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The Haymakers (Les Foins), a picture serving as the manifesto of the naturalist tendency, was admired at the 1878 Salon. Its painter, Bastien-Lepage, came from a rural background in Lorraine. Here he is treating one of his favorite themes: farm life and the accomplishment of daily tasks, observed in minute detail. His picture successfully evokes the type of subject chosen thirty years earlier by Millet.

He combines a perceptible brush-stroke inherited from the Impressionists, used in the treatment of the landscape, and a great concern for realism in the rendering of the bodies and the expression on the peasant woman’s face. The work was bought for an exceptional price after the painter’s death and exhibited at the Musée de Luxembourg.

While Zola admired the picture and the painter, regarding him as superior to the Impressionists, the writer and critic Huysmans did not share his enthusiasm:

“In both The October Season (La Saison d’octobre) and The Haymakers (Les Foins), Lepage obviously set out to be simple and great. This painter was haunted by Millet. I’m surely not going to blame him for that, for Millet was a powerful artist.

Only, the magnificently truthful bearing of Millet’s peasants in the countryside is not repeated here. The hands of his peasant woman do not belong to a woman who works with the soil, they are those of my maid who dusts as little as possible and barely washes the dishes.”