The Beggar

The Beggar, painted in 1880 and now at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, extends Bastien-Lepage's naturalist project from rural Lorraine to the subject of urban and itinerant poverty. The figure of the beggar — a social type whose presence in the landscape or on the street made visible the underside of bourgeois modernity — had a long tradition in French painting, but Bastien-Lepage approached it without sentimentality or moralizing. In 1880 he was working on multiple fronts: completing his well-known London scenes and continuing to exhibit at the Salon. The Ny Carlsberg's acquisition reflects Scandinavian interest in his work; the museum's founder Carl Jacobsen was an important collector of contemporary European art and acquired French naturalist and Impressionist paintings throughout the 1880s. The painting's directness in confronting vagrancy and social marginalization connects it to the broader social-documentary impulse that characterized advanced European painting in this period, from Courbet's stone-breakers to van Gogh's later peasant subjects.

The figure is painted with the same formal seriousness Bastien-Lepage accorded to peasant workers, refusing any distinction in painterly treatment between the laboring and the destitute. The worn textures of clothing are rendered with deliberate roughness.