Roasting Chestnuts

Edouard Frère 1819 - 1886

Summary

Two small children are roasting chestnuts, absorbed in their activity. The girl tends the nuts with a poker, while her brother sits on a low stool, concentrating hard on peeling them. The pale cream walls pick up green shadows in this tranquil domestic interior, but the children's hair and clothing, the presence of wood, the reflected glow of the coals and the husks on the floor provide contrasting warm tones of chestnut brown and orange. The paint application is dry with much texture, especially in the background. Pierre Edouard Frère, the younger brother of the orientalist genre painter, Théodore Frère (1814-88), was a pupil of Paul Delaroche (1797-1856) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He became a successful Salon genre painter, receiving a third class medal in 1851, a second class medal in 1852 and a third class medal at the Universal Exposition of 1855. His paintings of families, women and children going about their daily lives in rural France were sentimental, but never mawkish.