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.H'l.KS HASTIKN-LEPAGK

JULES BASTIEN LEPAGE
AND HIS ART. A MEMOIR,
BY ANDRE THEURIET

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

ILLUSTRATED WITH REPRO-
DUCTIONS OF BASTIEN-
LEPAGE'S AND MARIE BASH-
KIRTSEFF'S WORKS

LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN,
PATERNOSTER SOU.ARE. MDCCCXCII.

553

BaqT»>4

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Jules Bastien-Lepage and his Art: A Memoir. By Andre
Theuriet . . . . . . .11

J i i es Bastihn-Lepage as Artist. By George Clausen,

A.k.YV.S 107

Modern Realism in Painting. By Walter Sickert, N.E.A.C. 129

A Study of Marie Bashkirtseff. By Mathilde Blind . 145

971

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Jules Bastien-Lepage. After a Portrait by Himself.

Frontispiece

Grandfather Lepage. By Jpi.es Bastien-Lepage

The Communicant. By Jules Bastien-Lepage

The Haykikli). By Jules Bastien-Lepage

Sarah Bernhardt. By Jules Bastien-Lepage

Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices. By Jules Bastien
Lepage ......

The Beggar. By Jules Bastien-Lepage

Father Jacques, the Woodman. By Jules Bastien-Lepage

Sketch for Father Jacques. By Jules Bastien-Lepage

The Inn. By Jiu.es Bastien-Lepage

Bas-relief Portrait of Bastien-Lepage. By Augustus
Saint-Gaudi xs .....

The Little Sweep. By Jules Bastien-Lepage

Marie Bashkirtseff. From a Portrait by Herself

A Meeting. By Marie Bashkirtseff .

Marie Bashkirtseff. From a Photograph

PAGE
2 5

43
5i

55
61

7i

75
101

no

132

l6q
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 Montmedy.

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 fortifica-
tions 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

14 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE.

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 earthen-
ware, 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 contemporaiy 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 Dam-
villers, 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 male 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

16 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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 exact-
ness of detail, which were the ruling motives of his
Life ;is an artist.

In thus urging liim to draw every day, the father
had no idea of making his son a painter. At that

AS MAN .I.Y/r. I//77.ST. 17

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, ho 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 lie 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.

2

18 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

His habit was to express any thought that possessed
him by a drawing. He already attempted to repro-
duce 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, Ave 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
;it the time of the spring digging, when the leafless

AS MAX AND ARTIST. L9

trees spread their shadows over borders adorned only
by the precocious blossoms of the primrose and the
oown 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 mathe-
matics.

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 essen-
tially military, whose remarkable men have all been
generals or marshals; but this fancy, in which lie
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 Dam-
villers. While recognizing his son's skill as a
draughtsman. Father Bastien persisted in declaring
that painting was not a career — nothing certain, a

20 JULES BASTIEX-LEPAGE

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 per-
sistency 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 depart-
ment, 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 Ecole 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 18G7.

He divided his time between his postal duties and

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 21

his studies iii the School. Tliis could only be done
under greal 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
tli is together scarcely furnished him with bed and
board.

But Jules was endowed with a robust faith, a

22 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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
Eicard, 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, com-
manded 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

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 23

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 debutant 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 antephelic milk (hit
antephelique) 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
AYatteau's landscapes, with groups of young women
dressed in modern style approaching a fountain,
where Cupids were gambolling.

24 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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, dis-
appointed 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

(ii;\\|.| u in i I .,
By Jit', /: I |

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 27

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 butter-
flies' 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
cli arm, 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.

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
retrousse ; the white forked beard spread itself over
an ancient vest of the colour of dead leaves ; the

28 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE.

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 Dam-
villers 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 lew 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 deco-
rator 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 youngman, plainly dressed, small,
fair, and muscular ; his pale face, with its square

30 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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 roguish-
ness 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 friend-
ship.

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 Hong of Spring), and orders were
I x'ginning to come in.

In 1875 Rastien-Lepage reappeared in the Salon
with La Communiante (The Communicant) and the
portrait of M. Simon Hayem, two excellent works

The Communicant.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage,

is MAN AND ABTIST. 33

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
Comnmniante.

This young girl's simple awkward bearing, as she
stands out from a creamy background, with all the
stiffness of her starched white veil, naively opening
ber 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 it' il 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.

3

34 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

After a few minutes Bastien's picture was sur-
rounded, 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 miracu-
lous 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 oil" the Prix de Borne

AS MAN AND A11T1ST. 35

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
Slate.

For a moment Bastien-Lepage was troubled and
discouraged by this decision. Not that he felt him-
self 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 main-
tain him at Paris. That he did not soon forget this
un merited 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
tin1 devotion of the masters who direct the school.
Bui 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

36 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 37

developed in him the critical faculty. His repug-
nance to factitious and conventional art had driven
liim 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 Borne.
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 ;i 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 idiot' 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 witli
irregular and even vulgar features; — this is human

38 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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 Reville, 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 Repos-
ing), La Prairie de Damvillers (The Meadow at Dam-
villers), the two sketches for the picture Les Foins
(The Hay), Les Jardins au Print emps (Gardens in
Spring), Les Foins Murs (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 grand-
father, so cheerful in spite of his eighty years; of the
mother, so full of life, so devoted, the best mother that

AS MAN AND ABTIST. 39

one could wish for an artist. 1 saw what a strong
and tender union existed between the members of
I his 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 Ave
arrived at our resting-place in an evening, after a day
of walking in the rain, he almost deafened us with
scraps of cafi -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.

Ho wanted to tell the whole story of country life
in a series of large pictures: hay-making, harvest,

40 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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 Kustiques (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.* 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 cVocuvre of
Ligier liichier, before beginning his Christ in the Tomb.

Shortly a tt onwards he gave an account of this visit
in a letter to his friend Baude, the engraver:
See La Chanson dujardinier in Sous Bois.

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 41

" Our too short walkthrough theArgonne lias been
\< -it interesting, and ended with a visit to the grand
chef <r<inrre 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
1 01 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
in ustor. 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
Be If- 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."

42 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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 Eue 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

He already complained of stomach trouble, and
lived by rule. We used to smoke a cigarette, and then

m

■

i i

<*

-■hi -i'-

-■«—J--^— -'■—'- i »- «— — t-ir-. -»r B— ■ ■ ...J7

The IKmii i d.
By Jules Bastien- Lepage.

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 45

be began fco work. He painted with a feverish
rapidity, and with a certainty of band quite astonish-
ing. 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.

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 Hay-
field), 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. . . .

46 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

" 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

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 47

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 wannly discussed.

In the hall where it was placed, among the pictures
which surrounded it, this picture gave an extra-
ordinary sensation of light and of the open air. It
had the effect of a large open window.

The meadow, half mown, went hack 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 conven-
tional peasant whose hands look as if they had
never touched a tool, hut 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,
bo powerfully rendered, had a considerable influence
on the painting of the day. From the time of this

48 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE.

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.

III.

BASTIEN did not allow himself to be spoiled
by success, but continued liis life of assiduous
labour and conscientious research. He di-
vided 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
is;'). 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, Eecolte 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 ;m
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

4

50 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

Harvest, less discussed than The Hay, made a deep
impression on the mass of the public.

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 lie received his first important gains he took
I lis 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, f lightened 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
liois and the principal boulevards, expecting thai lit1

i5 A~-

Sakaii Bernhardt.
By J tiles Bastien-Lepage.

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 53

would be delighted ; but in litis direction his zealous
cllmts failed utterly. The old man remained in-
different 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 deafen-
ing, and lie went hack to Damvillers determined that
they should never take him away again.

A iter 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 ribhon 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.

\\\> idea was to paint Jeanne in the little orchard
at Domremy 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

54: JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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 haying 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 objec-
1 ion had impressed him, and he wanted to show his
work to his friends before it was quite finished.

"Come," lie wrote to me, about the 15th of
September, " F. is quite disposed to come ; he really
wants <n conio to Damvillers. Everything will go

Joan of Abc Listening io mi. Voices.

By Jules Bust icit-Li page.

AS MAN AND ABTIST. 57

beautifully. You will see my picture of .Jeanne d'Arc
well advanced, and somebody coming from I);u,is will
do nit' no harm. . . ."

■• It' 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
Bketched, 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
ili«i portrait of M. Andrieux. It did not produce all
the effect that Jules expected. The picture had its
enthusiastic admirers, but also passionate detrac-
tors. The critics attacked first the want of air
and of perspective; then, as I had foreseen, the
voiceSi represented by three symbolical personages,
too slightly indicated to be understood, and yet too

58 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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 Bastion'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 now mortification.

The two years that followed were fruitful in
vidimus work of different kinds : Les Bles Murs
(Ripe Corn), the London Docks, The Thames, Le
Laysan .illant voir son champ ' le dimanche (The

AS max AM) Airnsr. .v.»

Peasant Going to Look at his Field on Sunday), La
Petite Fille allant a l'ecole (The little Girl Going to
School) ; the portraits of M. and of Mme. Goudchaux,
of Mdlle. Damain, of Albert Wolff, and of Mine. \Y..
La Marcbande do Flours (The Flower Girl); last of
all, the two great pictures Le Mendiant (The Beggar),
and Pere Jacques, exhibited in the Salon in 1881
and 1882.

II is 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 hack
to Damvillers full of a project for painting the Death
of Ophelia.

II 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 a Lessive (The
Washing Kitchen) ; all the detail requires much time.
Besides I have begun and already advanced a largo
picture of Ophelia. I think it will be well to do
Bomething as a contrast to my Mendiant (Beggar).
It is to be a really touching Ophelia, as heartrending
as it* one actually saw her.

60 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

" 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

)H';ls;ll)tS.

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

The 13Et;<;.u:.
By Jules JBastien-Lepage.

AS MAX AND ARTIST. 63

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 liim,
and be 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 unim-
portant sketches.

Italy and the splendours of Venetian art had left
liim cold. In this world of history and mythology he
was not at borne He sickened for his meadows and
bis 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 soirees occupied him almost entirely. We
saw but little of him. But these successes, and the
adulation lavished upon him in Parisian drawings
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 intimate1 friends.

We were both members and even founders of an

64 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

Alsace-Lorraine dinner, the Diner 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 hoat had heen engaged, which was to take the
diners to the bridge at Suresnes, and to bring them
hack at night. When we arrived at the landing-
stage, a Mind 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 Diner 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

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 65

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
lasl visit to England had heen very prosperous ; his
head was full of fine projects for pictures. "It is
good to be alive ! " he exclaimed, as he played with
;i flower he had plucked from the bushes. . . . On
tli.' way back he gave himself up to all sorts of
roguish fun. Mounted on the prow of the boat he
Bang, with his full voice, the Chant du Depart.

