In Paris, indeed, other demands were made. In 1872 he painted, with the object of being represented in the Salon, that remarkable picture "In the Spring," the only one of his works which is slightly hampered by conventionality in conception. The pupil of Cabanel is making an effort at truth, and has not yet the courage to be true altogether. Here, as in the "Spring Song" which followed, there is a mixture of borrowed sentiment, work in the old style and fresh Naturalism. The landscape is painted from nature, and the peasant woman is real, but the Cupids are taken from the old masters. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. SARAH BERNHARDT.] The next years were devoted to competitive labours. To please his father and mother Bastien-Lepage twice contested the _Prix de Rome_. In 1873 he painted as a prize exercise a "Priam before Achilles," and in 1875 an "Annunciation of the Angel to the Shepherds," that now famous picture which received the medal at the World Exhibition of 1878. And he who afterwards revelled in the clearest _plein-air_ painting here celebrates the secret wonders of the night, though the influences of Impressionism are here already visible. In his picture the night is as dark as in Rembrandt's visions; yet the colours are not harmonised in gold-brown, but in a cool grey silver tone. And how simple the effect of the heavenly appearance upon the shepherds lying round the fire of coals! The place of the curly ideal heads of the old sacred painting has been taken by those of bristly, unwashed men who, nurtured amid the wind and the weather, know nothing of those arts of toilette so much in favour with the imitators of Raphael, and who receive the miracle with the simplicity of elemental natures. Fear and abashed astonishment at the angelic appearance are reflected in their faces, and the plain and homely gestures of their hands are in correspondence with their inward excitement. Even the angel turning towards the shepherds was conceived in an entirely human and simple way. In spite of this, or just because of it, Bastien failed with his "Annunciation to the Shepherds," as he had done previously with his "Priam." Once the prize was taken by Léon Comerre, a pupil of Cabanel, and on the other occasion by Josef Wencker, the pupil of Gérôme. It was written in the stars that Bastien-Lepage was not to go to Rome, and it did him as little harm as it had done to Watteau a hundred and sixty years before. In Italy Bastien-Lepage would only have been spoilt for art. The model for him was not one of the old Classic painters, but nature as she is in Damvillers,--Nature, the great mother. When the works sent in for the competition were exhibited a sensation was made when one day a branch of laurel was laid on the frame of Bastien-Lepage's "Annunciation to the Shepherds" by Sarah Bernhardt. And Sarah Bernhardt's portrait became the most celebrated of the small likenesses which soon laid the foundation of the painter's fame.