Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc, painted in 1879 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is Bastien-Lepage's most celebrated and historically significant work. The painting depicts the teenage Joan in the garden of her family home at Domrémy, receiving her divine visions — the ghostly figures of Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret are visible in the upper left background. The subject carried intense political resonance in the aftermath of France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the fall of the Paris Commune: Joan, a Lorrainer who drove out the English, was a potent symbol of national regeneration for a France still traumatized by military humiliation and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine — Bastien-Lepage's own home region. The painting was a sensation at the 1880 Salon and transformed his reputation. Its radical technique — combining his naturalist plein-air figure painting with the visionary supernatural elements treated as real phenomena — was entirely novel. The Metropolitan's acquisition made it one of the most important French paintings of its period in any American collection.

Bastien-Lepage juxtaposes two entirely different pictorial registers: the figure of Joan rendered with painstaking naturalist observation, and the vision behind her treated with a vaporous, almost watercolor-like translucency. The garden vegetation in the foreground is painted with botanical specificity characteristic of his outdoor work.