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.