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Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-84). He deserves a
modern biography, and finally one has been
published. Sources nearly all agree that he was
highly influential to important non-Academics and
non-Impressionists.

The man who, in 1879, Zola considered as "the
grandson of Courbet and of Millet" and as one of the
leading lights of naturalism, received an academic
training in Alexander Cabanel's studio.

He succeeded in looking at things from the side of the realists, his elders,
as well as that of his contemporaries, the defenders of the new painting
from which he took the light tones and the vibrant touch.

Bastien-Lepage devoted his short life to two types of subject: firstly to

portraits, for which he had a loyal clientele among performers – from Sarah
Bernhardt to Coquelin the and secondly, to rural subjects, often painted
in the places of his childhood. He captivated the public at the Salon with
The Hayfield (1877, Musée d'Orsay), Season of October (1878, Melbourne
National Gallery of Victoria), with Père Jacques (1881, Milwaukee Art
Center) and with Rural love (1882, Moscow, Pushkin Museum).

Once he became successful, the artist travelled, particularly to England,
Switzerland and Italy, and brought back not only landscapes but also
paintings halfway between portraits and genre paintings, in which he
sketched the rural and urban lives of children and adolescents, the heroes
of his Petit colporteur endormi (1882, Tournai, musée des Beaux Arts) or
his The London Bootblack (1882, Musée des Arts Décoratifs).

Bastien-Lepage's influenced the Glasgow Boys (link to book Pioneering
Painters), a group of non-establishment painters whose main work
appeared in the period 1875-95. Other artists including Joaquin Sorolla
(link to Joaquin Sorolla by blanca 129.00 ) and Anders Zorn, (link to
Zorn Masterpieces) were similarly influenced.

Artists were by was the muted colour range that these painters used,
again having an affinity with Whistler, and their choice of simple domestic
subjects rather than historical or anecdotal genre. What was also common
to both French and Dutch painters was a tendency to place their figures on
the frontal plane of the canvas, making them dominate the composition and
causing them often to be silhouetted against a receding landscape or a low
horizon. Nowhere was this particular device to be used so effectively as in
the work of a young French painter called Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Where Millet was concerned with the general, a synthesis of rural life,
Bastien-Lepage applied himself to the particular. Millet's paintings reflected
the life of rural France but Bastien-Lepage chose one particular task,
performed by one particular person at a specific moment and recreated it
on his canvas.

His models stand on the frame of his paintings, almost ready to walk out
of them. They are placed against a landscape background which Bastien-
Lepage painted from a standing position as he believed it to be crucial
in our understanding of the relationship of figures to their surroundings.
His grasp of aerial perspective was much criticized but he defended it
vehemently....

In many of his paintings the figure defines the size of the canvas by filling it
completely; in a similar way the landscape around the figure is defined by

the size of the brushstrokes used to depict it. Detailed marks are used to
render the foreground grasses or stones; broader, square brushes model
the middle distance; and a series of softer, less definite strokes indicate the
far distance. Perspective, therefore, is indicated by a change of handling
rather than by any pictorial indication of recession. The central figure of
these paintings ... cuts across all these changes in brushstroke and they
are therefore emphasized by a vertical reference point to the foreground
which can be charted by the handling of the figure. Other similar reference
points are often introduced by the use of vertical features having their
origin at the bottom of the picture, and therefore the frontal plane of the
composition. Such features included trees and tall grasses....