In the fields
(Dans les champs)
1892

José Júlio de SOUSA-PINTO

Medium: oil on canvas
Measurements: 93.0 × 73.9 cm
Inscription: inscribed in brown paint l.r.: Souza Pinto. (Pi underlined) (into underlined) / 1892
Accession Number: p.399.6-1
Department: International Painting
Credit Line: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1893
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited
Gallery location: 19th Century European Paintings Gallery
Level 2, NGV International
About this work: A Portuguese artist, born in the Azores, José Júlio de Sousa-Pinto studied in Paris under the important French painters Alexandre Cabanel and Jules Bastien-Lepage. In 1889 Sousa-Pinto won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle and was to receive many subsequent honours. As a young man, he settled in France, painting the local countryside and peasant life in a style reflecting in particular the works of the realist painter Jules Breton (1827–1906).
Subjects (general): Human Figures Landscapes Relationships and Interactions
Subjects (specific): children (people by age group) fields (land) flowers (plant components) meadows rural life seated figures sun hats
Provenance: Exhibited Salon, Paris, 1893, no. 1640; from where purchased, by John Longstaff, for the NGV, 1893.
Exhibited: Salon, Paris, 1893, no. 1640

Frame

The oak torus on this frame is unusually high relief, more in the manner we associate with carved timber frames from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Here the torus would be cast from lead or gelatin moulds allowing deep recesses and a degree of undercutting in the process. The conventional torus would be made from composition readily pressed from low relief carved wooden moulds.
The frame is unlikely to have been made locally and would have entered the collection with the painting in 1893.
The basic form of the frame is representative of a type revived around the middle of the nineteenth century in France and it is quite likely this frame was made in Paris for display at the Paris salon of 1893.
A frame very similar to this can be seen on exhibition in a photograph of the French Art Gallery of the Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1888.
Framemaker: Unknown - 19th century
Date: 1892
Materials: timber, composition or plaster, gold leaf
Condition: overpainted with gold paint effectively flattening a surface which would originally have carried matt and burnished gold leaf
Dimensions: 130.5 x 110.5 x 12 cm