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Title: Jules Bastien-Lepage and his art: a memoir
Author: Mathilde Blind
George Clausen
Walter Sickert
André Theuriet
Release date: September 12, 2023 [eBook #71623]
Language: English
Original publication: London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892
Credits: Carol Brown, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AND HIS ART: A MEMOIR ***
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE
[Illustration]
[Illustration: JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE
After the portrait by himself
Imp. Chardon-Wiltmann, Paris]
[Illustration] JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AND HIS ART.
A MEMOIR, BY ANDRÉ THEURIET [Illustration]
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST, BY
GEORGE CLAUSEN, A.R.W.S.; MODERN
REALISM IN PAINTING, BY WALTER
SICKERT, N.E.A.C.; AND, A STUDY OF
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF, BY MATHILDE BLIND
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATED WITH
REPRODUCTIONS OF
BASTIEN-LEPAGE’S AND
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF’S
WORKS [Illustration]
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN,
PATERNOSTER SQUARE. MDCCCXCII.
CONTENTS.
[Illustration]
PAGE
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AND HIS ART: A MEMOIR. BY ANDRÉ
THEURIET 11
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST. BY GEORGE CLAUSEN,
A.R.W.S. 107
MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING. BY WALTER SICKERT, N.E.A.C. 129
A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF. BY MATHILDE BLIND 145
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
[Illustration]
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE. AFTER A PORTRAIT BY HIMSELF.
_Frontispiece_
PAGE
GRANDFATHER LEPAGE. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 25
THE COMMUNICANT. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 31
THE HAYFIELD. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 43
SARAH BERNHARDT. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 51
JOAN OF ARC LISTENING TO THE VOICES. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 55
THE BEGGAR. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 61
FATHER JACQUES, THE WOODMAN. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 71
SKETCH FOR FATHER JACQUES. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 75
THE INN. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 101
BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE. BY AUGUSTUS
SAINT-GAUDENS 110
THE LITTLE SWEEP. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 132
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF. FROM A PORTRAIT BY HERSELF 148
A MEETING. BY MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF 169
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH 187
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AND HIS ART.
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE
AS MAN AND ARTIST.
In the month of June, 1856, the chances of a Civil Service noviciate
compelled me to live for six weeks at Damvillers, a small town on the
Meuse, half-way between Verdun and Montmédy.
Damvillers was formerly fortified, and had the honour of being besieged
by Charles V., but there is now nothing left to recall the memory of
those warlike days. The whole aspect of the place is peaceful and
rural. The people are occupied with agriculture. Orchards now cover
the ground where the fortifications once stood, and form a circle of
verdure round the scattered houses, in a valley where the Tinte winds
through osier beds and meadows. On the right a vine-covered mound
like the back of a camel, on the left a succession of wooded slopes,
enclose the little town. The grey, blue hills are low. The monotony of
the fields and meadows is broken only by rows of poplars. The ill-kept
solitary streets bordered by the labourers’ houses with grey or dingy
yellow fronts, have the same washed-out look as the landscape.
For a young fellow of twenty-two there was nothing here particularly
attractive. I spent my solitary evenings with my elbows on my
window-sill watching the twilight descend upon the brown-tiled roofs
which enclose the great square as with a horizontal frame. In one
corner the large green waggon of a travelling pedler was resting by
the side of rows of earthenware, whose polished surface reflected the
lights from the window of the neighbouring inn.
My only amusement consisted in listening to the chatter of some girls
sitting at the tinner’s door, or the shouts of the children playing at
ball by the wall of the corn-market.
I little thought then that among these urchins, with torn pinafores
and tangled hair, was to be found a future master of contemporary
painting, and that the name of Bastien-Lepage thrown to and fro each
evening by the children’s voices, and repeated by the echoes of the
solitary square, would come to be known, and received with acclamations
throughout the world, by all who are interested in Art and in Artists.
I.
Jules Bastien-Lepage was born at Damvillers, on November 1, 1848, in
a house which forms one of the corners of that square of which I have
just spoken; a simple, well-to-do farmer’s house, the front coloured
yellow, the shutters grey.
On opening the outer door one finds oneself at once in the kitchen,
the regular kitchen of the Meuse villages, with its high chimney-piece
surmounted by cooking utensils, with its rows of copper saucepans,
its _maie_ for the bread, and its dresser furnished with coloured
earthenware. The next room serves at once as sitting-room and
dining-room, and even, at need, as bed-chamber. Above are some
apartments not in general use, and then some vast granaries with
sloping rafters.
It was in a room on the ground floor, with windows looking to the
south, that the painter of Les Foins (_Hay_) and of Jeanne d’Arc
first saw the light. The family consisted of the father, a sensible,
industrious, methodical man; of the mother, a woman of the truest
heart and untiring devotion; and of the Grandfather Lepage, formerly
a collector of taxes, who now found a home with his children. They
lived in common on the modest produce of the fields, which the Bastiens
themselves cultivated, and on the grandfather’s small pension.
At five years old Jules began to show an aptitude for drawing, and his
father was eager to cultivate this dawning talent. He himself had a
taste for the imitative arts, employing his leisure in light work that
required a certain manual skill, and to this he brought the scrupulous
exactness and conscientious attention which were his ruling qualities.
From this time, in the winter evenings, he required that Jules should
draw with pencil on paper the various articles in use upon the
table――the lamp, the jug, the inkstand, etc. It was to this first
education of the eye and of the hand that Bastien-Lepage owed that love
of sincerity, that patient seeking for exactness of detail, which were
the ruling motives of his life as an artist.
In thus urging him to draw every day, the father had no idea of
making his son a painter. At that time, especially at Damvillers,
painting was not looked upon as a serious profession. The dream that he
cherished, along with the grandfather, was to put Jules in a position
to choose later on one of the administrative careers, such as overseer
of forests, or bridges, or high-ways, which are always easiest of
access to those who have been well trained in drawing. So, as soon as
he should be eleven years old, he was to leave the communal school, and
go to the College.
This involved great sacrifice, for the resources of the family were
low, and in the interval a second boy was born; but they redoubled
their economy, and in 1859 they managed to send Jules to the College of
Verdun.
It was at the drawing class that he worked with the greatest zeal. The
correctness of his eye and the dexterity of his hand astonished his
master.
When the boy went back to Damvillers for the holidays he drew
everywhere; upon his books, upon the walls, upon the doors, and long
afterwards traces of these rough outlines might be seen on the orchard
palings. His mother carefully preserved books full of pencil sketches
of the little brother Emile in all sorts of poses.
His habit was to express any thought that possessed him by a drawing.
He already attempted to reproduce with his pencil, passages that struck
him in reading, and his first composition was Abraham’s Sacrifice.
Classical stories made more impression on his mind at this time than
the rustic scenes which met him everywhere in his wanderings in the
open air.
At this age, the surroundings in which we live, and which custom
renders familiar to us, excite neither our surprise nor our
imagination, but they enter our eyes and our memory, and, without our
knowing it, become deeply engraven there. It is only in later years
that, by comparison and reflection, we feel their powerful charm and
their original grace.
In his walks across the fields, Bastien-Lepage received impressions
of country life, and assimilated them like daily food. Gatherers of
faggots carrying their bundles of wood; fishers for frogs wet to
the knees, crossing the meadows with their fishing tackle on their
shoulders; washerwomen wringing out their linen by the banks of the
Tinte; loungers sitting under a willow tree, while the lunch of cheese
is carried to the workers; the village gardens in April at the time of
the spring digging, when the leafless trees spread their shadows over
borders adorned only by the precocious blossoms of the primrose and the
crown imperial; potato fields, where fires of dried stems send up their
blue smoke into the red October evening――all these details of village
life entered the eyes of the child, who instinctively stored them up in
his memory.
Literary studies had little interest for him, while on the contrary he
had a strong liking for mathematics.
At one time when he was leaving the fourth form he thought of preparing
for the examination for St. Cyr. This is not surprising in a department
essentially military, whose remarkable men have all been generals or
marshals; but this fancy, in which he was led more by imitation of
others than by his own true calling, soon passed away, and during his
last years at college his thoughts were constantly turned towards
drawing, and when his course of philosophy came to an end, he made
known to his parents his wish to go to Paris to study painting.
Great was the astonishment in the home at Damvillers. While recognizing
his son’s skill as a draughtsman, Father Bastien persisted in declaring
that painting was not a career――nothing certain, a long and costly
apprenticeship, and then ten chances of failure to one of success.
Let us talk rather of an honourable appointment in the administration
of the state, where one is sure to get one’s pay every month, with a
prospect of a provision for one’s old age!
They held a family council. The grandfather considered the adventure
hazardous and shook his head; the mother was frightened above all at
the dangers of Paris and the life of privation to be undergone there,
but, conquered at last by the persistency of her son, she murmured
timidly, “Yet, if Jules wishes it!…”
A way was found for settling everything. A friend of the family, who
held a superior employment in the Central Postal Administration,
advised Jules to go up for examination for admission into that
department, promising him that on his being received, he would have
him called to Paris, when it could be arranged for him to study at
the École des Beaux Arts in the hours that were free from his postal
service. They took this advice; Bastien passed the examination, was
named supernumerary, and set out for Paris about the end of 1867.
He divided his time between his postal duties and his studies in
the School. This could only be done under great disadvantages. The
requirements of his position in the Post Office made consecutive and
serious study very difficult.
By the end of six months he was brought to the conclusion that this
double work was impossible; that he must choose between the Office
and the School. He did not hesitate; he gave up the Post Office, and,
furnished with a letter from M. Bouguereau, he entered the Cabanel
studio after having been received in the School with the number one.
“All beginnings are painful,” says Goethe. Bastien-Lepage had a
harsh experience of this. He had burnt his ships in leaving the Post
Office, and he found himself alone in Paris with very limited means of
existence.
At Damvillers there was more self-denial. The mother, always valiant,
herself went to work in the fields, that she might have something
to add to the little sum sent every month to the young painter. The
Council General of the Meuse had voted him an allowance of, I believe,
six hundred francs; all this together scarcely furnished him with bed
and board.
But Jules was endowed with a robust faith, a firm will, a
never-failing cheerfulness, and the magical power of these three
enabled him to endure bravely the many trials of the years of his
apprenticeship.
In 1870 he sent his first picture to the Salon. It passed unnoticed.
I have just seen this picture again. It is the portrait of a man,
quite young, dressed in a coat of strong green, the whole flooded
with a greenish light. It is rather in the manner of Ricard, but the
solid construction of the head and the expression of the face already
indicate a painter who sees clearly and seeks to enter into the
character of his model.
A short time later the war broke out. Jules Bastien enlisted in a
company of volunteers, commanded by the painter Castellani, and did his
duty bravely at the outposts.
One day in the trenches a shell burst near him and sent a clod of
hardened earth straight at his chest. He was taken to the ambulance,
where he remained during the last month of the siege, while another
shell fell upon his studio, and there destroyed his first composition,
a nymph, nude, her arms clasped over her blonde head, and bathing her
feet in the waters of a spring.
On the re-opening of communications he hastened back to his village,
where he arrived, like the pigeon in the fable, disabled,
“Trainant l’aile et tirant le pied.”
There he spent the remainder of the year 1871, recovering his shattered
health in his native air, making long excursions as far as to the
Moselle, and painting various portraits of relations and friends. He
did not return to Paris until sometime in the year 1872.
Then the struggling life of the _débutant_ began again. In order to
make both ends meet he tried to get some of his drawings into the
illustrated journals; but his manner of illustrating was not what
was wanted by the editors, who sought above all things to please the
ordinary public.
Weary of the struggle he began to paint fans.
One day a manufacturer of antéphelic milk (_lait antéphelique_) asked
him to make a sort of allegorical picture intended for an advertisement
for his Elixir of Youth. The artist, making a virtue of necessity,
painted a bright gay picture, after the manner of Watteau’s landscapes,
with groups of young women dressed in modern style approaching a
fountain, where Cupids were gambolling.
The painting finished, Bastien explained to the manufacturer his
intention to exhibit it first of all in the Salon.
The perfumer wished for nothing better, but insisted on one condition;
above the fountain was to be placed on a scroll of all the colours of
the rainbow, the name of the cosmetic, and the address of the place
where it was sold.
Naturally Bastien refused, and the tradesman, disappointed of his
advertisement, left him the picture for his trouble.
This painting was exhibited in the Salon of 1873, under the title of Au
Printemps (In Spring); being placed very high it attracted no attention.
Jules was not discouraged, but he was a prey to that restless and
feverish indecision which commonly besets beginners. The teaching
in the school troubled him, and being a great admirer of Puvis de
Chavannes, he was tempted to try decorative and allegorical painting.
His second picture, La Chanson du Printemps (The Song of Spring),
exhibited in 1874, is conceived and executed under this influence. It
represents a young peasant girl seated at the edge of a wood, bordered
by a meadow which slopes down to a Meusian village, whose red-tiled
roofs are seen in the distance. The girl is sitting, with wide-open
eyes, her arm passed through the bowed handle of a rustic basket
strewn with violets, while from behind her nude little children with
butterflies’ wings and blowing upon pipes, whisper to her the song of
the growing grass, and tell her of coming womanhood.
This light and spring-like picture, half realistic, half symbolical,
would, perhaps, in spite of its simple charm, have left the public
indifferent if it had not been accompanied by another, which suddenly
brought the artist into the light, and was the success of the Salon of
1874.
During his last holiday at Damvillers, Bastien-Lepage had conceived the
idea of painting the portrait of his grandfather, in the open air, in
the little garden which the old man loved to cultivate.
[Illustration: GRANDFATHER LEPAGE.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
The grandfather was represented seated in a garden chair, holding on
his knees his horn snuff-box and his handkerchief of blue cotton. His
striking face stood out well detached from the background of trees;
the black velvet cap sloping jauntily towards his ear gave effect to
the shrewd Socratic face; his blue eyes twinkled with humour; the nose
was broad and retroussé; the white forked beard spread itself over an
ancient vest of the colour of dead leaves; the hands, painted like
life, were crossed upon the grey trousers.
Before this picture, so true, so frank, of such marvellous intensity
of familiar life, the public stood delighted, and the name of
Bastien-Lepage, unknown before, figured the next day in the first place
in the articles on the Salon.
II.
It was in front of this picture that I first met Jules. Having looked
in my catalogue for the name of the painter, I was delighted to find
that he was from the Meuse, and born at that same Damvillers where I
had once lived.
The heavy soil of our department is not fruitful in artists. When it
has produced one it takes a rest for a few centuries.
Since Ligier Richier, the celebrated sculptor, born at the end of
the fifteenth century, the Meuse could only claim credit for the
painter Yard a clever decorator of churches and houses in the time
of Duke Stanislas; so I was quite proud to find that Bastien-Lepage
was a fellow countryman of mine. A few moments later a mutual friend
introduced us to each other.
I saw before me a young man, plainly dressed, small, fair, and
muscular; his pale face, with its square determined brow, short nose,
and spiritual lips, scarcely covered with a blond moustache, was
lighted up by two clear blue eyes whose straight and piercing look
told of loyalty and indomitable energy. There was roguishness as well
as manliness in that mobile face with its flattened features, and
a certain cool audacity alternated with signs of sensitiveness and
sparkling fun and gaiety.
Remembrances of our native province, our common love of the country and
of life in the open air, soon established kindly relations between us,
and after two or three meetings we had entered upon a close friendship.
The portrait of the grandfather had won for him a third medal, and had
ensured him a place in the sunshine.
It was not yet a money success, but it was a certain degree of fame; he
might go back to his village with his heart at rest, his head high. The
State had just bought his picture, La Chanson du Printemps (The Song of
Spring), and orders were beginning to come in.
In 1875 Bastien-Lepage reappeared in the Salon with La Communiante (The
Communicant) and the portrait of M. Simon Hayem, two excellent works
which gave, each in its way, a new mark of his originality.
The portrait of M. Hayem was best liked by men of the world; artists
were most struck by La Communiante.
[Illustration: THE COMMUNICANT.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
This young girl’s simple awkward bearing, as she stands out from a
creamy background, with all the stiffness of her starched white veil,
naïvely opening her pure hazel eyes, and crossing her fingers, ill
at ease in the white gloves, is a marvel of truthful painting. It
reminds one of the manner of Memling and of Clouet, though with quite a
modern feeling. It is interesting, as being the first of those small,
lifelike, characteristic portraits, in a style at once broad and
conscientious, which may be reckoned among the most perfect of this
painter’s works.
At the time of these successes in the Salon, Bastien joined in the
competition for the Prix de Rome. The subject chosen for 1875 was taken
from the New Testament――L’Annonciation aux Bergers (The Annunciation to
the Shepherds).
I remember as if it were yesterday that July morning when the gates of
the Palais des Beaux Arts were opened, and the crowd of eager inquirers
rushed into the hall of the competition.
After a few minutes Bastien’s picture was surrounded, and a buzz of
approval arose from the groups of young people gathered round that
work, so real, so strongly conceived and executed that the other nine
canvases disappeared as in a mist.
