All Souls’ Day Jules Bastien-Lepage

Jules Bastien-Lepage was one of the most successful French painters of the 1870s and 1880s. The Europe-wide popularity of the artist, who died at just thirty-six years of age, was largely due to his extraordinary ability to combine the precise, objective approach of naturalism with the light colours of plein air painting.
This small work was certainly a sketch for a larger-scale composition that was never realised. Despite the delicate execution and limpid colours, the painting conveys a profound and sombre message about grief and the inevitability of death: the old man, with his stiff gait and slightly bowed posture, is on his way to the cemetery with the two children, to visit the graves of their loved ones and pay their respects. Although not explicit, the composition suggests that the children are taking their yellow wreaths to lay on their parents’ grave. The factory chimneys rising in the distance are a reference to relentless modernisation, suggesting that time alters not only human beings but also their environment. The painting was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts from the collection of Baron Adolf Kohner, one of the most important private collectors in Hungary in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Anna Zsófia Kovács