Retour des Champs (Return from the Fields)

A painter-etcher who was deeply interested in a naturalistic approach to painting and graphic work, Bastien-Lepage frequently depicted scenes of everyday life in the countryside. He was intimately familiar with such scenes, as he grew up on a farm. In addition to creating naturalistic portraits, the artist recorded rural peasants toiling in the fields in the tradition of Realists Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet. This etching is typical of his favored subject matter, showing a solitary heroic peasant, hand-on-hip with a wooden rake resting on her shoulder following a day's hard labor.