It was in a room on the ground floor, with windows looking to the south, that the painter of Les Foins (Hay) and of Jeanne d’Arc first saw the light. The family consisted of the father, a sensible, industrious, methodical man; of the mother, a woman of the truest heart and untiring devotion; and of the Grandfather Lepage, formerly a collector of taxes, who now found a home with his children. They lived in common on the modest produce of the fields, which the Bastiens themselves cultivated, and on the grandfather’s small pension.
At five years old Jules began to show an aptitude for drawing, and his father was eager to cultivate this dawning talent. He himself had a taste for the imitative arts, employing his leisure in light work that required a certain manual skill, and to this he brought the scrupulous exactness and conscientious attention which were his ruling qualities.
From this time, in the winter evenings, he required that Jules should draw with pencil on paper the various articles in use upon the table—the lamp, the jug, the inkstand, etc. It was to this first education of the eye and of the hand that Bastien-Lepage owed that love of sincerity, that patient seeking for exactness of detail, which were the ruling motives of his life as an artist.
In thus urging him to draw every day, the father had no idea of making his son a painter. At that time, especially at Damvillers, painting was not looked upon as a serious profession. The dream that he cherished, along with the grandfather, was to put Jules in a position to choose later on one of the administrative careers, such as overseer of forests, or bridges, or high-ways, which are always easiest of access to those who have been well trained in drawing. So, as soon as he should be eleven years old, he was to leave the communal school, and go to the College.
This involved great sacrifice, for the resources of the family were low, and in the interval a second boy was born; but they redoubled their economy, and in 1859 they managed to send Jules to the College of Verdun.
It was at the drawing class that he worked with the greatest zeal. The correctness of his eye and the dexterity of his hand astonished his master.
When the boy went back to Damvillers for the holidays he drew everywhere; upon his books, upon the walls, upon the doors, and long afterwards traces of these rough outlines might be seen on the orchard palings. His mother carefully preserved books full of pencil sketches of the little brother Emile in all sorts of poses.
His habit was to express any thought that possessed him by a drawing. He already attempted to reproduce with his pencil, passages that struck him in reading, and his first composition was Abraham’s Sacrifice. Classical stories made more impression on his mind at this time than the rustic scenes which met him everywhere in his wanderings in the open air.
At this age, the surroundings in which we live, and which custom renders familiar to us, excite neither our surprise nor our imagination, but they enter our eyes and our memory, and, without our knowing it, become deeply engraven there. It is only in later years that, by comparison and reflection, we feel their powerful charm and their original grace.
In his walks across the fields, Bastien-Lepage received impressions of country life, and assimilated them like daily food. Gatherers of faggots carrying their bundles of wood; fishers for frogs wet to the knees, crossing the meadows with their fishing tackle on their shoulders; washerwomen wringing out their linen by the banks of the Tinte; loungers sitting under a willow tree, while the lunch of cheese is carried to the workers; the village gardens in April at the time of the spring digging, when the leafless trees spread their shadows over borders adorned only by the precocious blossoms of the primrose and the crown imperial; potato fields, where fires of dried stems send up their blue smoke into the red October evening—all these details of village life entered the eyes of the child, who instinctively stored them up in his memory.