The artist had understood and treated the subject in a manner utterly
different from the usual style of the Academy. It was familiar and
touching, like a page of the Bible. The visit of the angel had
surprised the shepherds sleeping by their fire in the open air; the
oldest of them was kneeling before the apparition, and prostrated
himself in adoration; the youngest was gazing with half-closed eyes,
and his open lips and hands, with fingers apart, expressed astonishment
and admiration. The angel, a graceful figure, with childlike almost
feminine head, was showing with outstretched arm to the shepherds,
Bethlehem in the distance surrounded by a miraculous halo.
This picture, which has both the charm of poetic legend and a manly
grip of real life, was executed with uncommon grace and vigour; its
very faults contributed to the realization of the effect aimed at.
Most of those who saw this work of Lepage declared that he would carry
off the Prix de Rome with a high hand; yet the jury decided otherwise.
It was an older and more correct competitor who was sent to the Villa
Medicis at the cost of the State.
For a moment Bastien-Lepage was troubled and discouraged by this
decision. Not that he felt himself strongly attracted towards Rome and
Italian art, but he knew that many people judge of an artist by his
success. Among the people down in his province and in his own family
the Prix de Rome would have been considered as an official recognition
of his talent, and he regretted, above all, not being able to give this
satisfaction to his relations, who had undergone so many privations
in order to maintain him at Paris. That he did not soon forget this
unmerited check, we may gather from this fragment of a letter to a
friend:
“I learned my business in Paris, I shall not forget that; but my
art I did not learn there. I should be sorry to undervalue the high
qualities and the devotion of the masters who direct the school. But is
it my fault if I have found in their studio the only doubts that have
tormented me? When I came to Paris I knew nothing at all, but I had
never dreamed of that heap of formulas they pervert one with. In the
school I have drawn gods and goddesses, Greeks and Romans, that I knew
nothing about, that I did not understand, and even laughed at. I used
to say to myself that this might be high art; I wonder sometimes now if
anything has resulted from this education….”
However, he did not consider himself beaten. The following year, at the
same time that he was exhibiting his portrait of M. Wallon, he went
in again for the Prix de Rome competition. This time it was less for
his own sake than to give a satisfaction to his family and friends. He
did not enter with any real feeling into this competition, the subject
for which was: Priam suppliant Achille de lui rendre le corps de son
fils Hector (Priam begging Achilles to restore to him the body of his
son Hector). This picture, though a vigorous composition, tells almost
nothing of the deep and poignant emotion of this episode of the Iliad.
Once more he failed to gain the prize, but this time he did not take it
much to heart. He was occupied with more absorbing prospects: his last
visit to Damvillers had bent his mind toward another ideal. Whatever he
might say, his studies in the school had not been without their use to
him. They had developed in him the critical faculty. His repugnance to
factitious and conventional art had driven him with more force to the
exact and attentive observation of nature.
At Paris he had learned to compare, and to see better. The Meuse
country, so little heroic, with its low hills, its limited horizons,
its level plains, had appeared to him suddenly more attractive and
more worthy of interest than the heroes of Greece and Rome. Our
labourers driving the plough across the field; our peasant women with
their large liquid eyes, prominent jaws, and widely opening mouths;
our vine-dressers, their backs curved with the labour of the hoe, had
revealed themselves to him as models much more attractive than those of
the atelier. It was a work for a great artist to bring out the poetry
pervading the village folk and their belongings and to give it a real
existence, as it were, by means of line and colour. To represent the
intoxicating odour of the mown grass, the heat of the August sun on
the ripe corn, the life of the village street; to bring into relief
the men and women who have their joys and sorrows there; to show the
slow movement of thought, the anxieties about daily bread on faces
with irregular and even vulgar features;――this is human art, and
consequently high art. This is what the Dutch painters did, and they
created masterpieces. Bastien, while lounging among the orchards of
Damvillers and the woods of Réville, resolved that he would do as they
had done, that he would paint the peasants of the Meuse.
The list of studies begun or completed at this time shows us the
progress of this dominant idea: La Paysanne au Repos (The Peasant
Woman Reposing), La Prairie de Damvillers (The Meadow at Damvillers),
the two sketches for the picture Les Foins (The Hay), Les Jardins au
Printemps (Gardens in Spring), Les Foins Mûrs (Ripe Grasses), L’Aurore
(Dawn)――all these canvases bear the date of 1876.
It was in the autumn of the same year that we carried out a
long-talked-of plan for making an excursion together on foot into the
Argonne. I went to join him in September at Damvillers.
Thanks to him, I saw with a very different feeling the town that
formerly I thought so dull. Cordially and hospitably received in the
house at the corner of the great square, I made the acquaintance of the
father, with his calm, thoughtful face; of the grandfather, so cheerful
in spite of his eighty years; of the mother, so full of life, so
devoted, the best mother that one could wish for an artist. I saw what
a strong and tender union existed between the members of this family
whose idol and whose pride was Jules.
We set out along with one of my old friends and the painter’s young
brother. For a week we walked with our bags on our backs through the
forest country of the Argonne, going through woods from Varennes to
La Chalade, and from Islettes to Beaulieu. The weather was rainy and
unpleasant enough, but we were none the less gay for that, never
winking when the rain came down, visiting the glass-works, admiring
the deep gorges in the forests, the solitary pools in the midst of the
woods, the miles of green and misty avenues at the foot of the hills.
Jules Bastien was always the leader. When we arrived at our resting
place in an evening, after a day of walking in the rain, he almost
deafened us with scraps of _café-concert_ songs, with which his memory
was stored.
I seem still to hear in the dripping night that voice, clear and
vibrating, now silent for ever….
As we went along he told me of his plans for the future.
He wanted to tell the whole story of country life in a series of large
pictures: hay-making, harvest, seed-time, the lovers, the burial of a
young girl…. He also wanted to paint a peasant woman as Jeanne d’Arc,
at the moment when the idea of her divine mission is taking possession
of her brain; then, a Christ in the Tomb.
Together we made a plan for publishing a series of twelve compositions:
Les Mois Rustiques (The Months in the Country), for which he was to
furnish the drawings and I the text.
From time to time we stopped at the opening of a wood or at the
entrance of a village, and Jules would make a hasty sketch, little
thinking that the wild and simple peasants of the Argonne would take
us for Germans surreptitiously making notes of their roads and passes.
At Saint Rouin, while we were looking on at a Pilgrimage, we had
nearly been taken as spies. I have told this story elsewhere.[1] The
remembrance of it amused us for a long time.
After eight days of this vagabond life we separated at Saint Mihiel,
where Bastien wished to see the group of statues of the sepulchre, the
_chef d’œuvre_ of Ligier Richier, before beginning his Christ in the
Tomb.
Shortly afterwards he gave an account of this visit in a letter to his
friend Baude, the engraver:
“Our too short walk through the Argonne has been very interesting,
and ended with a visit to the grand _chef d’œuvre_ of Ligier Richier
at Saint Mihiel. You must see that some day. I have seen nothing in
sculpture so touching. France ought to know better and to be prouder
of that great Lorraine artist. You will see a photograph of this
masterpiece when you come to me….”
He had scarcely been six weeks at Damvillers again when he lost his
father, who was suddenly carried off by pulmonary congestion. Death
entered the house for the first time, and it was a rude shock for a
family where each loved the other so well.
“We were too young to lose such a good friend,” he wrote to me; “in
spite of all the courage one can muster, the void, the frightful void
is so great, that one is sometimes in despair….”
“… Happily remembrance remains (letter to M. Victor Klotz), and what a
remembrance it is! … the purest that is possible;――he was goodness and
self-abnegation personified; he loved us so!… What is to be done? We
must try to fill the void with love for those who remain, and who are
attached to us, always keeping in mind him who is gone, and working
much to drive away the fixed idea.”
And indeed he did work furiously: at Damvillers, at a Job that remains
unfinished, and at Paris at the full-length portrait of a lady, which
was exhibited in the Salon of 1877.
He had left the Rue Cherche Midi and had settled in the Impasse du
Maine, where his studio and his apartment occupied one floor of a
building, at the end of a narrow neglected garden, whose only ornaments
were an apricot tree and some lilac bushes.
His brother Emile, who just then came to an end of his study of
architecture in the school, lived with him.
His studio was very large, and was simply furnished with an old divan,
a few stools, and a table covered with books and sketches. It was
decorated only with the painter’s own studies and a few hangings of
Japanese material.
I used to go there every morning at this time to sit for my portrait.
I used to arrive about eight o’clock, to find Jules already up, but
with his eyes only half awake, swallowing two raw eggs, to give himself
tone, as he said.
He already complained of stomach trouble, and lived by rule. We used
to smoke a cigarette, and then he began to work. He painted with
a feverish rapidity, and with a certainty of hand quite astonishing.
Sometimes he would stop, get up and roll a cigarette, would closely
examine the face of his model, and then, after five minutes of silent
contemplation, he would sit down again with the vivacity of a monkey
and begin to paint furiously.
The portrait, sketched in during the snows of January, was almost
finished when the apricot tree began to put on its covering of white
flowers in April.
[Illustration: THE HAYFIELD.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
Immediately after the opening of the Salon, Bastien packed up his
baggage and fled to Damvillers to prepare for his great picture Les
Foins (The Hayfield), which occupied him all the summer of 1877, and of
which he gave me news from time to time.
“_July._――I shall not say much about my work; the subject is not yet
sufficiently sketched in. What I can tell you is that I am going to
give myself up to a debauch in pearly tones: half-dry hay and flowering
grasses; and this in the sunshine, looking like a pale yellow tissue
with silver threads running through it.
“The clumps of trees on the banks of the stream and in the meadow will
stand out strongly with a rather Japanese effect….”
“15th _August_.――Your verses are just the picture I should
like to paint. They smell of the hay and the heat of the
meadow…. If my hay smells as well as yours I shall be
content…. My young peasant is sitting with her arms apart,
her face hot and red; her fixed eyes seeing nothing; her
attitude altogether broken and weary. I think she will
give the true idea of a peasant woman. Behind her, flat on
his back, her companion is asleep, with his hands closed;
and beyond, in the meadow, in the full sun, the haymakers
are beginning to work again. I have had hard work to set
up my first ideas, being determined to keep simply to
the true aspect of a bit of nature. Nothing of the usual
willow arrangement, with its branches drooping over the
heads of the people to frame the scene. Nothing of that
sort. My people stand out against the half-dry hay. There
is a little tree in one corner of the picture to show that
other trees are near, where the men are gone to rest in the
shade. The whole tone of the picture will be a light grey
green….”
“_September._――Why didn’t you come, lazy fellow? You
would have seen my Hay before it was finished. Lenoir,
the sculptor, my neighbour in the Impasse, liked it. The
country people say it is alive. I have little more than
the background to finish. I am going to harness myself to
the Reapers, and to a nude study of a Diogenes the cynic,
or rather, the sceptic….”
Les Foins was sent to the Salon in 1878. It had a great success, though
it was warmly discussed.
In the hall where it was placed, among the pictures which surrounded
it, this picture gave an extraordinary sensation of light and of the
open air. It had the effect of a large open window.
The meadow, half mown, went back bathed with sunshine, under a summer
sky, flecked with light clouds. The young haymaker sitting drooping in
the heat, intoxicated with the smell of the hay, her eyes fixed, her
limbs relaxed, her mouth open, was wonderfully real. There was nothing
of the conventional peasant whose hands look as if they had never
touched a tool, but a veritable countrywoman accustomed from childhood
to outdoor work. One felt that she was weary with fatigue, and glad to
breathe a moment at her ease, after a morning of hard work in the sun.
This picture of life in the fields, so carefully studied, so powerfully
rendered, had a considerable influence on the painting of the day. From
the time of this exhibition many young painters, many foreign artists
especially, threw themselves with enthusiasm into the new way opened
out by Bastien-Lepage, and, without intention on his part, the painter
of the Meusian peasants became the head of a school.
[1] See _La Chanson du jardinier_ in _Sous Bois_.
III.
Bastien did not allow himself to be spoiled by success, but continued
his life of assiduous labour and conscientious research. He divided
his time between Paris and Damvillers, giving the larger part to his
village.
We have a long list of his works done in 1878 and 1879. Portraits of
M. and Mme. Victor Klotz and of their children, of MM. de Gosselin, of
M. A. Lenoir, of M. de Tinan, of the publisher George Charpentier, of
Emile Bastien, of Sarah Bernhardt, and lastly that Saison d’Octobre,
or, Recolte des Pommes de terre (October, or The Potato Harvest) which
is the companion picture to Les Foins (Hay). This was in a graver key,
with warm yet sober colours, and an exquisite savour of the country
in the late summer; it was powerfully executed and full of health and
serenity.
The portrait of Sarah Bernhardt and The Potato Harvest, less discussed
than The Hay, made a deep impression on the mass of the public.
[Illustration: SARAH BERNHARDT.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
Dating from this time, Bastien’s success, both artistic and monetary,
was secure.
His first care was to let his friends at Damvillers join in his good
fortune.
They had been with him in his difficulties, they should now share his
pleasure, and he brought them to Paris in the summer of 1879. He was
happy to return to them, in all sorts of kind attentions, a little of
what he owed them for so much affectionate devotion. He was grateful
to them for having believed in him in his time of difficulty as a
beginner, and he experienced a tender pride in being able to show them
that they had not been mistaken.
When he received his first important gains he took his mother to a
large shop and had silks for dresses spread out before her. “Show some
more,” cried he. “I want Mama to choose the best.” And the poor little
mother, frightened at the sight of black satin that could stand upright
of itself, in vain protested that “she would never wear that.” She was
obliged to give way.
He took his grandfather through the avenues of the Bois and the
principal boulevards, expecting that he would be delighted; but in
this direction his zealous efforts failed utterly. The old man remained
indifferent to the splendours of Parisian luxury and to the scenery in
the theatres. At the opera he yawned openly, declaring that all this
commotion was deafening, and he went back to Damvillers determined that
they should never take him away again.
After having seen his people into the train for their return, he set
out for England, where he painted the Prince of Wales.
Decorated in the following July, he hastened to Damvillers to show his
red ribbon to his friends, and also to go on with the work he loved
best.
He had managed to arrange a studio in the spacious and lofty granaries
of the paternal house, and there he worked hard.
He hoped at last to realize his dream, so long deferred, of painting a
Jeanne d’Arc. He had meditated much on this subject, and we have often
spoken of it.
His idea was to paint Jeanne in the little orchard at Domrémy at the
moment when she hears, for the first time, the mysterious voices
sounding in her ears the call to deliver her country.
To give more precision to the scene, Bastien wished to show, through
the branches of the trees, the “blessed saints,” whose voices
encouraged the heroic shepherdess.
In this I differed from him. I maintained that he ought to suppress
these fantastic apparitions, and that the expression of Jeanne’s
face alone should explain to the spectator the emotion caused by
the hallucination to which she was a prey. I reminded him of the
sleep-walking scene in Macbeth: the doctor and the chamber-woman,
I said, do not see the terrible things that dilate the pupils of
Lady Macbeth, but from her face and gestures they know that there is
something terrible; the effect is only the greater, because, after
having perceived this, the imagination of the spectator increases it.
Suppress your phantoms and your picture will gain in sincerity and
dramatic intensity.
But Jules held to the personification of the voices, and our
discussions ended without either the one or the other being convinced.
Nevertheless, my objection had impressed him, and he wanted to show his
work to his friends before it was quite finished.
[Illustration: JOAN OF ARC LISTENING TO THE VOICES.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
“Come,” he wrote to me, about the 15th of September, “F. is quite
disposed to come; he really wants to come to Damvillers. Everything
will go beautifully. You will see my picture of Jeanne d’Arc well
advanced, and somebody coming from Paris will do me no harm….”
“If you knew how I work (letter to Ch. Baude) you would be less
surprised. My picture is getting on, and getting on well; all, except
the voices, is sketched, and some parts are begun. I think I have found
a head for my Jeanne d’Arc, and everybody thinks she expresses well the
resolution to set out, while keeping the charming simplicity of the
peasant. Also, I think the attitude is very chaste and very sweet, as
it ought to be in the figure that I want to represent; … but if I am to
see you soon, I prefer to leave you the pleasure of surprise and of the
first impression of the picture; you will judge of it better, and you
will be able to say better what you think of it….”
Jeanne d’Arc appeared in the Salon of 1880, with the portrait of M.
Andrieux. It did not produce all the effect that Jules expected. The
picture had its enthusiastic admirers, but also passionate detractors.
The critics attacked first the want of air and of perspective; then,
as I had foreseen, the _voices_, represented by three symbolical
personages, too slightly indicated to be understood, and yet too
precise for apparitions. But the public did not do justice to the
admirable figure of Jeanne, standing, motionless, quivering, her
eyes dilated by the vision, her left hand extended, and mechanically
fingering the leaves of a shrub growing near.
Never had Bastien-Lepage created a figure more poetically true than
this Lorraine shepherdess, so pure, so human, so profoundly absorbed in
her heroic ecstasy.
The rapid and brilliant success of the young master had ruffled the
_amour propre_ of many; they made him pay for these precocious smiles
of glory by undervaluing his new work. He had hoped that the medal of
honour would be given to his Jeanne d’Arc; this distinction was given
to an artist of talent, but whose work had neither the originality, nor
the qualities of execution, nor the importance of Bastien’s picture. He
felt this injustice strongly and went to London; there the reception
and appreciation of English artists and amateurs consoled him a little
for this new mortification.
