Landscape on the Banks of the Lez

An open stretch of grass, irregular trees and a large blue sky give Landscape on the Banks of the Lez its breadth. The river named in the title barely announces itself. Instead, the eye follows long shadows across the clearing, passes between slender trunks and reaches the low hills beyond. Painted in 1870 and now in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the canvas gives the southern French countryside the breadth of a major composition. Its calm depends on a carefully built arrangement of land, foliage and light. ^[1]

There are no visible human figures. Yet the picture is neither lifeless nor untouched: a small dog rests at the lower right, and rough masonry interrupts the stony channel nearby. These modest details complicate the first impression of an empty pastoral setting. The painting belongs to Bazille’s final summer, but neither its precise state of completion nor its position as his supposed last work can be settled simply by looking at its peaceful surface. ^[2]

A large landscape near Montpellier

The Minneapolis painting is an oil on canvas, accession number 69.23, which the museum calls Landscape by the Lez River. Its sight measurements are approximately 137.2 × 200.7 centimetres: more than two metres across. Michel Schulman’s catalogue raisonné identifies it as MSb-68. This is the broad, tree-framed landscape distinguished by its open clearing and small dog at the lower right. ^{[1] [2]}

The landscape belongs to the country around Montpellier, to which Bazille repeatedly returned from Paris. Méric, his family’s estate, gave him access to a setting that could accommodate portraits, groups, outdoor nudes and landscape painting. The Musée Fabre’s account of his last summer places the Lez canvas beside Ruth and Boaz, showing how widely his ambitions still ranged in 1870. A contemporary landscape and a biblical subject were both live possibilities for him. ^[3]

That setting should not be reduced to an attractive background to his biography. Here the terrain occupies the whole picture. No large sitter gives the foreground an immediate human scale, and no incident dictates where to look first. The width allows the eye to travel sideways before moving into depth. The trees establish intervals, the hills close the distance and the clouds keep the upper half active. The result asks for sustained attention to a place rather than recognition of a person.

How light holds the composition together

The opening is framed unevenly. A dense mass of foliage presses against the left edge, while a more extensive group of trees occupies the centre and right. Some trunks stand almost upright; others bend or divide. Above the right-hand group, a sparsely leafed branch reaches into the sky. These differences prevent the trees from becoming a repeated decorative border. Each changes the shape of the patch of sky beside it.

The central clearing remains open enough for the ground to be read as a continuous surface. Broad, pale areas alternate with long darker bands. Bazille gives the viewer several partial routes into the scene: along the sunlit grass, through a gap between trunks, and beside the exposed earth on the right. The shadows make the uneven land legible without turning it into a diagram.

The sky contributes more than an impression of fine weather. Broad cream-coloured clouds gather near the top, while thinner strokes sweep diagonally across the blue. Below them, a paler band of atmosphere separates the hills from the foliage. The sky opens the scene outwards; the foreground shadows bring the attention back towards the viewer. There is movement above a landscape that appears almost motionless.

The painting’s heat is consequently not a simple matter of dazzling brightness. Greens remain substantial, shadows are readable and the warmer earth colours appear in distinct passages. The Musée Fabre connected the work with Bazille’s description of the oppressive summer heat in a letter to his father, dated by its editors to 19 or 26 June 1870. That connection is persuasive as a context for the picture’s stillness, without requiring every colour to become an illustration of the letter. ^[3]

Surface handling also varies across the scene. Foliage is built from numerous smaller marks, while sky and clearing admit broader strokes. Pale stones form broken, angular patches beside the warmer exposed ground. Trunks cut vertically through these more dispersed areas. At close range the landscape separates into different kinds of touch; from farther away those touches cooperate to hold the large composition together. Its order does not depend on making every surface equally smooth.

The dog and the masonry

The dog at the lower right is easy to overlook because its dark coat merges with the shaded edge. Its body lies low, with the head raised slightly above the ground. Once noticed, it changes the scale of the trees and clearing: the viewer has a small, familiar creature against which to measure the space. It also gives the nearest corner a quiet point of interest, well away from the open distance.

