CAMPIÑA || Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat





Jules Bastien-Lepage (French naturalist painter) 1848 - 1884
Landscape with a Village, Environs of Damvillers, ca. 1882-83
oil on canvas
27 1/2 x 35 3/4 in. (69.85 x 90.81 cm.)
signed lower left: Jules Bastien-Lepage
private collection

Catalogue Notes
From the mid-1870s, Bastien-Lepage focused his subjects on life in his native Damvillers in the Meuse region of north-eastern France. In works such as Les Foins (1880, Musée d’Orsay), Saison d’octobre, récolte des pommes de terre (1879, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), Pas mèche (1882, National Gallery of Scotland), and L’Amour au village (1883, Pushkin Museum, Moscow), the distinct landscape of the Meuse plays a significant role in the regionalist character of Bastien-Lepage’s work. The rolling hills, broad patches of open fields, and red-roofed structures appear in numerous works, giving his peasant subjects a distinct and identifiable setting.

In addition to making the specificity of locale a running theme in his work, Bastien-Lepage’s working methods, which explored the visual qualities of light and atmosphere, further heightened the reality and modernity of his paintings. In the present work, the gardens in the foreground depicted in broad slashes of varying greens and earth tones. Changes in the play of light and shadow on the various crops, or on dry earth or open grass are depicted, while the precise visual interpretation of the landscape plays a secondary role. Atmosphere also gains a significance, as it blurs the range of color and strong light in the distant hills and village. This focus on the visual qualities and effects of light reveals a modern approach to painting that should not be underestimated.

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At the time of his death at the young age of 36 in 1884, Bastien-Lepage was avidly collected in Europe and America, and exerted tremendous influence on an international group of followers from France, Germany, England, America and beyond, who took up his Naturalist approach to painting and made it one of the dominant movements at the Paris Salons of the 1880s and 1890s. A few distinct qualities typified the Naturalist approach that Bastien-Lepage developed and spearheaded: a direct and non-sentimental approach to genre subjects drawn from Naturalist authors such as Zola, combined with the interest in natural light and modern painting techniques adopted from the Impressionists. In a departure from traditional methods of painting, Bastien-Lepage employed plein-air painting, photography, and the use of outdoor, glass studios to achieve a heightened sense of reality, of psychology, and of light and atmosphere in his paintings.