Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage was one of many paintings that caught my eye at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While walking through the hall of 19th and early 20th century European paintings and sculptures, this painting caught my eye due to its scale, the grittiness of the painting and its realistic look. Although I saw many other paintings and sculptures at the Met, I decided to analyze Joan the Arc from the Met and Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of Horatii, which I found in the Gardner’s textbook by Fred S. Kleiner (635). Both the Joan of Arc and the Oath of Horatii exhibit the theme of the Academy vs. the avante-garde.
Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc is painted by oil on canvas and was made in 1879. The painting’s dimensions are 100 x 110 in. (www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435621). The artist, Bastien-Lepage, was a realist and naturalist style painter, and we can establish this by looking at how he tries to show the world as he sees it, or in this case how he sees the world around Joan the Arc. The realistic style of art changed the subject matter of artwork during this time, by showing peasants and the working class rather than only presenting gods, goddesses and religious subjects like the academy pushed. This movement “freed art from social convention and academic standards” which allowed artists to paint the real world and break the ‘statuesque’ of the time (Van Scoy, Week 7 lecture).
Although the painters of the realist movement avoided the painting of religious figures, like gods, goddesses, and other religious subjects, Bastien-Lepage shows holy figures in Joan the Arc. The reasoning behind this is, Joan, the woman in the painting who seems to be standing towards the front of the artwork, was a teenage girl who at the time of the Hundred Years’ War in France had a “spiritual awakening” when she claimed to have had a vision that she led the French army to victory (Joan of Arc, 1879). Due to this, the artist incorporated Christ along with a couple other heavenly figures in the top left of the painting.
I believe that the artist used oil on canvas as the medium for this painting because he wanted to give the painting a very gritty look as well as to use the colors that resemble nature, like the dark greens, dark blues, browns and a color that isn’t quite white. By doing this he also gets Joan to look like a peasant; the colors of her clothing do not resemble the silk textured and rich colored clothes that the wealthy would be shown in. When observing the painting at the Met, I realized that the brushstrokes of the artwork were smooth and steady when drawing the human and god-like figures but in the background of the garden that Joan is in, the brushstroke becomes very rough and spontaneous. I assume that Bastien-Lepage needed to use smooth and defined brushstrokes in certain areas to make the figures look accurate. The background however was not as smooth as the main figures because the background was meant to look scruffy and a bit wild, to look like nature.
Overall the painting is colored in dark gritty colors which is a characteristic of the realism style of art. God in the painting, is very easy to miss when walking past, because his body is painted very lightly while his face is defined and distinct. The colors that Bastien-Lepage use in the artwork are very neutral and I feel that these colors are used to display the natural world around Joan, because the garden had many trees and grass. Joan is dressed in neutral colored clothing to express her lack of wealth.
Since the scale of the painting is so large, I feel that I was pulled in by the nature in the background of Joan, but when looking at it in smaller scale, the eyes of Joan is what draws the viewer into the painting. Although she has dull blue eyes, she looks stunned. As if she’s having the premonition at that moment. I feel that this painting which was commissioned by them Saints of Domremy who were from Joan the Arc’s hometown, was meant to remind the people of France that it was a teenaged peasant girl, who once had a premonition from God that she would led them to victory and she succeeded (Patterson).
Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, is another painting that depicts history and war in the artwork. The artist was known for painting pieces that depict noble events in ancient history (Kleiner 635). This piece is painted by oil on canvas 129.8 in x 167.2 in. By depicting this heroic narrative