Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto.

Note:

According to Victoria Baker, the date of this painting is consistent with Peel’s activities that year when he made a return trip to Brittany where, in the early 1880s he frequented the ex-patriot American artists’ colony based in Pont-Aven. “The architecture of the thatched cottage at the centre of the composition is a Brittany scene: the rural cottage of the Breton chaumiere (ie. thatched roof) type...Traditionally the thatched roof was made up of locally-available wheat, rye or reeds. To protect the front of the house, a local material was traditionally used, composed of sand, whitewash and linen, which gives the white colour to the walls.”

Writing of this lot, Victoria Baker explains that: “Peel was long drawn to such pastoral genre scenes, painting a number of smaller studies of rural French tenants at daily tasks, feeding chickens in front of their homes or reaping in the sun-filled fields. The greater attention to painterly effects of tone and light where the figures devolve into more anonymous actors completely integrated into the surrounding landscape reflects Peel’s later development as a painter.”