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(b Gruchy, nr. Cherbourg, 4 Oct. 1814; d Barbizon, 20 Jan. 1875). French painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, born into a prosperous and cultured farming family in Normandy. After studying with local painters, he moved to Paris in 1837 and for two years continued his training under Delaroche at the École des Beaux-Arts. His early work consisted of portraits and then small mythological and pastoral scenes, but with The Winnower (NG, London), exhibited at the Salon in 1848, he turned to the pictures of rustic life from which his name is now inseparable. The Winnower perfectly caught the spirit of the time, for earlier in the year in which it was shown, King Louis Philippe had been deposed, helping to create a taste for pictures of ordinary people such as this (it was indeed bought by a minister in the new republican government).

Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)


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