The Shepherd’s Star

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The Shepherd’s Star

Artist Jules Breton (French, 1827-1906)

Place of OriginFrance

Date1887

DimensionsPainting: 40 1/2 × 31 in. (102.9 × 78.7 cm)
Frame: 53 1/4 × 44 3/4 × 5 1/2 in. (135.3 × 113.7 × 14 cm)

Mediumoil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineGift of Arthur J. Secor

Object number

1922.41

Not on View

Label TextBarefoot and carrying a heavy sack of potatoes on her head, a young peasant woman returns from the fields at twilight as Capella, the “shepherd’s star,” rises over her shoulder. The model was an agricultural worker from Courrières, artist Jules Breton’s native village in the Artois region of northern France. However, the painter gives the figure a classical monumentality and timelessness that removes her from any commentary on her social position. As one critic wrote of The Shepherd’s Star in 1888, “imagine that she carried on her back a sheaf of wheat instead of a sack of potatoes, and then she could be the personification of harvesting. She would be a modern Ceres [goddess of summer].” Unlike the more frank, unsentimental images of workers by French Realist artists like Jean-François Millet (see his The Quarriers), Breton’s paintings present a romanticized view of the French peasant as the heroic embodiment of a traditional, idyllic, and noble way of life. This agrarian lifestyle, however, was rapidly disappearing under the pressures of the Industrial Revolution, prompting a sense of nostalgia for what was being lost to modernization.Published ReferencesMasters in Art: Breton, Boston, 1907, pp. 29, 37, pl. IV.

Toledo Museum of Art Museum News, no. 41, April 1922, repr.

Godwin, Blake-More, Catalogue of European Paintings, Toledo, 1939, p. 210, repr. 211.

Toledo Museum of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, European Paintings, Toledo, 1976, p. 30, pl. 266.

Weisberg, Gabriel, "Realists revisited," Art Journal, vol. 40, no. 1/2, Fall/Winter 1980, repr. p. 401.

Nochlin, Linda, "New York, Brooklyn Museum, The Realist Tradition," Burlington, vol. 123, no. 937, Apr. 1981, p. 264, repr. fig. 127.

Fryer, Judith, Felicitous space: the imaginative structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, Chapel Hill, 1986, p. 232, repr. p. 233.

Robertson, Bruce, Reckoning with Winslow Homer: his late paintings and their influence, Cleveland, 1990, p. 57, fig. 53.

The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art Masterworks, Toledo, 2009, p. 266, repr. (col.).

Lemonedes, Heather, Paul Gauguin : Paris, 1889, Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2009, pp. 35, 40, repr. (col.).

Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid, Heroínas, March-June, 2011, cat. 10, p. 24, repr. (col.) p. 134.

Exhibition HistoryParis, Salon, 1888, no. 374.

Toledo, The Toledo Museum of Art, Inaugural Exhibition, 1912, no. 162, repr.

Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art; Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum; St, Louis, St. Louis Art Museum; Glasgpw, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, The Realist Tradition, 1980-1982, no. 204, repr.

Glasgow, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove, Scotland. 1981.

Arras, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Quimper, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, Jules Breton: painter of peasant life 2002, no. 102, p. 209, 219, n. 55, 249, fig. 176 (col.).

Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, Paul Gaugin: Paris, 1889, Oct. 2009 - June 2010, cat. 27, p. 35, repr. (col.) p. 40.

Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid, Heroínas, March-June, 2011, cat. 10, p. 24, 292, repr. (col.) p. 134.