“Jules Bastien-Lepage was a French painter noted for his sentimental genre painting of rural life. Despite growing up during the era of Impressionism, his style of plein air painting was closer to the naturalism of the Realism art movement than the light-oriented art of Claude Monet (1840-1926). Ironically, a number of Impressionist painters - in Scotland, Holland, America and Australia - preferred to adopt his style of naturalist realist painting rather than Impressionism proper. The French realist writer Emile Zola, who described Bastien-Lepage as ‘the grandson of Courbet and of Millet’, later charactized his painting as: ‘Impressionism corrected, sweetened and adapted to suit the taste of the masses.’ ...”
2020 January: A Cultural History of the Potato as Earth Apple
