Peasant Woman Among the Olive Trees

Technical information

Title : Peasant Woman Among the Olive Trees
Date : c. 1950
Technique : Oil on canvas (HST)
Dimensions : 55 × 45 cm
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

This work belongs to the genesis of the “women with headscarf” cycle, a significant subgroup within the PR2 corpus. Breuillaud reuses a popular Provençal female model and reconstructs it in coloured planes, in a post-cubist vein that remains perceptible yet already inflected toward a more solar light.

The canvas appears as an early version of the motif: human presence remains tangible, while a geometric structure organises both figure and landscape.

Formal / stylistic description

A seated female figure occupies the foreground, articulated into polygonal facets. Clothing is treated in modular colour fields; the headscarf—red and green—cuts sharp angles that rhythmically structure the head and shoulder.

The background suggests olive trees synthesised into flat, oblique masses, without descriptive depth, like a carpet of forms. The palette is vivid (carmine reds, anise greens, lemon yellows, softened mauves) and the paint surface remains relatively raw, with little smoothing, reinforcing the sense of construction by planes.

Comparative analysis / related works

The painting is close to contemporary research on segmented figures, particularly works from the PR2-1950-007 and PR2-1950-008 group, through the geometrisation of the body and the headscarf’s structural role.

It anticipates, through controlled fragmentation of surfaces, certain “shattered silhouettes” that would develop in 1951–1952 (PR3). Within the corpus, it marks a passage: the artist moves away from volumetric complexities still present in earlier trials (such as PR2-1950-005) toward a more radical stylisation.

Justification of dating and attribution

Segmentation—still gentle but clearly established—together with the balance between post-cubist influence and Mediterranean chromaticism, places the work around 1950.

The headscarf as a structuring motif and the facture that is not yet fully “exploded” suggest a date after the late-1940s volumetric experiments and before the more advanced developments of the early 1950s. Attribution to André Breuillaud is consistent with the PR2 corpus from this period.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Private collection.