Geoffrey de Hagemann: girls chatting by the village gates Barbizon

Godefroy de Hagemann (1820-1877) was a member of the Hanover dynasty, of German Princes. His full name was Godefroy Auguste Christian Volfgann baron de Hagemann, or Godefroy de Hagemann de Hannovre.
He was born in Naples in 1820, but moved to Paris, where he studied art, as a young man. The Neapolitan artist Giuseppe Palizzi, his friend and mentor, took young Godefroy to Bourron Marlotte a pittoresque village near Paris that was loved by artists. Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne would regularly come to paint there. It is also not far from Gretz sur Loing and  from Barbizon, where painters whose key interest was landscape and the depiction of country life had created a created an artist's colony. Spearhead figures of the Barbizon movement were notably Jean Francois Millet and Theodore Rousseau. 
In Bourron Marlotte, Palizzi introduced Godefroy de Hagemann to plein air painting. Although de Hagemann would travel widely, to Italy, the Lebanon and Egypt, he would remain a lifelong inhabitant of Bourron Marlotte, delighting in painting the village, and its surrounding woods and pastures. It is in Bourron Marlotte that the lovely, fragrant and fresh scene presented here was painted. 
Godefroy de Hagemann exhibited in Nantes in 1861, and at the Salon in Paris from 1867. He continued to exhibit his works in Paris until 1872. 
Works by the artist can be found in. the Musées d'art et d'histoire in Geneva, the Musée Boudin in Honfleur, as well as in Museums in Chartres, Paris, Dijon and Nantes.
Our painting is signed at the lower right. The size of thr canvas is 41 x 55 cm