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Alfred Theodore Joseph Bastien (1873-1955) harlyn bay signed, titled and dated 32 watercolour and gouache on paper 20.5 by 28.5cm., 8 by 10.75in. E200-300 Provenance: Betty Heath, Eastbourne (a gift from the artist) Acquired from the above by the present owners The first owner of the present work, Betty Heath, was the long-term sweetheart of the artist. A correspondence was exchanged between Bastien and his muse for over forty years, and the artist gave her each of the following lots by him. Bastien, born in Belgium in 1873, entered the Royal Academy of Brussels as a student and studied under J. Portaels. He was a painter of portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, genre scenes, flowers, and occasionally animals. In 1895 he won First Prize in the Academic Contest for figure, landscape, and composition. At the contest of Godecharle in 1897, his canvas Symbole de l'humanite chretienn e won him a prize of twelve thousand francs. After attending the Academies of Ghent and Brussels, Bastien spent time at the Beaux- Arts in Paris, working in the Louvre and studying the paintings of Courbet and Delacroix there. He was also influenced by the Impressionists and, like them, he focused on the affects of light and developed a 'discrete luminism' that characterises his portraits and landscapes. After leaving Paris, he travelled extensively in Spain, Algeria, the Near East and Africa from 1905 to 1908. Bastien taught at the Brussels Academy of Fine Art where he became director in 1928. He continued to paint genre scenes, still-lifes, and landscapes, including forest and winter scenes, throughout his career.