The Cricket - Alexandre-jacques Chantron - Pastel On Canvas - 1911

This charming pastel by Alexandre-Jacques Chantron develops a rare iconography relating to La Fontaine's Fables. The young half-naked chilly woman and her mandolin embody the first verses of The Cricket and the Ant  : 

"The cricket from singing all summer long / Found herself skint when the winter winds blew."

Alexandre-Jacques Chantron (1842-1918)
The Cricket , pastel on canvas. 
Signed and dated 1911. Original frame. 

Chantron had already taken advantage of this subject at two previous Salons; that of 1885 (of which only one lithograph has come down to us) and that of 1911. We reproduce in the complementary photos these last two works. Our work, a variant executed in pastel of The Cricket from the Salon of 1911, was most certainly commissioned at the end of the exhibition.

Born in Nantes in 1842 and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Alexandre-Jacques Chantron had William Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury as his mentors. He was influenced by the symbolist school and the freedom of touch expressed by artists of his generation and became known at the Salon in the 1890s. He received an honorable mention in 1893, a third class medal in 1899 and a second class medal in 1902. He is known and appreciated for his representations of poetic and intimist nudes which are similar in some aspects to Bouguereau's style, with a freer touch and modernist accents. This is the case of our pastel, which represents a young girl in a timeless landscape, which captivates by its intense look and its position stopped in the moment, like a photograph.