Description:
Portrait of a girl with apple also known as The Red Apple, by artist James Wells Champney (1843-1903), signed in lower left in red paint "CHAMP 75", gilt period frame. Size: 22 1/4" x 18-1/4". A young girl in a red skirt and black apron with a grey blouse and a white neckerchief sits upon the ground with a large woven basket strapped to her back, she sits in a green glade of trees, and offers an apple to an unseen person in the foreground. Condition: Extensive stable craquelure, loss to red pigment on girl's skirt, no evidence of retouching under ultraviolet light.
Label Text:
Champney exhibition: This early genre scene captures a young girl seated in a forest glade, pausing from her apple picking. Rather than show the realities of agricultural tasks, Champney focused upon a moment of rest and the innocent gesture of holding up a half-bitten apple, the “fruits” of her labor. The scene was possibly inspired by Champney’s time living in the rural French village of Ecouen. This motif of a young child in the countryside was directly tied to his teacher, the French painter Pierre-Édouard Frère (1819-1886), who specialized in sentimental scenes of the lower classes and children performing domestic tasks. The year Champney painted this canvas, he exhibited at the Paris Salon, where his work appeared alongside French Academic artists who explored images of idealized peasants in country life, including William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) and Jules Breton (1827-1906). A ready market for romanticized scenes of peasants among American collectors may have attracted Champney to the theme.
Tags:
portraits; trees; girls; harvesting Subjects:
Portraits; Girls; Trees; Canvas Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2022.30.1 |
