in the tradition of the Dutch master Paulus Potter (1625-1654) or Constant Troyon (1810-1865) who was associated with Barbizon. Both of these artists preferred to paint animals rather than people, and even when humans appeared in their compositions, they tended to be small figures playing a secondary role. With few exceptions, Dupré’s canvases feature human beings as the central focus of his compositions.

The emphasis on Dupré’s depiction of animals—particularly cattle—emerged most prominently when he began to paint milkmaids in the late 1880s. These images were widely reproduced in both Europe and the US because of their popular appeal. By the turn of the century, Dupré’s reputation as an animalier was deeply entrenched, and has remained so into the twenty-first century. It is a critically incomplete description of his work that deserves to be amended to reflect the totality of his production more accurately.

 

Milking Time

Up until the late 1880s, Dupré’s subjects were primarily rural laborers—working in the fields, enjoying a brief respite from their toil, tending cattle or sheep, or feeding poultry in a farmyard. In 1888, however, he began to paint milkmaids. The first iteration was La porteur de lait, which was sold to Boussod & Valadon early in the year.^[4] The second was a Salon painting L’heure de la traite (Milking Time, cat. T1023), and the third was a réduction or copy of the Salon painting (cat. T1026).^[5] The two versions of the Salon painting, today in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the St. Louis Museum of Art, are identical scenes with different landscape backgrounds. In the following years, paintings of milkmaids proliferated. These types of images were popular, which is always an incentive to produce as many as the market can absorb, but there remains the question of why milkmaids suddenly appear in Dupré’s work and why these images were so appealing to the art buying public.

Millet was Dupré's most immediate predecessor for images of milkmaids. Over the course of three decades, he had often treated the subject and his work was clearly one of Dupré’s sources of inspiration. Art historian Robert Herbert focused on Millet’s milkmaids in a 1980 article, noting that Millet’s milkmaids are visually linked to Normandy by their costumes, and even more specifically by the copper milk jugs that they carry on their shoulders.^[6] Dupré was undoubtedly aware of Millet’s images, perhaps from the posthumous studio sale of his work in 1875, but almost certainly from the retrospective memorial exhibition at the École des Beaux-arts in 1887. Art historian Maura Coughlin added another element for consideration in her discussion of the milkmaid as a popular tourist trope. “The milkmaid is an icon of French popular culture that has long signified the region of Normandy both to outsiders and to Normans. This female figure appeared frequently in early nineteenth-century travel literature and popular art, and can still be found today. Her iconic status is demonstrated by the history of Arthur Le Duc's bronze sculpture Norman Milkmaid, first shown at the Salon of 1887.”^[7] By 1888, images of milkmaids were on display in both specialized art exhibitions and in the popular media. It may be that Dupré conceived his Salon painting of L’heure de la traite as a tribute to Millet, whose work was being so belatedly recognized.

Nonetheless, Dupré does not paint the traditional milkmaid associated with Normandy, even though he often painted on site there. His milkmaids are dressed in the well-worn garb of everyday farm workers and they carry the tin milking pails that were still in use well into the twentieth century. Further, the pails are often suspended from a yoke worn over both shoulders. (fig. 24, cat. T1035) The image of a milkmaid balancing a copper jug over one shoulder by attaching it to single strap does not appear in his work, perhaps because that was no longer a common method of carrying milk in Normandy. Just as in his images of harvesting or tending livestock, Dupré does not shy away from depicting the grubbiness of milking cows or the difficulty of transporting the milk to the barns. Nor are his models pretty girls posing in costumes with strategically placed rips and tears. They are physically strong and hard-working, grounded in a life of seasonal cycles rather than industrial production quotas. They offer a glimpse of a life of honest and healthy rural work. For a culture growing weary of its own restrictive behavioral conventions and increasingly conscious that the class systems of the past were dysfunctional, these visual reminders of life based on less convoluted social structures may have been quite attractive.

