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.