The two years that followed were fruitful in vigorous work of different
kinds: Les Blés Mûrs (Ripe Corn), the London Docks, The Thames, Le
Paysan allant voir son champ le dimanche (The Peasant Going to Look
at his Field on Sunday), La Petite Fille allant à l’école (The little
Girl Going to School); the portraits of M. and of Mme. Goudchaux, of
Mdlle. Damain, of Albert Wolff, and of Mme. W., La Marchande de Fleurs
(The Flower Girl); last of all, the two great pictures Le Mendiant (The
Beggar), and Père Jacques, exhibited in the Salon in 1881 and 1882.
His stay in London and the reading of Shakspeare had inspired him with
the idea of painting one of the heroines of the great poet, and in 1881
he went back to Damvillers full of a project for painting the Death of
Ophelia.
“I have been painting hard” (letter to Ch. Baude, August, 1881),
“for I want to go away and travel for two or three weeks. At the end
of September you will come and see us. That is settled, is it not?
Shooting, amusements, friendship. Since my return I have painted a
haymaker and worked at a little picture of an interior: The Cuvier
à Lessive (The Washing Kitchen); all the detail requires much time.
Besides I have begun and already advanced a large picture of Ophelia.
I think it will be well to do something as a contrast to my Mendiant
(Beggar). It is to be a really touching Ophelia, as heartrending as if
one actually saw her.”
“The poor distracted girl no longer knows what she is doing, but her
face shows traces of sorrow and of madness. She is close to the edge
of the water leaning against a willow; upon her lips, the smile left
by her last song; in her eyes, tears! Supported only by a branch, she
is slipping unawares; the stream is quite close to her. In a moment
she will be in it. She is dressed in a little greenish blue bodice,
and a white skirt with large folds; her pockets are full of flowers,
and behind her is a river-side landscape. One bank under trees, with
tall flowering grasses, and thousands of hemlock flowers, like stars
in the sky; and in the higher part of the picture, a wooded slope; and
the evening sun shining through birches and hazel bushes; that is the
scene….”
This picture was never finished. The landscape and flowers were
rendered as the artist wished, but the face and the costume of Ophelia
recalled his Jeanne d’Arc too much.
Bastien-Lepage no doubt saw this, and for this reason put the picture
on one side to return to his peasants.
[Illustration: THE BEGGAR.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
The more he become master of his brush, the more the rustic work
haunted him. He was still a thorough countryman. Although he had now
at intervals the refinements of elegance and little bursts of
worldliness; although he had exchanged the modest _atelier_ in the
Impasse du Maine for a house in the Quartier Monceau, the world soon
wearied him, and he was glad to go back to his village.
This six weeks’ absence, of which he speaks in his letter to his friend
Baude, was spent in an excursion to Venice, and in Switzerland. He
came back only half delighted, and brought back only a few unimportant
sketches.
Italy and the splendours of Venetian art had left him cold. In this
world of history and mythology he was not at home. He sickened for his
meadows and his Meusian forests.
During his rapid visits to Paris in 1881 and 1882, the painting of
various portraits, notably that of Madame Juliette Drouet, and the
compulsory tax of visits and soirées occupied him almost entirely. We
saw but little of him. But these successes, and the adulation lavished
upon him in Parisian drawing-rooms, did not change him.
He was still the loyal, joyous comrade, faithful to old ties; very
good, very simple; happy as a child when he found himself in a circle
of intimate friends.
We were both members and even founders of an Alsace-Lorraine dinner,
the Dîner de l’Est, which was always given in summer in the country.
One of the last meetings at which he was present, took place at the end
of May, 1881.
A boat had been engaged, which was to take the diners to the bridge
at Suresnes, and to bring them back at night. When we arrived at the
landing-stage, a blind man was standing by the footbridge, attended by
a young girl, who held out her sebilla to the passers-by.
“Come, gentlemen! all of you, put your hands in your pockets!” gaily
commanded Bastien, and he passed over first, preaching by example. And
the eighty, or a hundred guests of the Dîner de l’Est, passed one after
another over the footbridge, each one leaving in the child’s sebilla a
coin, large or small.
When we were on the deck, Bastien turned round to look at the blind man
and his girl, who were amazed at this unexpected windfall, and were
slowly counting their money.
“What a lovely group?” he said to me. “How I should like to paint that
child!”
While waiting for dinner we walked in the Bois de Boulogne. The acacias
and hawthorns were in flower. The lawns, newly shorn, gave out a
perfume of mown grass. Jules, joyfully drawing in this air impregnated
with country odours, laughed like a happy child.
At that moment all was going well with him. His Mendiant had had a
great success at the Salon; his last visit to England had been very
prosperous; his head was full of fine projects for pictures. “It is
good to be alive!” he exclaimed, as he played with a flower he had
plucked from the bushes…. On the way back he gave himself up to all
sorts of roguish fun. Mounted on the prow of the boat he sang, with his
full voice, the Chant du Départ.
The vibrating tones resounded powerfully between the two sleeping river
banks; the sky was splendid, twinkling with innumerable stars. From
time to time Bastien lighted a rocket and sent it up overhead, shouting
a loud hurrah!
The fusée mounted slowly into the night, showering down many-coloured
sparks, then fell suddenly and sank in the dark water. Alas! it was the
image of the short and brilliant years that remained for him to live.
IV.
On the death of Gambetta, January 1, 1883, Bastien was commissioned
to make a design for the funeral car in which the great orator was to
be conveyed to Père Lachaise; he spent a week in the little room at
Ville d’Avray, painting the picture representing the statesman on his
deathbed. The cold was extreme at this time, and, his work scarcely
finished, he went away, feeling ill, to Damvillers, where he hoped to
finish the great picture he had began of L’Amour au Village.
His native air, the simple life, and his mother’s loving care restored
him, and he began to work again with his usual eagerness.
Muffled in a warm jacket and a travelling cloak that covered him down
to the feet, he made his models pose for him in the piercing days
of February, in the little garden where he had already painted the
portrait of his grandfather. In March the work was well advanced,
and he invited me to go and see it at Damvillers before it was sent
to the Salon. I left Verdun on a freezing afternoon, accompanied by
the old friend who had walked with us through the Argonne, and we were
set down at Damvillers at night-fall. Our hosts were awaiting us on
the doorstep; the grandfather, always the same, with his Greek cap and
white beard, and his Socratic face; the painter and the little mother,
with smiles and outstretched hands.
Around them Basse the spaniel, and Golo and Barbeau were bounding and
barking joyfully to give us a welcome.
The next morning, early, we went up to the studio to see L’Amour au
Village, which was to go to Paris that day.
The subject of this picture is well known; it is one of the most real
and the most original that the artist has painted: the daylight is
waning; at the gate of a village garden, a lad of twenty, who has been
binding sheaves, and still wears his leggings of leather, is talking,
leaning against a fence, with a young girl, who turns her back to the
spectator; what he is saying to her may be guessed from his awkward
manner of twisting his stiff fingers, and also from the attentive but
embarrassed air of the young girl. One feels that they are not saying
much, but that love exhales from every word, so difficult to speak.
Around them summer spreads the robust verdure of the country. The fruit
trees stand lightly silhouetted against a background of kitchen herbs,
gently sloping up to the houses of the village, whose brown roofs and
pointed spire come against the soft and misty twilight sky. All this,
bathed in a subdued light, is marvellously painted. The young girl, her
short plaits falling over her shoulders, her neck bent, the form of
her back, so young, so delicate, is an exquisite figure; the face of
the young harvester, so energetic, so ingenuously in love, is charming
in expression; the treatment of the hands, the bust, the dress, is
masterly. There is in this picture a true and manly poetry, which is
strengthening and refreshing, like the odour of ripe corn.
Bastien was glad to have completed this difficult work, and his
satisfaction enabled him to bear with cheerfulness the pains in his
loins, and the digestive troubles which were becoming more and more
frequent.
It was long since I had seen him so gay and unreserved. This happy
holiday-week spent at Damvillers was the pendant to the walk through
the Argonne. The sullen sky, continually blotted out by chilling
showers, allowed us few walks in the open air; but every morning we
went up to the studio. Jules dismissed the little sweep, who was
sitting for a picture that he had on hand, and, taking a sheet of
copper, he made us pose for an etching. I have this plate before me
now; it did not bite well. It represents the whole family, including
the grandfather, making a circle round our friend F., who, standing up
and very grave, is reciting one of La Fontaine’s fables. While I look
at it, I seem to hear again the merry laughter which filled the studio,
alternating with the rattling of the hail against the windows.
In the evening, after supper, we placed ourselves at the round
table, and played at Diable or Nain rouge. Jules, throwing away his
best cards, always managed to let the grandfather win; and when the
octogenarian, quite proud of his success, took up the stakes, he would
pat him on the shoulder, and cry out, with a merry twinkle of the eye,
“Ha! what a lucky man! he will ruin us all!” and the laughter began
again.
We did not go to bed till well on into the night, after having roused
the little domestic, Felix, who had dozed off in the kitchen while
copying a portrait of Victor Hugo.
[Illustration: FATHER JACQUES, THE WOODMAN.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
In the intervals of sunshine, Bastien-Lepage took us to visit “his
fields.” He had a peasant’s love for the land, and he employed his
gains in adding to the paternal domains. He had just bought an
orchard situated in the old moat of the town, which had belonged to
an unfrocked priest. He intended to build a châlet there, where his
friends, painters or poets, might come and live in their holidays
and dream at their ease. He explained to us with the delight of a
child, his plans for the future. When, with his portraits, he should
have gained an independent fortune, he would execute at his ease
and in freedom, the grand rustic pictures that he dreamed of, and
among others, that burial of a young village girl, for which he had
already made many notes and sketched the principal details. We only
took one long walk, and it was in those woods of Réville which form
the background of his landscape, Ripe Corn. The weather had remained
cold, and there were still patches of snow on the backs of the grey
hills, though the sun shone sometimes. Except a few downy buds on the
willows, the woods were without verdure; but the ploughed fields had
a beautiful brown colour; the larks sang; the tops of the beeches began
to have that reddish hue, which indicates the rising of the sap, the
swelling buds. “Look,” said Bastien to me, when we were in the forest,
“my Wood-cutter in the last Salon was reproached with want of air….
Well, here we are in a wood, and the trees are still without leaves,
yet look how little the figure stands out from the undergrowth of trees
and bushes. There is a great deal of routine and prejudice in that
criticism of the perspective of my pictures done in the open air. It is
the criticism of people who have never looked at a landscape, except
crouching down or sitting. When you sit down to paint, you naturally
see things quite differently from the way you see them standing.
Sitting, you see more sky and you have more objects――trees, houses,
or living beings standing out sharply in silhouette against the sky,
which gives the illusion of a greater distance and a wider atmosphere.
But it is not in this way that we generally see a landscape. We look
at it standing, and then the objects, animate or inanimate, that are
nearest to us, instead of being seen in profile against the sky, are
silhouetted upon the trees, or upon the fields, grey or green. They
stand out with less clearness, and sometimes mix with the background,
which then, instead of going away, seems to come forward. We need to
renew the education of our eye, by looking with sincerity upon things
as they are in nature, instead of holding as absolute truths the
theories and conventions of the school and the studio.”
All the afternoon passed thus happily away in friendly talking and slow
smoking along the wooded paths. The blackbirds were whistling; from
time to time we discovered a flower in the open spaces, which showed
that spring was surely coming; a wood anemone, with its milk-white
petals, or a branch of mezereon, with its pink flowers opening before
the leaves, and its Japanese appearance.
Jules stopped and gathered a stem of black helebore. “Ah, how
beautiful!” he said. “How one would like to make a careful study of
these leaves――so decorative, so finely cut――of dark green, almost
brown, out of which comes this pale green stem, with its clusters of
greenish flowers edged with pale rose-colour. What lovely forms, and
what a variety of tender shades! This is what they ought to give as a
copy to the children in the schools of design, instead of the eternal
and wearisome Diana de Gabies!”
[Illustration: SKETCH FOR FATHER JACQUES]
We did not return till evening, when there was a magnificent sunset,
which crimsoned the smoky roofs of Réville, and made the light clouds
scattered over the sky look like a strew of rose-leaves.
The next day was the last of my visit. We took leave after long
embraces, making fine plans for returning to Damvillers for the
September holiday, while the grandfather, shaking his hoary head,
murmured sadly, “Who knows if you will find me here?” And Barbeau, and
Golo, and Basse bounded and barked round the omnibus that took us away
with tremendous noise.
I did not see Jules again till a month later, at the opening of the
Salon, in front of L’Amour au Village, which had a full success. He was
ill, and complained of pains in the loins more acute than formerly;
then he suddenly disappeared mysteriously. The door of the atelier in
Rue Legendre was closed, and visitors were told that the painter was
gone into the country. We did not know till later that he had hidden
himself, to undergo a sharp and painful treatment, and that, scarcely
convalescent, he had gone to breathe the sea air in Brittany, at
Concarneau. He spent his days there, in a boat, painting the sea, and
forgetting his pains by the help of work.
When he came to see us again in October, he appeared to be recovered;
but digestion was still a difficulty, and his habitual gaiety was,
as it were, clouded over. His character was changed. There were no
more of those trenchant affirmations of which his comrades sometimes
complained; he was indulgent, and even affectionate, much more than
was usual with him. He did not stay long in Paris, but hastened back
to Damvillers, to get seriously to work again. He arrived in time to
be present during his grandfather’s last moments. The old man departed
loaded with years; but, though surely expected, his death was a painful
blow to the survivors. “The house,” he wrote, “is empty more than one
could believe. Only a few days ago, at any moment, a door would open
and the grandfather appeared, without motive, without object, without
speaking or being spoken to; but the sight of his kindly face was
enough. One kissed him, and he went away, as before, without object,
sitting down, going into the garden, coming back, and always with the
same kind face. I remember now that he has been growing paler for
some days…. No, you can have no idea how empty the house is. I cannot
get accustomed to it. We often talk of him with my mother――with what
pleasure! It is not that we weep for him with tears; we reason about
it, and we appear resigned and courageous; but behind all that there is
a sad feeling of want, of absolute loss. It is the touch one wants…. I
have been ill with it, and am so still. I have not been able to work;
to-day, for the first time, I went out to shoot larks; the weather was
fine, the sun was shining, and the country beautiful. This did me good.”
Indeed, the health of the artist, far from improving, was becoming
daily more uncertain. “It is the digestive tube,” said he, “that is out
of order.” Nevertheless, he worked with his usual courage, overlooking
his Concarneau studies, planning a new picture, and only stopping to go
out shooting or to saunter through the woods.
“Our evening walks are the best part of the day”――(letter to Ch.
Baude, Nov. 27, 1883)――“that is, from the setting of the sun till it
is dark. Every night the spectacle is new. The programme changes with
the weather. Sometimes the subject of the piece is dramatic; the next
day it is soft and charming; and, with the constant rain, our inundated
meadows reflect the brilliant scenery. Can you imagine all our
pleasure, in your dingy Paris? The next morning is too slow in coming;
one wants so much to put down last night’s impression; so that I am
making a heap of sketches, and find much pleasure in it. Then――here is
a surprise!――I have a new picture on the way…. Guess!… The subject is a
wounded deer taken by the dogs. The scene is, naturally, the wood, and
the wood at this time of year: only a few leaves of brilliant yellow
against the marvellous rosy-grey of the branches of the trees; then
the violet tone of the dead leaves flattened on the soil, and a few
green briars round a pool under a willow. The place was not chosen by
me. The deer chose it himself to die there; for I killed him the other
day, and he went there to be taken, a hundred yards from where he was
shot――just opposite the spot where Minet killed a hare. It was then
that this picture struck me. Afterwards I sketched in and reconstructed
the scene; and, as I wanted a model, I killed a second deer….”
Here is a characteristic symptom: he who formerly only wrote the
shortest of notes, scribbled in haste at the corner of a table, now
sent long, expansive letters to his friends, showing signs of redoubled
love of life, of art, of the beauties of nature:――
“My dear friends” (Jan. 3, 1884), “if you could see your poor Bastien,
with this heap of letters to write, you would certainly say: ‘How he
is changed!’… If my wishes had the extraordinary virtue of fulfilling
themselves, I should like that you, whom I love, should profit by it,
and that 1884 should bring health and happiness and success to all.
My mother’s wishes are the same as mine, and she rejoices that we are
to see you soon. Ah, my dear friend, what pleasure you would have
in living upon the woods, as I feed upon them now almost every day,
along with Golo and Barbeau! What marvellously delicate tones! and
the fading out of daylight, and when the evening comes on! The woods
are exquisitely fine, with their tall, dry, ivory-coloured grasses;
they are so tall in some of the open spaces that they caress your face
as you pass, and the cool touch upon your face and hands, hot with
walking, is a delicious sensation. I rarely leave the woods before
night, for I must send up a few salutes to the wild ducks with my gun
before going in. One hears them coming from a great distance, but it is
difficult to judge if they are far away or near, from the peculiarity
of their cry; so they have often passed, and are already a good way
off, before one finds out that one has missed them.
