About this work
Three women cross flowering fields, bathed in the glow of the setting sun, their postures evoking those of ancient classical sculpture. This is the image that greets the viewer of *Fin du travail* — and it arrests completely. Breton depicts the women returning from their day's work in the potato fields, their figures backlit by the sunset in a way that adds a theatrical charge to the scene.
The landscape glows with the dying light, and the female workers appear clean and composed rather than dirty or exhausted from their long day of labour. The palette is warm amber and rust, deepening at the horizon into amber-gold, with the women rendered in silhouette-adjacent shadow that gives them a sculptural, almost monumental weight. The light is striking and quite deliberate — Breton idealizes his figures in warm sunlight against a glowing background , and the effect is less documentary than ceremonial, as though the close of a working day deserves its own quiet consecration.
*The End of the Working Day* was created between 1886 and 1887, executed in oil on canvas at 84 × 120 cm, and now held in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. It belongs to a particularly focused phase of Breton's mature career. During the 1880s, he concentrated on works showing one or only a few figures in rustic settings, which gave him the opportunity to explore the transient effects of light — a preoccupation that was becoming more significant with the rising popularity of Impressionism.
His poetic renderings of single or small groups of peasant female figures in a landscape, posed against the setting sun, remained very popular, especially in the United States. The painting also exemplifies the tension at the heart of his practice: Breton was well-versed in the heroic figural traditions of academic painting, and explained that art was to do the workers "the honour formerly reserved exclusively for the gods."
This is a painting that wants a room with natural light — somewhere light changes through the day — because Breton's sunset palette shifts register depending on the hour. It suits a living room or reading room with warm tones: terracotta walls, aged oak, linen. Breton portrayed rural labourers, frequently young women, as dignified, majestic, and above all poetic — and that is the mood this print carries into any space. It speaks to a viewer drawn to work that holds stillness and beauty in equal measure: not sentimental, not stark, but suspended between the two, like the last light before dark.
