Rural Love (1883)

Jules Bastien-Lepage: Rural Love

Jules Bastien-Lepage (1882)

 Jules Bastien-Lepage: The Little Bootblack in London

  

 Jules Bastien-Lepage: The Little Peddler Sleeping

  

 Jules Bastien-Lepage: The Thames, London

  

Jules Bastien-Lepage: The Village Lovers

The Floral Path (1882)

 Jules Bastien-Lepage: The Floral Path (The Little Shepherdess)

The wild flowers which had died back during the winter months are in bloom in Bastien-Lepage’s painting of a young shepherdess, Fleur du Chemin. The abundant white heads of Queen Anne’s Lace, a rogue among the crops, dominates the more delicate ox-eye daisies, poppies and other flowers that blossom at the edges of the large rolling fields of north-eastern France. Being a terrain close to the artist’s home village of Damvillers, they were completely familiar. The girl who passes the viewer, in addition to her staff, carries a bunch of what appear to be golden ragwort, common in these regions. Her flock is unseen and, unlike the iconic shepherdesses of Jean-François Millet, overtones of rustic piety are missing. Indeed, where Millet’s grande bergère is clothed and cloaked against the windswept plain of Chailly, Lepage’s is dressed in a well-worn coat, striped skirt and long black shoes that are evidently too big for her. Framed by thick golden curls, her gaze is nevertheless compelling. The painter would have us believe that she is a wayside flower, blooming unkempt, on the hillsides of the Meuse. [Sotheby’s]

Nothing Doing (1882)

Jules Bastien-Lepage: Nothing Doing

A young boy looks directly out of the painting clad in raggedy clothes and large unlaced boots. His relaxed air fits the title which is an abbreviation of the French slang: 'Il n'y a pas meche' meaning 'There's nothing doing'. The whip he holds and the horn slung on his back suggest that he was a barge boy who would have controlled the horses pulling the barge and alerted the lockmasters of its imminent arrival. The painting was made for the London art dealers Arthur Tooth and Sons and was included in the artist's memorial exhibition held in Paris in 1885. [National Galleries Scotland]

Le Pere Jacques (1882)

Jules Bastien-Lepage: Le Pere Jacques (The Woodgatherer)

The Woodgatherer, painted for the Salon of 1882, is one of Jules Bastien-Lepage's most important works. The old woodsman, a family friend, and his granddaughter represent the heavy weariness of old age and the innocence of youth, as well as the passage of time. The remarkable color and handling of paint reflect the artist's unique ability to blend the greater luminosity and atmosphere of the Impressionists with the more conservative, precisionist technique of the Academicians. By the early 1880s, Bastien-Lepage had become the leader of the Naturalist school, and many of his contemporaries believed that he would one day succeed Manet as the leader of modern painting. [Milwaukee Art Museum]

Flower Seller in London (1882)

Jules Bastien-Lepage: Flower Seller in London

In a photograph of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s studio on rue Legendre in the 17th arrondissement in Paris, produced after his death in 1884, several of the artist’s works remain on display, including La Chanson du printemps (circa 1873), a portrait of his brother Émile Bastien-Lepage (1879); Fleur du chemin or La Petite bergère (1882) and the Portrait of Mme Juliette Drouet (1883) and the present work, Marchande de fleurs à Londres. Painted in 1882, the fact that the painting was found in the artist’s studio after his death clearly establishes its pedigree and its significance for the artist.

What is unusual about this Marchande de fleurs is that she is not French but English, and one of only two working-class subjects that Bastien-Lepage completed in London, the other being Le petit cireur de bottes (1882). Bastien-Lepage first visited London in 1879 when two of his portraits were included in the Royal Academy exhibition of that year. He used this opportunity to find prospective clients for portraits, returning to paint a portrait of the Prince of Wales (Portrait du Prince de Galles, 1879), and again, for the last time, in 1882.

Marchande de fleurs and Le petit cireur de bottes were painted in the studio of Dorothy Tennant (later known as Lady Stanley after her marriage to the explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, in 1890) herself an artist who had been very impressed by the young Bastien-Lepage as he made his impact on the London art scene. She recalled her impressions of the artist and of his two English subjects in an article published in 1897 in the London Art Journal, noting that the artist was so interested in the city “We undertook… to show him London – not the sights… but… those bits of London most characteristic or more picturesque.” (Stanley, p. 53) After painting the shoeblack in Le petit cireur de bottes, Bastien-Lepage decided, together with Tennant, that a flower girl would be an appropriate English subject. His model was found near Charing Cross and according to Tennant was “a tall, graceful girl, with sloping shoulders, wrapped in a thin weather-stained shawl, her hair tangled over the eyes, and drawn back in a knot at the back” (Stanley, p. 53). Tennant reproached him for not putting enough sentiment into the picture, to which he responded “I don’t put literature into the painting, like you English; I am satisfied to represent nature just as I see her” (Stanley, p. 56).  While the flower girl is situated confrontationally in the foreground, as if ready to speak to an approaching client, Bastien-Lepage added well-dressed figures farther away in the upper left, visually establishing the stratification of the social classes.

