Stanhope Forbes was born in Dublin in 1857. His father was a railway inspector and his mother, Juliette de Guise, was French. When the family moved to England Forbes was educated at Dulwich College and later at the Lambeth School of Art. He continued his art education at the Royal Academy Schools in 1876 and in 1880 went to Paris where he worked in the studio of the painter Leon Bonnat. Forbes was greatly influenced by the painter Jules Bastien-Lepage who had achieved success with his pictures of the everyday lives of agricultural workers.
Bastien-Lepage worked 'en plein air', that is he painted outdoors, directly from nature and used ordinary people as his models. Forbes wrote later about this method of working, "To paint the picture entirely and absolutely out of doors, braving all difficulties and relying in no way upon sketches or studies, with which later on, the work could be comfortably finished within the walls of a studio..."
Stanhope Forbes went to work in Cancale, Brittany from June to October 1881. Cancale was a small fishing village near St Malo. Forbes clearly wished to follow in the footsteps of Bastien-Lepage, as he later wrote, "I was wild to attack this great problem of the open-air effect myself." During this stay in Cancale he painted "A Street in Brittany". He worked in the street that is now named Rue Kitchener and had the usual problems experienced by 'plein air' painters, changing sunlight, wind, dust and over-curious children.
His principal model was a young girl from the village called Desiree. She had worked in the hotel in which he was staying but had been dismissed for stealing. Forbes wished to pay her only when the picture was completed. Desiree sensibly struck a deal and insisted on a daily payment. Forbes was forced to agree and seemed well satisfied with her work. He wrote to his mother "she grows more perfect every day and seems to be as charming as she looks". Desiree is holding an implement used for making or repairing nets, possibly making a string bag. The other women in the street are knitting. Forbes declared himself pleased with the picture but in a letter to his mother said "I fear from certain peculiarities it won't go down at all well with the British public".
He was possibly referring to the fact that the foreground figure appears out of scale to the rest of the figures in the street, or to the highly visible and distinctive brush-work. This method of working with a flat square brush was one adopted by Bastien-Lepage and was not well received by many people. The overall blue tone of the picture was also unusual and a critic writing later in The Pall Mall Gazette accused Forbes of seeing nature through blue spectacles.
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