Description
A Farm in Brittany – a house with no people in it, and a single thread of smoke
The picture lies across and is quiet. On the left and in the middle stand farm buildings with red-brown roofs and pale stone walls; three tall white chimneys rise from the roofs, and on the right of the building the dark opening of a door can be seen. Behind the houses a band of pink and green fields stretches away, and above them a grey-violet sky rises, painted in broad strokes. On the left, in the middle distance, stands a row of slender poplars; on the right a large crown with a yellow top and, behind it, a dark green mass of trees. In the foreground lie green grass and a low brown-red mound. The work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York under the inventory number 54.143.2, and the year is given as about 1894.
Not one person anywhere
There is not a single human figure in the picture. No worker in the field, nobody at the door, no animals. And yet the house is not deserted: from one of the chimneys a thin bluish thread of smoke rises. It is this tiny plume that is the only sign the farm is lived in, and it carries the whole scene. Take it away and the picture becomes an empty stage set.
The pink fields behind the roofs
The fields at the back are neither green nor yellow but pink, in places almost raspberry. This band runs the full width of the picture, just above the roofs, and gives the farm its ground of colour. The red-brown roofs sound a second time within it, so that the warm colour repeats above and below, while the cool grey is left to the sky alone.
How the museum gives the measurement
The museum record gives the measurement first in inches and only then, in brackets, in centimetres: 72.4 x 90.5 cm, and specifically as height by width. We report it as it is written, because a number taken from a museum table is easily read in the wrong unit. For choosing a size this makes no difference, since the ratio of the sides stays the same and the landscape format stays landscape.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every reproduction here is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the pink band at the back is the hardest part: if it darkens, the roofs merge into it and the farm loses its outline. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval.
- Subject: a Breton farm with red roofs, poplars on the left, a yellow crown on the right, pink fields behind.
- Technique: oil on canvas, a softly painted sky and firm areas of colour in front.
- Sizes: landscape format, from 40 x 32 cm to 200 x 160 cm; 80 x 64 cm and 100 x 80 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: no person appears in the picture at all, only a thin plume of smoke above one chimney.
If the same period interests you, see also Winter Landscape (Vinterlandskap), Breton Peasant Women and Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven.
