View Across a Plain

A native of Lorraine, Bastien-Lepage grew up on a farm and specialized in scenes of rural life, which allowed him to explore the potential of a naturalist approach to figures and the landscape. This small watercolor is an informal sketch of the type of topography seen in the background of his paintings from the mid-1870s and early 1880s. While the liquid strokes of predominantly grays and browns correspond with the palette used for his canvases, watercolor allowed him to render the landscape more broadly than in his precisely detailed landscape paintings.