Louise Becq De Fouquières (1825-1892) — Talking By The Cottage — Oil On Canvas

Oil on canvas, signed lower right.
The frame bears a plaque reading "L. BECQ DE FOUQUIERES".

Frame: 55 x 76 cm
Artwork: 43 x 64 cm

Day is fading over a hamlet. Great trees with deep masses of foliage fill almost the whole canvas, letting only a laden grey-blue sky filter through; to the right stands the cottage with its uneven thatch, its wooden gate, a small garden. In the middle of the meadow, three peasant women: two standing, white-capped, talking, a basket on the arm; the third crouching, bent over her work. That is the whole subject — a conversation at the end of a working day, in the dark green of a summer evening.

The picture is built in broken tones, deep greens and shadowed browns, with only the white caps and a blue apron to pierce the gloom. We are in the climate of the Barbizon school: the rustic motif treated without anecdote, attention given to the hour and the light rather than to the incident. The handling is rich in the foliage, more careful and miniaturist in the figures — the hand of a portraitist is recognisable.

Louise Becq de Fouquières (1825-1892), born Louise Marie Anaïs Dedreux, was the sister of the painter Alfred de Dreux (1810-1860) and the daughter of the architect Pierre-Anne Dedreux. A pupil of Isidore Pils — who drew her seated at her easel — she made her Salon debut in 1857 with a pastel, La prière, and exhibited there until 1884: pastel portraits of women, her speciality, and landscapes, rarer, to which the present canvas belongs. A close friend of Georges-Hippolyte Géricault, natural son of Théodore Géricault, she maintained a long correspondence with him. She is listed in Bénézit, in the RKD and in the Musée d'Orsay's register of artists.