 

History Painting in the Fields

Dupré’s choice of large scale Salon canvases carried an implicit challenge to the longstanding premise that history painting was defined, in part, by mandating that subject matter be restricted only to historical, classical or biblical events. The Académie des Beaux-Arts, supported whole-heartedly by the École, decreed that history painting was at the top of a hierarchy based on preconceived notions of importance. In contrast, genre painting, which would have typically included rural scenes of peasants and country life, was considered one of the least important subjects. This system was endorsed by the French Academy, not only for the visual arts but for the literary and dramatic arts as well. Challenging that order was considered heretical in the middle of the nineteenth century when Courbet exhibited A Burial at Ornans, a twenty-foot long painting depicting an ordinary funeral in a small provincial town. The sheer size of the canvas proclaimed that daily life was deserving of treatment on the same scale as history painting. By the time Dupré began to exhibit at the Salon in 1876, the use of such large-format paintings had decreased in every category except traditional history painting. The causes of this were as much practical as political; the Franco-Prussian War had ruined the French economy, and it was prohibitively expensive to develop a truly large painting.

Most of the post-war generation of young painters were far from wealthy, which makes Dupré’s foray into large-format canvases in the late 1870s quite unexpected. He was not wealthy and he had a family to support, but by 1879 when he painted Le regain, he was just beginning to enjoy an increasing number of sales of his more modestly sized works. Le regain (40 x 50 inches, cat. W1033) was followed in 1881 by the larger La récolte des foins at 48 x 88 inches (4’ x 7.5’) (fig. 17, cat. W1017); and in 1883, Le Berger measured 55.5 x 78.5 inches (4.5’ x 6.5’). (fig. 25, cat. T1007) Le Ballon, painted in 1886, was the largest canvas of all at 96 x 78 inches (8’ x 6’). (fig. 20, cat. R1011) All of these paintings feature rural workers, whether harvesters or shepherds, unapologetically portraying contemporary life on a grand scale rather than historical, classical or biblical subjects.

The only other artist working on this scale was Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), who began to experiment with large-format images of rural scenes at about the same time that Dupré did. Bastien-Lepage had previously developed two large history paintings on standard classical and religious subjects, but in 1877 he began composing a large canvas entitled Les Foins (Haymaking) that measured 71 x 72 inches (approximately 6’ square). It was exhibited at the Salon of 1878 where Dupré certainly would have seen it just as Bastien-Lepage would have seen La récolte des foins and Le Berger.^[8]

Both men were indebted to the work of Millet, but their interest in portraying rural subjects as if they were contemporary history paintings sets them apart. They undoubtedly knew each other, but there is no evidence to date that they were more than professional acquaintances. Bastien-Lepage went on to produce other large scale images such as Potato Gatherers shown at the Salon of 1879, and The Wood Gatherer, a very large canvas, for the Salon of 1882. He soon emerged as a leader of the Naturalist movement, then flourishing as an alternative to both Impressionism and traditional academic art—or more accurately, as a blending of the merits of both methodologies.

Reporting on Dupré’s work two years after Bastien-Lepage’s premature death in 1884, journalist Sophia Beale saw a definite relationship between their work.

In La Prairie Normande, by M[onsieur] J. Dupré, we have another type of everyday life. A vigorous peasant-girl, such as one sees in every part of France, dressed simply and picturesquely, her hair bound up in a coloured handkerchief, and her feet shod in sabots, is dragging her cows home to be milked. The cattle are well drawn, and the action of the girl is good; but her face might have been less plain, without ceasing to belong to the type of a 'femme du peuple'. These younger Frenchmen, following in the train of Bastien-Lepage and Le Rolle, rather revel in their love of what is ugly; but surely there is a medium between sentimentality and unreality, and positive ugliness.^[9]

Although Beale did not realize that Dupré and Bastien-Lepage began exploring similar Naturalist ideas at the same time, she perceptively acknowledged their mutual commitment to the depiction of unfiltered realism. Other painters would soon follow their example, among them Léon Lhermitte, George Clausen and Albert Edelfelt.^[10]

Beale found Dupré’s work a little too plain and perhaps too socially aware to be entirely comfortable, these are the qualities that characterize his oeuvre and distinguish it from the Naturalist artists who preferred to avoid the reality of rural work in favor of more prettified scenes. Dupré’s harvesters are tired and thirsty and hot; their clothing is patched and worn; the hay wagons are a bit rickety, and the sheep and cows are whole-heartedly muddy. The women and men alike are well-muscled, though not always attractive workers. Even the milkmaid paintings, which are unquestionably the most sentimentalized of Dupré’s work, are not sanitized. They remain grounded in the life of the agricultural laborers of Picardy and Normandy, and they offer a more enduring snapshot of a rural way of life that would disappear within a decade as the machines of war rolled over the very same fields that Dupré painted.