“This is to let you know that I am not a stay-at-home, as you might
think. I find it important to walk a good deal, for in this way I
regain a little health. My stomach was beginning to get wrong, but it
is better!…”
A few days after this I met a mutual friend of ours. “Well,” he said to
me, “our poor Bastien is very ill…. They think it is hopeless.”
V.
Indeed he was very ill. The treatment he had undergone in the summer
of 1883 had not been successful. The pains in the loins and bowels had
returned with greater violence at the end of January.
By the advice of his friend Dr. Watelet he again went to Paris in March
to consult Dr. Potain. Without any illusions as to the fatal nature of
the disease, the doctors thought that a change of air and of climate
might, morally and physically, produce good results. They advised that
he should go to Algiers for two months.
Bastien himself, seized with that longing desire for movement which
often torments invalids who are seriously ill, had experienced a wish
to go to the south. It was decided that he should start as soon as
possible for Algiers, accompanied by his servant Felix, and by his
mother.
On the morning of the day fixed for starting I went to the Rue Legendre
to say good-bye to him. He had gone to complete some arrangements with
his picture-agent. I found only Mme. Bastien, who was occupied in
filling the trunks which were scattered about the studio. The brave
little mother, who had never left her home at Damvillers for more than
a few days together, was preparing for this long journey to an unknown
country quite simply, with an apparent tranquillity, as if she were
going as far as Saint Cloud.
The hope that the change might be good for Jules was enough to give her
courage to face this upsetting of all her old ways of living. Sometimes
only, when she was carefully arranging the linen in the trunk, the
tears would rise to her eyes and a quiver of pain pass over her lips.
Upon the chairs and against the walls were placed the recent studies
brought from Damvillers, and one felt one’s heart tighten at the sight
of these last works, where nature had been observed and rendered with
incomparable skill, penetration, and charm. They were The Frog-fisher,
The Little Sweep, The Washerwoman, The Pond at Damvillers, The Edge of
the Wood, The Church at Concarneau, and that study of A Midnight Sky
so original, with the clouds scattered over an azure that was almost
black.
At this moment Bastien-Lepage came in, and on seeing him walk with
difficulty into the studio, I was distressed at the change that had
come over him. His thin face had become quite bloodless; the skin of
his neck was peeling off; his hair seemed to have no life in it. His
questioning blue eyes expressed an anguish and weariness that was
heartrending. “Well,” said he, after having embraced me, “are you
looking at my studies? When people see them at George Petit’s, they
will say that the little Bastien could paint the landscape too, when he
gave himself the trouble!…” When I said to him that his long absence
that morning had made his mother anxious, he added quite low, and
taking me into one corner of the studio: “When one is going to take a
journey so far, one must prepare for it…. I wanted to put my affairs in
order. Poor little mother!” he went on; “she has been very brave! Down
at home she used to spend whole nights in rubbing me for my rheumatism,
and I let her think that it did me good…. Now, perhaps the Algiers sun
will cure me.” Hope alternated with discouragement. During breakfast
he recovered a little. I was to go to Spain at the end of March; he
urged me to change my plans, and to join him in Algiers. We ended with
a half-promise. We tried hard to appear gay; we clinked our glasses
as we drank to the hope of soon meeting again, but each one felt his
throat tighten, and turned away to hide from the other his moist eyes.
I left the house in the Rue Legendre with my heart full of the saddest
forebodings.
Jules left the same night for Marseilles. They had a good crossing, and
his first letter, dated March 17th, was reassuring:――
“My dear friends, there is no getting out of it; you must come, for
a thousand reasons. Here it is just like May in Paris. Everything is
in flower; and such flowers!――heaps of them, everywhere. The verdure
is delicate and grey, and, like patches, always well placed; the
outlines picturesque and new, the trees very dark green. And in the
midst of all this, upon the roads, the Arabs, of astonishing calmness
and splendid carriage, under their earth-coloured and ash-coloured
draperies――ragamuffins as proud as kings, and better dressed than
Talma. They all wear a shirt and burnous; not one is like another. It
seems as if each one, at every moment, gave expression to his thought
by his manner of draping his garment. It is once more the triumph of
blank truth over arrangement and conventionalism. The sorrowful man,
whether he wishes it or not, in spite of himself is not draped like the
gay. Beauty, I am convinced, is exact truth: neither to the right nor
to the left, but in the middle.
“All this without telling you we have hired a house at Mustapha
Superior. It is half Arab, half French, quite white, with an interior
court opening into a garden twice as big as that at Damvillers.
The garden is full of orange-trees, and lemon, almond, fig, and a
quantity of other trees, the names of which I do not know and probably
never shall. All this, not trim like a park, but left a little _à la
diable_, like our garden at home. Then we have the right of walking in
a magnificent garden which joins ours. We have at least eight rooms;
in counting them I thought of you. In all directions round this house
there are delightful walks within reach for invalid limbs; in short, it
is a Mahomet’s Paradise, … ‘_moins les femmes_.’ I have said nothing
about Kasbah, the old Arab town――my legs have only let me see it from
a distance as yet; but, my good friend, imagine that against a morning
sky you have, sometimes in the palest rose, sometimes in silvery grey,
sometimes in faint blue, and so on――everywhere against the pearly
sky――more or less elongated rectangles, placed irregularly, but always
horizontally, in the manner of a line of low hills, and you will have
the delicate colouring of the old town. One would not suppose it was
a town with habitations, so delicate is the tone of it, but for some
little holes of rare windows placed here and there. One could not have
a sensation more unexpected, and never a sweeter and finer joy. So
you must come! My mother is counting upon it, and what, then, am I?
What new things you could say about all this! The sea was very fine at
the beginning and end of our crossing. Midway some of the passengers
suffered: my mother and Felix among them, but they got some sleep. We
were twenty hours in crossing, and we were not tired on arriving. Come,
set off; start!… A good embrace from my mother and from me.”
His first letter, as may be seen, was full of ardour. The climate of
Algeria did him good at first, and his sufferings seemed to be relieved.
“I am preparing myself bravely for the ordeal by fire” (April letter
to Ch. Baude); “may my rheumatism take flight and depart with the
coming attack of the sun! When it is hot here, it is still quite
bearable. Apart from these calculations about the heat and these health
experiences, I am happy, even excited, by all that I have seen; and
yet I have only seen what any bagman might see who is busy about the
selling of his goods; but it has been enough to give me great delight.
What remains of the old Arab town is marvellous; one holds one’s breath
when, at a sudden turn, the vision reappears. For those unhappy eyes
that only see the colours on the palette, it is white; but picture to
yourself a long hill, rather high, with a depression in the middle, and
sloping as if to the sea, and this hill all covered with elongated or
elevated cubes of which one cannot distinguish the thickness; all this
remaining unnoticed by the eye that is ravished by the delicate tone,
rosy, greenish, pale blue, making altogether white tinted with salmon.
“If one did not know it beforehand, one would never dream that
amongst these cubes of plaster thousands of men are walking, talking,
sleeping――men of noble manner, proud and calm, and with something very
like indifference or contempt for us. And they are right. They are
beautiful, we are ugly. What matter is it to me that they are knaves!
They are beautiful!…
“Yesterday I went to take a bath. I had to go three or four hundred
steps through streets full of merchants. In a passage a Jew was selling
silks, pearls and corals; in front of his shop, not two yards wide,
were three Arabs――an old man, another of middle age, the third about
seventeen. There they were, seated, attentive, calm, wishing to buy,
consulting together, making scarcely a gesture with their hands, always
kept at full length, but sitting quietly, never hurrying, reflecting
enormously, and keeping all the while under their burnouses the
softest, gentlest attitudes. The youngest was superb――so handsome that
mama was struck with it. ‘They are like beautiful statues,’ said she.
I could not understand the scene and the relations that united these
three Arabs. It was clear they were come to buy; they had come down
from the higher part of the town. They were poor, for the youngest was
in rags, and the burnouses of the others, though not in rags, were very
much worn; but they took such pains in counting the little pieces of
false coral that it was clear the Jew was selling dear to these big
children a thing of no value. The one of middle age was counting on the
table, with his flat hand by groups of five, the little pieces of coral
which he chose as he counted them; thus adding each time five pieces
to the heap that he drew towards him.
“What strikes one is this simple colouring, these magnificent folds,
and then this serious childishness.
“I was not able to wait till the end of the scene. It was cold and
draughty in this passage, which brought me back to the fact of my poor
crazy legs. I long for the time when I shall be a man again; what
lovely things I shall see, and perhaps I shall do!”
April 23rd (to the same): “Now I take myself by the ear and drag myself
to the letter-paper, and all the needful things. Nothing is wanting,
neither the thousand things I have to say, nor above all the tender
affection that I keep in store for you.
“Emile says that you are coming, and soon: don’t be alarmed, you will
not melt in the hot sun. There are cool places in the garden, where one
can stretch oneself, with a magnificent landscape at one’s feet. We
have only had the heat since yesterday; you will see how good you will
find it, your muscles will relax, and you will go back quite young. We
will make some excursions together if I am up to it. Any way there are
plenty all round us to tempt you to make some.
“You have heard from Emile that I went to Blidah. I bore the little
journey very well at first, but I was tired afterwards. I am going
to begin to rest, and go slowly, in order that I may go farther. I
have scarcely done anything till now, for I don’t feel myself up to
remaining long in the same position, as a painter must, who thinks only
of his work.”
The health that he hoped for, and so anxiously waited for, did not
come. On the contrary, as the heat increased, Jules felt more unwell
and more fatigued. The last letter that he wrote to me reached me at
Granada, in that hotel, the “Siete Suelos,” where Fortuny and Henri
Regnault had lived. There was all through it a sentiment of touching
melancholy and discouragement.
“My good friends, this is delightful. It is too good to get your
photographs at the same time as your kind and affectionate letter.
I am glad you are going to Spain. Lucky fellows! Go along! while I,
who should so like to see a bull fight!… You had not time to come,
and indeed it was selfish to ask you. You could not have stayed more
than a few days. But that is to be done some day when I am no longer a
cripple, and when we can have two months before us. We are comfortably
settled here. At this moment I am writing to you under the tent set up
in the terraced court of our villa, with a wonderful view before me.
Placed a little to the left of a semicircle, formed by the hills of
Mustapha, 170 yards above the sea which flows at their base, we have
at every hour of the day, a different landscape; for the sides of the
hills are full of ravines, and the sun, according to the time of day,
throws their slopes into light, or makes a network of shade, in a way
quite peculiar to this corner of Africa. Little villas gleaming in the
sunshine or grey in the shade give effect to the groups of verdure, the
whole looking from the distance like a rich embroidery, with bosses
of green harmoniously arranged. All this runs down toward the Gulf of
Algiers, and trending away from here forms Cape Matifou. Above are
the crests of the Little Atlas, far away, and lost in heaven’s blue;
near by, sloping gardens spread out their golden or silvery verdure,
according as one looks upon olive or eucalyptus. Add to this the
perfume of the orange and lemon trees, the pleasure of telling you that
I embrace you all three, Tristan included, that I am a little better,
and you will have the state of my heart.
“Enjoy yourselves,――and you, my dear forester, with your Toledo eyes,
what are you going to give to the world after all this delight of
sunshine and kindly fellowship and the loving union of the charming
trio that you make? It seems to me I have the heart and voice to make a
fourth――what say you? Ah! that shall be after the rheumatism! Kindest
regards from mama and from me. A last embrace to all three of you.”
The improvement he had experienced on arriving in Algiers ceased about
the end of April. His strength and appetite gradually failed; and at
the end of May it was decided to take the invalid back to France. He
settled again in the Rue Legendre with the poor little mother, who
never left him afterwards. When I saw him again I was shocked at the
progress the disease had made. His thinness was such that my unhappy
friend was nowhere in the garments that were made for his journey. His
legs refused their service; he could no longer work; and yet he kept
a little hope. He had just begun a new treatment, and talked of going
into Brittany “as soon as he was strong enough.” He drove every day in
the Bois when the weather was fine, and spent the rest of his day on
cushions in the corner of the studio, occupied in contemplating, with a
heartrending look, his studies hanging on the walls. This inaction was
most distressing to him.
“Ah!” cried he, “if I was told: They are going to cut off your two
legs, but after that you will be able to paint again, I would willingly
make the sacrifice….”
He could only sleep now with the help of injected morphine, and he
waited with impatience for the hour when a new supply should give him
some relief, and a factitious drowsiness should make him forget his
suffering.
In proportion as digestion became more difficult his appetite became
more capricious. He wanted to have dishes made which reminded him of
the cooking of his village; then, when they were brought to him, he
turned away disgusted, without tasting them. “No,” said he, pushing
aside the plate, “that’s not it; to have it good it must be made down
there, prepared by the Damvillers people, with home-grown vegetables.”
And while he was speaking one saw by his moist eyes a sudden and
painful calling up of the impressions of former days; he saw all at
once the old home, the gardens and orchards of Damvillers at the fall
of evening, the peaceful village interiors at the time when the fires
were lighted for the evening meal.
As the season advanced his strength decreased. In September his brother
was obliged to take him on his back to carry him to the carriage, and
he drove about slowly for an hour in the avenues of the Bois. He could
not read, and was easily wearied by conversation. His nerves were
become very irritable, and the slightest odours were disagreeable to
his sense of smell. His courage seemed to forsake him; at the same time
he was always wanting to know what others thought of his illness. His
blue eyes with their penetrating look anxiously searched the eyes of
his friends, and of his mother, who never left his side. The heroic
little woman did her best to dissimulate, and was always smiling
and affecting a cheerfulness and a confidence which were painful to
see; then, when she could escape for a moment, she hastened into the
neighbouring room and melted into tears.
For months this cruel agony was thus prolonged. Bastien was only a
shadow of himself. On the 9th of December, during great part of the
night, he talked of Damvillers with his mother and his brother. Then at
about four in the morning he said to them, with a kiss, “Come, it is
time for children to sleep.” All three slept. Two hours later Mme. B.
was awakened by Jules, who asked for something to drink; she rose, and
brought him a cup of tea, and was alarmed on finding that the invalid
groped for the cup to guide it to his lips; he could no longer see; but
he still spoke and even joked about the difficulty he had in moving his
limbs.
Shortly afterwards he dozed, and sliding gently from sleep into death,
he expired at six in the evening, December 10, 1884.
I saw him next day lying on his mortuary bed, in the midst of a thick
covering of flowers. His poor emaciated face, with its sightless and
deeply sunk orbits, made him look like one of those Spanish figures of
Christ, fiercely cut in wood by Montanez.
On the 12th of December a long train of friends and admirers
accompanied his remains to the Eastern Railway Station, whence it was
conveyed to the Meuse. The next day, Sunday, the whole population of
Damvillers waited at the entrance of the town for the funeral carriage,
which brought back Bastien-Lepage to his native place.
The sad procession advanced slowly on that road from Verdun where the
painter had loved to walk at twilight, talking with his friends. A pale
mist blotted out those hills and woods whose familiar outlines he had
so often reproduced. The _cortège_ stopped before the little church
where he had intended painting his Burial of a Young Girl. The morning
was showery; the wreaths and festoons of flowers, placed the night
before on his coffin, were revived and refreshed by the moisture; when
they were heaped up upon the grave they seemed to come to life again,
and to send out with their renewed perfume a last adieu from Paris to
the painter of the peasants of the Meuse.
VI.
On the 17th of the following March, at the Hôtel de Chimay, now
connected with the École des Beaux Arts, the exhibition of the works of
him whom we have surnamed the “Primitif” was opened. All the works of
Bastien, with the exception of the Jeanne d’Arc, were collected there.
On visiting this exhibition the most prejudiced minds were struck with
the suppleness, the fecundity, and power of the talent of this painter,
carried off at the age of thirty-six. For the first time his varied and
original work could be judged as a whole.
One could study in detail these productions of a thoroughly
conscientious artist, and follow the growth of each composition as one
follows the development of a beautiful plant――first in the drawings,
so pure, so sober, and expressive; then in the sketches so truthful
and sincere; and, lastly, in the finished pictures, so harmonious and
luminous. By the side of the great pictures, Les Foins (The Hay), La
Saison d’Octobre (October), Le Mendiant (The Beggar), Père Jacques
(Father Jacques), and L’Amour au Village (Love in the Village), like
windows opening upon life itself, one admired that collection of small
portraits in which the most penetrating physiological observation was
united with an execution most masterly, precise, and delicate. One
passed delighted from those interiors worthy of the Dutch painters,
such as La Forge and La Lessive, to the landscapes breathing the
odours of the fields and of the woods, such as Le Vieux Gueux (The Old
Beggar), Les Vendanges (The Vintage), La Prairie (The Meadow), La Mare
(The Pool), Les Blés Mûrs (Ripe Corn), or to those full of air and
motion, like London Bridge and the Thames; then one stopped before La
Petite fille allant à la École (The Little Girl going to School), or
that poetic Idyl, Le Soir au Village (Evening in the Village).
[Illustration: THE INN.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
In this exhibition containing more than two hundred canvases and a
hundred drawings, there was nothing trifling, nothing indifferent. The
smallest sketches were interesting because they revealed passionate
worship of what is simple and natural, hatred of the almost and the
conventional, and the incessant striving of the artist after his ideal,
which is Truth.
A healthy and robust poetry exhaled from this collection. One left
the Hôtel de Chimay with a sensation of strengthening and reviving
pleasure, such as one gets from certain aspects of nature――deep woods,
limpid waters, and the bright sky of a summer morning.
