Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Jules Bastien-Lepage and his art by Blind Mathilde Clausen George Sickert Walter Theuriet Andr
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page
Ebook has 289 lines and 33723 words, and 6 pages
PAGE
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AND HIS ART: A MEMOIR. BY ANDR? THEURIET 11
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST. BY GEORGE CLAUSEN, A.R.W.S. 107
MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING. BY WALTER SICKERT, N.E.A.C. 129
A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF. BY MATHILDE BLIND 145
PAGE
GRANDFATHER LEPAGE. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 25
THE COMMUNICANT. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 31
THE HAYFIELD. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 43
SARAH BERNHARDT. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 51
JOAN OF ARC LISTENING TO THE VOICES. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 55
THE BEGGAR. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 61
FATHER JACQUES, THE WOODMAN. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 71
SKETCH FOR FATHER JACQUES. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 75
THE INN. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 101
BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE. BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 110
THE LITTLE SWEEP. BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE 132
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF. FROM A PORTRAIT BY HERSELF 148
A MEETING. BY MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF 169
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH 187
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AND HIS ART.
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE
AS MAN AND ARTIST.
In the month of June, 1856, the chances of a Civil Service noviciate compelled me to live for six weeks at Damvillers, a small town on the Meuse, half-way between Verdun and Montm?dy.
For a young fellow of twenty-two there was nothing here particularly attractive. I spent my solitary evenings with my elbows on my window-sill watching the twilight descend upon the brown-tiled roofs which enclose the great square as with a horizontal frame. In one corner the large green waggon of a travelling pedler was resting by the side of rows of earthenware, whose polished surface reflected the lights from the window of the neighbouring inn.
My only amusement consisted in listening to the chatter of some girls sitting at the tinner's door, or the shouts of the children playing at ball by the wall of the corn-market.
I little thought then that among these urchins, with torn pinafores and tangled hair, was to be found a future master of contemporary painting, and that the name of Bastien-Lepage thrown to and fro each evening by the children's voices, and repeated by the echoes of the solitary square, would come to be known, and received with acclamations throughout the world, by all who are interested in Art and in Artists.
Jules Bastien-Lepage was born at Damvillers, on November 1, 1848, in a house which forms one of the corners of that square of which I have just spoken; a simple, well-to-do farmer's house, the front coloured yellow, the shutters grey.
It was in a room on the ground floor, with windows looking to the south, that the painter of Les Foins and of Jeanne d'Arc first saw the light. The family consisted of the father, a sensible, industrious, methodical man; of the mother, a woman of the truest heart and untiring devotion; and of the Grandfather Lepage, formerly a collector of taxes, who now found a home with his children. They lived in common on the modest produce of the fields, which the Bastiens themselves cultivated, and on the grandfather's small pension.
At five years old Jules began to show an aptitude for drawing, and his father was eager to cultivate this dawning talent. He himself had a taste for the imitative arts, employing his leisure in light work that required a certain manual skill, and to this he brought the scrupulous exactness and conscientious attention which were his ruling qualities.
From this time, in the winter evenings, he required that Jules should draw with pencil on paper the various articles in use upon the table--the lamp, the jug, the inkstand, etc. It was to this first education of the eye and of the hand that Bastien-Lepage owed that love of sincerity, that patient seeking for exactness of detail, which were the ruling motives of his life as an artist.
In thus urging him to draw every day, the father had no idea of making his son a painter. At that time, especially at Damvillers, painting was not looked upon as a serious profession. The dream that he cherished, along with the grandfather, was to put Jules in a position to choose later on one of the administrative careers, such as overseer of forests, or bridges, or high-ways, which are always easiest of access to those who have been well trained in drawing. So, as soon as he should be eleven years old, he was to leave the communal school, and go to the College.
This involved great sacrifice, for the resources of the family were low, and in the interval a second boy was born; but they redoubled their economy, and in 1859 they managed to send Jules to the College of Verdun.
It was at the drawing class that he worked with the greatest zeal. The correctness of his eye and the dexterity of his hand astonished his master.
When the boy went back to Damvillers for the holidays he drew everywhere; upon his books, upon the walls, upon the doors, and long afterwards traces of these rough outlines might be seen on the orchard palings. His mother carefully preserved books full of pencil sketches of the little brother Emile in all sorts of poses.