 

A Symbolist Mood

By the turn of the century, Dupré had become one of the leaders of the French art establishment. Together with Léon Bonnat, William Bouguereau, Jean Léon Gérôme, Jean-Jacques Henner and Jehan Georges Vibert among others, he served on the jury for the Salon, but unlike some of his colleagues, Dupré continued to explore new directions in his work. These changes were already discernible in the four paintings that he exhibited at the Exposition universelle in 1900. In Vâches à l’ombre (1898) and La Vallée de la Durdent (1896), the artist’s interest in sharp contrasts of light is increasingly evident. Rather than spotlight the foreground of these paintings, Dupré has created bursts of light in the background, shrouding the cows beneath the trees as they gaze placidly at the viewer, creating a sense of a breezy summer day. Similarly, in Chemin au Mesnil (1891) the village road is dominated by cows and sheep lumbering through patches of sunlight on their own. The slightly later Berger et son troupe (1896) depicts a shepherd watching his flock graze on the shaded roadside grass while in the middle ground behind them is a patch of brilliant light throwing the trees and sky into high relief. (fig. 26, cat. T1036)

In each of these paintings, Dupré elicits a reaction to a particular tableau of country life, directing the viewer’s gaze to the brightly lit areas of the canvas in the middle of the composition, in essence requesting that the audience conceptually step beyond the shadowed foreground and into the sunny landscape at the heart of the painting. There, the viewer can imagine himself as part of the scene. This strategy marks a departure from Dupré’s earlier narrative approach in which the artist encouraged observers to devise a story about the action shown on the canvas. These later works are instead invitations to participate in a scene, to enjoy a specific atmosphere and mood.

The emphasis on mood is most evident in Dupré’s single figure compositions of women in the fields. Images of a woman taking a pause from her work is characteristic of his oeuvre beginning in the 1880s, but over time these figures became enigmatic and isolated. Une bergère au soleil, moutons (1902) exemplifies this trend. (fig. 27, cat. T1112)

To the left of the canvas stands a shepherdess, partly cloaked in shadow as if to suggest that the sunlit clouds and meadows in the distance are actually the focus of the painting. The blue of her cloak blends into the blue shadows of the hills as she silently stands watch over her flock. Her attention, however, is directed beyond the boundaries of the canvas—off stage in fact. The viewer cannot tell whether she is musing on some personal concern or simply entranced with the beauty of the surrounding landscape. This is a departure from earlier compositions in which the woman shades her eyes with her hand as she looks for someone in the distance; that simple gesture allows the viewer to develop a story about who or what she is hoping to see. When Dupré removes this gesture from his composition, the narrative possibilities disappear, emphasizing instead the solitude of the individual isolated in a landscape devoid of other people.  

Dupré returned to the image of a solitary woman lost in thought repeatedly over the decades. Like Claude Monet’s series of grain stacks, these solitary rural women are invested with personal meaning related to the productivity of French soil. They become a touchstone for Dupré, a marker of both his development as a painter and his deepening understanding of rural life and its evolving role in the cultural and economic life of France. Notably, these solitary female figures are consistently shown wearing blue cloaks and red scarves, hinting at a social comment without overtly stating it. As in Dupré’s multi-figure paintings of harvesters, the red scarf may be intended as an allusion to republican values, but after 1880, the reference is likely to be more specifically to the figure of Marianne, the symbol of republican France.^[11] Historically, the figure of Marianne emerged as a symbol of liberty during the French Revolution when she was typically shown wearing the bright red Phrygian cap as well as a blue gown or cloak. Under the Second Empire of Napoleon III, this image fell out of favor but returned full blown under the Third Republic in the late 1870s.

A public design competition for the still empty Place de la République in 1879 heralded the return of Marianne as the central symbol of France—specifically, the Republic of France. The Place de la République itself carried a wealth of historical associations with the French revolution and the cause of democracy; and its location in northeastern Paris on the border between the Marais district, the Bastille quarter and the Belleville neighborhood underscores those physical and historic connections. The winning entry was designed by the sculptor Léopold Morice (1846-1919) in partnership with his brother, Charles (1848-1918) who was an architect. Their 31-foot bronze sculpture of Marianne stood on an equally large pedestal depicting three allegorical figures of Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood, as well as twelve bas-reliefs showing significant moments in the French fight for liberty. Eight of these reliefs illustrate the events of the French Revolution, but the last two in the series depict the creation of the Third Republic on September 4, 1870 and the establishment of the Fête nationale nearly ten years later on July 14, 1880. The importance of this monument, constructed between 1880 and 1883, cannot be overemphasized; it was an imposing statement of republican values as embodied by the figure of Marianne and a memorial to the struggle of the French people who persevered in their fight for democracy. For Julien Dupré, the Place de la République also held personal associations from his childhood; his family home was located just a few blocks from the square.

In 1880, the City of Paris took an equally influential step by ceremonially installing a bust of Marianne as the symbol of France at city hall; provincial and municipal governments throughout the nation soon followed that example.^[12]  Similarly, during the celebration of the Fête nationale that summer, the city renamed the former Place du Trône (Throne Square) on the eastern side of Paris in honor of the French Revolution, calling it Place de la Nation. Nine years later, on the centenary of the Revolution in 1889, a larger-than-life-size sculpture of Marianne, designed by Jules Dalou (1838-1902), was installed at the center of the Place de la Nation.

The choice of Dalou as the sculptor was especially significant; he had been an active participant in the Commune of 1871 and had fled to London after the occupation of Paris by Prussian troops. On his return to France in 1879, he submitted a design for the Place de la République competition; Triomphe de la République was not selected but it did attract many favorable comments. “Nonetheless, his concept so charmed the competition jury that they decided to pay for and erect his work anyway at the Place de la Nation.”^[13]  As art historian Caterina Pierre described it, Dalou’s design was an “unlikely but successful marriage of political Realism with a capital “R” and allegorical symbolism allied with modern concepts of industry, instruction and labor.”^[14] This marriage of Realism and allegorical symbolism would become a defining characteristic of much official art under the Third Republic, providing a successful means of presenting new concepts to the public through educational and often propagandistic imagery.

Like the many figures of Marianne that emerged in the 1880s, Dupré’s monumental solitary women, always wearing the symbolically charged red scarf, stand proudly in the fields of France, watching over their flocks and gazing into the distance. In the context of Dupré’s work as a whole, these imposing and isolated women seem both connected to the land and in charge of it. Just as Marianne represents the ideals of liberty, so too Dupré’s rural workers embody the sanctity of the earth and the dignity of their service to the land. There is no evidence that Dupré was a political activist like Jules Dalou or Gustave Courbet, but as a Parisian from a working class neighborhood, he was an ardent supporter of republican ideals. And like his friend Emile Zola (1840-1902), his work was an expression of cultural and social perspectives that were grounded in an attentive study of his subjects. In the 1890s, when the Dreyfus Affair exploded on the front pages of every newspaper in France, Dupré would choose to stand with the Dreyfusards against anti-Semitism and government corruption and in favor of the ideals expressed by the symbol of Marianne as liberté, égalitié et fraternité.

 

Reassessing Dupré’s Contribution

Dupré does not fall easily into any stylistic category. He is grounded in French classical tradition and tempered by Realism; over time, he integrated many of the Impressionist’s concerns about light and color, and perhaps the Symbolist’s fascination with mood and atmosphere. In the kaleidoscopic art world of late nineteenth century France, this suggests that Dupré was an astute observer and thoughtful integrator of diverse ideas and directions. What merits more serious critical attention is the way that he absorbed these influences and expressed them through his depictions of rural labor.