Unhappily this joy was mixed with the sad thought of the sudden death
of the young man who had produced all this masterly work.
On first entering these rooms reserved for his pictures I was, for a
long time, impressed with a feeling that I had already experienced
at the exhibition of the works of the talented young artist, Mdlle.
Bashkirtseff, mown down like Bastien, in full youth, and at the same
time as he. This cruel death seemed only a bad dream.
On seeing again these unfinished sketches, these perfect portraits,
these canvases that I had seen him paint one after another, I felt as
if I was conversing with the painter and the friend who had created
all this. I felt that he was still living and in possession of all his
force. I expected every moment to see him appear among us, smiling,
happy, fortified by the now unanimous admiration of the crowd gathered
before his work.
Alas! instead of himself my eyes only met his portrait, placed in the
first room, and the mournful eloquence of the wreaths and flowers
attached to the frame recalled me harshly to the heartrending reality.
The poor “Primitif” will paint no more. The atelier at Damvillers where
we have spent such happy hours is closed for ever. The peasants of the
village will no more meet their countryman on the roads where he used
to work in the open air. The rustic flowers that he used to paint in
the foreground of his pictures, the blue chicory and the groundsel,
will flower again this summer by the edges of the fields, but he will
not be there to study and admire them.
Among the sketches exhibited by the side of the great pictures there
was one that I had already remarked at Damvillers, and that I now saw
again with deep emotion. It represents an old peasant woman going in
the early morning into her garden to visit her apple tree in blossom.
The nights of April are perfidious, and the spring frosts give mortal
wounds; the old woman draws to her a flowering branch and inspects
with anxious eye the disasters caused by the hurtful rays of the red
moon. Bastien-Lepage was like this tree, full of sap and of promising
blossom. For years the heavens had been clement to him, and the flowers
had given many and rich fruits; then in a single night a murderous
frost destroyed all――the open flowers by thousands, and the tree
itself. All that remains is the splendid fruit of past seasons, but the
exquisite flavour of that the world will long enjoy.
Things truly beautiful have wonderful vitality and last on through the
centuries, hovering above the earth where the generations of men go
turn by turn to sleep,――and this survival of the works of the spirit of
man is perhaps the surest immortality upon which he can count.
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST.
[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE.
_By Augustus Saint-Gaudens._]
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST.
The work of Bastien-Lepage ranks, to my mind, with the very best
in modern art. He brought to us what was in some ways a new view
of nature――one whose truth was at once admitted, but which was
nevertheless the cause of much discussion and criticism. It was
objected to mainly, I think, as not being in accord with established
rules, but nevertheless the objectors expressed their admiration for
the skill of the painter; while, on the other hand, for those who
accepted him (chiefly the younger men these), no praise was too great,
no admiration too enthusiastic.
It is only a few years since his untimely death was mourned as a loss
to the whole art-world, for his whole career is so recent that his
fellow-students are still young men, many of them only now beginning
to obtain full recognition; and yet it is perhaps long enough ago to
enable his work to be considered as a whole, and his place in the
art-movement to be seen. For although he was an innovator, and one
showing in all he did a strong individuality, the general direction of
his genius was given him by the artistic tendencies of his time.
It will be generally admitted that if painting has made any advance
in our day, if it shows in any direction a new departure, or fresh
revelation of the beauty that exists throughout nature, it is in
the development of the problems which have arisen from the study of
landscape and of the effects of light. There now prevails a close
and sincere study of nature, founded on the acceptance of things as
they are, and an increasing consciousness on the part of artists (or
perhaps it would be more correct to say an increasing courage on the
part of artists to express their conviction) that a picture should be
the record of something seen, of some impression felt, rather than
be formally constructed. And men have awakened at length to see that
all nature is beautiful, that all light is beautiful, and that there
is colour everywhere; that the endeavour to realize truly the natural
relation of people to their surroundings is better than to follow
unquestioning on the old conventional lines. This is, roughly speaking,
the modern standpoint, and it cannot be denied that it is an enormous
advance on the accepted artistic ideals of thirty or forty years ago.
And to the men who have brought this about――to the Pre-Raphaelite
brotherhood; to Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Courbet, Manet, and Mr.
Whistler――to all those who have fought the battle and to whom our
present clearer outlook is due, we owe a lasting debt of gratitude.
It is a little surprising now, that the work of Bastien-Lepage, based
as it is on the simple acceptance of nature, should have caused so
much discussion on its first appearance. For time has justified him;
we feel on comparing his work with other men of his time that it
marks a new departure, and we realize that it has helped to form our
present standpoint. But as the majority of people tune their eyes by
pictures and not by nature, and only admire in nature that which is
made manifest to them by their artistic prophet, it may be taken as
a compliment to a man of independent genius that when he discloses a
fresh view of nature, it is not for some time accepted. “Good gracious,
sir!” said an eminent critic, referring to Claude Monet, “like nature?
Yes; of course it’s like nature; but a man has no business to choose
that aspect of it!”
Every picture may be said to appeal to the spectator from two sides or
points of view――the literary and the æsthetic.
A picture may tell its story to perfection――may point a moral and all
the rest of it, and so fulfil the purpose of its author――and still,
or, as some extreme persons would say, therefore――may be bad art,
may indeed be not worthy to rank as art at all. Such pictures are
frequently seen. And again, a picture may, by raising and defining to
some inner sense emotions dimly felt by us before nature, leave us
with a fuller sense of beauty, a feeling of something revealed to us.
And yet it need have no subject or story. We are convinced that this
picture is beautiful: that no other form of artistic expression can
precisely so touch us. Such pictures are rare, but happily they do
exist. Yet, from the nature of things, it is impossible but that such a
picture should speak to some――ever so slight――extent to the mind; and
also the most literary picture is never without evidence of some desire
to please the eye.
The work of Bastien-Lepage seems to me to embrace both these points
of view. The literary and æsthetic sides of art were very evenly
balanced in him. If we take any individual work, as, for example, the
Beggar, we find a most perfect realization of character: the whole
life-history of the man seen and brought before us――evidently this was
the motive of the picture; yet the painting is in itself so full of
charm, the perception of colour so fine, that we feel he was equally
interested in that. He tried to hold the balance even. His work shows
an extraordinary receptive power, an unequalled (almost microscopic on
occasion) clearness of vision, allied with an absolute mastery of his
material. His attitude towards nature is one of studied impartiality,
and seems to show the resolute striving of an intensely sympathetic
nature to get at the actual optical appearances and to suppress any
hint of his own feelings. And his subjects are presented with such
force and skill that their truth to nature is at once felt, and if
a painter, you cannot fail also to feel the charm of his simple and
sincere method. You cannot tally it by any other painter’s work: it
stands by itself.
His impartial attitude towards his model constitutes one of
Bastien-Lepage’s distinctions. I am not sure that it is not the
distinct note of all his work. He paints a man――and the man stands
before you, and you ask yourself, “What is he going to say? What does
the artist wish to express?” You may make what you can of him; Lepage
gives you no clue. To me, I confess, this quality is a very high one;
it seems to indicate a great gift, and to be, if I may presume to say
so, akin to Shakespeare’s method of presenting his characters without a
hint of his own feelings towards them.
Although it is no doubt owing to Millet that Lepage’s eyes were opened
to the paintableness of country life, he saw his subjects in his own
way and approached them from his own point of view. With Millet the
subject and type were everything――the individual nothing. He was
passionately moved by his subject, and once its action and sentiment
were expressed, everything was subordinated to them. He cared nothing
for the smaller truths of detail provided the general impression were
true to his mental image, and his aim was avowedly to impose his
mental impression on the spectator. Lepage, on the contrary, appears
to avoid communicating his mental impression. He will give you the
visual impression, as truly as he possibly can; you may, if you please,
find――as he has found――pathos and poetry in it: as before the same
scene in nature, if you have sympathy; but for his part he will not
help you by any comment of his own.
And whereas with Millet the interest always centres in the subject, in
Lepage it centres in the individual. His pictures become portraits.
He chooses a good type, and sets himself to paint him at his work and
amid his natural surroundings, and, somehow or other, the subject, as
motive and reason for the picture, takes a subordinate place. And yet
this is not because anything belonging to the subject is slurred, but
because the attention is taken beyond the subject to the actors in
it. For his figures not only live; they convince us of their identity
as individuals, and gradually we get so interested in them that we
begin to forget what they are doing, and almost to wonder why they
are there. We are, in fact, brought so close to them that we cannot
get away from the sense of their presence. It is no small tribute to
Lepage’s skill that his people do so interest us; but is not this
interest a conflicting element in the picture? Is it to the advantage
of the picture that the interest should be so equally divided? I cannot
tell: when before a picture of Lepage’s I accept it in everything――on
thinking it over, I begin to doubt. There is no room for doubt about
Millet; no mistake about what he meant. With him the attention is
always concentrated on the business in hand: and without desiring to
qualify the great respect and admiration which I have for Lepage’s
work, it seems to me that the point of view of Millet included more
essential truths (or perhaps excluded those which were not essential to
the expression of the subject); and that for this reason Lepage’s most
successful pictures depend least upon the interest of subject, and most
upon the interest of portraiture.
For it is in his portraits that the great capacity of the man is best
seen; and they are altogether admirable. His people stand before you,
and you feel that they must be true to the very life. He loves to
place them in an even, open, light, and simply accepting the ordinary
conditions of his sitters, produces a surprisingly original result.
There is no forcing of effect, no slurring of detail――everything is
searched out relentlessly, lovingly. There is the same impartial
standpoint――the same apparent determination to keep himself out of
the picture. From the artist’s point of view they are altogether
delightful; modelled with the thoroughness of a sculptor, the colour
and atmosphere are always true, and the execution is unlaboured and
direct. It would be difficult to point to any modern portraits which
surpass for technical mastery and charm such works as the “First
Communion,” the portraits of his parents, his grandfather, of M.
Theuriet, Albert Woolf, Sarah Bernhardt, “Pas Meche,” and the Beggar.
Each of these is a complete picture, as well as being a portrait. The
elaborate dress of the actress, the cheap muslin and ill-fitting gloves
of the child, in the “First Communion”――all the matters of minor detail
are dwelt on with, in each case, the fullest sense of their literary
importance to the picture, and yet the painting of these things, as of
all else, is so delightful in itself that the artist desires no other
reason.
While landscape entered as a matter of course into his rustic pictures,
it was always subordinate to the figures; although he carried the
finish of the foregrounds in these pictures to the farthest possible
point, delighting to express the beauty of everything――weeds, sticks,
stones, the clods of earth――all was felt, and shown to be beautiful.
But he painted also some admirable landscapes: of these I have seen but
few, and the recollection of one in particular remains with me as one
of the most beautiful things I have seen. It is a field of ripe golden
corn; beyond are the distant fields and low hills, and overhead in the
clear blue sky a few clouds. The corn is swaying and rustling in the
breeze, and small birds are flitting about. The whole scene is bathed
in daylight and fresh air: with no great stretch of fancy one can see
the corn moving, and hear the singing of the birds. One is filled
with a sense of the sweetness of nature and the beauty of the open
fields. And the picture is so simple――no effort in design, no artifice
apparent――it impresses as a pure piece of nature.
This love of nature and resolute determination not to depart from
the strict literal truth as he saw it, marks all the work of
Bastien-Lepage. As far as it was possible for an artist nowadays, he
appears to have been uninfluenced by the old masters. The only lesson
he seems to have learnt from them was that nature, which sufficed for
them, should suffice for him also. It is this attitude of mind which
brings him into kinship with the early painters, and which led to his
being styled “the primitive.” He did not set out to form his art on
the methods of the older painters, but going as they did, direct to
nature, he resolutely put on one side (as far as was possible to one
familiar with them) the accepted pictorial artifices. He seems to have
set himself the task of going over the ground from the beginning;
and the fact that his uncompromising and unconventional presentment
of his subjects should be expressed by means of a most highly
accomplished, very modern, and very elegant technique, was one of the
things which, while it greatly charmed, at the same time puzzled and
surprised people. It was so different from what had been seen, or might
reasonably have been expected; and one can understand some critics
feeling that a man so thoroughly master of his art, so consummate a
painter, must be wilfully affected in the treatment of his subjects,
his simple acceptance of nature appearing to them as a pose. But it
was not long before he was understood; and one has only to read the
very interesting memoir of M. Theuriet to see how mistaken this view
was, and how simply and naturally his art developed from his early
life and associations. It is seldom indeed that one finds an artist so
completely adjusted to his surroundings――so much so that he is able to
go back for his mature inspiration not only to his first impressions,
but to the very scenes and, in some cases no doubt, the individuals who
awakened them. As a rule an artist nowadays is led in many directions
before he finds himself. Bastien-Lepage had his doubts and hesitations,
of course, but they were soon over, and almost from the start he seems
to have decided on his path.
The advantage of this to him in his work must have been enormous,
as any one who has painted in the country will know; for villages
contain no surplus population――every one has his work to do; and
the peasant is slow to understand, and distrustful of all that lies
outside his own experience: so that it is difficult, and in many cases
impossible, for an artist to get models in a village. But one can
imagine Lepage to have been friends with all his models, and that his
pictures excited as lively an interest (though, of course, on different
grounds) in Damvillers as in Paris; and it was, I think, due to some
extent to this, as well as to his own untiring energy, that he was
enabled to complete so much. As far as I am aware, he was unique among
contemporary artists in being so happily circumstanced; and it is
evidence of the simple sincerity of the man that he found his ideal in
the ordinary realities of his own experience: feeling, no doubt, that
beauty exists everywhere waiting for him who has eyes to see.
It has been frequently said of Bastien-Lepage that he had no feeling
for beauty――or, at any rate, that he was indifferent to it; but as it
is impossible to arrive at any satisfactory definition of beauty, this
point cannot be discussed. Taking the word, however, in its obvious
and generally accepted meaning, that of personal beauty, it seems to
me that there is no fair ground for the charge; for such works as the
“First Communion,” the portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, and “Joan of Arc,”
all show a most refined and delicate appreciation of personal beauty,
and should surely have led his critics to consider whether the man who
painted them had not very good reasons for painting people who were
not beautiful, too. For all work cannot be judged from one point of
view; we recognize that a work of art is the outcome of a personal
impression, and that the artist’s aim is to give expression to his
views; and the deeper his insight into nature, the greater the result.
And yet, curiously enough, the fact that Bastien-Lepage’s insight into
nature was exceptionally deep and wide renders it difficult to form
a clear judgment, as his work appeals equally from different points
of view. His love of beauty, for instance, seems to go hand-in-hand
with a psychological, or even pathological interest: and this equal
prominence of different tendencies is a very puzzling element in his
work. We expect an artist to give us a strongly personal view; but
here is one who gives us something very like an analysis, and whose
personal view it is impossible to define――and the premature ending of
his career leaves it now for ever doubtful which was the strongest bias
of his mind. It seems to me that his sympathies were so wide as to try
and include everything, and that he has helped to widen the bounds of
beauty, by showing its limitless possibilities. The words of Blake, “To
see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” suggest,
I think, his general feeling towards nature.
In spite of the wide range of his work and the extraordinary
versatility of his execution, he kept, as a rule, within certain
limitations of treatment. He did not care for the strong opposition of
light and shadow, and he seems almost to have avoided those aspects of
nature which depend for their beauty on the changes and contrasts of
atmosphere and light. All that side of nature which depends on memory
for its realization was left almost untouched by him, and yet it is
idle to suppose that so richly gifted a man could not have been keenly
sensible to all nature’s beauty; but I think he found himself hedged
in by the conditions necessary to the realization of the qualities he
sought. For in painting a large figure-picture in the open air, the
painter must almost of necessity limit himself to the effect of grey
open daylight. This he realized splendidly: at the same time it may be
said that he sought elaboration of detail perhaps at the expense of
effect, approaching nature at times too much from the point of view of
still-life. This is not felt in his small pictures, in which the point
of view is so close that the detail and general effect can be seen at
the same time; but in his large works much that is charming in the
highest degree when examined in detail, fails to carry its full value
to the eye at a distance necessary to take in the whole work. This
was the case with “Joan of Arc” in the Paris Exhibition of two years
ago; and it was instructive to compare this picture with Courbet’s
“Stone-breakers,” which hung near it on the same wall. Courbet had
generalized as much as possible――everything was cleared away but the
essentials; and at a little distance Courbet showed in full power and
completeness, while the delicate and beautiful work in “Joan of Arc”
was lost, and the picture flat and unintelligible in comparison. No
doubt Bastien-Lepage worked for truth of impression and of detail too,
but it is apparently impossible to get both; and this seems to show
that the building-up or combining a number of facts, each of which may
be true of itself and to the others, does not in its sum total give
the general impression of truth. It is but a number of isolated truths.
Bastien-Lepage has carried his endeavour in this direction farther than
any of his predecessors――in fact it may be said that he has carried
literal representation to its extreme limit: so much so as to leave
clearly discernible to us the question which was doubtless before him,
but which has at any rate developed itself from his work, whether it
is possible to attain literal truth without leaving on one side much
of that which is most beautiful in nature? And further, the question
arises, whether literal truth is the highest truth. For realism, as an
end in art, leads nowhere; it is an _impasse_. Surely it is but the
means to whatever the artist has it in him to express.
