Emma Herland

(French, 1856-1947)

Sur la place à Concarneau

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, UK

Exhibited
Paris, Salon, 1907, no.792, illustrated in black and white, p.140

Emma Herland was born in Cherbourg in 1855 to a large bourgeois family. The family moved to Brittany as a result of her father's job as a pharmacist in the Navy. Herland's parents encouraged her desire to pursue a career as an artist, having already shown great talent in her early portraits of her sister, Louise. She began her formal training under Alexandre Fischer, and later under Benjamin-Constant and Jules Lefebvre, developing a classically academic style of painting.

In 1885, Herland moved to Concarneau, a place which was to be a great source of inspiration for her work. The slow-paced seaside town was the ideal setting for Herland to capture the happy simplicity of Breton family life, with the majority of her works depicting female subjects, often in domestic settings and wearing traditional Breton dress. The present lot is an excellent example of Herland's work, a bustling sunny market scene with Breton women in typical white starched collars and bonnets buying and selling local wares. Herland's keen interest in ceramics is also evident in the finely painted piles of crockery glimmering in the sunshine.

Herland rejected the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, remaining true to her own realist figurative style. She exhibited widely in France, and at the Paris Salon from 1879 to 1920, where she was awarded an honourable mention in 1901. She dedicated her life to her career as an artist, remaining unmarried and living modestly, until her death in 1947.

A largely forgotten artist, the Musée Pont-Aven held a retrospective in 2009, Emma Herland: Femme artiste en Bretagne. The exhibition brought together eighty-three works from both public and private collections, including an oil study for the present lot.