Joan of Arc - Visions of Saints in the Garden

At the age of thirteen, while in her parents' garden, Joan of Arc began to see visions of saints. Then she began to hear their voices - urging her to help the Dauphin of France become King Charles VII. This painting, by Jules Bastien-Lepage, recreates the moment when Joan first saw her visions.

The painting - entitled Joan of Arc - is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. The Met's web site provides more information about the large (100 x 110 inches - 254 x 279.4 cm) oil on canvas (which Bastien-Lepage created in 1879):

With the loss of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), the national heroine from Lorraine, Joan of Arc, acquired new symbolic importance among the French. A succession of sculpted and painted images of the medieval teenaged martyr appeared in the Salons of the 1870s and 1880s. At the 1880 Salon, Bastien-Lepage, himself a native of Lorraine, exhibited this painting, which represents the moment of Joan of Arc's divine revelation in her parents' garden. His depiction of the saints whose voices she heard elicited a mixed reaction from Salon critics, many of whom found the presence of the saints at odds with the naturalism of the artist's style.

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