His habit was to express any thought that possessed him by a drawing. He already attempted to reproduce with his pencil, passages that struck him in reading, and his first composition was Abraham's Sacrifice. Classical stories made more impression on his mind at this time than the rustic scenes which met him everywhere in his wanderings in the open air.
At this age, the surroundings in which we live, and which custom renders familiar to us, excite neither our surprise nor our imagination, but they enter our eyes and our memory, and, without our knowing it, become deeply engraven there. It is only in later years that, by comparison and reflection, we feel their powerful charm and their original grace.
In his walks across the fields, Bastien-Lepage received impressions of country life, and assimilated them like daily food. Gatherers of faggots carrying their bundles of wood; fishers for frogs wet to the knees, crossing the meadows with their fishing tackle on their shoulders; washerwomen wringing out their linen by the banks of the Tinte; loungers sitting under a willow tree, while the lunch of cheese is carried to the workers; the village gardens in April at the time of the spring digging, when the leafless trees spread their shadows over borders adorned only by the precocious blossoms of the primrose and the crown imperial; potato fields, where fires of dried stems send up their blue smoke into the red October evening--all these details of village life entered the eyes of the child, who instinctively stored them up in his memory.
Literary studies had little interest for him, while on the contrary he had a strong liking for mathematics.
At one time when he was leaving the fourth form he thought of preparing for the examination for St. Cyr. This is not surprising in a department essentially military, whose remarkable men have all been generals or marshals; but this fancy, in which he was led more by imitation of others than by his own true calling, soon passed away, and during his last years at college his thoughts were constantly turned towards drawing, and when his course of philosophy came to an end, he made known to his parents his wish to go to Paris to study painting.
Great was the astonishment in the home at Damvillers. While recognizing his son's skill as a draughtsman, Father Bastien persisted in declaring that painting was not a career--nothing certain, a long and costly apprenticeship, and then ten chances of failure to one of success. Let us talk rather of an honourable appointment in the administration of the state, where one is sure to get one's pay every month, with a prospect of a provision for one's old age!
They held a family council. The grandfather considered the adventure hazardous and shook his head; the mother was frightened above all at the dangers of Paris and the life of privation to be undergone there, but, conquered at last by the persistency of her son, she murmured timidly, "Yet, if Jules wishes it!..."
A way was found for settling everything. A friend of the family, who held a superior employment in the Central Postal Administration, advised Jules to go up for examination for admission into that department, promising him that on his being received, he would have him called to Paris, when it could be arranged for him to study at the ?cole des Beaux Arts in the hours that were free from his postal service. They took this advice; Bastien passed the examination, was named supernumerary, and set out for Paris about the end of 1867.
He divided his time between his postal duties and his studies in the School. This could only be done under great disadvantages. The requirements of his position in the Post Office made consecutive and serious study very difficult.
"All beginnings are painful," says Goethe. Bastien-Lepage had a harsh experience of this. He had burnt his ships in leaving the Post Office, and he found himself alone in Paris with very limited means of existence.
At Damvillers there was more self-denial. The mother, always valiant, herself went to work in the fields, that she might have something to add to the little sum sent every month to the young painter. The Council General of the Meuse had voted him an allowance of, I believe, six hundred francs; all this together scarcely furnished him with bed and board.
But Jules was endowed with a robust faith, a firm will, a never-failing cheerfulness, and the magical power of these three enabled him to endure bravely the many trials of the years of his apprenticeship.
In 1870 he sent his first picture to the Salon. It passed unnoticed. I have just seen this picture again. It is the portrait of a man, quite young, dressed in a coat of strong green, the whole flooded with a greenish light. It is rather in the manner of Ricard, but the solid construction of the head and the expression of the face already indicate a painter who sees clearly and seeks to enter into the character of his model.
A short time later the war broke out. Jules Bastien enlisted in a company of volunteers, commanded by the painter Castellani, and did his duty bravely at the outposts.
One day in the trenches a shell burst near him and sent a clod of hardened earth straight at his chest. He was taken to the ambulance, where he remained during the last month of the siege, while another shell fell upon his studio, and there destroyed his first composition, a nymph, nude, her arms clasped over her blonde head, and bathing her feet in the waters of a spring.
On the re-opening of communications he hastened back to his village, where he arrived, like the pigeon in the fable, disabled,
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page