After the Storm

Jules Bastien-Lepage was the leading figure of French Naturalism, a painter of peasant life and rural landscape who grew up in the village of Damvillers in northeastern France. Zola called his work "impressionism corrected." He fought in the Franco-Prussian War, studied under Cabanel at the École des Beaux-Arts, and was recognized as the head of a new school of painting by the time he was thirty. His most famous work, Joan of Arc, is at the Met. He died of cancer in 1884 at thirty-six. After the Storm is a landscape — a single bare tree stands at center against a sky of breaking clouds, with patches of blue pushing through heavy gray and violet. The lower third is scrubby autumn brush in ochres and browns, lit with warm gold where the post-storm light is hitting. What looks like a faint rainbow is visible at the far right. The signature is in the lower left corner.