I. The Song of Springtime Frontispiece
Museum at Verdun
II. Portrait of M. Wallon 14
Museum of the Louvre
III. The Artist's Mother 24
Collection of E. Bastien-Lepage
IV. The Hay-making 34
Museum of the Luxembourg
V. Portrait of M. Hayem 40
Museum of the Luxembourg
VI. Portrait of M. X---- 50
Museum at Verdun
VII. The Little Boatman 60
Collection of E. Bastien-Lepage
VIII. The Artist's Uncle 70
Museum at Verdun
[Illustration]
There are certain beings who bear the stamp of the divine seal and are
preordained to receive the highest favours within the gift of glory;
they are fated to pass through life like those brilliant meteors which
are seen to flash across the heavens and disappear in the same instant.
Bastien-Lepage was one of these meteors. But while the others leave
behind them only a luminous trail that swiftly vanishes, this rare
artist, snatched so prematurely from the field of art, traced his
passage in a furrow of dazzling splendour, the radiance of which has not
even yet begun to fade.
Bastien-Lepage was a painter in the noblest acceptation of the term; it
may even be asserted that he would have exercised considerable influence
upon the art of his epoch if Destiny had not stupidly mown down the
sturdy flower of his genius in the very hour of its brightest
blossoming. Born into this world with a solid tenacity of purpose which
seems to be a special gift of the soil of Lorraine to her sons and
daughters, he had a clear-cut and unalterable conception of what
painting should be. His mind was receptive only of simple ideas, his eye
perceived only visions that were tangible, such as were unobscured by
any shadow or any artifice. He was the apostle of clearness, both in
conception and in execution. Every time that he tried experimentally to
turn aside from his chosen path, he ceased to be himself, he fell
below his own standards. What interested him most of all, in the life of
this world which he observed so eagerly, as though he had a presentiment
of his early end, was nature's most precise and most uncompromising
manifestation, both in line and in relief; namely, the peasant and the
environment which frames him. Having deliberately chosen such models,
Bastien-Lepage could not pretend to be the painter of the Beautiful, nor
did he ever become so. He did not even adorn his subjects with that
special sort of idealism with which Millet embellished even his most
uncouth rustic types, a slightly melancholy idealism obtained by a
sombre toning down of colour, which Bastien-Lepage held in horror. His
peasants stand out boldly, in the crude glare of flamboyant noontide,
under a summer sun that refuses to leave hidden any part of their
ugliness or their defects. He painted them as he saw them, with the
searching rays striking them full in the face; and his brush was a
stranger to any compromise, intolerant of even the slightest
betterment, in the course of the literal transference of his model to
his canvas. It made no difference how handsome or how homely a given
subject might be, Bastien-Lepage would always render him precisely as
nature, in a grudging or indulgent mood, had made him,--that is to say,
truly and sincerely, with a precision that would be almost photographic,
if the minuteness of his technique were not ennobled by the high quality
of his art. With such gifts, Bastien-Lepage was foreordained to be a
marvellous interpreter of rural life, and such he was in the highest
degree; in like manner, he could not fail to become a portrait painter
of the first order, and it was in this capacity also that he enrolled
himself among the most interesting and vigorous artists of our epoch.
[Illustration: