A beautiful Oil on Canvas Painting of a child and a woman Resting During the Harvest by Albert-Auguste Fourié.
Born in Paris in 1854, Fourié trained as an artist at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris.
He began his career as a sculptor, but after his first exhibition in 1877, he reoriented his career to devote himself exclusively to painting.
The elegance of his style and his talent soon made him a household name. He won several awards at the Paris Salon, including a gold medal in 1889.
He also illustrated the works of Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, Victor Hugo and Guy de Maupassant.
He died in Paris in 1937.
Many of his works can be found in national museums.
The painting shows a young woman woman and a child sharing a tender complicity in a moment of rest.
The gentleness of the scene tempers the reality of the hard labor of farm workers at a time when most of the work in the fields was done by hand.
This work follows in the footsteps of Jean-François Millet’s paintings and Realism, an artistic movement that depicted the everyday life of working-class people, based on the representation of reality rather than the ideal as in previous movements.
Realist artists showed life as it really is, without idealization or embellishment.
They wanted to show the beauty and interest of the simplest, most modest aspects of life, making them as precise and detailed as possible.
They refused to paint mythological or historical subjects, preferring scenes of everyday life and portraits of ordinary people.
They also rejected the conventions of academic compositions, preferring asymmetrical compositions and unusual angles of view.
This rejection of aesthetic ideals and academic conventions enabled realist artists to explore new territories in artistic representation, challenging prevailing aesthetic norms and highlighting the beauty and interest of the most modest aspects of everyday life.
This challenge had a major impact on art history, paving the way for new artistic movements such as Impressionism, Naturalism and Symbolism.
A lovely composition full of light.
Oil on canvas, signed lower right, in a gilded wood frame.
Unframed 18″ X 21 ½ ”
Framed 29” x 25 ½ “