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 over-
haul, shouting a loud hurrah!

The fusee mounted slowly into the night, shower-
ing (low 11 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.

66 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

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 Pere Lachaise ; he spent a
week in the little room at Yille d'Avray, painting
the picture representing the statesman on his death-
bed. 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 Feb-
ruary, in ' the little garden where he had already
painted the portrait of his grandfather. In March

AS MAN AM) ARTIST. 67

the work was well advanced, and lie invited me to
go and see it at Damvillers before it was sent to the
Si Ion. I left Verdun on a freezing afternoon, ac-
companied by the old friend who had walked with
as through the Argonne, and we were set down at
Damvillers at night-fall. Oar hosts were awaiting
us on the doorstep ; the grandfather, always the
same, with his Greek cap and white beard, and his
Socratic lace; the painter and the little mother, with
smiles and outstretched hands.

Around them Basse the spaniel, and Golo and
Barbeau were bounding and barking joyfully to give
u> a welcome.

The next morning, early, we went up to the
studio to see L'Amour au Village, which was to go
to Paris that day.

The subject of this picture is well known ; it is
one of the most real and the most original that the
artist has painted: the daylight is waning; at the
gate of a village garden, a lad of twenty, who has
been binding sheaves, and still wears his leggings of
Leather, is talking, leaning against a fence, with a
young -irl, who turns her back to the spectator;
what ho is saying to her may be guessed from his
awkward manner of twisting his stiff fingers, and

68 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

also from the attentive but embarrassed air of the
young girl. One feels that they are not saying
much, but that love exhales from every word, so
difficult to speak. Around them summer spreads
the robust verdure of the country. The fruit trees
stand lightly silhouetted against a background of
kitchen herbs, gently sloping up to the houses of
the village, whose brown roofs and pointed spire
come against the soft and misty twilight sky. All
this, bathed in a subdued light, is marvellously
painted. The young girl, her short plaits falling
over her shoulders, her neck bent, the form of her
back, so young, so delicate, is an exquisite figure ;
the face of the young harvester, so energetic, so
ingenuously in love, is charming in expression ; the
treatment of the hands, the bust, the dress, is
masterly. There is in this picture a true and
manly poetry, which is strengthening and refreshing,
like the odour of ripe corn.

Bastien was glad to have completed this difficult
work, and his satisfaction enabled him to bear with
cheerfulness the pains in his loins, and the digestive
troubles which were becoming more and more
frequent.

It was long since I had seen him so gay and unre-

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 69

served. This happy holiday-week spent at Dam-
villers was the pendant to the walk through the
Argonne. The sullen sky, continually blotted out by
chilling showers, allowed us few walks in the open
air ; but every morning we went up to the studio.
Jules dismissed the little sweep, who was sitting for a
picture that he had on hand, and, taking a sheet of
copper, he made us pose for an etching. I have this
plate before me now ; it did not bite well. It repre-
sents the whole family, including the grandfather,
milking a circle round our friend F., who, standing up
;ind very grave, is reciting one of La Fontaine's
tallies. While I look at it, I seem to hear again the
merry laughter which filled the studio, alternating
with the rattling of the hail against the windows.

In the evening, after supper, we placed ourselves
at the round table, and played at Diable or Nain rouge.
Jules, throwing away his best cards, always managed
to let the grandfather win ; and when the octo-
genarian, quite proud of his success, took up the
stakes, he would pat him on the shoulder, and cry
out, with a merry twinkle of the eye, "Ha! what a
lucky man ! he will ruin us all ! " and the laughter
began again.

We did not go to bed till well on into the night,

70 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

after having roused the little domestic, Felix, who
had dozed off in the kitchen while copying a portrait
of Victor Hugo.

In the intervals of sunshine, Bastien-Lepage took
us to visit " his fields." He had a peasant's love for
the land, and he employed his gains in adding to the
paternal domains. He had just bought an orchard
situated in the old moat of the town, which had
belonged to an unfrocked priest. He intended to
build a chalet there, where his friends, painters or
poets, might come and live in their holidays and
dream at their ease. He explained to us with the
delight of a child, his plans for the future. When,
with his portraits, he should have gained an inde-
pendent fortune, he would execute at his ease and in
freedom, the grand rustic pictures that he dreamed
of, and among others, that burial of a young village
girl, for which he had already made many notes and
sketched the principal details. We only took one
long walk, and it was in those woods of Reville which
form the background of his landscape, Ripe Corn.
The weather had remained cold, and there were still
patches of snow on the backs of the grey hills, though
the sun shone sometimes. Except a few downy buds
on the willows, the woods were without verdure ; but

Fatheb Jacques, the Woodman.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

AS MAN AND ABTIST. 73

the ploughed fields had a beautiful brown colour ; tbe
larks sang; the tops of the beeches began to have
that reddish hue, which indicates the rising of the
sap, the swelling buds. " Look," said Bastien to me,
when we were in the forest, " my Wood-cutter in the
last Salon was reproached with want of air. . . . Well,
here we are in a wood, and the trees are still without
leaves, yet look how little the figure stands out from
the undergrowth of trees and bushes. There is a
great deal of routine and prejudice in that criticism
of the perspective of my pictures done in the open
air. It is the criticism of people who have never
looked at a landscape, except crouching down or
sitting. When you sit down to paint, you naturally
see things quite differently from the way you see
them standing. Sitting, you see more sky and you
have more objects — trees, houses, or living beings
standing out sharply in silhouette against the sky,
which gives the illusion of a greater distance and
a wider atmosphere. But it is not in this way that
we generally see a landscape. We look at it stand-
ing, and then the objects, animate or inanimate, that
arc nearest to us, instead of being seen in profile
against the sky, are silhouetted upon the trees, or
upon the fields, grey or green. They stand out with

74. JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

less clearness, and sometimes mix with the back-
ground, which then, instead of going away, seems
to come forward. We need to renew the education
of our eye, by looking with sincerity upon tilings
as they are in nature, instead of holding as absolute
truths the theories and conventions of the school and
the studio."

All the afternoon passed thus happily away in
friendly talking and slow smoking along the wooded
paths. The blackbirds were whistling ; from time to
time we discovered a flower in the open spaces, which
showed that spring was surely coming ; a wood
anemone, with its milk-white petals, or a branch of
mezereon, with its pink flowers opening before the
leaves, and its Japanese appearance.

Jules stopped and gathered a stem of black hele-
bore. " All, how beautiful ! " he said. " How one
would like to make a careful study of these leaves —
so decorative, so finely cut — of dark green, almost
brown, out of which comes this pale green stem, with
its clusters of greenish flowers edged with pale rose-
colour. What lovely forms, and what a variety of
tender shades ! This is what they ought to give as a
copy to the children in the schools of design, instead
of the eternal and wearisome Diana de Gabies!"

-A,* - V

U-,

"V

&

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 77

We did not return till evening, when there was a
magnificent sunset, which crimsoned the smoky roofs
of Reville, and made the light clouds scattered over
the sky look like a strew of rose-leaves.

The next day was the last of my visit. We took
leave after long embraces, making fine plans for
returning to Damvillers for the September holiday,
while the grandfather, shaking his hoary head, mur-
mured sadly, " Who knows if you will find me
here ?" And Barbeau, and Golo, and Basse bounded
and barked round the omnibus that took us away
with tremendous noise.

I did not see Jules again till a month later, at the
opening of the Salon, in front of L' Amour an Village,
which had a full success. He was ill, and complained
of pains in the loins more acute than formerly ; then
lie suddenly disappeared mysteriously. The door of
the atelier in Rue Legendre was closed, and visitors
were told that the painter was gone into the country.
We did not know till later that he had hidden him-
self, to undergo a sharp and painful treatment, and
that, scarcely convalescent, he had gone to breathe
the sea air in Brittany, at Concarneau. He spent
his days there, in a boat, painting the sea, and
forgetting his pains by the help of work.

78 JULES BASTIEX-LEPAGE

"When he came to see us again in October, he
appeared to be recovered ; but digestion was still a
difficulty, and his habitual gaiety was, as it were,
clouded over. His character was changed. There
were no more of those trenchant affirmations of which
his comrades sometimes complained ; he was indul-
gent, and even affectionate, much more than was
usual with him. He did not stay long in Paris, but
hastened back to Damvillers, to get seriously to
work again. He arrived in time to be present during
his grandfather's last moments. The old man
departed loaded with years ; but, though surely
expected, his death was a painful blow to the sur-
vivors. " The house," he wrote, " is empty more
than one could believe. Only a few days ago, at any
moment, a door would open and the grandfather
appeared, without motive, without object, without
speaking or being spoken to ; but the sight of his
kindly face was enough. One kissed him, and he
went away, as before, without object, sitting down,
going into the garden, coming back, and always with
the same kind face. I remember now that he has
been growing paler for some days. . . . No, you can
have no idea how empty the house is. I cannot get
accustomed to it. We often talk of him with my

AS MAN AND ABTIST. 79

mother — with what pleasure ! It is not that we
weep for him with tears ; we reason about it, and we
appear resigned and courageous; but behind all that
there is a sad feeling of want, of absolute loss. It is
the touch one wants. ... I have been ill with it,
and am so still. I have not been able to work;
to-day, for the first time, I went out to shoot larks;
the weather was fine, the sun was shining, and the
country beautiful. This did me good."

Indeed, the health of the artist, far from improving,
was becoming daily more uncertain. "It is the
digestive tube," said he, "that is out of order."
Nevertheless, he worked with his usual courage, over-
looking his Concarneau studies, planning a new pic-
ture, and only stopping to go out shooting or to
saunter through the woods.

" Our evening walks are the best part of the day "
—(letter to Ch. Bande, Nov. 27, 1883)— " that is,
Prom the setting of the sun till it is dark. Every
uight the spectacle is new. The programme changes
with the weather. Sometimes the subject of the
piece is dramatic; the next day it is soft and charm-
ing; and, with the constant rain, our inundated
meadows reflect the brilliant scenery. Can you
imagine all our pleasure, in your dingy Paris ? The

80 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

next morning is too slow in coming ; one wants so
much to put clown last night's impression ; so that I
am making a heap of sketches, and find much plea-
sure in it. Then — here is a surprise ! — I have a new
picture on the way. . . . Guess ! . . . The subject is
a wounded deer taken by the dogs. The scene is,
naturally, the wood, and the wood at this time of
year : only a few leaves of brilliant yellow against the
marvellous rosy -grey of the branches of the trees ;
then the violet tone of the dead leaves flattened on
the soil, and a few green briars round a pool under a
willow. The place was not chosen by me. The
deer chose it himself to die there ; for I killed him
the other day, and he went there to be taken, a
hundred yards from where he was shot — just opposite
the spot where Minet killed a hare. It was then
that this picture struck me. Afterwards I sketched
in and reconstructed the scene ; and, as I wanted a
model, I killed a second deer. ..."

