Lepère. L’Enfant Prodigue
Size of the original etching, 9½ × 12⅝ inches
Classic Lepère can be, however, with a curiously vital appreciation of what the living classic must have been. He has an etching of a swineherd entering the yard in which the beasts are penned. They move, grunting, toward him. Outside is a cluster of great trees with bushy foliage. The light is clear and warm. The folds of the swineherd’s mantle and his gesture are Greek. His figure might have passed across the Athenian stage, one fancies, at the time of Sophoclean drama. And the landscape has the deep repose immortalized in classic verse—such songs as in his extreme old age Sophocles made to do honor to his native village:
Our home, Colonus, gleaming fair and white:
The nightingale still haunteth all our woods,
Green with the flush of spring;
And sweet, melodious floods
Of softest song through grove and thicket ring.
Lepère is not often found in this mood, however, and the swineherd plate cannot be considered wholly characteristic of his temper of mind. It seems to have been one of those rare happenings when the mind is lifted above its habitual plane, occasion serves, and the trained hand obediently records a moment of peculiar exaltation. He is perhaps most of all his daily self in the little plate called Le Moulin des Chapelles. Here he shows us the machinery of the mill and the round white column of the structure as others have done, but he also shows us what others seldom do—the use of the mill. A patient horse is standing near, a man is shifting the bags of flour to his back. It is not a mere accident of landscape; it has a social and utilitarian function; it is connected with human life.