Breton masterpiece
comes "home"

A very special addition to Clayton this holiday season is the loan of The Last Gleanings by Jules-Adolphe Breton from The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.

This painting was once in the collection of Henry Clay Frick, and archival photographs show it hanging above the fireplace in the dining room, where it will return this holiday season. The dining room table setting reflects the subtle golden and pastel hues of this harvest scene while sideboards and tables shimmer with grand serving pieces like a cut-glass punch bowl, brass samovar and enameled Russian tea set from Tiffany.

In the summer of 1895, Henry Clay Frick and his family traveled to Europe, where they met a number of artists, and Frick, who was beginning an enduring relationship with the dealers M. Knoedler and Co., went on a bit of a buying spree. That year 18 of his 25 art purchases were made through Knoedler. His purchases for 1895, in total, added up to over $76,000—an indication that his collecting was becoming more ambitious and broader in scope. 

Frick bought The Last Gleanings on August 23, 1895. At $14,000, it was the most expensive painting he had purchased up to that time.  It’s quite likely that Frick saw the painting when he visited with Breton in his studio at his hometown of Courrières in northern France. The painting also had been displayed that spring in the Salon of 1895, where The New York Times noted on April 28 that the painting was executed in the “master’s best manner.”

By 1895, the art-buying and art-viewing public was well aware of Breton’s “best manner.” The artist had developed a reputation for peasant scenes, more idealized than those of Jean-François Millet, his older contemporary and more famous painter of peasant life. Breton’s canvases are, however, imbued with a deep sensitivity to the natural environment and an appreciation for atmospheric effects. Millet is famously said to have remarked that Breton only painted the pretty girls, the ones that left the village to get married.

Breton’s pretty girls were, like those of other French academic artists who worked with similar subject matter, hugely popular with American collectors right around the turn of the twentieth century. The idealized agrarian scenes of Breton, Julien Dupré, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and others found welcome spaces on the walls of American industrialists where their works evoked nostalgia for a rapidly vanishing rural way of life.  Sowing, gleaning and harvesting also have references to biblical themes and can be read as metaphors for the condition of humankind in general.

Breton was popular in Pittsburgh as he was elsewhere in the States, and his works were displayed in the Carnegie Annuals of 1896, 1897 and 1898. Paintings by Breton formerly in local 19th-century collections remain in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Duquesne Club. Breton’s 1890 autobiography, The Life of An Artist, was quite popular and the Fricks owned a copy of the English language edition.

In November 1895, Frick received the following letter from Breton:

Dear Mr. Frick,

Both Mrs. Breton and myself remember with great pleasure your too short visit at Courrières.

We often speak of you and congratulate ourselves that my painting, The Last Gleanings, has become the property of an amateur of your merit.

This painting, one of my favorites, expresses a feeling I have frequently felt before the majestic simplicity and beauty of our rustic scenes, when bathed in the last rays of the sun.Those daughters of our fields seem then to be transfigured, the reflections of the heavens giving them the semblance of being surrounded by a natural halo.

This is the hour which always moved me most, and which I have all my life tried to express.I believe I have never succeeded better than in your painting.

Awaiting the pleasure of seeing you again, I beg of you, dear Mr. Frick, to receive from both Mrs. Breton and myself the assurance of our best wishes and the expression of our warmest sympathies.

The painting was hung in the dining room at Clayton, where it is visible in period photographs, and is recorded on the household inventory of 1903. After 1903, it is no longer on the Pittsburgh inventory; it was likely moved to the Fricks’ rented residence at 640 Fifth Avenue, or perhaps spent time at their summer home in Massachusetts. A new frame was purchased for $240 on October 23, 1905, and it is likely that this was to suit the painting better in its new location, wherever that might have been.

Frick often kept paintings on a trial basis, or later returned them to Knoedler for credit toward future purchases. Between 1890 and 1905, while Clayton was the Frick family’s main residence, at least 54 works were exchanged or returned to dealers for credit as Frick’s tastes changed or his collecting interests evolved. The Last Gleanings was returned to M. Knoedler and Co. on January 1, 1907 for $25,000, towards the purchase of a Rembrandt self-portrait now in The Frick Collection, New York. Breton had died in July 1906, and one can speculate whether the artist’s death had any impact on Frick’s decision to trade the painting.

The Last Gleanings is now visiting Pittsburgh for at least the third time in its history, since it was also borrowed in 1997 to be part of the exhibition Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh,

1890–1910.