Here is a characteristic symptom : he who for-
merly only wrote the shortest of notes, scribbled in
haste at the corner of a table, now sent long, expan-
sive letters to his friends, showing signs of redoubled
love of life, of art, of the beauties of nature : — ■

" My dear friends" (Jan. 3, 1884), "if you could

AS MAN AND ARTIST. 81

see your poor Bastien, with this heap of letters to
write you would certainly say: ' How lie is changed !'
... It my wishes had the extraordinary virtue of
fulfilling themselves, I should like that you, whom
I love, should profit by it, and that 1884 should
bring health and happiness and success to all. My
mother's wishes are the same as mine, and she re-
joices that we are to see you soon. Ah, my dear
friend, what pleasure you would have in living upon
the woods, as I feed upon them now almost everyday,
along with Golo and Barbeau ! What marvellously
delicate tones ! and the fading out of daylight, and
when the evening comes on ! The woods are exqui-
sitely line, with their tall, dry, ivory-coloured grasses ;
they are so tall in some of the open spaces that they
caress your face as you pass, and the cool touch upon
your face and hands, hot with walking, is a delicious
sensation. I rarely leave the woods before night, for
I must send up a few salutes to the wild ducks with
my gun before going in. One hears them coming
from a great distance, but it is difficult to judge if
they are far away or near, from the peculiarity of
their erv ; so they have often passed, and are already
a good way off, before one finds out that one has

missed them.

6

82 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE.

" This is to let you know that I am not a stay-at-
home, as you might think. I find it important to
walk a good deal, for in this way I regain a little
health. My stomach was heginning to get wrong,
hut it is better ! . . ."

A few days after this I met a mutual friend of
ours. " Well," he said to me, " our poor Bastien is
very ill. . . . They think it is hopeless."

V.

INDEED lie was very ill. The treatment lie had
undergone in the summer of 1883 had not heen
successful. The pains in the loins and howels
had returned with greater violence at the end of
January.

By the advice of his friend Dr. Watelet he again
went to Paris in March to consult Dr. Potain. With-
out any illusions as to the fatal nature of the disease,
the doctors thought that a change of air and of
climate might, morally and physically, produce good
results. They advised that he should go to Algiers
for two months.

Bastien himself, seized with that longing desire
tor movement which often torments invalids who are
seriously ill, had experienced a wish to go to the
south. It was decided that he should start as soon
as |>o>sil>l(> for Algiers, accompanied by his servant
Felix, and by his mother.

84 JULES BASTIEN -LEPAGE

On the morning of the day fixed for starting I
went to the Rue Legendre to say good-bye to him.
He had gone to complete some arrangements with
his picture-agent. I found only Mme. Bastien, who
was occupied in filling the trunks which were scat-
tered about the studio. The brave little mother,
who had never left her home at Damvillers for more
than a few days together, was preparing for this long
journey to an unknown country quite simply, with an
apparent tranquillity, as if she were going as far as
Saint Cloud.

The hope that the change might be good for Jules
was enough to give her courage to face this upsetting
of all her old ways of living. Sometimes only, when
she was carefully arranging the linen in the trunk,
the tears would rise to her eyes and a quiver of pain
pass over her lips.

Upon the chairs and against the walls were jxlaced
the recent studies brought from Damvillers, and one
felt one's heart tighten at the sight of these last
works, where nature had been observed and rendered
with incomparable skill, penetration, and charm.
They were The Frog-fisher, The Little Sweep, The
Washerwoman, The Pond at Damvillers, The Edge
of the Wood, The Church at Concarneau, and that

AS MAX AND AllTIST. 85

study of A Midnight Sky so original, with the clouds
scattered over an azure that was almost black.

At this moment Bastien-Lepage came in, and on
seeing him walk with difficulty into the studio, I was
distressed at the change that had come over him.
His thin face had become quite bloodless ; the skin
of his neck was peeling off; his hair seemed to have
no life in it. His questioning blue eyes expressed an
anguish and weariness that was heartrending. "Well,"
said he, after having embraced me, "are you looking
at my studies ? When people see them at George
Petit's, they will say that the little Bastien could
paint the landscape too, when he gave himself the
trouble ! . . ." When I said to him that his long
absence that morning had made his mother anxious,
he added quite low, and taking me into one corner of
the studio : " When one is going to take a journey
so far, one must prepare for it. ... I wanted to
put my affairs in order. Poor little mother ! " he
went on ; " she has been very brave ! Down at home
she used to spend whole nights in rubbing me for my
rheumatism, and I let her think that it did me good.
. . . Now, perhaps the Algiers sun will cure me."
Hope alternated with discouragement. During break-
last he recovered a little. I was to go to Spain at

86 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

the end of March ; he urged me to change my plans,
and to join him in Algiers. We ended with a half-
promise. We tried hard to appear gay; we clinked
our glasses as we drank to the hope of soon meeting
again, hut each one felt his throat tighten, and turned
away to hide from the other his moist eyes. I left
the house in the Rue Legendre with my heart full of
the saddest forebodings.

Jules left the same night for Marseilles. They
had a good crossing, and his first letter, dated March
17th, was reassuring : —

" My dear friends, there is no getting out of it ;
you must come, for a thousand reasons. Here it is
just like May in Paris. Everything is in flower ;
and such flowers! — heaps of them, everywhere.
The verdure is delicate and grey, and, like patches,
always well placed ; the outlines picturesque and
new, the trees very dark green. And in the midst
of all this, upon the roads, the Arabs, of astonish-
ing calmness and splendid carriage, under their
earth - coloured and ash-coloured draperies — raga-
muffins as proud as kings, and better dressed than
Talma. They all wear a shirt and burnous ; not one
is like another. It seems as if each one, at every
moment, gave expression to his thought by his

AS MAN AND AL'TI ST. 87

manner of draping his garment. It is once more
the triumph of blank truth over arrangement and
conventionalism. The sorrowful man, whether he
wishes it or not, in spite of himself is not draped
like the gay. Beauty, I am convinced, is exact
truth: neither to the right nor to the left, hut in
the middle.

" All this without telling you we have hired a
house at Mustapha Superior. It is half Arah, half
French, quite white, with an interior court opening
into a garden twice as big as that at Damvillers.
The garden is full of orange-trees, and lemon, almond,
fig, and a quantity of other trees, the names of which
I do not know and probably never shall. All this,
not trim like a park, hut left a little a hi diable, like
our garden at home. Then we have the right of
walking in a magnificent garden which joins ours.
We have at least eight rooms ; in counting them I
thought of you. In all directions round this house
there are delightful walks within reach for invalid
limbs ; in short, it is a Mahomet's Paradise, . . .
1 moins les femmes' I have said nothing about
Rasbah, the old Arab town — my legs have only let me
see it from a distance as yet ; but, my good friend,
imagine that against a morning sky you have, some-

88 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

times in the palest rose, sometimes in silvery grey,
sometimes in faint blue, and so on — everywhere
against the pearly sky — more or less elongated rec-
tangles, placed irregularly, hut always horizontally, in
the manner of a line of low hills, and you will have
the delicate colouring of the old town. One would
not suppose it was a town with habitations, so deli-
cate is the tone of it, hut for some little holes of rare
windows placed here and there. One could not have
a sensation more unexpected, and never a sweeter and
finer joy. So you must come ! My mother is count-
ing upon it, and what, then, am I ? What new things
you could say about all this ! The sea was very fine
at the beginning and end of our crossing. Midway
some of the passengers suffered : my mother and
Felix among them, but they got some sleep. We
were twenty hours in crossing, and we were not tired
on arriving. Come, set off ; start ! . . . A good
embrace from my mother and from me."

His first letter, as may be seen, was full of ardour.
The climate of Algeria did him good at first, and his
sufferings seemed to be relieved.

" I am preparing myself bravely for the ordeal by
fire " (April letter to Ch. Baude) ; " may my rheu-
matism take flight and depart with the coming attack

. I S MAN AND ARTIST. 89

of the sun ! When it is hot here, it is still quite
bearable. Apart from these calculations about the
heat and these health experiences, I am happy, even
excited, by all that I have seen ; and yet I have only
seen what any bagman might see who is busy about
the selling of his goods ; but it has been enough to
give nic great delight. What remains of the old Arab
town is marvellous ; one holds one's breath when, at
a sudden turn, the vision reappears. For those un-
happy eyes that only see the colours on the palette,
it is white ; but picture to yourself a long hill, rather
high, with a depression in the middle, and sloping as
if to the sea, and this hill all covered with elongated
or elevated cubes of which one cannot distinguish the
thickness ; all this remaining unnoticed by the eye
that is ravished by the delicate tone, rosy, greenish,
pale blue, making altogether white tinted with salmon.
" If one did not know it beforehand, one would
never dream that amongst these cubes of plaster
thousands of men are walking, talking, sleeping —
men of noble manner, proud and calm, and with
something very like indifference or contempt for us.
And they are right. They are beautiful, we are
ugly. What matter is it to me that they are knaves !
They are beautiful ! . . .

90 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

" Yesterday I went to take a bath. I had to go
three or four hundred steps through streets full of
merchants. In a passage a Jew was selling silks,
pearls and corals ; in front of his shop, not two yards
wide, were three Arabs — an old man, another of
middle age, the third about seventeen. There they
were, seated, attentive, calm, wishing to buy, consult-
ing together, making scarcely a gesture with their
hands, always kept at full length, but sitting quietly,
never hurrying, reflecting enormously, and keeping
all the while under their burnouses the softest,
gentlest attitudes. The youngest was superb — so
handsome that mama was struck with it. 'They
are like beautiful statues,' said she. I could
not understand the scene and the relations that
united these three Arabs. It was clear they were
come to buy ; tbey had come down from the higher
part of the town. They were poor, for the youngest
was in rags, and the burnouses of the others, though
not in rags, were very much worn ; but they took
such pains in counting the little pieces of false coral
that it was clear the Jew was selling dear to these
big children a thing of no value. The one of middle
age was counting on the table, with his flat hand by
groups of five, tbe little pieces of coral which he

AS MAN AND ABTIST. 91

chose as he counted them ; thus adding each time
five pieces to the heap that he drew towards him.

"What strikes one is this simple colouring, these
magnificent folds, and then this serious childishness.

