Collection: Jules Bastien-Lepage

Jules Bastien-Lepage was an important French painter born on 1 November 1848 in Damvillers, Meuse. He died on 10 December 1884 in Paris. He was a prominent representative of naturalism in the art of painting and was a bridge builder between Jean-François Millet's folk and evocative genre pictures and the earlier plein air painting.

He distinguished himself from the Impressionists because of his almost playful rendering of detail, and he drew inspiration for his subjects from his home in Lorraine. Bastien-Lepage became famous for depicting everyday folk life in works such as Oktoberdag, Høying, Le Père Jacques and Village love. One of his most famous works is Joan of Arc, in which the young peasant girl and her clothes are rendered as minutely as the vegetables in the small garden. In his realistic painting, the whole could often suffer because of the focus on the details. Bastien-Lepage played a role for the Scandinavian artists of the 1870s, especially for the Norwegian colony in Munich in their search for realism. Among his students was Asta Nørregaard.