Jules Bastien-Lepage (1 November 1848 – 10 December 1884) was a French painter closely associated with the beginning of naturalism, an artistic style that grew out of the Realist movement and paved the way for the development of impressionism.

"[1] His en plein air depictions of peasant life in the countryside were highly influential on many international artists, including George Clausen in England and Tom Roberts in Australia.

After exhibiting works in the Salons of 1870 and 1872, which attracted no attention, in 1874 his Portrait of my Grandfather[5] garnered critical acclaim and received a third-class medal.

He also showed Song of Spring, an academically oriented study of rural life, representing a peasant girl sitting on a knoll above a village,[3] surrounded by wood nymphs.

His initial success was confirmed in 1875 by the First Communion, a picture of a little girl minutely worked up in manner that was compared to Hans Holbein, and a Portrait of M. Hayern.

His next attempt to win the Prix de Rome in 1876 with Priam at the Feet of Achilles was again unsuccessful (it is in the Lille gallery), and the painter determined to return to country life.

In 1881 he painted The Beggar and the Portrait of Albert Wolf; in 1882 Le Père Jacques; in 1885 Village Love, in which we find some trace of Gustave Courbet's influence.

His friend, Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch,[7] was with him at the end and wrote:[4] At last he was unable to work anymore; and he died on the 10th of December, 1884, breathing his last in my arms.

[4] The influential English critic Roger Fry credited the wider public's acceptance of the Impressionists, especially Claude Monet, to Bastien-Lepage.

In his 1920 Essay in Æsthetics, Fry wrote:[8] Monet is an artist whose chief claim to recognition lies in the fact of his astonishing power of faithfully reproducing certain aspects of nature, but his really naive innocence and sincerity was taken by the public to be the most audacious humbug, and it required the teaching of men like Bastien-Lepage, who cleverly compromised between the truth and an accepted convention of what things looked like, to bring the world gradually around to admitting truths which a single walk in the country with purely unbiassed vision would have established beyond doubt.Ukrainian-born painter Marie Bashkirtseff formed a close friendship with Bastien-Lepage.