"I was not aide to wait till the end of the scene.
It was cold and draughty in this passage, which
brought me back to the fact of my poor crazy legs.
I long for the time when I shall be a man again ;
what lovely things I shall see, and perhaps I shall
do ! "

April 23rd (to the same) : " Now I take myself by
the ear and drag myself to the letter-paper, and all
the needful things. Nothing is wanting, neither
the thousand things I have to say, nor above all
the tender affection that I keep in store for you.

" Emile says that you are coming, and soon : don't
be alarmed, you will not melt in the hot sun.
There are cool places in the garden, where one can
Btretch oneself, with a magnificent landscape at one's
feet. We have only bad the beat since yesterday:
you will see bow good you will find it, your muscles
will relax, and you will go back quite young. We
will make some excursions together if I am up to it.
An\ way there are plenty all round us to tempt you
to make some.

92 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

" You have heard from Emile that I went to
Blidah. I bore the little journey very well at first,
but I was tired afterwards. I am going to begin to
rest, and go slowly, in order that I may go farther. I
have scarcely done anything till now, for I don't feel
myself up to remaining long in the same position, as
a painter must, who thinks only of his work."

The health that he hoped for, and so anxiously
waited for, did not come. On the contrary, as the
heat increased, Jules felt more unwell and more
fatigued. The last letter that he wrote to me
reached me at Granada, in that hotel, the " Siete
Suelos," where Fortuny and Henri Regnault had
lived. There was all through it a sentiment of
touching melancholy and discouragement.

" My good friends, this is delightful. It is too
good to get your photographs at the same time as
your kind and affectionate letter. I am glad you are
going to Spain. Lucky fellows ! Go along ! while I,
who should so like to see a bull fight ! . . . You had
not time to come, and indeed it was selfish to ask you.
\<»u could not have stayed more than a few days.
Hut that is to be done some day when I am no longer
a cripple, and when we can have two months before
us. We are comfortably settled here. At this

AS MAN AND ABTIST. 93

moment I am writing to yon under the tent set up in
fche terraced court of our villa, with a wonderful view-
before me. Placed a little to the left of a semicircle,
formed by the hills of Mustapha, 170 yards above the
Bea which flows at their base, we have at every hour of
the day, a different landscape; for the sides of the
hills are full of ravines, and the sun, according to the
time of day, throws their slopes into light, or makes
a network of shade, in a way quite peculiar to this
coiner of Africa. Little villas gleaming in the sun-
shine or grey in the shade give effect to the groups of
verdure, the whole looking from the distance like a
rich embroidery, with bosses of green harmoniously
arranged. All this runs down toward the Gulf of
Algiers, and trending away from here forms Cape
Matifou. Above are the crests of the Little Atlas,
far away, and lost in heaven's blue ; near by, sloping
gardens spread out their golden or silvery verdure,
according as one looks upon olive or eucalyptus.
Add to this the perfume of the orange and lemon
trees, the pleasure of telling you that I embrace
you all three, Tristan included, that I am a
little better, and you will have the state of my
heart.

"Enjoy yourselves, — and you, my dear forester,

94 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

with your Toledo eyes, what are you going to give
to the world after all this delight of sunshine and
kindly fellowship and the loving union of the charm-
ing trio that you make ? It seems to me I have
the heart and voice to make a fourth — what say you ?
Ah ! that shall he after the rheumatism ! Kindest
regards from mama and from me. A last embrace to
all three of you."

The improvement he had experienced on arriving
in Algiers ceased about the end of April. His
strength and appetite gradually failed ; and at the
end of May it was decided to take the invalid hack to
France. He settled again in the Rue Legendre with
the poor little mother, who never left him afterwards.
When I saw him again I was shocked at the progress
the disease had made. His thinness was such that
my unhappy friend was nowhere in the garments that
were made for his journey. His legs refused their
service ; he could no longer work ; and yet he kept a
little hope. He had just begun a new treatment, and
talked of going into Brittany "as soon as he was
strong enough." He drove every day in the Bois
when the weather was fine, and spent the rest of his
day on cushions in the corner of the studio, occupied
in contemplating, with a heartrending look, his

AS MAN AND ABTIST. 95

studies hanging on the walls. This inaction was
most distressing to him.

" Ah ! " cried he, " if I was told : They are going to
cut off your two legs, hut after that you will be able to
j).ti ut again, I would willingly make the sacrifice. . . .'"

He could only sleep now with the help of in-
jected morphine, and he waited with impatience for
the hour when a new supply should give him some
relief, and a factitious drowsiness should make him
forget his suffering.

In proportion as digestion became more difficult
his appetite became more capricious. He wanted to
have dishes made which reminded him of the cooking
of his village; then, when they were brought to him,
he turned away disgusted, without tasting them.
"No," said he, pushing aside the plate, "that's not
it ; to have it good it must be made down there,
prepared by the Damvillers people, with home-grown
vegetables." And while he was speaking one saw by
his moist eyes a sudden and painful calling up of the
impressions of former days ; he saw all at once the
old home, the gardens and orchards of Damvillers at
the fall of evening, the peaceful village interiors at
the time when the fires were lighted for the evening
meal.

96 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

As the season advanced liis strength decreased.
In September his brother was obliged to take him on
his back to carry him to the carriage, and he drove
about slowly for an hour in the avenues of the Bois.
He could not read, and was easily wearied by con-
versation. His nerves were become very irritable,
and the slightest odours were disagreeable to his
sense of smell. His courage seemed to forsake him ;
at the same time he was always wanting to know
what others thought of his illness. His blue eyes
with their penetrating look anxiously searched the
eyes of his friends, and of his mother, who never left
his side. The heroic little woman did her best to
dissimulate, and was always smiling and affecting a
cheerfulness and a confidence which were painful to
see ; then, when she could escape for a moment, she
hastened into the neighbouring room and melted into
tears.

For months this cruel agony was thus prolonged.
Bastien was only a shadow of himself. On the 9th
of December, during great part of the night, he
talked of Damvillers with his mother and his brother.
Then at about four in the morning he said to them,
with a kiss, " Come, it is time for children to sleep."
All three slept. Two hours later Mme. B. was

AS MAN AND ABTIST. 97

awakened by Jules, who asked for something to
drink ; she rose, and brought him a cup of tea, and
w.is alarmed on finding that the invalid groped for the
cup to guide it to his lips ; lie could no longer see;
but he still spoke and even joked ahout the difficulty
he had in moving his limbs.

Shortly afterwards he dozed, and sliding gently
from sleep into death, he expired at six in the
evening, December 10, 1884.

I saw him next day lying on his mortuary bed,
in the midst of a thick covering of flowers. His
poor emaciated face, with its sightless and deeply
sunk orbits, made him look like one of those Spanish
figures of Christ, fiercely cut in wood by Montanez.

On the 12th of December a long train of friends
and admirers accompanied his remains to the Eastern
Railway Station, whence it was conveyed to the
Meuse. The next day, Sunday, the whole population
of Damvillers waited at the entrance of the town for
the funeral carriage, which brought back Bastien-
Lepage to his native place.

The sad procession advanced slowly on that road
from Verdun where the painter had loved to walk
at twilight, talking with his friends. A pale mist
blotted out those hills and woods whose familiar

7

98 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE.

outlines he had so often reproduced. The cortege
stopped before the little church where he had in-
tended painting his Burial of a Young Girl. The
morning was showery ; the wreaths and festoons of
flowers, placed the night before on his coffin, were
revived and refreshed by the moisture ; when they
were heaped up upon the grave they seemed to come
to life again, and to send out with their renewed
perfume a last adieu from Paris to the painter of the
peasants of the Meuse.

VI.

ON the 17th of the following March, at the
Hotel de Chimay, now connected with the
Ecole des Beaux Arts, the exhibition of the
works of him whom we have surnamed the " Primitif "
was opened. All the works of Bastien, with the ex-
ception of the Jeanne d'Arc, were collected there.

On visiting this exhibition the most prejudiced
minds were struck with the suppleness, the fecundity,
and power of the talent of this painter, carried off at
the age of thirty-six. For the first time his varied
and original work could be judged as a whole.

One could study in detail these productions of
a thoroughly conscientious artist, and follow the
growth of each composition as one follows the de-
velopment of a beautiful plant — first in the draw-
ings, so pure, so sober, and expressive; then in the
skeicbes so truthful and sincere; and, lastly, in the
finished pictures, so harmonious and luminous. By

100 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

the side of the great pictures, Les Foins (The
Hay), La Saison (VOctohre (October), Le Mendiant
(The Beggar), Pere Jacques (Father Jacques), and
L' Amour au Tillage (Love in the Village), like windows
opening upon life itself, one admired that collection
of small portraits in which the most penetrating
physiological observation was united with an execu-
tion most masterly, precise, and delicate. One
passed delighted from those interiors worthy of
the Dutch painters, such as La Forge and La
Lessive, to the landscapes breathing the odours
of the fields and of the woods, such as Le Vieux
Gueux (The Old Beggar), Les Vendanges (The
Vintage), La Prairie (The Meadow), La Mare (The
Pool), Les Bles Murs (Pipe Corn), or to those full
of air and motion, like London Bridge and the
Thames ; then one stopped before La Petite fille
allant a la Ecole (The Little Girl going to School),
or that poetic Idyl, Le Soir au Village (Evening in
the Village).

In this exhibition containing more than two
hundred canvases and a hundred drawings, there was
nothing trifling, nothing indifferent. The smallest
sketches were interesting because they revealed pas-
sionate worship of what is simple and natural, hatred

The Inn.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

AS MAN AND ARTIST. L03

of the almost and the conventional, and the incessant
striving of the artist after his ideal, which is Truth.

A healthy and robust poetry exhaled from this
collection. One left the Hotel de Chimay with a
sensation of strengthening and reviving pleasure,
such as one gets from certain aspects of nature —
deep woods, limpid waters, and the bright sky of
a summer morning.

Unhappily this joy was mixed with the sad thought
of the sudden death of the young man who had pro-
duced all this masterly work.

On first entering these rooms reserved for his
pictures I was, for a long time, impressed with a
feeling that I had already experienced at the exhibi-
tion of the works of the talented young artist, Aldlle.
Bashkirtseif, mown down like Bastien, in full youth,
and at the same time as he. This cruel death seemed
only a had dream.

On seeing again these unfinished sketches, these
perfect portraits, these canvases that I had seen him
paint one after another, I felt as if I was conversing
with the painter and the friend who had created all
this. I felt that he was still living and in possession
of all his force. I expected every moment to see him
appear among us, smiling, happy, fortified by the now

104 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

unanimous admiration of the crowd gathered before
his work.

