Technical information
- Title : Little Girl with a Slice of Bread and Jam
- Date : 1932
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : 92 × 60 cm
- Location : Unknown
Biographical / historical context
In 1932, Breuillaud gradually moved away from the most geometrized and color-driven research of the ZM cycle and entered a more intimate territory: close figures, silent scenes, portraits of everyday life. Paris remains the setting, but attention shifts from objects and architectures toward human presence—modest, untheatrical, often caught in a simple gesture.
This Little Girl belongs fully to that threshold. The paint still carries a dark vibration inherited from earlier years, but the aim is no longer analytical: it becomes psychological. The child is not a narrative pretext; she is a presence, and the painting seeks to hold together the subject’s innocence and the gravity of the atmosphere.
Formal / stylistic description
The vertical composition centers on the seated figure on a wooden chair whose uprights are faintly visible behind the shoulders. The background is almost entirely absorbed into very dark browns and greens, worked in broad rubbings and scratched passages that animate space without identifying it. This darkness forms a screen against which the child’s face stands out, as if lit from within.
The face is built with dense yet nuanced paint: a pale forehead, strongly flushed cheeks, a small red mouth, and slightly enlarged dark eyes that lend the expression an unusual gravity. The short, helmet-like hair is treated in thick brown touches, while a barely indicated blue-green collar introduces a cool note that stabilizes the flesh tones.
The hands play a central role: one lies open on the thigh; the other holds a slice of bread with jam, a small reddish nucleus that echoes the cheeks and mouth. The clothing is treated as a dark mass, crossed by rare bluish glints; the painting favors compact presence over the detail of folds. The result is a portrait of childhood without sentimentality: a contained, almost mute intensity in which paint becomes the vehicle of emotion.
Comparative analysis / related works
The work clearly heralds the PN cycle of 1932–1934 through its tightening on the figure, its muffled atmosphere, and the primacy given to the face as a psychological focus. It differs from the late ZM canvases: construction is no longer driven by an analytical spatial organization, but by a drama of values and by the vibration of paint around the model.
The deliberately non-descriptive background and the insistence on hands and face place the canvas within a vein of intimate portraits in which the everyday—a chair, simple clothing, a piece of bread—becomes the minimal frame for inner presence.
Justification of dating and attribution
The date 1932 is consistent with this transitional phase: paint still dark and vibrating, but re-centered on psychology rather than the analysis of forms. The subject and the device (isolated figure, muffled ground, light localized on face and hands) match the climate of early PN. No formal element contradicts this attribution.