
Thomas Seaman
Specialist, Head of Sale
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Provenance
Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Vente Bastien-Lepage, 11 - 12 May 1885, lot 85, as Pendant les vendanges; esquisse (Damvillers).
Private collection, Switzerland.
Exhibited
Paris, Hôtel de Chimay, École Nationale des Beaux Arts, Jules Bastien-Lepage, no 108, as Pendant les vendanges; esquisse (Damvillers).
Literature
Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1848-1884, Catalogue raisonné de l'Oeuvre, 1985, p. 183, no. 271 as Pendant les vendanges (Damvillers).
Following his early encounters with British art Bastien-Lepage hoped to introduce sentiment into his work. Coy peasant lovers would eventually emerge in l'Amour au Village 1883 (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), his last important Salon painting, however the theme may have originated here in a small sketch of grape-pickers in a vineyard close to his home village of Damvillers (Meuse). It did not however survive into the finished work, Au temps des vendanges 1880 (Private Collection, Aubrun no 270), a picture which shows a single foreground figure walking towards the spectator, a basket slung over her left arm and her head thrown back to answer the call of distant companions (see Jules Bastien-Lepage. 1848-1884, 2007, exhibition catalogue, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, p. 131). The same hilltop contour appears in both works.
We are grateful to Mr. Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.