Veduta del villaggio

Bazille painted this in the summer of 1868 at his family's estate near Montpellier, in the south of France, years before Impressionism had a name. He was after something his friends Monet and Renoir were also chasing: a real figure, painted outdoors, sitting naturally in a real landscape. A young woman in a white dress with fine pink stripes sits on a ledge, and behind her the sunlit village of Castelnau-le-Lez spreads out under a bright southern sky. Bazille frames her with dark trees so the eye slides past to the glowing distance. Berthe Morisot, a painter herself, saw it the next year and wrote that he had finally managed what they had all been trying for. Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War at 28, two years after this. It hangs in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier.