A barefoot field worker stops at dawn with a sickle in her hand and looks up at a bird that is not in the picture. In 1934 newspaper readers voted it the best-loved painting in America; Eleanor Roosevelt unveiled the result at the Chicago world's fair and said it was her favourite too.
The 1934 vote
The Century of Progress fair filled Chicago in 1933 and 1934. During the second summer the Chicago Daily News ran a contest to find the best-loved work of art in America, and its readers chose a French peasant girl listening to a lark.
Eleanor Roosevelt unveiled the winner and said it was her own favourite painting.
What happened next is in the Art Institute's exhibition records and it is slightly absurd. The painting went on tour alone. In March 1935 the Los Angeles Art Association put on a show listed as The Song of the Lark by Jules Breton, Lent by the Art Institute of Chicago — one picture, one room — and in June it did the same in Dallas. No group, no theme, no other artist. A single painting, billed on its own.
Painted at home
Jules Breton grew up in Courrières, a village in the coal country of northern France, and he painted the people there all his life. The signature on this canvas says Jules Breton, Courrières, 1884 — he made it at home.
It was bought straight from him. An agent named George A. Lucas took it in 1885 for the New York dealer Samuel P. Avery, who sold it the same year to Henry Field in Chicago; it has hung at the Art Institute since 1894.
What is in it is a pause. She is barefoot, her sleeves are pushed up, the sickle is still in her right hand and the field is behind her waiting. The sun is just up. For the length of one bird call she is not working, and the picture is entirely about that gap rather than about the lark, which Breton did not bother to paint.
The man on his way to the lake
Critical opinion went the other way. When modern art became the story of the twentieth century the salon naturalists were written out of it, and Breton went with them — too neat, too sentimental, too popular. The painting did not notice.
In 2014, at a press conference for a film, Bill Murray told a story about his first years on stage in Chicago. One night he was so bad that he walked off and kept walking, towards Lake Michigan, and went into the Art Institute instead because it was there. He stopped in front of this painting. There's a girl who doesn't have a whole lot of prospects, he said, but the sun's coming up anyway.
He said it gave him the sense that he had another chance. A hundred and forty years, a newspaper poll and a bad night in a theatre, and the painting has only ever done one thing: a woman stops, and the day starts anyway.
A newspaper poll once made her the best-loved painting in America. The story is on the back of the mug, and the sun is coming up anyway.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.