I feel convinced that realism was not the end with Bastien-Lepage. I
believe that his contribution to art, great as it was, and covering as
it does an amount of work which might well represent a whole life’s
work instead of the work of a few short years, was but the promise of
his full power, and that, had he lived, his work would have shown a
wider range of nature than that of any other artist, except perhaps
Rembrandt. But it was not to be.
He gave his best, and the world is richer for his work; his name will
not die.
“Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave.”
GEORGE CLAUSEN.
MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.
[Illustration: THE LITTLE SWEEP.
_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]
MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.
Much has been written about Jean François Millet, and mostly from two
points of view. The picturesque surroundings of the plain of Barbizon
and the peasant’s blouse have tempted the sentimental biographer to
dwell on the personal note of poverty, which we now know was not the
dominant one in Millet’s life. The picturesque writer has amplified,
with more or less intelligence, reflections suggested by the subjects
of his pictures. In all this, the painter’s point of view, which is,
after all, the only one that matters, has, so far as its expression in
print is concerned, been overlooked and omitted.
The important fact about Millet is not that he struggled with poverty,
or that he expressed on canvas the dignity of labour, but that he was
a great artist. As corollaries, he was a great draughtsman and a great
colourist. He was gifted with the comprehension in its entirety of the
import of any scene in nature which he wished to render. An unerring
analysis enabled him to select what were the vital constituents of
such a scene, and exquisite perceptions, trained by incessant labour,
to render them in fitting terms in accordance with the tradition which
governs the use of each material.
It may seem that the process here summarized is after all only that
which governs all art production, and that the work of the second-rate
and the ordinary differs only from that of the master in the degree of
capacity exercised. But this is not so. It differs totally in kind.
The conception, conscious or unconscious, of the nature and aim of art
is in the two cases different, and, as a consequence, the practice is
different.
It would be affectation to ignore that, for good or for evil, Paris is
the art-centre of European painting, and that the most serious training
in drawing and painting that is procurable on European lines is
procurable in Paris. I should therefore consider it a service of great
utility to serious art if it were possible to make clear the reasons
for my conviction that the tendency of the mass of exhibition painting
in France, and, by reflection, in England, has been in an inartistic
direction, and has led inevitably to the sterile ideal of the
instantaneous camera. And, on the other hand, that the narrow stream of
purely artistic painting, that has trickled its more sequestered course
parallel with the broad flood of exhibition work, owes its vitality to
a profound and convinced reverence for tradition. For the illustration
of that tradition I can find no more convenient source than the work of
Jean François Millet, and for a typical monument of its disregard, the
more fair to cite in that it is respectable in achievement, the work
of Bastien-Lepage affords me a timely and perhaps the most appropriate
example possible.
What, then, is the main difference? How did Millet work, and with what
objects? How did Lepage work, and what is it he strove to attain?
To begin with, Millet, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, had seen
his picture happen somewhere in nature. Its treatment generally
involved complex difficulties of suggestion of movement, or at least
of energy, to say nothing of those created by the variety of lighting
and atmospheric effect; the management of sunlight, of twilight, of
the lighting of interiors. All these elements he was enabled, by
means of a highly-trained artistic memory, to retain and render in
the summary method which we call inspiration, and which has nothing
in common with the piecemeal and futile copying of nature of a later
school. Dealing with materials in their essential nature living and
fleeting, his execution was in the main separated from his observation.
His observation was thus uninterrupted by the exigencies of execution,
and his execution untrammelled by the fortuitous inconveniences
incident on the moment of observation, and undisturbed, moreover, by
the kaleidoscopic shifting of the pictorial elements which bewilder
and mislead the mere _plein-airiste_. He did not say to the woman at
the washtub, “Do as if you were washing, and stay like that for me
for four or five hours a day, while I paint a picture from you.” Or
to the reaper, “Stay like that with the scythe drawn back, pretending
to reap.” “_La nature ne pose pas_”――to quote his own words. He knew
that if figures in movement were to be painted so as to be convincing,
it must be by a process of cumulative observation. This truth one of
the greatest heirs of the great school of 1830 has not been slow to
understand, and it is to its further and more exquisite development
that we owe the profoundly learned and beautiful work of Degas. His
field of observation is shifted from the life of the village and
the labour of the plains, to the sordid toil of the greenroom and
the hectic mysteries of stage illumination; but the artistic problem
remains the same, and its solution is worked out on the same lines.
Millet observed and observed again, making little in the way of studies
on the spot, a note sometimes of movement on a cigarette-paper. And
when he held his picture he knew it, and the execution was the singing
of a song learned by heart, and not the painful performance in public
of a meritorious feat of sight-reading. The result of this was that his
work has style――style which is at the same time in the best traditions
and strictly personal. No one has been more imitated than Millet, and
no one is more inimitable.
Holding in the hollow of his hand the secrets of light and life and
movement, the secrets of form and colour, learnt from the visible
world, he was equipped, like the great masters of old, for the
treatment of purely fanciful themes; and, when he painted a reluctant
nymph being dragged through the woods by a turbulent crowd of cupids,
he was as much at home as when he rendered the recurring monotone of
the peasant’s daily labours. My quarrel with the gentlemen who escape
from the laws of anatomy and perspective by painting full-length
portraits of souls, and family groups of abstractions, is, not that
they paint these things, but that they have not first learnt something
about the laws which govern the incidence of light on concrete bodies.
It might be well if they would discover whether they can paint their
brother, whom they have seen, before they elect to flounder perennially
in Olympus.
Let it also be noted here that the work of Jean François Millet was,
with scarcely an exception, free from a preoccupation with the walls of
an exhibition. The scale of his pictures and their key were dictated by
the artistic requirements of the subject, and not by the necessities or
allurements of what I may call for brevity, competitive painting. It
was never a question with him of the preparation within twelve months
of an annual poster, which was to occupy so much linespace, and send
the betting on him up or down as the case might be.
What, on the other hand, were the essential ideas of Bastien-Lepage’s
work? To begin with, he was a painter of exhibition pictures, of what
are called in Paris _machins_. He was an inveterate _salonnier_,
with the ideals and the limitations of the typical uncultured Paris
art-student, the _fort_ of his _atelier_. _Faire vrai_ is the sum
and aim of his intention. Realists he and his like have been jauntily
labelled by the hasty journalist. But the truth in their work is truth
of unessentials, and their elaborate and unlovely realities serve only
to cover themes that are profoundly unreal.
To begin with, it was thought to be meritorious, and conducive of
truth, and in every way manly and estimable, for the painter to take
a large canvas out into the fields and to execute his final picture
in hourly _tête-à-tête_ with nature. This practice at once restricts
the limits of your possible choice of subject. The sun moves too
quickly. You find that grey weather is more possible, and end by never
working in any other. Grouping with any approach to naturalness is
found to be almost impossible. You find that you had better confine
your compositions to a single figure. And with a little experience the
photo-realist finds, if he be wise, that that single figure had better
be in repose. Even then your picture necessarily becomes a portrait of
a model posing by the hour. The illumination, instead of being that of
a north light in Newman Street, is, it is true, the illumination of
a Cornish or a Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant in his own
natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what is
he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks it.
That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise again.
The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the sack, and
never a breath of air circulates around that painful rendering in the
flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a real peasant. What
are the truths you have gained, a handful of tiresome little facts,
compared to the truths you have lost? To life and spirit, light and air?
The tacit assumption on which the theory and practice of the so-called
realist rests, is that if photography, instead of yielding little
proofs on paper in black and white, could yield large proofs on
canvas in oils, the occupation of the painter would be gone. What
a radical misconception of the nature and function of art this is,
becomes evident when we paraphrase the same idea and apply it in the
region of letters. Few would be found to defend the proposition that
a stenographic report of events and words as they occurred would
constitute the highest literary treatment of a given scene in life. A
page of description is distinguished as literature from reporting when
the resources of language are employed with cunning and mastery to
convey, not a catalogue of facts, but the result of the observation
of these facts on an individual temperament. Its value depends on the
degree of mastery with which the language is used, and on the delicacy
and range of the writer’s personality, and in no wise on the accuracy
of the facts recorded.
Richter says somewhere that no artist can replace another, and not
even the same artist himself, at different periods of his life. One
characteristic of the work of the modern photo-realist in painting is
that almost any one of them could have painted a portion of the work of
any other without making any appreciable discord of execution apparent.
They are all equipped from the first at the studios with a _technique_
which serves them equally, once for all. It is known as _la bonne
peinture_. It differs from style in being a thing you can acquire, and
I believe it is even maintained, not only to be perfectible, but to
have been, on several occasions, perfected.
Nothing is more frequently brought home to the student of modern
painting than the truth that the work of the _salonnier_, the picture,
that is, that is born of the exhibition and for the exhibition, wears
its air of novelty and interest strictly for the season. If he meet it
again in a house, or in the holocaust of a retrospective exhibition,
its date is stamped upon it with the accuracy of a page of _Le follet_
or _Le moniteur de la mode_. And whether a picture be asserted at the
date of its exhibition as advanced, or the contrary, as daring or dull,
if it is born of the exhibition, it dies with the exhibition, and the
brood to which it gives birth hold their life on the same tenure.
It was impossible, on seeing Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc at the
Paris Exhibition of 1890, after a lapse of some years since its first
appearance, to resist the conclusion that it falls inevitably under the
heading of “_machin_.” In the composition, or in what modern critics
prefer to call the placing, there is neither grace nor strangeness. The
drawing is without profundity or novelty of observation. The colour is
uninteresting, and the execution is the usual mechanically obtrusive
square-brush-work of the Parisian schools of art. Dramatically, the
leading figure is not impressive or even lucid; and the helpless
introduction of the visionary figures behind the back of the rapt maid
completes the conviction that it was an error of judgment for a painter
with the limitations of Lepage to burden a touching and sanctified
legend with commonplace illustration. A faithful copy of so strange
and interesting a subject as Mme. Sarah Bernhardt cannot fail to be a
valuable document, but Lepage’s portrait has surely missed altogether
the delicacy of the exquisitely spiritual profile. The _format_ of the
little panel portrait of the Prince of Wales evoked in the press the
obviously invited reference to Clouet. The ready writer cannot have
looked at so much as a single pearl in the necklace of one of Clouet’s
princesses.
To judge fairly of an artist, however, we must follow him on to his own
ground. In his portrait of his grandfather, at the same exhibition,
it was quite possible to see Lepage at his best as a workmanlike and
photographic copyist of a figure in repose. It was at the same time
possible to turn from this picture straight to Manet’s _fifre_, and
to his _bon bock_, and thus to measure the gulf that separates a
meritorious workman from an inspired executant of the first rank. No
useful end can be gained by obscuring this fact, and if, in league
with the modern gigantic conspiracy of toleration, we are to speak
of Bastien-Lepage as a master, what terms are left us for Keene and
Millet, for Whistler and Degas?
WALTER SICKERT.
_Chelsea, 1891._
A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
[Illustration:
In Possession of her Mother.] [Engraved by C. State.
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
(_From a Portrait by Herself._)]
A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
The brilliant sunshine of a glorious October morning poured through the
tall windows of Marie Bashkirtseff’s studio on my last visit to the Rue
de Prony. This mellow light bathing her canvasses brought them out in
fullest relief, and I had never had such a favourable opportunity of
judging her work in its entirety. I was struck more than ever by the
vigour and vitality of these studies, sketches, pastels, and pictures
struck off at a white heat of mental production between the ages of
seventeen and four and twenty. Hanging above the gallery which runs
along one side of the wall were her first studies from life, which
astonished Julian so much that he pronounced them phenomenal; here were
her numerous sketches showing the sincerity of her efforts to be true
to nature; and her finished pictures full of individuality and power.
As the eye rested on these portraits where the keynote of character
had been so unmistakably struck, on these bits of city life in their
shabbier aspects, on these Paris street children with faces so
prematurely sharpened or saddened, you became at once aware that this
artist was a naturalist of the naturalists. Her chief object was to
seize life――to seize the flying impression as she happened to see
it; to render it with unflinching faithfulness to nature without any
attempt at arrangement, composition, or beauty of treatment.
“Oh, to catch nature!” This is the cry of Marie Bashkirtseff, as it is
the cry of Impressionism, as it was perhaps the cry of the primitive
artist who with much labour and wrestling of the spirit modelled the
first rude image of the lioness or painted the first likeness of an
archer, bow in hand. Not quite the same, perhaps. For these early
workers in clay or pigments saw nature with the eyes of children――those
visionary eyes to which the leaves of the trees, the flowers of the
field, the dogs and horses and cats and cows are as much part of the
interminable fairy-tale in which they live as the more fantastic
figures in more orthodox stories. For these primitive artists looked
at the world with the eyes of children, and though they looked
at her with clear, wide-open eyes, they could not help seeing her
symbolically, seeing the analogy between men and beasts, between beasts
and plants, between the articulate and inarticulate phases of nature,
so that whatever they produced not only stood for itself but for a
host of subtly apprehended affinities linked together by imaginative
insight into the mystery of things. And in tracing the development
of this primitive style of art a little further, in following it to
its legitimate development into the loftiest forms of Greek art, we
cannot help seeing that it was the consummate flower of this archaic
symbolism. With this difference, that while Egyptian, Assyrian, and
Indian artists invented the most grotesque and fantastic forms to
express the wonder and mystery of the world, the Greeks tried to find
outward expression for that archetype of beauty which has as yet only
existed in the mind of man.
And nature, plus the mind of man, plus that master faculty which
refuses and chooses, and which reaches its highest results by
making fresh combinations from what is widely diffused in nature:
that, surely, is the secret of art. This faculty of selection and
concentration, within the limits of some more or less conventional
form, seems to belong to every manifestation of art, which can never
under any circumstances be a simple reproduction of nature. How can
it, indeed, since, as Blake so pithily puts it: “A fool sees not the
same tree a wise man sees”? And we question whether any two people,
any two painters would ever see precisely the same thing――the same
tree, however hard they might try to free themselves from the bias
of personality; or would succeed in giving us an identical pictorial
representation of any subject whatsoever. For the artist’s own mind,
unlike a photographic apparatus, would always intervene so as to force
him to see life through the medium of his temperament. Indeed, will
not the circulation of the artist’s blood, the pitch of his nerves,
the thoughts he has thought and the emotions he has felt from the
beginning of consciousness, have to be taken into account as factors
in any individual painter’s picture of a tree or any other object? For
this reason a picture can never be truly likened to a window opening on
nature unless, indeed, it be a stained-glass window. On the contrary,
the artist for the time being lends us his eyes to see nature with. And
as the eyes of a Titian or a Turner saw combinations and harmonies of
tones and tints whose magnificent effect entirely escapes the eyes of
ordinary mortals, it is much wiser to accept their interpretation than
to go into hair-splitting discussions as to the precise exactitude of
their copy to a reality which is eternally changing.
Take only the painters of the realistic modern French school――can
we not tell at a glance, in going through the Louvre, whether it is
nature according to Corot, to Rousseau, or to Millet that we are
looking at? For whether the realists like it or no, the world will
reflect itself in their brains according to the laws of their peculiar
individuality, and the preciousness of all art expression seems
precisely to consist in this rare flavour which the artist’s self
impresses on nature outside himself. This priceless quality which we
call style is as inseparable from the genuine artist as the shape of
his nose. It clearly differentiates a peasant woman by Millet from any
ordinary peasant woman we may chance on in a field, and is as marked
in his simple pourtrayal of rustic subjects as in the most sublime
compositions by Michael Angelo.
These few inadequate remarks may not be entirely out of place when
speaking of the æsthetic views of our day; or of an artist who is
peculiarly representative of them. For the new scientific spirit which
has revolutionized our views of nature, has also penetrated the realms
of literature and art, and impelled artists to attempt a perfectly
unprejudiced reproduction of life. For the present this has led them
to a grim realism, which loves to dwell exclusively on the material
side of existence, scouting the romantic and ideal as figments of
man’s fancy to be relegated into the limbo of unrealistics along with
the dragons and griffins of the world’s childhood. The same movement
which has produced the extremely powerful but one-sided novels of De
Goncourt, Zola, and Guy de Maupassant may also be studied in the works
of the realistic French painters in their almost fierce insistence on
what is natural even to the pitch of repulsiveness.
Impressionism was in the air when Marie Bashkirtseff entered on her
artistic career in 1877. It would amount to a truism to give any fresh
account of her birth, parentage, and early life at this time. All the
world has read her famous journal. All the world knows that she was
born at Poltava, in the south of Russia, in 1860. That her parents
were separated after a few years of marriage; that her mother and aunt
came to the West of Europe with the two children――Paul and Marie, and
a cousin Dina; that they travelled about after the fashion of their
kind, afterwards settling down first at Nice, and later on in Paris.
