Petit Cireur de bottes à Londres

Petit Cireur de bottes à Londres (Little Boot-Black in London), painted in 1882 and now at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, belongs to Bastien-Lepage's series of London street children — a category that also includes Pas Mèche and the Flower Seller. The boot-black was a quintessential figure of Victorian London street poverty: young boys who cleaned shoes for a few pennies, immortalized in Dickens and in the social photography of John Thomson and others. Bastien-Lepage brought his French naturalist rigour to this British subject, rendering the child with the same monumental seriousness he gave to French peasant laborers. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs acquisition — a decorative arts museum rather than a fine arts museum — reflects how widely Bastien-Lepage's work circulated through different institutional collections. The series of London poor children collectively made a strong social statement about urban poverty in the Victorian metropolis, drawing comparisons with the rural poverty he documented in Lorraine.

The small figure of the street child is rendered with concentrated observation, Bastien-Lepage's technique finding the monumental in the diminutive. The London street context is suggested with economical atmospheric strokes, focusing attention on the child's face and working posture.