Alas ! instead of himself my eyes only met his
portrait, placed in the first room, and the mournful
eloquence of the wreaths and flowers attached to the
frame recalled me harshly to the heartrending reality.

The poor " Primitif " will paint no more. The atelier
at Damvillers where we have spent such happy hours
is closed for ever. The peasants of the village will
no more meet their countryman on the roads where
he used to work in the open air. The rustic flowers
that he used to paint in the foreground of his pictures,
the blue chicory and the groundsel, will flower again
this summer by the edges of the fields, but he will
not be there to study and admire them.

Among the sketches exhibited by the side of the
great pictures there was one that I had already
remarked at Damvillers, and that I now saw again
with deep emotion. It represents an old peasant
woman going in the early morning into her garden
to visit her apple tree in blossom. The nights of
April are perfidious, and the spring frosts give mortal
wounds ; the old woman draws to her a flowering
branch and inspects with anxious eye the disasters
caused by the hurtful rays of the red moon. Bastien-

AS MAN AND ABTIST. 105

Lepage was like this tree, full of sap and of promising
blossom. For years the heavens had been clement
to him, and the flowers had given many and rich
fruits; then in a single night a murderous frost
destroyed all — the open flowers by thousands, and
the tree itself. All that remains is the splendid fruit
of past seasons, but the exquisite flavour of that the
world will long enjoy.

Things truly beautiful have wonderful vitality and
last on through the centuries, hovering above the earth
where the generations of men go turn by turn to
sleep, — and this survival of the works of the spirit
of man is perhaps the surest immortality upon which
he can count.

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST.

I; Relief Pobtbait of Baste \ . >
By Augustus S tin '■<■' tudt ns.

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS AETIST.

THE work of Bastien-Lepage ranks, to my
mind, with the very best in modern art.
He brought to us what was in some ways
a new view of nature — one whose truth was at once
admitted, but which was nevertheless the cause of
much discussion and criticism. It was objected to
mainly, I think, as not being in accord with estab-
lished lilies, but nevertheless the objectors expressed
their admiration for the skill of the painter ; while,
on the other hand, for those who accepted him
(chiefly the younger men these), no praise was too
great, no admiration too enthusiastic.

It is only a few years since his untimely death
was mourned as a loss to the whole art-world, for
his whole career is so recent that his fellow- students
are si ill young men, many of them only now begin-
ning to obtain full recognition ; and yet it is perhaps
long enough ago to enable his work to be considered
as ;i whole, and his place in the art-movement to be

112 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

seen. For although he was an innovator, and one
showing in all he did a strong individuality, the
general direction of his genius was given him by
the artistic tendencies of his time.

It will be generally admitted that if painting has
made any advance in our day, if it shows in any
direction a new departure, or fresh revelation of the
beauty that exists throughout nature, it is in the
development of the problems which have arisen
from the study of landscape and of the effects of
light. There now prevails a close and sincere study of
nature, founded on the acceptance of things as they
are, and an increasing consciousness on the part of
artists (or perhaps it would be more correct to say
an increasing courage on the part of artists to
express their conviction) that a picture should be
the record of something seen, of some impression
felt, rather than be formally constructed. And men
have awakened at length to see that all nature is
beautiful, that all light is beautiful, and that there
is colour everywhere ; that the endeavour to realize
truly the natural relation of people to their sur-
roundings is better than to follow unquestioning on
the old conventional lines. This is, roughly speaking,
the modern standpoint, and it cannot be denied that

AS ABTIST. 113

it is an enormous advance on the accepted artistic
ideals of thirty or forty years ago. And to the
men who have brought this about — to the Pre-
Raphaelite brotherhood; to Millet, Corot, Eousseau,
Courbet, Manet, and Mr. Whistler — to all those who
have fought the battle and to whom our present
clearer outlook is due, we owe a lasting debt of
gratitude.

It is a little surprising now, that the work of
Bastien-Lepage, based as it is on the simple accept-
ance of nature, should have caused so much discussion
on its first appearance. For time has justified him ;
we feel on comparing his work with other men of his
time that it marks a new departure, and we realize
that it has helped to form our present standpoint.
But as the majority of people tune their eyes by
pictures and not by nature, and only admire in
nature that which is made manifest to them by their
artistic prophet, it may be taken as a compliment to
a man of independent genius that when he discloses
a fresh view of nature, it is not for some time
accepted. "Good gracious, sir!" said an eminent
ciitie, referring to Claude Monet, "like nature?
Xes ; of course it's like nature ; but a man has no
business to choose that aspect of it ! "

8

114 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

Every picture may be said to appeal to the spec-
tator from two sides or points of view — the literary
and the aesthetic.

A picture may tell its story to perfection — may
point a moral and all the rest of it, and so fulfil the
purpose of its author — and still, or, as some extreme
persons would say, therefore — may be bad art, may
indeed be not worthy to rank as art at all. Such
pictures are frequently seen. And again, a picture
may, by raising and defining to some inner sense
emotions dimly felt by us before nature, leave us
with a fuller sense of beauty, a feeling of something
revealed to us. And yet it need have no subject
or story. We are convinced that this picture is
beautiful : that no other form of artistic expression
can precisely so touch us. Such pictures are rare,
but happily they do exist. Yet, from the nature of
things, it is impossible but that such a picture should
speak to some — ever so slight — extent to the mind ;
and also the most literary picture is never without
evidence of some desire to please the eye.

The work of Bastien-Lepage seems to me to em-
brace both these points of view. The literary and
{esthetic sides of art were very evenly balanced in him.
If we take any individual work, as, for example, the

AS ABTIST. 115

Beggar, we find a most perfect realization of
character: the whole life-history of the man seen
and brought before us — evidently this was the motive
of the picture ; yet the painting is in itself so full of
charm, the perception of colour so fine, that we feel
he was equally interested in that. He tried to hold
the balance even. His work shows an extraordinary
receptive power, an unequalled (almost microscopic on
occasion) clearness of vision, allied with an absolute
mastery of his material. His attitude towards nature
is one of studied impartiality, and seems to show the
resolute striving of an intensely sympathetic nature
to get at the actual optical appearances and to suppress
any hint of his own feelings. And his subjects are
presented with such force and skill that their truth
to nature is at once felt, and if a painter, you cannot
fail also to feel the charm of his simple and sincere
method. You cannot tally it by any other painter's
work : it stands by itself.

His impartial attitude towards his model con-
stitutes one of Bastien-Lepage's distinctions. I am
not sure that it is not the distinct note of all his
work. He paints a man — and the man stands before
you, and yon ask yourself, " What is he going to say ?
What does the artist wish to express?" You may

116 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

make what you can of him ; Lepage gives you no
clue. To me, I confess, this quality is a very high
one ; it seems to indicate a great gift, and to be, if I
may presume to say so, akin to Shakespeare's method
of presenting his characters without a hint of his
own feelings towards them.

Although it is no doubt owing to Millet that
Lepage's eyes were opened to the paintableness of
country life, he saw his subjects in his own way and
approached them from his own point of view. With
Millet the subject and type were everything — the
individual nothing. He was passionately moved by
his subject, and once its action and sentiment were
expressed, everything was subordinated to them. He
cared nothing for the smaller truths of detail provided
the general impression were true to his mental image,
and his aim was avowedly to impose his mental
impression on the spectator. Lepage, on the con-
trary, appears to avoid communicating his mental
impression. He will give you the visual impression,
as truly as he possibly can ; you may, if you please,
find — as he has found — pathos and poetry in it : as
before the same scene in nature, if you have
sympathy ; but for his part lie will not help you
by any comment of his own.

AS ABTIST. 117

And whereas with Millet the interest always centres
in tlie subject, in Lepage it centres in the individual.
His pictures become portraits. He chooses a good
type, and sets himself to paint him at his work and
amid his natural surroundings, and, somehow or
other, the subject, as motive and reason for the
picture, takes a subordinate place. And yet this is
not because anything belonging to the subject is
slurred, but because the attention is taken beyond the
subject to the actors in it. For his figures not only
live ; they convince us of their identity as individuals,
and gradually we get so interested in them that we
begin to forget what they are doing, and almost to
wonder why they are there. We are, in fact, brought
so close to them that we cannot get away from the
sense of their presence. It is no small tribute to
Lepage's skill that his people do so interest us ; but
is not this interest a conflicting element in the
picture ? Is it to the advantage of the picture that
the interest should be so equally divided ? I cannot
tell : when before a picture of Lepage's I accept it in
eyerything — on thinking it over, I begin to doubt.
There is no room for doubt about Millet ; no mistake
abont what he meant. With him the attention is
always concentrated on the business in hand : and

118 r JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

without desiring to qualify the great respect and
admiration which I have for Lepage's work, it seems
to me that the point of view of Millet included more
essential truths (or perhaps excluded those which
were not essential to the expression of the subject) ;
and that for this reason Lepage's most successful
pictures depend least upon the interest of subject,
and most upon the interest of portraiture.

For it is in his portraits that the great capacity of
the man 'is best seen ; and they are altogether ad-
mirable. His people stand before you, and you feel
that they must be true to the very life. He loves to
place them in an even, open, light, and simply accept-
ing the ordinary conditions of his sitters, produces a
surprisingly original result. There is no forcing of
effect, no slurring of detail — everything is searched
out relentlessly, lovingly. There is the same impartial
standpoint — the same apparent determination to keep
himself out of the picture. From the artist's point
of view they are altogether delightful ; modelled with
the thoroughness of a sculptor, the colour and atmos-
phere are always true, and the execution is unlaboured
and direct. It would be difficult to point to any
modern portraits which surpass for technical mastery
and charm such works as the " First Communion,"

AS ARTIST. 119

the portraits of his parents, his grandfather, of M.
Theuriet, Albert Woolf, Sarah Bernhardt, "Pas
ftieche," and the Beggar. Each of these is a com-
plete picture, as well as being a portrait. The
elaborate dress of the actress, the cheap muslin
and ill-fitting gloves of the child, in the " First
Communion " — all the matters of minor detail are
dwelt on with, in each case, the fullest sense of their
literary importance to the picture, and yet the paint-
ing of these things, as of all else, is so delightful in
itself that the artist desires no other reason.

While landscape entered as a matter of course into
his rustic pictures, it was always subordinate to the
figures; although he carried the finish of the fore-
grounds in these pictures to the farthest possible
point, delighting to express the beauty of everything
— weeds, sticks, stones, the clods of earth — all was
felt, and shown to be beautiful. But he painted also
some admirable landscapes: of these I have seen
but few, and the recollection of one in particular
remains with me as one of the most beautiful things
I have seen. It is a field of ripe golden corn ; beyond
are the distant fields and low hills, and overhead in
the clear blue sky a few clouds. The corn is swaying
and rustling in the breeze, and small birds are flitting

120 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

about. The whole scene is bathed in daylight and
fresh air : with no great stretch of fancy one can see
the corn moving, and hear the singing of the birds.
One is filled with a sense of the sweetness of nature
and the beauty of the open fields. And the picture is
so simple — no effort in design, no artifice apparent —
it impresses as a pure piece of nature.

