The Song of the Lark

A lone peasant girl pauses in the field, scythe at rest, and turns her face toward the sky to listen to a lark singing in the distance, the rising sun behind her flooding the plain with golden light. Jules Breton painted the picture in 1884, in the years when his idealized scenes of rural life had made him one of the most popular artists in France, and it became his best-loved work: a single figure of absorbed stillness set against the vast flat landscape of his native Artois, the horizon low and luminous. The canvas, exhibited at the Salon of 1885, entered the Art Institute in 1894 with the Henry Field Memorial Collection and has remained one of the most cherished pictures in the museum. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.