Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage

This monumental work represents a pinnacle of naturalist art applied to national historical and spiritual figures. The visionary painter Jules Bastien-Lepage renews the iconography of a famous heroine through the superb pictorial composition entitled “Joan of Arc”. The treatment combines a scrupulous realism of rural settings with the subtle evocation of an extraordinary mystical dimension. The artist succeeds in humanizing the myth by anchoring it in her native land.

A young peasant girl with tied brown hair stands in a vegetable garden, leaning against the trunk of an apple tree. Dressed in a gray corset laced over a white shirt and a long coarse brown skirt, her body is frozen and her left arm is extended forward. Her face raised toward the sky expresses a deep spiritual trance, her wide-open eyes filled with an invisible vision. On the left, in an ethereal and transparent atmosphere, appear the spectral silhouettes of three saints in armor and light robes floating near a stone house. The ground is strewn with tall grass and thistles in greenish and bluish shades.

The exceptional know-how is revealed in the perfect coexistence between the meticulous rendering of nature and the vaporous appearance of divine apparitions. The richness of the textures of the vegetation and the precision of the expressions testify to an oil technique pushed to perfection.