This love of nature and resolute determination not
to depart from the strict literal truth as he saw it,
marks all the work of Bastien-Lepage. As far as it
was possible for an artist nowadays, he appears to
have been uninfluenced by the old masters. The only
lesson he seems to have learnt from them was that
nature, which sufficed for them, should suffice for him
also. It is this attitude of mind which brings him
into kinship with the early painters, and which led to
his being styled " the primitive." He did not set out
to form his art on the methods of the older painters,
but going as they did, direct to nature, he resolutely
put on one side (as far as was possible to one familiar
with them) the accepted pictorial artifices. He seems
to have set himself the task of going over the ground
from the beginning; and the fact that his uncom-
promising and unconventional presentment of his
subjects should be expressed by means of a most

AS ARTIST. 121

highly accomplished, very modern, and very elegant
technique, was one of the things which, while it greatly
charmed, at the same time puzzled and surprised
people. It was so different from what had heen seen,
or might reasonably have heen expected ; and one can
understand some critics feeling that a man so
thoroughly master of his art, so consummate a
painter, must he wilfully affected in the treatment
of his subjects, his simple acceptance of nature
appearing to them as a pose. But it was not long
before he was understood ; and one has only to read
the very interesting memoir of M. Theuriet to see
how mistaken this view was, and how simply and
naturally his art developed from his early life and
associations. It is seldom indeed that one finds an
artist so completely adjusted to his surroundings —
so much so that he is able to go hack for his mature
inspiration not only to his first impressions, hut
to the very scenes and, in some cases no doubt,
the individuals who awakened them. As a rule an
artist nowadays is led in many directions before
he finds himself. Bastien-Lepage had his doubts
and hesitations, of course, hut they were soon over,
and almost from the start he seems to have decided
on his path.

122 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

The advantage of this to him in his work must
have been enormous, as any one who has painted in
the country will know ; for villages contain no surplus
population — every one has his work to do ; and the
peasant is slow to understand, and distrustful of all
that lies outside his own experience : so that it is
difficult, and in many cases impossible, for an artist
to get models in a village. But one can imagine
Lepage to have been friends with all his models,
and that his pictures excited as lively an interest
(though, of course, on different grounds) in Dam-
villers as in Paris ; and it was, I think, due to
some extent to this, as well as to his own untiring
energy, that he was enabled to complete so much.
As far as I am aware, he was unique among con-
temporary artists in being so happily circumstanced ;
and it is evidence of the simple sincerity of the man
that he found his ideal in the ordinary realities of
his own experience : feeling, no doubt, that beauty
exists everywhere waiting for him who has eyes to
see.

It has been frequently said ot Bastien-Lepage that
he had no feeling for beauty — or, at any rate, that
he was indifferent to it ; but as it is impossible to
arrive at any satisfactory definition of beauty, this

AS ARTIST. 123

point cannot be discussed. Taking the word, how-
ever, in its obvious and generally accepted meaning,
that of personal beauty, it seems to me that there
is no fair ground for the charge ; for such works as
the "First Communion," the portrait of Sarah Bern-
hardt, and " Joan of Arc," all show a most refined
and delicate appreciation of personal beauty, and
should surely have led his critics to consider whether
the man who painted them had not very good reasons
for painting people who were not beautiful, too. For
all work cannot be judged from one point of view ;
we recognize that a work of art is the outcome of a
personal impression, and that the artist's aim is to
give expression to his views ; and the deeper his
insight into nature, the greater the result. And yet,
curiously enough, the fact that Bastien-Lepage's
insight into nature was exceptionally deep and wide
renders it difficult to form a clear judgment, as his
work appeals equally from different points of view.
His love of beauty, for instance, seems to go hand-
in-hand with a psychological, or even pathological
interest : and this equal prominence of different ten-
dencies is a very puzzling element in his work. We
expect an artist to give us a strongly personal view ;
but here is one who gives us something very like an

124 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

analysis, and whose personal view it is impossible to
define — and the premature ending of his career leaves
it now for ever doubtful which was the strongest bias
of his mind. It seems to me that his sympathies
were so wide as to try and include everything, and
that he has helped to widen the bounds of beauty,
by showing its limitless possibilities. The wrords of
Blake, " To see a world in a grain of sand, and
heaven in a wild flower," suggest, I think, his general
feeling towards nature.

In spite of the wide range of his work and the
extraordinary versatility of his execution, he kept, as
a rule, within certain limitations of treatment. He
did not care for the strong opposition of light and
shadow, and he seems almost to have avoided those
aspects of nature which depend for their beauty on
the changes and contrasts of atmosphere and light.
All that side of nature which depends on memory
for its realization was left almost untouched by him,
and yet it is idle to suppose that so richly gifted
a man could not have been keenly sensible to all
nature's beauty ; but I think he found himself hedged
in by the conditions necessary to the realization of
the qualities he sought. For in painting a large
figure-picture in the open air, the painter must almost

AS ABTIST. 12 5

of necessity limit himself to the effect of grey open
daylight. This he realized splendidly: at the same
time it may be said that he sought elaboration of
detail perhaps at the expense of effect, approaching
nature at times too much from the point of view of
still-life. This is not felt in his small pictures, in
which the point of view is so close that the detail and
general effect can be seen at the same time ; but in
his large works much that is charming in the highest
degree when examined in detail, fails to carry its full
value to the eye at a distance necessary to take in the
whole work. This was the case with " Joan of Arc "
in the Paris Exhibition of two years ago ; and it was
instructive to compare this picture with Courbet's
" Stone-breakers," which hung near it on the same
wall. Courbet had generalized as much as possible —
everything was cleared away but the essentials ; and
at a little distance Courbet showed in full power and
completeness, while the delicate and beautiful work
in " Joan of Arc " was lost, and the picture flat and
unintelligible in comparison. No doubt Bastien-
Lepage worked for truth of impression and of detail
too, but it is apparently impossible to get both ; and
this seems to show that the building-up or combining
a number of facts, each of which may be true of itself

126 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

and to the others, does not in its sum total give the
general impression of truth. It is but a number of
isolated truths. Bastien-Lepage has carried his
endeavour in this direction farther than any of his
predecessors — in fact it may be said that he has
carried literal representation to its extreme limit :
so much so as to leave clearly discernible to us the
question which was doubtless before him, but which
has at any rate developed itself from his work,
whether it is possible to attain literal truth without
leaving on one side much of that which is most
beautiful in nature ? And further, the question arises,
whether literal truth is the highest truth. For
realism, as an end in art, leads nowhere ; it is an
impasse. Surely it is but the means to whatever the
artist has it in him to express.

I feel convinced that realism was not the end with
Bastien-Lepage. I believe that his contribution to
art, great as it was, and covering as it does an amount
of work which might well represent a whole life's
work instead of the work of a few short years, was
but the promise of his full power, and that, had he
lived, his work wrould have shown a wider range of
nature than that of any other artist, except perhaps
liembrandt. But it was not to be.

AS ARTIST. 127

He gave his best, and the world is richer for his
work ; his name will not die.

" Quiet consummation have ;
And renowned be thy grave."

GEORGE CLAUSEN.

MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.

The Little Sweep.
By Juki Bastien-Lepage.

MODERN BEALISM IN PAINTING.

MUCH has been written about Jean Francois
Millet, and mostly from two points of
view. The picturesque surroundings of
the plain of Barbizon and the peasant's blouse have
tempted the sentimental biographer to dwell on the
personal note of poverty, which we now know was not
the dominant one in Millet's life. The picturesque
writer lias amplified, with more or less intelligence,
reflections suggested by the subjects of his pictures.
In all this, the painter's point of view, which is, after
all, the only one that matters, has, so far as its
expression in print is concerned, been overlooked and
omitted.

The important fact about Millet is not that he
struggled with poverty, or that he expressed on canvas
the dignity of labour, but that he was a great artist.
As corollaries, he was a great draughtsman and a great
colourist. He was gifted with the comprehension in

134 2I0DEBN REALISM IN PAINTING.

its entirety of the import of any scene in nature
which he wished to render. An unerring analysis
enabled him to select what were the vital constituents
of such a scene, and exquisite perceptions, trained by
incessant labour, to render them in fitting terms in
accordance with the tradition which governs the use of
each material.

It may seem that the process here summarized is
after all only that which governs all art production,
and that the work of the second-rate and the ordinary
differs only from that of the master in the degree of
capacity exercised. But this is not so. It differs
totally in kind. The conception, conscious or uncon-
scious, of the nature and aim of art is in the two
cases different, and, as a consequence, the practice
is different.

It would be affectation to ignore that, for good or for
evil, Paris is the art-centre of European painting, and
that the most serious training in drawing and painting
that is procurable on European lines is procurable in
Paris. I should therefore consider it a service of great
utility to serious art if it were possible to make clear
the reasons for my conviction that the tendency of the
mass of exhibition painting in France, and, by reflec-
tion, in England, has been in an inartistic direction,

MODEBN HE A LISM IN PAINTINi h 135

and has led inevitably to the sterile ideal of the
instantaneous camera. And, on the other hand, that
the narrow stream of purely artistic painting, that has
i lidded its more sequestered course parallel with the
broad ilood of exhibition work, owes its vitality to a
profound and convinced reverence for tradition. For
the illustration of that tradition I can find no more
convenient source than the work of Jean Francois
Millet, and for a typical monument of its disregard,
tiic more fair to cite in that it is respectable in
achievement, the work of Bastien-Lepage affords me
a timely and perhaps the most appropriate example
possible.

What, then, is the main difference ? How did
Millet work, and with what objects ? How did
Lepage work, and what is it he strove to attain ?

