Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 3 of 11

The Shepherd’s Star by Jules Breton, painted 1887. 

In this painting, made late in the artist’s career, a barefoot young woman works the potato fields into the early evening. The sky colours into a rose-petal gradation that sinks into the dark landscape and in the high left corner, the painting’s namesake star has risen and our heroine gazes out, absorbed under the weight of that heavy laden sack. 

In the farming region in northern France where Breton grew up, peasants could work 12 or 14 hour days, until sundown. Breton himself was born into a prosperous, middle-class family, in the town of Courrières and rural people and female labourers at work, became his abiding focus. 

The name Jules Breton might be unfamiliar now, but in his lifetime, he was one of the most famous artists of the day. Like Jean-François Millet, whose work you can see beside this painting, Breton was a leader in Realism, an art movement that used the refinement and precision of traditional painting to depict real, working people rather than the historical battles and biblical scenes of neo-classical art. 

At the same time, the softness and bright colours of Impressionism often glimpsed through and in Jules Breton’s case, more than a little sentimentality. 

In the late 1800s Breton was known as the ‘painter-poet’ because he also wrote romantic poetry and verse novels. All were a huge hit with the public.  

Here, the young woman treads through the warm earth of the potato field on her own. She was modelled on a real farm worker named Catherine Bibi, from Courrières.

Despite his contemporary popularity, Breton’s art was swiftly overshadowed by the art movements of the 20th century. And, perhaps, the realities of the industrial revolution. 

Breton’s beloved hometown was transforming from farming to coal mining. In 1906, months before he died, Courrières experienced Europe’s worst ever mining disaster, where more than a thousand people died. By the time he painted Catherine Bibi, Breton was increasingly interested in the solitary female figure as a subject, working at dawn or sunset. One critic at the Salon, noted his subjects were given ‘the importance of genuine historical figures’!

In fact, this painting was made with the encouragement of his American art dealers, after the success of an earlier work named The Song of the Lark. In 1934 the US  First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, named The Song of the Lark the most loved work of art in America.

So it’s no surprise that the country’s best art collections, like the Toledo Museum of Art, own an example of Jules Breton’s work.