Schulman draws attention to this animal and reports an earlier suggestion by Sarraute that Bazille may have intended to add human figures to the landscape. That remains a hypothesis. The dog cannot demonstrate a missing group, and the apparently available meadow is not proof that the picture awaited people. The animal’s identity is unknown. ^[2]

Beside the dog’s shaded corner, the rough channel introduces a different kind of detail. Loose-looking stones and irregular courses of masonry surround a low, dark opening. Ochre and reddish earth stand out against the surrounding greens. The structure makes clear that this countryside bears signs of human intervention, even though its function is not established by the picture. Calling the scene pristine wilderness would miss something Bazille placed prominently in the foreground.

The channel also explains why the title can initially seem surprising. There is no broad expanse of water spreading across the near ground. Thin distant bands and the broken terrain offer a less immediate encounter with the river setting. Rather than making water the spectacle, Bazille paints the land, vegetation and atmosphere around it. The Lez gives the landscape its location without monopolising the composition.

A pastoral without people

The Minneapolis Institute of Art relates the picture to the literary tradition of the eclogue, a pastoral poem associated with rustic speakers in an idealised rural setting. Its interpretation emphasises how the painting’s repose can evoke that tradition even though no people appear. This is a useful way to understand the tension between an observed southern landscape and a composition that seems ready to accommodate a human encounter. ^[1]

The painting never supplies that encounter. The empty clearing offers room for movement or conversation, but the only visible creature remains at its edge. The trunks create a succession of places in which someone might stand; the foreground gives way to a middle distance that remains unoccupied. The viewer becomes unusually aware of space as something available, rather than as the remainder around a central figure.

That effect need not mean the scene contains a hidden narrative. The masonry, dog and irregular vegetation keep it attached to ordinary material things. At the same time, the generous scale and balanced distribution of masses make it more composed than a casual glimpse of a riverbank. Its pastoral quality lies in this suspension between a recognisable place and the ordered quiet of a pictorial world.

The evidence from Bazille’s final summer

The correspondence helps establish the painting’s place in his work without fixing every stage. Schulman associates a letter of about 20 June 1870 with the beginning of a large landscape. He then identifies the Lez canvas with the landscape Bazille described to Edmond Maître on 2 August as nearly finished. The later letter also discusses other work, so it presents an active group of projects rather than the ceremonial completion of a final masterpiece. ^[2]

Bazille enlisted in the zouaves on 16 August 1870. He was killed at Beaune-la-Rolande on 28 November, aged twenty-eight. These dates explain why the summer paintings have acquired such emotional weight, but they do not establish an exact last painting or prove that war interrupted a particular intended addition to this canvas. The documentary distinction between nearly finished and finished deserves to remain open. ^[3]

An inscription reading Bazille’s name and the year 1870 appears at the lower left. The museum itself raises the possibility that the signature was added posthumously. It therefore cannot serve as uncomplicated proof that Bazille declared the whole picture complete. The secure date and the uncertain finishing history can coexist: the work is a major landscape of 1870 even if its final intended state remains unresolved. ^[1]

Knowledge of Bazille’s death can make the stillness feel like a farewell. That is a response available to later viewers, rather than a meaning the artist is known to have assigned to the landscape. The clearing has no visible military presence, and the dog’s rest does not predict what happened months later. Letting the landscape retain its ordinary summer duration allows its emotional force to emerge without turning it into an omen.

Classical order and a modern painter

Writers have often approached the canvas through the classical landscape tradition. Schulman recounts comparisons with Poussin and Claude Lorrain, while the Musée Fabre places Poussin and Corot among the relevant points of reference. Michel Hilaire’s account of Bazille’s final summer stresses the contrast between this unpeopled landscape and the figure-filled Summer Scene. These are interpretations of its structure and place in the career, rather than documentary proof that Bazille copied a particular older painting. ^{[2] [3] [4]}

The classical comparison is clearest in the way the scene is organised. Framing foliage, an open middle ground and a measured recession towards low hills give the view a legible sequence. Light connects those zones instead of breaking the landscape into unrelated brilliant fragments. Yet the trees are irregular, the channel is rough and the foreground contains a resting dog. Formal balance does not remove the specificity of the place.