To begin with, Millet, ninety-nine times out of a
hundred, had seen his picture happen somewhere in
nature. Its treatment generally involved complex
difficulties of suggestion of movement, or at least of
energy, to say nothing of those created by the variety
of lighting and atmospheric effect ; the management
of sunlight, of twilight, of the lighting of interiors.
All these elements he was enabled, by means of a
highly-trained artistic memory, to retain and render in

136 MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.

the summary method which we call inspiration, and
which has nothing in common with the piecemeal and
futile copying of nature of a later school. Dealing
with materials in their essential nature living and
fleeting, his execution was in the main separated from
his observation. His observation was thus uninter-
rupted by the exigencies of execution, and his execu-
tion untrammelled by the fortuitous inconveniences
incident on the moment of observation, and undis-
turbed, moreover, by the kaleidoscopic shifting of the
pictorial elements which bewilder and mislead the
mere plein-airiste. He did not say to the woman at
the washtub, " Do as if you were washing, and stay
like that for me for four or five hours a day, while I paint
a picture from you." Or to the reaper, " Stay like
that with the scythe drawn back, pretending to reap."
"La nature nc pose pas" — to quote his own words.
He knew that if figures in movement were to be
painted so as to be convincing, it must be by a process
of cumulative observation. This truth one of the
greatest heirs of the great school of 1830 has not been
slow to understand, and it is to its further and more
exquisite development that we owe the profoundly
learned and beautiful work of Degas. His field of
observation is shifted from the life of the village and

MODEUX BEALISM IN PAINTING. 137

the labour of the plains, to the sordid toil of the green-
room and the hectic mysteries of stage illumination ;
hill the artistic problem remains the same, and its
solution is worked out on the same lines.

Millet observed and observed again, making little
in the way of studies on the spot, a note sometimes
of movement on a cigarette-paper. And when lie
held his picture he knew it, and the execution was the
singing of a song learned by heart, and not the pain-
ful performance in public of a meritorious feat of
sight-reading. The result of this was that his work
lias style — style which is at the same time in the best
traditions and strictly personal. No one has been
more imitated than Millet, and no one is more
inimitable.

Holding in the hollow of his hand the secrets of light
and life and movement, the secrets of form and colour,
learnt from the visible world, he was equipped, like the
great masters of old, for the treatment of purely fanciful
themes; and, when he painted a reluctant nymph
being drugged through the woods by a turbulent crowd
of cupids, he was as much at home as when he
rendered the recurring monotone of the peasant's
daily labours. My quarrel with the gentlemen who
escape from the laws of anatomy and perspective

138 MODEBN BEALISM IN PAINTING.

by painting full-length portraits of souls, and family
groups of abstractions, is, not that they paint these
things, but that they have not first learnt something
about the laws which govern the incidence of light on
concrete bodies. It might be well if they would
discover whether they can paint their brother, whom
they have seen, before they elect to flounder perennially
in Olympus.

Let it also be noted here that the work of Jean
Francois Millet was, with scarcely an exception, free
from a preoccupation with the walls of an exhibition.
The scale of his pictures and their key were dictated
by the artistic requirements of the subject, and not by
the necessities or allurements of what I may call for
brevity, competitive painting. It was never a question
with him of the preparation within twelve months of
an annual poster, which was to occupy so much line-
space, and send the betting on him up or down as the
case might be.

What, on the other hand, were the essential ideas
of Bastien-Lepage's work? To begin with, he was a
I », i inter of exhibition pictures, of what are called in
Paris machins. He was an inveterate salonnier, with
the ideals and the limitations of the typical uncul-
tured Paris art-student, the fort of his atelier. Faire

Mi )DEBN BEALISM IN PAINTINi I . 139

v'rai is the sura and aim of his Intention. Realists
he and his Like have been jauntily labelled by the
hasty journalist. But the truth in their work is truth
of unessentials, and their elaborate and unlovely
realities serve only to cover themes that are profoundly
unreal.

To begin with, it was thought to be meritorious,
and conducive of truth, and in every way manly and
estimable, for the painter to take a large canvas out
into the fields and to execute his final picture in
hourly tete-a-tete with nature. This practice at once
restricts the limits of your possible choice of subject.
The sun moves too quickly. You find that grey
weather is more possible, and end by never working
in any other. Grouping with any approach to natural-
ness is found to be almost impossible. You find that
you had better confine your compositions to a single
figure. And with a little experience the photo-realist
finds, if he be wise, that that single figure had better
be in repose. Even then your picture necessarily
becomes a portrait of a model posing by the hour. The
illumination, instead of being that of a north light in
Newman Street, is, it is true, the illumination of a
Cornish era Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant
in his own natural surroundings, and not a model

140 MODEBN REALISM IN PAINTING.

from Hatton Garden. But what is lie doing ? He is
posing for a picture as best lie can, and lie looks it.
That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will
never rise again. The potatoes, portraits every one,
an ill never drop into the sack, and never a breath of
air circulates around that painful rendering in the flat
of the authentic patches on the very gown of a real
peasant. What are the truths you have gained, a
handful of tiresome little facts, compared to the
truths you have lost ? To life and spirit, light and
air ?

The tacit assumption on which the theory and
practice of the so-called realist rests, is that if photo-
graphy, instead of yielding little proofs on paper in
black and white, could yield large proofs on canvas in
oils, the occupation of the painter would be gone.
What a radical misconception of the nature and
function of art this is, becomes evident when we
paraphrase the same idea and apply it in the region
of letters. Few would be found to defend the proposi-
tion that a stenographic report of events and words
;is they occurred would constitute the highest literary
treatment of ;i given scene in life. A page of descrip-
I'k.ii is distinguished ;is literature from reporting when
the resources of language are employed with cunning

MODERN BEALISM IN PAINTING. Ml

and mastery to convey, not a catalogue of facts, but

the result of the observation of these facts on an
individual temperament. Its value depends on the
degree of mastery with which the language is used,
and on the delicacy and range of the writer's person-
ality, and in no wise on the accuracy of the facts
recorded.

Richter says somewhere that no artist can replace
another, and not even the same artist himself, at
different periods of his life. One characteristic of
the work of the modern photo-realist in painting is
that almost any one of them could have painted a
portion of the work of any other without making
any appreciable discord of execution apparent. They
are all equipped from the first at the studios
with a technique which serves them equally, once for
all. It is known as la bonne peinture. It differs from
Btyle in being a thing you can acquire, and I believe
it is even maintained, not only to be perfectible, but
to have been, on several occasions, perfected.

Nothing is more frequently brought home to the
student of modern painting than the truth that the
work <>F the salonnicr, the picture, that is, that is born
oi the exhibition and for the exhibition, wears its air
of novelty and interest strictly for the season. If lie

142 MODERN REALISM TX PAINTING.

meet it again in a house, or in the holocaust of a
retrospective exhibition, its date is stamped upon it
with the accuracy of a page of Le follet or Le moniteur
de la mode. And whether a picture be asserted at the
date of its exhibition as advanced, or the contrary, as
daring or dull, if it is born of the exhibition, it dies
with the exhibition, and the brood to which it gives
birth hold their life on the same tenure.

It was impossible, on seeing Bastien-Lepage's
Joan of Arc at the Paris Exhibition of 1890, after a
lapse of some years since its first appearance, to resist
the conclusion that it falls inevitably under the
heading of "machin." In the composition, or in what
modern critics prefer to call the placing, there is
neither grace nor strangeness. The drawing is with-
out profundity or novelty of observation. The colour
is uninteresting, and the execution is the usual
mechanically obtrusive square-brush-work of the
Parisian schools of art. Dramatically, the leading
figure is not impressive or even lucid ; and the help-
less introduction of the visionary figures behind the
back of the rapt maid completes the conviction that
it \\as an error of judgment for a painter with the
limitations of Lepage to burden a touching and
saiictilied legend with commonplace illustration. A

MODEL'X REALISM IX PAINTING. 143

faithful copy of so strange and interesting a subject

\ I iii**. Sarah Bernhardt cannot fail to be a valuable

document, but Lepage's portrait has surely missed

altogether the delicacy of the exquisitely spiritual

profile. The format of the little panel portrait of the
Prince of Wales evoked in the press the obviously
invited reference to Clouet. The ready writer cannot
bave looked at so much as a single pearl in the neck-
lace of one of Clouet's princesses.

To judge fairly of an artist, however, we must
follow him on to his own ground. In his portrait of
bis grandfather, at the same exhibition, it was
quite possible to see Lepage at his best as a work-
manlike and photographic copyist of a figure in
repose. It was at the same time possible to turn
from this picture straight to Manet's fifre, and to his
bon bock, and thus to measure the gulf that separates
a meritorious workman from an inspired executant
of the first rank. No useful end can be gained by
obscuring this fact, and if, in league with the modern
gigantic conspiracy of toleration, we are to speak
of L.i^tien-Lepage as a master, what terms are left
us for Keene and Millet, for Whistler and Degas ?

WALTBB SICKERT.
Chelsea, 1891.

A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

10

r Mother.]

Marie Bashkibtseff.

Portrait by Herself.)

A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

THE brilliant sunshine of a glorious October
morning poured through the tall windows of
Marie Bashkirtseft's studio on my last visit
to the Rue de Prony. This mellow light bathing her
canvasses brought them out in fullest relief, and
I had never had such a favourable opportunity of
judging her work in its entirety. I was struck more
than ever by the vigour and vitality of these studies,
Bketches, pastels, and pictures struck off at a white
heat of mental production between the ages of
seventeen and four and twenty. Hanging above the
gallery which runs along one side of the wall were
her fust studies from life, which astonished Julian so
much that he pronounced them phenomenal; lure
were her numerous sketches showing the sincerity of
lici- efforts to be true to nature; and her finished
pictures full of individuality and power.

As the eye rested on these portraits where the key-

150 A STUDY OF

note of character had been so unmistakably struck,
on these bits of city life in their shabbier aspects, on
these Paris street children with faces so prematurely
sharpened or saddened, you became at once aware
that this artist was a naturalist of the naturalists.
Her chief object was to seize life — to seize the flying
impression as she happened to see it ; to render it
with unflinching faithfulness to nature without any
attempt at arrangement, composition, or beauty of
treatment.

'• Oh, to catch nature ! ' This is the cry of
Marie Bashkirtseff, as it is the cry of Impres-
sionism, 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 pig-
ments 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

MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF. 151

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 appre-
hended 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 concen-
tration, within the limits of some more or less conven-
tional form, seems to belong to every manifestation

152 -1 STUDY OF

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 what-
soever. For the artist's own mind, unlike a photo-
graphic 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
lie lias 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
<ir<<i entirely escapes the eyes of ordinary mortals, it

MM! IE IlASTIKTL'TSEEE. L53

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 wre 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
Btyle 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 aesthetic views of
our day; or of an artist who is peculiarly representa-
tive of them. For the new scientific spirit which lias
revolutionized our views of nature, has also penetrated

154 A STUDY OF

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 wrorks 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 llussia, in I860. 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 ;
thai tiny travelled about after the fashion of their

MARIE BASEKIBTSEFF. L55

kind, afterwards settling down iirst at Nice, and later
on in Paris. As Marie often bitterly laments, her
cducit ion was carried on in a rather desultory
fashion. But her faculty for acquiring knowledge
was so surprising, her intellect so extraordinary, that
-lie 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 indepen-
dent that she had the audacity to speak of the " card-
board 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
Ntudios, 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 scru-
pulous 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

156 A STUDY OF

more, and the desire to be a singer was her greatest
ambition. In fact, she laboured under the disadvan-
tage of an embarras cle 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, accom-
panied 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 Bashkirt-
seff was to attend his classes, and every morning found

MABIE BASHKIBTSEFF. i;,7

her <luly 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
iu her attendance than the other art students, she
Hung 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 in-

158 A STUDY OF

tensity 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 impres-
sions gave her a peculiar facility for catching like-
nesses and hringing out the salient and personal
traits in her models.

