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.