Many nineteenth century art critics, and their twentieth century followers, have tried to find correspondences between Bastien-Lepage’s style or manner of painting and his peers. Émile Zola described him as “le petit-fils de Courbet et de Millet." His flower girl in the present work has been compared with Édouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-82), exhibited at the Salon of 1882, and the tilt of the sitters' heads, black chokers and indifferent yet enticing expressions certainly align. While Manet is mainly concerned with rendering the psychological state of his sitter, Bastien-Lepage is more interested in conveying the narrative of his scene and its implications for the principal character. [Sotheby’s]

Jules Bastien-Lepage (1880)

 Jules Bastien-Lepage: At Harvest Time

  

 Jules Bastien-Lepage: The Beggar

  

Jules Bastien-Lepage: The Ripened Wheat

October, Gathering Potatoes (1879)

Jules Bastien-Lepage: October, Gathering Potatoes

Joan of Arc (1879)

Jules Bastien-Lepage: Joan of Arc

With the loss of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), the national heroine from Lorraine, Joan of Arc, acquired new symbolic importance among the French. A succession of sculpted and painted images of the medieval teenaged martyr appeared in the Salons of the 1870s and 1880s. At the 1880 Salon, Bastien-Lepage, himself a native of Lorraine, exhibited this painting, which represents the moment of Joan of Arc's divine revelation in her parents' garden. His depiction of the saints whose voices she heard elicited a mixed reaction from Salon critics, many of whom found the presence of the saints at odds with the naturalism of the artist's style. [Metropolitan Museum of Art]

October (1878)

Jules Bastien-Lepage: October

Many artists developed a particular interest in rural life and themes, including subjects that highlighted regional customs and industries that were slowly disappearing. In his work, Bastien-Lepage blended a contemporary approach to painting such as October, 1878 (everyday subject matter and landscapes painted en plein air in an Impressionist style) with aspects of traditional academic art practice (figures painted with clear, firm outline and strongly modeled form). This blending of styles treated everyday subject matter, such as the work of the potato harvesters in October, with the dignity and nobility traditionally reserved for “serious” history painting. [All Things Victorian]

Haymaking (1877)

Jules Bastien-Lepage: Haymaking

Dubbed the "grandson of Millet and Courbet" by Zola, Jules Bastien-Lepage specialised in agricultural scenes which were a far remove from the affected pastoral scenes that cluttered the Salon. Zola was excited by Hay Making, seeing it as the masterpiece of naturalism in painting.

Indeed it is a far cry from Millet's Rest. The artist has powerfully captured the epic of the French countryside and depicted the peasants in their simplicity and despondency: the young woman sitting in the foreground is haggard with weariness. The scene is inspired by a poem:

"The reaper stretched out on his bed of fresh grass
Sleeps with clenched fists while
The tedder, faint and fuddled, tanned by the sun,
Sits vacantly dreaming beside him […]. "

The painting clearly exceeds the scope of this mild text and was indeed very popular at the 1878 Salon. The composition is daringly photographic: the horizon is unusually high, allowing the hay "like a very pale yellow cloth shot with silver" to fill the main part of the canvas. The effects of accelerated perspective, the light palette, and close framing of the figures are signs of modernity within the naturalist approach. [Musée d’Orsay]

La Communiante (1875)

Jules Bastien-Lepage: La Communiante

The young communicant is sitting in perfect frontal, facing the viewer. She fixes him with an amazingly expressionless gaze. Her eyes and hair are the only dark details of the canvas. Her skin (face, wrists and arms in the light gauze) is the only colorful appearance. All the rest is bathed in shades of white and gray, as her long communion dress that stands out from the wall with consummate monochrome technique. She joined her gloved hands in her lap. Because of severe frontal of the subject and the complete lack of decor, the regard of the viewer is led back to himself. He can not escape the disturbing presence. And, in contrast to the fixed, the girl, his gaze passes from her hands in a back-and-forth incessant following of the curve of her arm. For details of the hands is not innocent. Jules Bastien-Lepage did not painted them in such a precise way by chance. He wants the viewer to always return to them. We immediately see that the fingers are not crossed. Instead they slightly brush against each other, the tips of the thumb and forefinger of her left hand against the thumb and forefinger of the right hand. Furthermore we note that below, her knees are politely pressed against each other. Is she trying to fold the hands or, conversely, to uncross them, or she looks for a capacity constrained and knows what to do with his hands? Still, the space created between the fingers is an invitation to look much as it is a ban. An invitation is also a ban? But to what? Do not play the frightened innocent. It is an invitation/ban which now makes her a woman and wants to hide as much as show. [histoire de l’art]