Nor should an interest in earlier art be treated as a sudden reversal of Bazille’s modern commitments. Writing to his cousin Louis on 27 April 1869, he stated, in our translation: “I greatly like Ingres, Corot, Rousseau, Millet, and often Courbet.” That varied list records preferences across different kinds of painting; its qualification about Courbet is part of the statement. It gives direct evidence that admiration for established masters and engagement with recent painting coexisted in his thinking. ^[5]

The Lez landscape can therefore be understood as another solution within his work, rather than a retreat from an inevitable future style. The broad outdoor light and differentiated brushwork belong to his practical investigation of painting. The ordered spaces connect that investigation to traditions he continued to value. Later comparisons with Cézanne may draw attention to the firmness of the construction, but they should remain comparisons, not claims that Bazille knowingly anticipated another painter’s future achievement. ^[2]

Looking beside other Bazille paintings

View of the Village, painted in 1868, offers a particularly revealing comparison. There, a seated girl and a tall foreground trunk establish an immediate relationship between figure, shade and sunlit distance. The Lez canvas distributes attention much more widely. Its lack of a dominant person gives the smaller intervals between trunks and patches of ground a greater share of the composition. The comparison shows how the absence of a large foreground figure transforms a familiar landscape problem. ^[6]

Summer Scene supplies the opposite extreme: bodies standing, reclining, wrestling and swimming make a complex pattern across grass and water. Hilaire’s contrast between that crowded outdoor subject and the Lez landscape is especially helpful because it avoids treating landscape as a lesser activity between figure paintings. In each work Bazille organises an extensive outdoor space; the visible human presence changes the viewer’s route through it. ^[4]

A different comparison is offered by The Western Ramparts at Aigues-Mortes, dated 1867. Its long wall, broad foreground water and open sky establish strong horizontal divisions. In the Lez painting, trunks interrupt the view at irregular intervals and the water loses its broad foreground role. Both compositions find order in a southern setting, but one depends heavily on the continuity of architecture while the other builds its rhythm from trees, light and uneven ground. ^[6]

Landscape at Chailly, from 1865, also places rocky terrain beneath a substantial sky. Seen beside the Lez, it brings the importance of landforms into focus. Bazille’s landscapes are not simply records of different weather conditions: stones, slopes, foliage and openings carry much of their spatial construction. The southern picture extends that interest across a notably spacious field. ^{[2] [6]}

From the family to Minneapolis

Schulman records a history beginning with the artist’s family in Montpellier and continuing through his brother Marc and his nephew Frédéric. The subsequent chain includes the Louis Carré and Wildenstein galleries and the collector Walter P. Chrysler. The Minneapolis Institute of Art acquired the painting in 1969 through its Special Arts Reserve Fund. This history places the work within both the family’s preservation of Bazille’s legacy and its later circulation through dealers, collectors and an American museum. ^[2]

The catalogue also records its presence in the 1927 Bazille retrospective in Montpellier and in later exhibitions that reconsidered the origins of Impressionism. It was included in the 2016–17 Bazille retrospective, and the National Gallery of Art’s checklist identifies the Minneapolis loan as catalogue number 65. Seen in such a retrospective, its large scale and lack of human figures offer a counterpoint to Bazille’s portraits, studio interiors and outdoor figure groups. ^{[2] [6]}

In that company, the painting broadens the idea of what Bazille was pursuing. It offers no basis for knowing the career he might have had. It does show an artist able to give sustained pictorial weight to open land, a spare horizon, irregular trees and the unhurried presence of a small animal. The calm is something the composition achieves, while the unfinished questions around its creation remain part of its history.