Resumen de The motionless look of a painting: Jules Bastien-Lepage, "Les Foins", and the end of realism
Although a popular success when Jules Bastien-Lepage first showed it at the Paris Salon of 1878, "Les Foins (Haymaking)" immediately prompted a critical skirmish over the legacy and meaning of realism. At the centre of the debate was the painter's troubling representation of an immobile, exhausted haymarker, 'absorbed by some vague thought', as one critic put it. Underlying the critical division, this essay argues, was the painting's problematic attempt to make an enduring and temporally extended picture -a picture consistent with the mid-century realism of Gustave Coubert and Jean-François Millet- out of the historically shifting dynamics of rural wage labour in early Third Republic France. In doing so, Bastien-Lepage brought one line of realist painting to a close and in turn opened a new tradition of artistic naturalism.
