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Dimensions: 35 1/2 by 64 in.
90.2 by 162.6 cm.
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Provenance: Purchased directly from the Paris Salon of 1885 by M. Knoedler & Company through Goupil, April 30, 1885
Mr. W.F. Weld, Boston, Masachusetts, 1886
Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1927
Owen Gallery, New York
Sale, Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, November 12, 1970, lot 7
Glat Gallery (acquired for the present owner at the above sale)
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Exhibited: Paris, Salon de 1885, no. 368
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Literature: Marius Vachon, Jules Breton, Paris, 1899, p. 145
Hollister Sturges, Jules Breton and the French Rural Tradition, Omaha, 1982, p. 132
Annette Bourrut Lacouture, Jules Breton, Painter of Peasant Life, New Haven, 2002, pp. 206 and 252
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Notes: When Le Dernier Rayon was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1885, it reflected Jules Breton's continued nostalgia for a bucolic, rustic way of life that served as an overriding theme in his late work. This scene is inscribed with the name of the artist's beloved hometown of Courrières, a small agriculturally rich village in Northern France. Despite Breton's travels, this village remained crucial to his artistic development.
In his late works Breton increasingly concentrated on light and atmosphere. The closing hour of the day with its last fleeting rays of sunlight, combined with the serene moments of peasant life, captivated him, repeatedly appearing in his works. For Breton, evening was the "ideal hour chasing away all miseries so only beauty can appear." He sought to submerge himself in the past in order to escape the inevitable encroachment of modern industrialization. Indeed, the last two decades of the nineteenth century engendered a fervor for paintings of rural life.
