Formal Analysis
The work of art in question is Evening by Jules Breton painted in 1888. It is approximately two and a half feet wide by four feet
long, so a fairly large painting. It is oil on canvas painting. The subject of the painting is a figure walking diagonally along a dirt road
towards the bottom right corner of the painting. There are flowers and grass growing along the edges of the dirt path, beyond her, in the middle
ground, is a section of field that has already been harvested and another section that has yet to be worked on. In the background, the horizon
line extends to show distant trees and in the sky there is both the setting sun on the right and the rising moon on the left.
The figure is a woman; she is carrying a very full burlap bag across her shoulders with her arms above her head. She wears very simple and plain clothes, her shoes are simple clogs. She wears a curved knife used to cut grass on her fight hip. All of these details tell the viewer that she is obviously a peasant and she is walking away from a day’s work as the sun sets, carrying a large bag of harvested grain.
The color palate for this painting is predominately made up of cool colors. The artist chose to depict the soft dusky hour when the sun is setting. The figure is still well lit but the light is not harsh and the mood set by this time of day is calm. It makes the whole scene seem very still and graceful. There is still a bit of warmer colors radiating out from the sunset, the sky gradates from the red-orange on the right side to a violet blue towards the left.
The woman is centered in the composition; she is the only human in the painting, and she is in the foreground. This says that it is definitely about the person and not the landscape, even though there is great amount of detail in the flowers, fields, trees, and sky. The brush strokes used in the flowers and fields are layered giving the effecting of being hazy. The farther off in the field the viewer looks, the fuzzier the landscape becomes. This makes sense because of the setting sun giving off this dusky light that makes objects further away appear hazy.
The artist also chose to use this effect on the flowers growing along the dirt road, which is in the foreground, rather than a precise rendering which we know he can do because of the way he painted the figure. It almost seems like there is an impressionist influence in the way he painted the flowers, although this painting is by no means an impressionist painting.
This painting is actually more of an academic painting. Besides the natural landscape portion of this composition, no other element has the layered brush strokes. He painted the woman with extremely fine brush strokes this makes the figure appear overly sharp against her background. The overall darkness of the painting suggests that he painted on a dark canvas and not a white one as the impressionists did. The painting of both the moon and the sun in the sky shows an element of imagination, he pays attention to what’s happening in the sky as well and though he does show a lot of interest in the light of the setting sun the light is not a character of its own. The sun and moon appear as characters but not the light they produce.
The woman, although a peasant, does not appear to be so. Aside from her clothes and the scene she is placed in, she does not in any way appear to be poor. She is young, very clean even though she has been working all day. She has a strong body that is not bent and she is a very pretty woman. Pretty, but she is still not seen as a perfect beauty like many paintings of young women are. Her arms are very muscled and rather masculine and her breasts are not emphasized, they are actually even covered up. It is obvious that the artist painted an idealized figure of a peasant rather than presenting the realistic portrait of one of the poorest people in the country. Aside from her physical appearance, she is also idealized in the fact that she is not struggling with the large sack that she is carrying above her head. In reality, she would be dragging it but he shows her carrying it as though it weighs nothing, another unfeminine quality that is seen in her.
She is in a three-quarter turned pose, frozen in mid-step. Of course this shows the motion of her walking but the figure still possesses a very still statuesque quality because of the uprightness of her body. The viewer’s gaze is lower than that of the woman in the painting. The viewer is looking up at her and she does not meet our eyes. She is looking ahead of her further into the right side of the painting.
On my first encounter with this painting, my reaction to it was to almost be instantly board with the scene; another pretty, clean peasant girl. It didn’t seem to be an expression of one’s individual interpretation of the lower class and, at first, I couldn’t see how it had much of a message in it. But as I kept looking and saw that the girl was not meant to just be pretty, the painting become a lot more interesting to me.
She appears to be more of an idealization of the type of people rather than the idealization of an individual. She is also endowed with this sense of importance because of the way the viewer looks up at her and because of the strong statuesque quality she has. There is no connection between the viewer and the figure in the painting but the viewer is not peeping at her while she is vulnerable. We are looking up at her but she is looking off, another quality that gives us a feeling that she is more important. There is a sense of nurturing because she is a woman but there is also an element of strength through the musculature of her body and through the way she carries a heavy load so easily. The curved knife at her hip, placed clearly in our view, once again shows not only her strength but also her power. She appears to me to be more of a Lady Liberty type of figure.
By making her appear as such a figure, he is not only giving importance to her but also to all the low class farmers and peasants. They grow and harvest the food and materials that the upper class society would not be able to function without. They are the support system that the society depends on but they are often completely ignored or looked down upon. He does not try to make her look upper-class by dressing her in really nice fashionable clothes and he does not show the harsh reality of being that poor. He is not trying to shine a light on what’s wrong with the society by painting her. Instead he gives peasants a quiet grace and strength and even dignity through his painting that the poor are not often given.