As Marie often bitterly laments, her education was carried on in a
rather desultory fashion. But her faculty for acquiring knowledge
was so surprising, her intellect so extraordinary, that she became
an admirable linguist, a skilled musician, a splendid singer, a fair
mathematician with a rapidity that seemed to amount to intuition. Her
powers of observation had probably been much developed by all that
she saw and heard on their travels. She had an early opportunity of
seeing the master works of all time in Florence and Rome, and was an
indefatigable frequenter of museums and picture galleries. At the
age of fifteen, her judgment was already so independent that she had
the audacity to speak of the “cardboard pictures of Raphael” and the
“stupid if glorious Venuses of Titian.” She had never as yet lived in
Paris, mixed with artists, or heard the talk of the studios, yet in
many respects she seems already a full-fledged art student, with the
last phrase of the hour on her lips. Already she sought in pictures
that scrupulous resemblance to nature which was her chief aim when
she herself took to painting. But though deeply interested in art, it
did not at that time occupy the chief place in her thoughts. Music
attracted her more, and the desire to be a singer was her greatest
ambition. In fact, she laboured under the disadvantage of an _embarras
de richesses_ in regard to her natural gifts, and for several years she
found it difficult to make a choice.
However, one day in October, 1877, there entered M. Julian’s now
famous life-school in the Passage des Panoramas two very tall ladies,
all in black, accompanied by a young girl dressed in pure white from
head to foot, as if she were a lily of the field. This strange and
striking trio made quite a sensation. M. Julian himself, with his happy
picturesqueness of phrase in describing the first appearance of Marie
Bashkirtseff in his studio, spoke of her as _une blancheur_――something
bright and startling, which seemed to have little in common with the
severe work-a-day routine of studio life. Nevertheless, she had come,
accompanied by her mother and aunt, to be entered as a pupil; and in
the letter which she brought him from an eminent physician, he found
this curt word by way of introduction: “I have sent you a monster.”
All this was very unlike the usual order of things. But it was there
and then settled that Marie Bashkirtseff was to attend his classes, and
every morning found her duly at place, working away as if her life
depended upon it. At first, her master took this wish to paint for
the caprice of a spoilt child, which would soon pass when confronted
by the difficulties of execution. Before long, however, he recognized
his mistake; he felt that she was a power; that there was something
which lifted her out of the ranks and placed her apart among her fellow
pupils. Something which gave to her first efforts, however crude and
tentative, a vigour and spontaneity which were truly astonishing. And
he discovered, too, that so far from playing at art she was in deadly
earnest. Instead of being less regular in her attendance than the other
art students, she flung herself into her work with the passionate zeal
of an enthusiast. Morning, noon, and night found her either at her
easel, or else taking private lessons in anatomy and modelling, or
haunting sales and picture galleries――always, on the alert to improve
herself. Indeed, Julian found her a little monster of energy, of
talent, of ambition, of concentrated will. Whatever she took into her
head to do, she did and accomplished the seemingly impossible.
In a surprisingly short time she had mastered the elements of art, and
her studies from the nude were considered wonderful by her masters.
By the intensity of her attention and fever of work joined to her
native endowment she managed after only two years of study to produce a
picture of a woman reading, which was hung in the Salon. It evinces all
her characteristic qualities――masterly vigour of drawing, and a vivid
and striking manner of painting human faces. Her extreme sensitiveness
to impressions gave her a peculiar facility for catching likenesses and
bringing out the salient and personal traits in her models.
After some few years devoted to painting in the studio, Marie
Bashkirtseff began to feel very unhappy about her work as a colourist.
It fell so far below her own standard as to plunge her into fits of
despair. In the midst of this profound dissatisfaction, in the autumn
of 1881, she went to Spain, and there she seemed to awaken to a new
sense――for the first time to awaken to the full, glorious significance
of colour in the painter’s sense.
In reading those pages of her journal which describe the picturesque
Moorish palaces, the gloomy Gothic cathedrals, the dark, crooked
streets with their groups of gipsies and the treasures of art stored
away in museums and churches, it seems as if they were illumined by a
mellower light than the rest of the book. Velasquez and Goya opened
her eyes, and she “raised herself on tiptoe,” as she says, to master
the secret of their unique method. Day after day she steeped herself
in those glowing canvasses, and on her return to Paris she began to
reap the benefit of this enthusiastic absorption. Soon afterwards she
painted The Umbrella, in which she made a great leap forward.
Her method and style of painting now placed her definitely in the
same school to which Bastien-Lepage belonged, or of which he was the
master. It was the school which said: “We will let the open air into
our pictures. Let us paint light just as it is out of doors, not the
artificial studio effects from north aspects and skylights.” The _Plein
Air_ movement of the painters was precisely the same as that which Zola
inaugurated in literature. It was nature taking the citadel of art by
storm――at least, what these particular men and artists understood by
nature.
At the head of this school stood Bastien-Lepage, the young painter
who so early became what the French call _Chef d’École_. His pictures
taken fresh from the country――his Haymakers, and Harvesters, and Potato
Gatherers, and Rustic Lovers filled Marie Bashkirtseff with boundless
delight. “He is not only a painter,” she says, “he is a poet, a
psychologist, a metaphysician, a creator.” His perfect imitation of
nature, the quality which ranked highest in her judgment, was beyond
all praise in her eyes.
Many of the French critics called her the pupil of Bastien. But she had
of course never been his actual pupil, having been trained in quite a
different school, and it always gave her much annoyance to be called
so. But in spite of the striking contrast between the origin and early
associations of these two young painters they were singularly alike in
their love of realism, their early fame, and premature end.
Look, on the one hand, at Marie, this offspring of Tartar nobles, with
savage instincts lying like half-tamed wild beasts in the background
of her consciousness. She was descended from owners of lands and
serfs, and the instinct of command, the pride of power, the love of
all things splendid became part of her inheritance. She was the idol
of two women, her “two mothers,” who, in her master Julian’s incisive
phrase, “would have burned down Paris to please her, or had themselves
cut into a thousand pieces to satisfy one of her caprices.” Nature had
endowed her with such lavish gifts that her very talents turned into
a stumbling-block, threatening to divert her efforts into too many
channels. Music, literature, sculpture, the stage, were successively
the goal of her ambition; and each one of these arts was in her eyes
only the means to an end――the one burning desire for fame. However,
as the deep meaning of work, of the artist’s simple and disinterested
absorption in what he is fashioning, became familiar to her she began
to forget herself more and more in the things she did. Her devotion
to art, her love and delight in it, grew steadily with her increasing
mastery over its technical difficulties. She says truly: “Outside of my
art, which I commenced from caprice and ambition, which I continued out
of vanity, and which I now worship; outside of this passion――for it is
a passion――there is nothing.”
Little by little――with many outcries, it is true, and kickings against
the traces――Marie Bashkirtseff had begun to discover that there is
no royal road to art. That to him only is given who is ready, also,
to give up much. She found out that however great her natural gift
might be, it would remain a diamond in the rough, unless she regularly
applied herself to the task of acquiring technical mastery. After
some years’ intense but interrupted application she would have
admitted that no work of first-rate talent can be produced without the
expenditure of as much courage, perseverance, and self-control as might
have made a hero. For, as Schumann truly says: “The laws of morality
are also the laws of art.”
What a widely different lot was that of Bastien-Lepage. He, the son of
French peasant proprietors, came of people who are perhaps the most
thrifty and industrious class in existence: people punctual to their
daily task as the sun himself in his rising and down-going; clinging to
the soil they till with the tenacity of rocks and trees; working much
and wanting little, asking no joy of life except rest.
Just as Marie’s parents lived apart in painful disunion, those of
Bastien were united by the tenderest family affection. The shrewd,
caustic, clear-headed old grandfather――a sort of village Nestor――the
thoughtful father, the devoted mother, were helpful influences which
unobtrusively helped in developing Bastien’s faculties. He began to
draw as naturally as another child learns to talk; and his father,
noticing his aptitude, very wisely set him to copy some object or other
every evening from the age of five. Country life, with its primitive
simplicity and its regular succession of daily tasks, sank deeply if
unconsciously into the little fellow’s mind: it sank as the seed does,
without question or self-analysis, to hide its time in silence and
shoot up strong and vigorous when the appointed hour had come. Bastien
probably never asked himself whether he should be a painter, a poet, a
psychologist, or metaphysician. He became one very likely because he
could not help painting. And I suppose he never asked himself whether
in his pursuit of art he was sacrificing something that might be more
precious. But he was not dazzled and enchanted by the sight of Italian
cities and Carnival festivities and ball-room flirtations. Toil and
hardship were the rule of life around him, and in his love for art he
was willing to undergo any amount of it. Instead of rushing in express
trains from Berlin to St. Petersburg and from St. Petersburg to Paris,
he remained stationary in his low-roofed country home, seeing the same
round of occupation going on year after year: the labourer following
the plough; the haymakers in the mowing grass with the light beating on
their sunburnt faces, or stretched in the shade of full-leaved trees
in the luxury of repose; reapers reaping the orange-coloured corn;
summer evening in the village, with the cattle coming home to their
stalls, as their shadows deepen on the bright green meadows. Such were
the impressions which graved themselves always afresh on the lad’s
receptive memory, to turn themselves one day into those pictures of
rural life which may truly be called “the harvest of a quiet eye.”
Though Bastien-Lepage’s lot――who had to make his living by turning
post-office clerk while studying at the École des Beaux Arts――may
appear so much harder than that of Marie Bashkirtseff, it was in
reality more favourable to the development of an artist. For, according
to Goethe, “Character is formed by contact with the world, while talent
develops in seclusion.” Marie Bashkirtseff, with her penetrating
intelligence, was quite aware of this. She, for whom nothing was
ever sufficiently fine, would sometimes quite seriously envy her
fellow-students’ their poverty, their humble way of life, their cares
and hard work shared in common in a Paris garret. A stern necessity
seemed to lend dignity to their art work, while hers was so often
patted on the back by her fashionable friends as the pastime of a
charming young _Mondaine_.
I was particularly fortunate this year in finding in Marie
Bashkirtseff’s studio a picture by Bastien-Lepage, L’Annociation au
Bergers, which he painted in 1875 to compete for the Prix de Rome.
It was interesting to compare these two artists in their likeness
in unlikeness. The same uncompromising realism applied in different
ways, and the same power of catching expression and pinning it down
as you would a butterfly without losing any of the delicate shades.
This picture of a “far-off, divine event” is treated by Bastien-Lepage
in a surprisingly naturalistic way, and yet without sacrificing that
mystical element which sometimes belongs to the simplest aspects of
life. Here is none of that conventional treatment of religious subjects
against which Marie rebelled in those “old dusky pictures in the
Louvre.” Here was real atmosphere, there were real shepherds, rough,
homely, unsophisticated men, brown as the soil; and yet, in spite of
the reality, this picture gave you a sense of unfamiliar awe. Sitting
there in the twilight before the fire lit in the open air, they seem
to have been more or less overcome by drowsiness. The first, an old
man, an expressive, rugged figure, has bowed his head in adoration and
is kneeling before the angel whose sudden apparition has taken the
shepherds by surprise. Bewildered and amazed the second leans forward
with gaping mouth and outstretched hands as if to assure himself by
touch of the reality of what he sees. Hardly able to rouse himself
from sleep the third one sits huddled together in the distance. It is
as true as can be to simple shepherd life. The apparition itself has
nothing supernatural. It might be purely human with only the angel
light of tenderness beaming from the face. The grace of the figure
is suggestive of the “eternally feminine” as the celestial messenger
shows the shepherds the way to Bethlehem visible in the distance by the
luminous haze encircling it like a halo.
This picture with its effect of gloaming light is an idyl of shepherd
life. It breathes that simplicity of nature which invests the calling
of the herdsman, the ploughman, the mower, the reaper, with the poetry
of primitive existence, I shall never forget the impression once
produced on me by a Highland shepherd and his flock slowly winding
along the solitary road of an upland moor. The long white line of the
wavering sheep with that sombre figure of the solitary shepherd was
thrown into relief by the smouldering purple of the barren hillsides.
It was a scene which seemed to carry one back to remote ages. Even so
in the mythic East might the flocks and their shepherds have passed
along similar roads in the vast silence of deepening twilight. This
same feeling of nearness given to what is dimly remote appeared to me
one of the chief attractions of Bastien-Lepage’s work.
As Bastien by the country, so is Marie Bashkirtseff inspired by the
town. The boulevards and squares of Paris became to her what the hay
and harvest-fields had been to Lepage. Her pictures were imbued with
the atmosphere of Paris――those delicate, pearly greys which strike
one as its keynote of colour. She caught that misty light which you
see clinging to masses of architecture as you look from one of the
bridges along the blue-grey Seine to the picturesque old Cité with
the iron-grey towers of Notre Dame outlined against the clouded azure
above. Effects of roofs and clusters of buildings half seen through the
confusing haze of early morning; drab-coloured walls enlivened by black
and white placards and the flashy tints of rival advertisements; narrow
streets with masses of shadow emphasizing the value of light on wall
and pavement――these became the dominant note in Marie Bashkirtseff’s
work as a colourist.
Her subjects, too, are usually taken from the every-day life of the
French capital as you may meet it round every street corner. The
blouse of the artisan, the cap of the milliner, the rags of the
gamin appeared better adapted to Marie Bashkirtseff for pictorial
treatment than the thousand freaks of fashion with which society
annually delights to astonish the world. As a painter she preferred the
Boulevard de Batignolles or Avenue Wagram to the Champs Élysées and the
Bois de Boulogne. The faces of weary people sitting on public benches
casually seen in passing or caught sight of across the counter of a
shop had hints and suggestions of meaning which she missed in the sleek
features of the swells whom she met in the drawing-rooms of her friends.
So it happens that instead of painting the pretty, neat, carefully
brushed children marshalled by stately _bonnes_ in the Parc Monceaux,
she chose in preference the unkempt ragamuffins running wild in the
streets. She found more scope there for the exercise of that scrupulous
and powerful realism which was the secret of her strength. In the Jean
and Jacques, The Girl with the Umbrella, Le Meeting, she has vividly
rendered some of the incidents in the town life of children. The
faces of these little boys and girls, so pathetic in their premature
maturity, in their shrewd or sad or pathetic outlook on the world, are
extraordinary in their truth to life. With most of the childhood
taken out of their childish features, they look at us, if we consider
them well, with eyes where experience has already taken the place
of innocence――the experience taught them by the teeming streets,
those books of the poor, for ever unfolding fresh pages before their
inquisitive eyes.
[Illustration: A MEETING.
(_By Marie Bashkirtseff._)]
They cannot be called beautiful, these pictures, in the sense that
fine forms, nobility of outline, charm of expression are beautiful.
But they are interesting, vivid, quick with life. Take that little
piteous figure clutching the big, gamp-like umbrella, while she draws
her battered shawl more closely around her. With what a look of stolid,
inarticulate suffering she seems looking through the rain on the life
that is dark and dreary as the prospect before her. You see the hair
actually blown back from the forehead, and one mesh has got caught
round the handle of the umbrella as she meets the force of the wind
with tight-shut lips――a humble subject, but remarkable for the solidity
of its handling. Indeed there is a Holbeinesque quality in the vigour
of the drawing and the truth of the pose.
Jean et Jacques, the picture of two boys, of seven and four years
old, is an equally striking work. They stand so naturally on their
legs, these little fellows, their attitudes are so unstudied, their
expressions so admirably true to life. The eldest has already that
responsible look which the offspring of the poor acquire so early. With
his cap at the back of his head, a shabby umbrella tucked under his
right arm, he steps along in his clumsy boots with the resolute air of
a little man; the handkerchief tied cravat-wise, but all on one side,
the leaf stuck between the lips as a make-believe cigar, show Marie
Bashkirtseff’s close observation of the ways of his kind. With one
hand he grips the unwilling Jacques, dawdling obstinately on his way
to school, while with the other in his pocket he pensively fingers the
seductive marbles that invite him to play.
Le Meeting, her most important work, is a fine, powerfully painted,
vividly realized picture. Just a group of Paris gamins met in council
at a street corner, discussing the use to which a piece of string is
to be applied, with the excitement of stockbrokers buying and selling
shares on the steps of the Bourse. It is a triumph of realism. The
faces speak, the limbs are informed with life; it seems as if any
moment their legs and arms might begin to move quite naturally.
There is nothing conventional about these figures, so fresh in their
unstudied attitudes and gestures. These faces, bathed in the pale
air of a Paris back street, breathe quite as much of town life as
the discoloured walls and palings in the background. How pert, how
Parisian, how wide-awake they are, with their thin, sharp-edged
features and their gimlet eyes which allow nothing to escape them.
The biggest of the six, with his back to the spectator, is eloquently
holding forth to his intently listening comrades, even as he may one
day hold forth to quite a different kind of audience, when, after due
graduation in the philosophy of rags, he shall begin to practise the
lessons which the stony streets have taught him. Quite a different
lesson from that which Bastien-Lepage’s shepherds have learnt on the
hillsides of the wooded Meuse. The execution of this picture, hung
in a place of honour at the Luxembourg, is extremely good. There is
a genuine feeling for colour in the grey and sombre tones in harmony
with the nature of the subject. The open-air effect is happily caught,
and the faces stand out in brilliant light. The powerful realism,
scrupulous technique, and excellence of the painting, make a great
success of Le Meeting, and it is a performance which at once secured a
wide recognition for Marie Bashkirtseff, not only in artistic circles,
but from the general public.
