Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, May 27, 2024: Julien Dupré, a French painter (#2034)

Julien Dupré (1851 – 1910) was a French painter. Throughout his career, he maintained a reputation as an artist of merit and integrity. For thirty-five years, he never once failed to submit his work to the annual Salon of the Socitété des Artistes Français, and his efforts were recognized with a number of medals and honors. In addition, he formed productive relationships with several art dealers who represented his work both in France and abroad. His work received international recognition as well as ample attention from private collectors, the result of which was a comfortable degree of financial security. In his personal life, he was happily married and generally untroubled by family discord. In short, he was a successful professional painter, committed to his art and aspiring to create redoubtable paintings without engaging in unnecessarily theatrical behavior. It may be, however, that Dupré’s decision to pursue his career within accepted social structures—and without excessive public fanfare—has overshadowed his contributions to the history of art.

Dupré has been characterized as an animalier, a student of Jules Breton, and repeatedly—and erroneously—as the nephew of Jules Dupré. To set the record straight, Dupré was never a student of Jules Breton and, in fact, the two painters approached their work from quite different perspectives. Breton’s sentimental images of rural life are essentially a continuation of an eighteenth-century genre tradition, influenced by nineteenth-century Realism, but far less grounded in its social themes and aesthetic ideas than Dupré’s work.

The conflation of Jules and Julien Dupré, however, is a more serious issue. Even Vincent van Gogh thought that Julien was related to Jules, asking parenthetically in a letter to his brother Théo “(is this a son of Jules Dupré???)”. Kudos are due to the Dutch artist for asking a question about it rather than assuming a relationship based solely on a common surname. Others have not been so thoughtful, but simply presumed a relationship—usually cited as that of uncle and nephew—and repeated the falsehood in auction catalogues, journal articles and sales sheets. The fact is that there is no relationship between the painters whatsoever.

The emphasis on Dupré’s depiction of animals—particularly cattle—emerged most prominently when he began to paint milkmaids in the late 1880s. These images were widely reproduced in both Europe and the US because of their popular appeal. By the turn of the century, Dupré’s reputation as an animalier was deeply entrenched, and has remained so into the twenty-first century. It is a critically incomplete description of his work that deserves to be amended to reflect the totality of his production more accurately.

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