Walter F. Osborne

Study from Nature

This painting also shows traces of Bastien-Lepage's "square-brush" method, painted across forms to give them greater breadth. 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.