Marie loved to recall Balzac’s questionable definition that the genius
of observation is almost the whole of human genius. It was natural
it should please her, since it was the most conspicuous of her many
gifts. As we might expect, therefore, she was especially successful
as a portrait painter, for she has a knack of catching her sitter’s
likeness with the bloom of nature yet fresh upon it. She seems to me
equally good in her men and women and children, the contrast of many
of her heads showing the range and variety of her power. Her portraits
are noticeable for that absence of family likeness which is often seen
even in the works of great painters, as if the artist had some ideal
head before his mind’s eye to which he was unconsciously trying to
assimilate the faces of his models.
Marie Bashkirtseff’s impressionable nature was a safeguard in that
respect. All her likenesses are singularly individual, and we realize
their character at a glance. Look, for example, at her portrait of a
Parisian swell, in irreproachable evening dress and white kid gloves,
sucking his silver-headed cane, with a simper that shows all his
white teeth, and then at the head and bust of the Spanish convict,
painted from life at the prison in Granada. Compare that embodiment
of fashionable vacuity with this face, whose brute-like eyes haunt
you with their sadly stunted look. What observation is shown in the
painting of those heavily-bulging lips, which express weakness rather
than wickedness of disposition――in those coarse hands engaged in the
feminine occupation of knitting a blue and white stocking. Again,
take those three heads expressive of different kinds of laughter. And
nothing is perhaps more difficult than to paint laughing or singing
faces: the open mouth being apt to give a foolish, strained, and
unnatural look to the face. But Marie Bashkirtseff evinces great skill
in painting a natural effect of laughter. The little smiling boneless
baby face is a delightfully realistic study of an infant, and equally
good is that of the pert little girl whose mouth bubbles over with a
child’s artless laugh. Much more knowing is the wicked laughter of
the young woman with the stylish hat and bunch of violets fastened
coquettishly in her sealskin cape. She surely must be laughing at
somebody――at some lovelorn swain, whose antics make all her features
twitch with amusement.
One of Marie Bashkirtseff’s first portraits, and an admirably painted
one, is that of her cousin Dina. It was her first work exhibited at the
Salon, and shows a young woman with her elbow resting on a table and
her face in her hand. Her loose gown of light blue damask, white muslin
fichu and soft, pale golden hair harmonize very happily with the green
plush of the table-cover, the white of the book, and the flowers beside
the bare arm. The delicate flesh tints of a buxom blonde are admirable
in tone, and the face extremely characteristic. It has the unmistakable
Tartar type in the low brow, slightly oblique eyes, flattened nose,
and broad lips with their expression of sensuous indolence. Here there
is nothing of that vivacious charm which is so marked an element in
the portrait of Mdlle. de Canrobert. This sketchy portrait looks as
if the painting had been done at the first stroke. The round hat, the
well-fitting clothes, the plants in the background seem dashed in with
the facility of a master. The face sparkles at us from the canvas as if
about to utter a witticism. This cleverly-painted figure is all life,
all movement, and in its style of treatment and freedom of pose is
suggestive of Mr. Whistler’s manner.
Her portrait of herself, palette in hand, painted in the last year of
her life, is extremely interesting. It is a three-quarters length,
and she is standing looking straight in front of her with a harp a
little behind to the left. She is done in that becoming black studio
uniform with the broad white frills and jabot which has been so often
described, and the gown fits as if moulded on the body. Her deep blonde
hair, thickly coiled on the top of the head, ends in a fringe over her
forehead. Her features are more refined and spiritual than we know
them from the photographs. It seems as if the invisible presence of
death had already laid a finger on her fair body and fined it down to a
greater delicacy and had given that expression of questioning pathos to
the profound wide-open eyes.
It is not possible here to enumerate all her portraits, admirable as
many of them are. Her likenesses of Mdlle. Armandine, of a Parisienne,
of Prince Bojidar Karegeorgevitch, of Georgeth, and of Mdme. Paul
Bashkirtseff, have the same convincing air of intense realism which she
adored in Bastien-Lepage’s works of that kind. The enthusiastic words,
full of light and colour, in which she describes his portraits, might
in many an instance be applied to her own without exaggeration.
Not to be overlooked are some of her landscapes and townscapes, if
one might be allowed to coin such a word. There is an extremely good
little picture of a portion of a street near the Rue Ampère. A plot
of fenced-in building ground gives it a dismally, unfinished look. The
houses and walls behind, seen through a pale morning mist, are bathed
in an atmosphere, whose grey tones are delicately touched with pink.
Two heavy cart-horses are standing at rest in the bit of waste ground,
in the centre of which a flame of fire shoots up from a rubbish heap――a
spot of brilliant colour amid the general dimness. This is just a
finely felt, finely rendered impression. As characteristic and full
of atmosphere is the study of a landscape in autumn――a long, straight
avenue, with the look of trees about to lose their foliage. Wan clouds,
waning light, withering leaves blending their tones in a harmony of
grey in grey. The mournfulness of the misty avenue is like a feeling in
the air. A mood of nature has been caught which corresponds to a mood
of the human mind. The sense of desolation, decay, and impending death
seems to breathe from the canvas, as from some actual presence, which
though unseen, is none the less there. I cannot help thinking that
the artist’s own state must, by some subtle process, have literally
passed into her canvas. How intensely Marie Bashkirtseff had identified
herself with this picture is shown by Julian’s remark on meeting her
just after she had painted it. Without knowing the subject she had been
at work upon, he exclaimed, “What have you been doing with yourself?
Your eyes look full of the mists of autumn.”
I have only picked out the most important of her works here, but there
are many more――bold designs, original little sketches, studies of all
kinds, with always a characteristic touch of expression.
There is that dare-devil sketch of a nude model sitting astride on a
chair looking at the skeleton, between the lips of which she has stuck
a pipe while waiting for the artist. The sardonic humour conveyed by
the contrast of this fair young woman in her fresh exuberance of form
facing the skeleton with a challenging attitude is an unparalleled
piece of audacity for a young girl to have painted. It is especially
good, too, as an arrangement of colour, and shows perhaps more
originality of invention than anything else this artist did. The Fisher
with Rod and Line is an interesting study of a brown Niçois with the
deep blue sea-water below. And last, not least, there is the unfinished
sketch for the picture of The Street by which she was so completely
engrossed only a few weeks before her death. The background of houses,
the bench with the people sitting back to back in various attitudes
expressive of weariness, destitution, or despair――one with his head
hidden by his arm leaning on the back of the seat, another with crossed
legs staring straight before him with the look of one for whom there
is no more private resting-place than this――all these half-finished
figures, even when only consisting of a few scratches, are as true to
every-day life as can be. But when all the preliminary studies for this
characteristic picture were done, when the canvas had been placed and
all was ready, the artist found but one thing missing, and that, alas,
was herself!
Though all the work accomplished by Marie Bashkirtseff is strictly
modern and realistic, the dream of her last years was to paint a great
religious picture. The subject was to be the two Maries mourning
beside the tomb of Christ. She imagined these women not as they had
hitherto been represented by the old masters, but as forlorn outcasts,
wayworn and weary, the “Louise Michels” of their time, shunned of all
pharisaic, respectable folk. They were to embody the utmost depth of
love and grief. Her descriptions of this picture that was to be, as
given in her journal, are highly suggestive and poetical. The figures
of these women――one standing, the other in a sitting posture――would
have shown in their pose and attitude different phases of sorrow. The
woman on the ground abandoning herself to the violence of unrestrained
mourning; the other as rigid as a statue, as if in confirmation of
Mrs. Browning’s line, “I tell you hopeless grief is passionless.” Only
a few inadequate sketches, however, are left of this pictorial vision
in which the crescent moon was described as floating in an ensanguined
sunset sky above a waste dark with the coming night.
This word-picture never took shape in line and colour. But it haunts
you with a suggestion of lofty possibilities to be reached by Marie
Bashkirtseff as an artist had she only lived to carry out her
conceptions. And as the poet declares “songs unheard” to be sweeter
than any that we may ever hear, so it is with this unpainted picture
as compared to the painted ones; for, remarkable as her work is, it is
to a great extent remarkable as having been done by so young a girl
after only a few years of study. It is as a promise even more than a
performance that it claims our admiration.
As we already know, Marie Bashkirtseff belongs to the modern French
school of naturalists, more particularly to that branch of it of which
Bastien-Lepage was the most representative man. But her work is not
exclusively French. There is in it also a pronounced Russian element.
There is a marked race-likeness between her work and that of other
eminent Russian painters and novelists. Matthew Arnold’s definition of
the Russian nature in his article on Count Leo Tolstoï might with very
little alteration be applied to Marie Bashkirtseff herself. “Russian
nature,” he says, “as it shows itself in the Russian novel, seems
marked by an extreme sensitiveness, a consciousness most quick and
acute, both for what the man’s self is experiencing and also for what
others in contact with him are thinking and feeling. He finds relief to
his sensitiveness in letting his perceptions have perfectly free play,
and in recording their reports with perfect fidelity. The sincereness
with which the reports are given has even something childlike and
touching….”
This was ever Marie Bashkirtseff’s paramount aim, both as a painter and
writer, to make a perfectly faithful report of nature, of human nature
and what is external to it――to give a living picture of gesture and
manner as well as of thought and feeling――in short, to produce human
documents. Her mind and temperament, happily for her, were in touch
with the times. For the specially Russian alertness to impressions and
its genius for recording them has also become the mark of the latest
phase of European art. And Marie Bashkirtseff took to it as if to the
manner born (as indeed she was), rather than in imitation of the modern
French style, or of Bastien-Lepage in particular.
In realizing this dominant quality, one wonders how it had fared
with this impressionable artist if, instead of being surrounded by
Parisian influences, she had lived in her native land, the South of
Russia. Supposing she, with her intense receptivity, had imbibed those
primitive aspects of life still to be found amid the remoteness of
the Steppe? Faithful to what lay around her, Marie has painted dreary
houses blurred by mist, waifs and strays of the Paris boulevards,
unlovely children in unlovely rags. The critic who blames her
preference for what is ugly and sordid does not do so without cause.
But when he asks why she does not paint the elegances by which she
is surrounded, she replies on her part, “Where, then, shall I find
any movement, any of that savage and primitive liberty, any true
expression?”
That natural movement and primitive liberty she could certainly not
expect in Paris night-life. But in the Ukraine she might have found
it without admixture of ugliness; she might have been inspired by its
coquettish villages gleaming white amid orchards; by the robust and
handsome peasantry still clad in their picturesque national garb.
What splendid models a realist like herself would have had to paint
from in those well-shaped peasant girls, whose movements had never
been hampered by anything more artificial in the way of clothes than
an embroidered chemise and a petticoat reaching no further than the
ankles. Here she would still have met something of the “savage and
primitive liberty” which her soul longed for preserved in many an
old Cossack custom and village rite. Still more so in the aspects of
primitive nature――in the boundless expanse of the Steppe, “that green
and golden ocean” as Gogol calls it, “variegated by an infinite variety
of iridescent tints.” What a virgin soil for an artist in love with
nature! What new types! What splendid opportunities for the expression
of beauty in form and colour! Perhaps it is idle to speculate on
such possibilities, but it seems as if Marie Bashkirtseff might have
produced work of a much higher order had her astonishing gift for
recording impressions found impressions more pictorially attractive to
record; had she lived in an atmosphere bathed in an ampler light, amid
a population still partial to the display of brilliant colours in their
dress. However that might have been will never be known now.
There is a passage in her Journal where, speaking of the sacrifices
which art exacts, she says she has given up more for it than Benvenuto
Cellini when he burn his costly furniture; indeed, it was her life
itself which she gave. To quote her own striking words: “Work is a
fatiguing process, dreaded yet loved by fine and powerful natures, who
frequently succumb to it. For if the artist does not fling himself into
his work as unhesitatingly as Curtius did into the chasm at his feet,
or as the soldier leaps into the breach, and if when there he does not
toil with the energy of the miner beneath the earth, if, in short, he
stays to consider difficulties instead of overcoming them like those
lovers of fairyland who triumph over ever fresh difficulties to win
their princesses, his work will remain unfinished and die still-born in
the studio. The general public may not understand, but those who are
of us will find in these lines a stimulating lesson, a comfort, and an
encouragement.”
Marie Bashkirtseff’s work, unfortunately for us, was left unfinished,
but it has not died still-born in the studio. It is astonishingly
alive. More alive to-day than on the day it was painted, and resembles
that plant of basil which throve so luxuriantly, rooted in a dead man’s
brain. For the energies of her glowing vitality are now alive in her
pictures.
I subjoin here a complete list of Marie Bashkirtseff’s works:――
1. Portrait de Mdlle. Bashkirtseff.
2. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.
3. Portrait de Mme. P. B.
4. Jeune femme lisant.
5. Le Meeting.
6. Fleurs.――_Salon_, 1884.
7. Fleurs.
8. Les trois Rires.
9. Tête (Étude).
10. Profil.
11. Nature morte.
12. Intérieur d’une chaumière à Nice.
13. Portrait du Général Pélikan.
14. Georgette.
15. Portrait de Mdlle. Bashkirtseff.
16. Esquisse.
17. Tête d’enfant.
18. Coco.
19. Étude des mains.
20. Esquisse.
21. Marine.
22. Monsieur et Madame (Étude).
23. L’Atelier, Julian.
24. Tête (Étude).
25. Tête d’enfant.
26. Le Soir.
27. Ophélie (Étude).
28. Paysan de Poltava (Étude).
29. Tête (Étude).
30. Grand-Père malade.
31. Copie.
32. Étude.
33. La Rue.
34. Avril.
35. Portrait du Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch.
36. Le Parapluie.
37. Jean et Jacques.
38. Étude d’enfant.
39. Paysage d’Automne.
40. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.
41. Étude de femme.
42. Portrait de Jacques Rendouin.
43. Jeune Garçon (Étude).
44. Tête de femme.
45. Étude.
46. Coin de Rue.
47. Portrait de Mdlle. de Canrobert.
48. Une Vague.
49. Étude de mains.
50. Paysage à Sèvres.
51. Paysage à Sèvres.
52. Paysage.
53. Portrait de son frère.
54. Portrait de femme.
55. Étude de Main.
56. Vielle femme (Étude).
57. Tête (Étude).
58. Esquisse.
59. Mendiant (Étude).
60. Projet du tableau: “Les Saintes Femmes.”
61. Les Saintes Femmes (Esquisse)
62. Mendiant de Grenade.
63. Une Dame.
64. Parisienne.――_Salon_, 1883.
65. Tête de Forçat.
66. Irma (Étude).
67. Paysage de Nice.
68. Copie d’après Velasquez.
69. Chiffonière.
70. La Rue Brémontier.
71. Étude de mains.
72. Gommeux.
73. La Bohémienne.
74. Intérieur d’une boutique au Mont Dore.
75. Portrait de Mdlle. C.
76. Intérieur de bric-à-brac à Madrid.
77. Écluse à Asnières.
78. Étude d’enfant.
79. Étude (Modèle).
80. Modèle.
81. Pêcheur à Nice.
82. Esquisse.
83. Au bord de la mer.
84. A la fenêtre.
85. Thérèse.
86. Wanka.
87. Paysage à Nice.
88. Étude.
89. Étude.
90. Marine.
91. Bébé.
92. Marine.
93. Étude pour le tableau: “Les Saintes Femmes.”
94. Convalescente.
95. Mendiant Italien.
96. Portrait.
97. Étude.
98. Portrait de Mme. Gredelue.
99. Portrait de Mme. Nachet.
100. Japonaise.
[Illustration: MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
(_After a Photograph._)]
_PASTELS._
101. Portrait de Louis de Canrobert.
102. Portrait de Mdlle. de Villevielle.
103. Portrait de Mdlle. Eral.
104. Portrait de Mdlle. Babanine.
105. Portrait de Mdlle. Armandine.
106. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.
_DESSINS._
107. Portrait.
108. Tête.
109. Soirée Intime.
110. Projet de tableau.
111. Coco, Chèvres.
112. Un Monsieur.
113. Une Dame.
114. Le Sommeil.
115. Les Cartes.
116. La Lecture.
117. La Cigarette.
118. Un Monsieur et une Dame.
119. Une Dame.
120. Une Dame.
121. Une Tête.
122. Mimi.
123. Marie.
124. Rosalie.
125. L’Orateur.
126. Ophélie.
127. Les Enfants.
128. Bojidar.
129. L’Orpheline.
130. Amélie.
131. Devant la Cheminée.
132. Madame B.
133. Une partie.
134. Salon d’essayage chez Doucet.
135. Carnaval de Nice.
136. Tête.
137. Tête.
138. Mademoiselle D.
139. Les Cartes.
140. Étude.
141. à 144. Études d’après le Modèle.
_SCULPTURE._
1. La Douleur de Nausicaa.
2. Femme appuyée.
3. Le Bras.
4. Petit Garçon.
5. Une Femme.
MATHILDE BLIND.
The Gresham Press,
UNWIN BROTHERS,
CHILWORTH AND LONDON.
Transcriber’s Note:
This book was written in a period when many words had not become
standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple spelling
variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been
left unchanged. Obsolete words, alternative spellings, and misspelled
words were not corrected.
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. One footnote was moved to the end of the chapter. Obvious
printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially printed
letters and punctuation, were corrected. Final stops missing at the
end of sentences and abbreviations were added.
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