Walter F. Osborne

At the Breakfast

Both of these early, undated paintings show traces of Bastien-Lepage's "square-brush" method, painted across forms to give them greater breadth. Seated Boy and the Sea was probably created in a small coastal town in northeast England, where Osborne settled in 1884.

In this canvas, the artist experiments with the effects of contre jour lighting, which renders faces in deep shadow against strong sunlight. Study from Nature, painted either in Brittany or England, in a similar period, depicts a woman leisurely working in her cottage garden. The painting's limited range of subtle color - the distinctive blue-green of the cabbages and the pale light of the autumnal scene - typifiies plein-air works. Like other followers of Bastien-Lepage, Osborne often painted autumnal scenes of the harvest: turnip and fruit picking, hoeing and plowing. But here the female protagonist relates his work to the history of another art form as well: the small cottage garden, tended by women in France, England and Ireland.