Oil on Canvas Signed Aimé Perret (1846

Oil on Canvas Signed Aimé Perret (1846 – 1927) and Dated 1889

Undoubtedly Aimé Perret, a painter from Lyon, retained from his Parisian teaching with the artist Antoine Vollon (1833 – 1900) a certain taste for the realism of the second half of the 19th century. An interest also for peasant life and its intimate daily life. While this social category is largely absent from the painting advocated by the Académie des Beaux-Arts other than in a context of idealization, the realist current gives a new place to people of little means, to anonymous people. Our oil on canvas in very good condition, whose remarkable technique we can only admire, depicts a couple seated near a field of wheat when a summer night is amply illuminated by the moon. We can also compare this work to L’aveu dans les Blés, a canvas painted four years before ours and preserved today in the national collections.

Aimé Perret participated regularly in the Salon, from 1870 to 1889, and became a member of the Society of French Artists. From 1890 to 1912, he exhibited at the Salon of the National Society of Fine Arts, of which he became a member. He was a bronze medalist during the Universal Exhibition of 1889. On June 26, 1894, sponsored by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.