Post-Impressionist. His works, focused on the effects of light in natural landscapes, are directly inspired by his masters, Delacroix and Courbet.
A desire of many Belgian artists to come together around a new painting, freer, more impressionist, more symbolist. It will influence a whole future generation of painters, like Alfred Bastien.
Bastien learns to control light during his travels in Morocco and Algeria. His practice of the outdoors and his taste for "sketching" will also be done in the trenches.
Returning from the war, he devoted himself to painting, in particular landscape painting, but also to teaching. From 1927 to 1945 he was an “outdoor teacher” at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
At Bastien, it is not the drawing that makes the work, but the color and the light. The only priority is the emotion given to the spectator, by a touch, brightly colored with blurred outlines.