Jules Bastien-Lepage was born at Damvillers, in the department of the Meuse, on the first of November, 1848. His parents were of the well-to-do farming class, occupied from one year's end to the other with the work of the fields. Consequently, all the early boyhood of the artist was passed in daily contact with the soil of Lorraine and with the sons of that soil. He knew them, one and all, in his native village; he grew up among them; he went to school side by side with the other little rustics of his own age: he understood the peasant class, with all their faults, their virtues, their habits of life; he learned to read in their faces, which were a sealed book to the outsider, the opinions and emotions which they had in common with him.
