Frans Lebret artwork • painting • for sale Milking time on the farm

Frans Lebret went outside at a young age to study the landscape, and especially the cattle, around Dordrecht. This resulted in refined and detailed landscapes with sheep and cows using what he had sketched outside. His specialty would always remain the animals, especially sheep ‘whose movement in their fur attracted him so much’. After 1850, people broke away from academic traditions and looked at the landscape with ‘new’ eyes. Following the Barbizon school, Lebret changed the romantic image of the landscape into a more realistic representation in the mid-19th century. But that was it. While Lebret paved the way for younger painters who wanted to work in the open air around 1880, following the example of the Hague School, he himself hardly or never walked that path. In this painting, the attention is drawn by a shepherd and his cattle in the foreground. In the middle ground, a grove and a country house, along which the gaze slides to the panorama in the background with a mill on the horizon. In this work Lebret opts for the traditional depiction of an idealized landscape, for which sketches served as an example.