Emma Herland was born in Cherbourg in 1855 to a large bourgeois family. The family moved to Brittany as a result of her father's job as a pharmacist in the Navy. Herland's parents encouraged her desire to pursue a career as an artist, having already shown great talent in her early portraits of her sister, Louise. She began her formal training under Alexandre Fischer, and later under Benjamin-Constant and Jules Lefebvre, developing a classically academic style of painting. In 1885, Herland moved to Concarneau, a place which was to be a great source of inspiration for her work. The slow-paced seaside town was the ideal setting for Herland to capture the happy simplicity of Breton family life, with the majority of her works depicting femal...