Joan of Arc

France had just lost part of Lorraine to the new German Empire when Jules Bastien-Lepage painted this in 1879, and that loss is the key to it. Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who once drove the English out of France, had come from Lorraine, and so did the painter. He shows her not in armour but barefoot in her parents' garden at Domrémy, a real garden painted with plain, almost photographic care, at the instant she first hears the saints who will send her to war. Look to the left, among the trees, and their pale figures hover there. Critics at the Salon admired the girl and her rapt, listening face, but grumbled that the ghostly saints did not belong in so down-to-earth a scene.