L'Amour au village

Jules Bastien-Lepage grew up among farmers in Damvillers, a village in the Meuse, and he built his reputation painting country people plainly, without prettifying them. Here a young labourer leans on a wooden fence talking to a girl on the other side, and Bastien-Lepage turns her almost entirely away, her face hidden, so the whole small drama of the courtship rests on posture and hesitation. He painted it in 1882. It was among the last things he did. He fell ill and died in 1884, only 36 years old, and the following year the Russian collector Sergei Tretyakov bought the picture at the sale of his estate in Paris. It has hung in Moscow ever since.