Description
From 1875 to 1878, while living in the small village of Pont-Aven, in Brittany, France, American artist Thomas Hovenden painted a number of works featuring local Breton women. He wanted to convey their traditional values and simple lives in his genre scenes. They typically wore a headdress, bodice, skirt, apron, and sabots (a type of shoe). Hovenden wanted his images of these women to evoke a nostalgic, romanticized vision of the peasants as uncorrupted by the modern world.