Although Millet’s influence is evident in Dupré’s work, his personal exposure to rural life through the Laugée family in Picardy brought him into direct contact with the reality of farming. He learned what was actually involved in harvesting and milking cows and tending sheep and feeding geese—knowledge that a city dweller from the Marais district simply did not have cause to learn. Those direct observations were recorded in sketchbooks and ultimately transformed into compositions filtered through the artist’s classical education. As many critics noted, his drawing skills were impeccable and his compositions were gracefully organized, but what made his work most memorable was his honesty in representing rural conditions. This is the heart of what makes Dupré’s work compelling. His figures convey a genuine presence that the impeccably lovely country maidens of William Bouguereau or Jules Breton do not. Their faces are plain; their shoes are filthy; their clothes are mended with visible patches. The cows and sheep are often caked in mud. Without ever making an adversarial public statement, Dupré rejected the dapper Realism of some of his contemporaries in favor of an unaffected frankness.

Dupré’s social commentary was equally understated, in part because there was no longer a need to utilize the bombastic strategies that Courbet found effective in the 1840s and 1850s. The changes brought about by the fall of the Second Empire in 1871 created an environment that was more conducive to open political discussion. In Dupré’s case, it was woven into his work as a subtle reminder of the republican values of liberty, equality and brotherhood. His farm workers were citizens of a republic, not the subjects of an emperor. They were still poor and overworked, but they had more hope than might have seemed possible for the stone breakers and gleaners of earlier decades. The signs of that hope could be read—if the viewer chose to do so—in the red scarves of the women or the seemingly casual use of blue, white and red in the visual rhythms of workers’ clothing. These cues would have been readily understandable to French audiences, as well as many other Europeans. For many of Dupré’s American collectors, however, the political messages probably went unnoticed as did the social commentary in Millet’s painting of The Gleaners, which was understood in the US as a nostalgic glimpse of French peasant life.

The choice of large format paintings to depict agricultural workers was also a political statement, albeit one that was directed primarily at the academic establishment. Like the issue of social commentary in art, it was considerably less fraught in the late 1870s as the École relaxed some of its more doctrinaire positions. History painting was no longer the sole privilege of those who chose to paint classical, biblical and historical subjects. For Dupré, the farmworkers of France were as deserving of large format paintings as any ancient Roman general or Greek hero. That his view was shared by Bastien-Lepage raises the question of whether the two of them together might have sparked a more authentic type of Naturalism if Bastien-Lepage had not died so young. As it was, Dupré succeeded in exhibiting his large paintings of rural life at the Salon without controversy, thus ensuring that future artists would have similar opportunities.

Future artists did indeed study Dupré’s painting. Van Gogh wrote of his admiration in letters to his brother Théo and the young Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) studied Dupré’s work during his years as an art student in Amsterdam in the 1890s. He would have seen these paintings in print form, probably in one of the local art dealers’ galleries.

Mondrian’s detailed pencil and wash drawing of Dupré’s 1882 painting, Au pâturage (In the pasture), focuses on the physical struggle of a young woman trying to tether a very uncooperative cow.^[15] (fig. 28) The landscape of the original painting has been almost entirely eliminated in the drawing so that Mondrian can study the muscular forms of the main figures as well as the tension created by the horizontal movement of the cow against the vertical restraint of the woman holding the rope. Although his later abstract work would take him in a different direction, Mondrian found Dupré’s work an inspiration in his formative years.

When the unemployed apprentice lacemaker Julien Dupré decided to pursue an education at the École des Beaux-Arts, he surely hoped that he would succeed in a profession more suited to his interests and his talent. He immersed himself in the curriculum of the École and emerged with both the technical and critical skills to develop a career as a painter in the tradition of the French academy. His friendship with Georges Laugée opened new doors as well, introducing him not only to his future wife and her family of artists but to the world of rural France, which would become the subject of his painting for the rest of his life. His honesty in representing that world—an agricultural environment that would soon disappear beneath waves of industrialization in the twentieth century—is an important legacy. Ethel Evans, a journalist from the midwestern farm country of Nebraska, recognized the authenticity of his work when she wrote “Dupré observes the character, both human and animal, with an unfailing truthfulness.”^[16]    This unvarnished depiction of rural life, often presented at the scale of traditional history painting, distinguishes Julien Dupré’s work. Grounded in the traditional education of the École des Beaux-Arts, but open-minded enough to absorb and learn from the Realist and Impressionist movements of his time, Dupré succeeded in capturing the life of French agricultural workers without apologies for the muck and mud of rural work, and with a sincere acknowledgment of their contribution to a rapidly changing world.