After some few years devoted to painting in the
studio, Marie BashkirtsefT hegan to feel very unhappy
about her work as a colourist. It fell so far helow
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 de-
scribe 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

M. 1 HIE BASIIKIBTSE1 I 1 5! I

book. Velasquez and Goya opened her eyes, and she
"raised herself on tiptoe," as she sa)rs, 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 Pic in 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 par-
ticular 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'Ecole. 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

1G0 A STUDY OF

only a painter," she says, "he is a poet, a psych-
ologist, 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 con-
sciousness. 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, threaten-

MABIE BASBEIBTSEFF. 161

ing to divert her efforts into too many channels.
Music, literature, sculpture, the stage, were suc-
cessively 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. How-
ever, 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
kic kings 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

11

162 A STUDY OF

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 dis-
union, 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 <>l
five. Country life, with its primitive simplicity and
its regular succession of daily tasks, sank deeply if

MAL'IE BASIIKIirrsEFF. L63

unconsciously into tlic little fellow's mind: it sank as
the seed does, without question or self-analysis, to
bide 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 sun-
burnt 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

164 A STUDY OF

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 Ecole 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 M<> uridine.

I was particularly fortunate this year in finding
in Marie Bashkirtseff' s studio a picture by Bastien-

.V. I /,'//•; /;. I SHEIBTSEFF. 165

Lepage, L'Annociation au Bergers, which lie painted
In 1875 to compete for the Prix de lvome. 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 l>astien-Lepage in a surprisingly natural-
istic 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,
lias bowed his head in adoration and is kneeling
before the angel whose sudden apparition has taken
the shepherds by surprise. Bewildered and amazed
tlie second leans forward with gaping mouth and

166 A STUDY OF

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 impres-
sion 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 shephenis

MABIE BASIIKIBTSEFF. 1G7

have passed along similar roads in the vasi 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 Bastion by the country, so is Marie Bash-
kirtsefl 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 Cite 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 wdiite 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 BashkirtsefFs 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

168 A STUDY OF

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
Elysees 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 Pare 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 ren-
dered 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

[By Marit BashkirtsqtF,

MARIE BASEKIBTSEFF. 171

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 hooks of the poor, for ever unfolding
fresh pages before their inquisitive eyes.

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 Hol-
beinesque quality in the vigour of the drawing and
the truth of the pose.

Jean et Jacques, the picture of two boys, of seven
and four years old, is an equally striking work. They
stand so naturally on their legs, these little fellows,

172 A STUDY OF

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 tacked 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

MAIUE BASTIKUITSI'IFF. \T-\

Talis back street, breathe quite as much of town life
as the discoloured walls and palings in the back-
ground. 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 Bash kirt self, not
only in artistic circles, but from the general public.
Marie loved to recall Balzac's questionable delini-

174 A STUDY OF

tion that the genius of ohservation 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 hloom 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 notice-
able 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 BashkirtsefT's impressionable nature wns
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,

MA Bl E Ji. 1 SEEIB TS E I ■'!• . 17 5

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 occupa-
tion 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 BashkirtsefT evinces great
skill in painting a natural elfect 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 some-
body— at some lovelorn swain, whose antics make all
her features twitch with amusement.

One of Marie BashkirtsefT' 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

176 A STUDY OF

resting on a table and her face in her hand. Her
loose gown of light bine 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-paintod
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 th(3 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

MARIE BASHKIBTSEFF. 177

behind to the left. She is done in that becoming
black studio uniform with the broad white frills and
j ibot 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 lined 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
ail 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 he 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

12

178 A STUDY OF

of a portion of a street near the Rue Ampere. 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 pre-
sence, 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

MABIE BASBKIBTSEFP. IT*.*

Julian's remark on meeting her just alter she had
painted it. Without knowing the subjeci 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 con-
veyed 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 Bod
and Line is an interesting study oi a brown Nicois
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 en-
grossed only a few weeks before her death. The

180 A STUDY OF

background of houses, the bench with the people
sitting back to back in various attitudes expressive
of weariness, destitution, or despair — one with Ids
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 Bash-
kirtseff 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,
si i mined 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 an<3

MARIE BASHKIBTSEFF. L8]

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 pas-
sionless." 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 !><>
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

1S2 A STUDY OF

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 Tolstoi 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

MABIE BASHKIBTSEFF, L88

temperament, happily for her, were in touch with the
times. For the specially Russian alertness to im-
pressions 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
horn (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 im-
bibed 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 boule-
vards, 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, k' Where, then.
shall I find any movement, any of that savage and
primitive liberty, any true expression ? "

That natural movement and primitive lil erty she

184 A STUDY OF

could certainly not expect in Paris high-life. But in
the Ukraine she might have found it without ad-
mixture 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 move-
ments 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 iri-
descent 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
;ii id 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

MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF,

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 line 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 BashkirtsefFs work, unfortunately for as,

186

.4 STUDY OF

was left unfinished, but it lias not died still-born in
the studio. Jt 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 Bashldrt serf's
works : —

1.

Portrait deMdlle. Bashkirtseff.

25.

Tete d'enfant.

2.

Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.

26.

Le Soir.

3.

Portrait de Mme. P. B.

27.

Ophelie (Etude).

4.

Jeune femme lisant.

28.

Paysan de Poltava (Etude).

5.

Le Meeting.

29.

Tete (Etude).

6.

Fleurs.— Salon, 1884.

30.

Grand-Pere malade.

7.

Fleurs.

31.

Copie.

8.

Les trois Rires.

32.

Etude.

9.

Tete (Etude).

33.

La Eue.

10.

Profil.

34.

Avril.

11.

Nature morte.

35.

Portrait du Prince Bojidar

12.

Interieur d'une chaumiere a

Karageorgevitch.

Nice.

36.

Le Parapluie.

13.

Portrait du General Pelikan.

37.

Jean et Jacques.

14.

Georgette.

38.

Etude d'enfant.

15.

Portrait deMdlle. Bashkirtseff.

39.

Paysage d'Automne.

1G.

Esquisse.

40.

Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.

17.

Tete d'enfant.

41.

Etude de femme.

18.

Coco.

42.

Portrait de Jacques Rendouin.

19.

Etude des mains.

43.

Jeune Garcon (E tude).

20.

Esquisse.

44.

Tete de femme.

21.

Marine.

45.

Etude.

22.

Monsieur et Madame (Etude).

46.

Coin do Rue.

23.

L'Atelier, Julian.

47.

Portrait de Mdlle.de Can robert.

24.

Tete (Etude).

48.

Une Vague.

M \kii: Bashkir] -im.
i .in, r a Photograph.)

MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

L89

49.

Etude de mains,

75.

Portrait de Mdlle. I

50.

Paysage a Sevres.

7(i.

[nterieur de bric-a-1

51.

Paysage a Sevres.

Madrid.

52.

Paysage.

77.

Ecluse a Asnieres.

53.

Portrait de son frere.

78.

Etude d'enfant.

54.

Portrait do femme.

79.

Etude (Modele).

55.

K tude de Main.

80.

Modele.

56.

Vielle femme (Etude).

81.

Pe'cheur a Nice.

57.

Tete (Etude).

82.

Esqm

58.

Esquisse.

83.

Au bord de la ]

59.

Mendiant (Etude).

84.

A la fenetre.

60.

Projet du tableau: " Les

85.

Therese.

Saintes Femmes."

86.

Wanka.

61.

Les SaintesFemmes (Esquisse)

87.

l'a\ sage a Nice.

62.

Mcndiant de Grenade.

88.

Etude.

63.

Une Dame.

89.

Etude.

64.

Parisienne. — Salon, 1883.

'.in.

Marine.

65.

Tete de Foi^at.

91.

Bebe.

66.

Irma (Etude).

92.

Marine.

67.

l'a\ Bage ill' Nice.

93.

El ude pour le tableau : •• I

68.

Copie d'apres Velasquez

Saintes Femmes."

69.

Cuiffoniere.

94.

( !onvalescente.

70.

La Kue Bremontier.

95.

Mcndiant Italien.

71.

Etude de mains.

96.

Portrait.

72.

Gommeux.

97.

Etude.

73.

La Boheinienne.

98.

l'oii rail ilr Minr. ( Iredelue.

74.

Interieur d'une bontique au

99.

Portrait de Mme. Nachet.

Mont Dore.

100

i. Japonaise.

I .■ -

PASTELS.

101. Portrait de Louis de Can- !<>•">. Portrait de Mdlle. Eral.

robert.
102. Portrait de Millie, de Ville-

vielle.

L04. Portrait de Mdlle. Babanine.

105. Portrait de Millie. Armandine.

106. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.

107. Portrait.

108. Tete.

DESSINS.

109. Soiree [ntin

110. Projet de tableau

190

A STUDY OF MABIE BASHK1RTSEFF.

111.

Coco, Chevres.

127.

Les Enfants.

112.

Un Monsieur.

128.

Bojidar.

113.

Une Dame.

129.

L'Orpheline.

114.

Le Sommeil.

130.

Amelie.

115.

Les Cartes.

131.

Devant la Cheminee.

116.

La Lecture.

132.

Madame B.

117.

La Cigarette.

133.

Une partie.

118.

Un Monsieur et

une Dame.

134.

Salon d'essayagechezDoucet

119.

Une Dame.

135.

Carnaval de Nice.

120.

Une Dame.

136.

Tete.

121.

Une Tete.

137.

Tete.

122.

Mimi.

138.

Mademoiselle D.

123.

Marie.

139.

Les Cartes.

124.

Eosalie.

140.

Etude.

125.

L'Orateur.

141.

a 144. Etudes d'apres 1(

126.

Ophelie.

Modele.

SCULPTURE:

1.

La Douleur de N

ausicaa.

4.

Petit Garcon.

2.

Femme appuyee.

5.

Une Femme.

MATHILDE BLIND.

STlje ©regain Preg0,

UNWIN BROTHERS,
CHILWORTH AND LONDOK.

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