POSIBLEMENTE :: Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Virginie Demont-Breton (French painter) 1859 - 1935
L'Enfant à la Pêche, s.d.
oil on panel
26.9 x 35.6 cm. (10 5/8 x 14 in.)
signed Demont-Breton (lower right)
private collection

This painting is included in the Demont-Breton archives prepared by Annette Bourrut Lacouture.

Virginie Elodie Marie Thérèse Demont-Breton is the daughter of Breton Jules Breton and the niece of Emile Breton, both recognized painters. She married the painter Adrien Demont in 1880. She exhibited in Paris in 1879 and received a gold medal at the Universal Exhibition in Amsterdam in 1883.

In 1890, she moved to Wissant, a small village of the Côte d'Opale, between Cape Blanc-Nez and Gris-Nez, where the couple built a neo -Egyptianvilla, Typhonium, built by the Belgian architect Edmond De Vigne in the following year. The Typhonium is registered historical monuments since November 29, 1985. Virginie Demont-Breton was president of the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors (which she joined in 1883), from 1895 to 1901.

Augustin Lesieux, mason and sculptor in Paris, made a bust of Virginie Demont-Breton kept in museum Chartreuse de Douai. She was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1894.

The first period has mainly portraits and historical or mythical treated academic and realistic. After her discovery of Wissant, her paintings, sometimes monumental endeavor to paint the life of fishermen and take a more social tone. It crunches the environmental fishermen, their families and children Wissant amid waves of the raging sea.