Saint Francis of Assisi

In 1894 a Protestant pastor named Paul Sabatier published a life of Saint Francis in Paris. It sold enormously, ran through dozens of editions in his lifetime, and turned a 13th-century friar into someone secular, anticlerical France was glad to read about. Martin painted his Francis that same year.

Nothing miraculous happens in it. Francis stands in a coarse brown habit, the hood pulled over his head, a thin halo above it, praying under a wide pale sky. The paint is laid on in small separate touches taken from the Neo-Impressionists and put to work on religious subjects that most of Martin's Paris colleagues had dropped.

Six years later he bought a house at Labastide-du-Vert, west of Cahors, and painted that valley for the rest of his life.