There are certain beings who bear the stamp of the divine seal and are preordained to receive the highest favours within the gift of glory; they are fated to pass through life like those brilliant meteors which are seen to flash across the heavens and disappear in the same instant. Bastien-Lepage was one of these meteors. But while the others leave behind them only a luminous trail[Pg 12] that swiftly vanishes, this rare artist, snatched so prematurely from the field of art, traced his passage in a furrow of dazzling splendour, the radiance of which has not even yet begun to fade.

Bastien-Lepage was a painter in the noblest acceptation of the term; it may even be asserted that he would have exercised considerable influence upon the art of his epoch if Destiny had not stupidly mown down the sturdy flower of his genius in the very hour of its brightest blossoming. Born into this world with a solid tenacity of purpose which seems to be a special gift of the soil of Lorraine to her sons and daughters, he had a clear-cut and unalterable conception of what painting should be. His mind was receptive only of simple ideas, his eye perceived only visions that were tangible, such as were unobscured by any shadow or any artifice. He was the apostle of clearness, both in conception and in execution. Every time that he tried experimentally to turn aside from his chosen path, he[Pg 15] ceased to be himself, he fell below his own standards. What interested him most of all, in the life of this world which he observed so eagerly, as though he had a presentiment of his early end, was nature\'s most precise and most uncompromising manifestation, both in line and in relief; namely, the peasant and the environment which frames him. Having deliberately chosen such models, Bastien-Lep............