I love the story behind this painting. The man who made it had failed twice at the most important art competition in France. Instead of trying again, he went home to his village and painted the farmers he had grown up with. And that’s what made him famous... It’s called October, painted by Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1878. In a wide, open field, a young woman bends forward to tip a basket of freshly dug potatoes into a big sack, and her face is so alive it almost seems to lean out of the canvas toward you. Behind her, another woman kneels in the brown soil, smiling as she gathers more into her basket, while potatoes lie scattered all around them and a few more workers are dotted across the hillside under a cloudy autumn sky. Nothing in the scene has been dressed up for the viewer. It’s simply the harvest, the ordinary work that had to be done every October before winter came. Bastien-Lepage knew this world from the inside: he grew up in that same village, Damvillers, among the families who worked these fields, and he even wrote its name in the corner of the canvas, just above his signature. Paris loved it, and when it was shown at the Salon of 1879, it became one of its great attractions. A few years later, the painter Vasily Surikov wrote to a friend that, in an entire Paris exhibition, only a handful of works had “true dignity.” Out of all the grand paintings on those walls, the first one he named was this simple harvest scene...