Read Ebook: Jules Bastien-Lepage and his art by Blind Mathilde Clausen George Sickert Walter Theuriet Andr

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On the re-opening of communications he hastened back to his village, where he arrived, like the pigeon in the fable, disabled,

"Trainant l'aile et tirant le pied."

There he spent the remainder of the year 1871, recovering his shattered health in his native air, making long excursions as far as to the Moselle, and painting various portraits of relations and friends. He did not return to Paris until sometime in the year 1872.

Weary of the struggle he began to paint fans.

One day a manufacturer of ant?phelic milk asked him to make a sort of allegorical picture intended for an advertisement for his Elixir of Youth. The artist, making a virtue of necessity, painted a bright gay picture, after the manner of Watteau's landscapes, with groups of young women dressed in modern style approaching a fountain, where Cupids were gambolling.

The painting finished, Bastien explained to the manufacturer his intention to exhibit it first of all in the Salon.

The perfumer wished for nothing better, but insisted on one condition; above the fountain was to be placed on a scroll of all the colours of the rainbow, the name of the cosmetic, and the address of the place where it was sold.

Naturally Bastien refused, and the tradesman, disappointed of his advertisement, left him the picture for his trouble.

This painting was exhibited in the Salon of 1873, under the title of Au Printemps ; 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 , exhibited in 1874, is conceived and executed under this influence. It represents a young peasant girl seated at the edge of a wood, bordered by a meadow which slopes down to a Meusian village, whose red-tiled roofs are seen in the distance. The girl is sitting, with wide-open eyes, her arm passed through the bowed handle of a rustic basket strewn with violets, while from behind her nude little children with butterflies' wings and blowing upon pipes, whisper to her the song of the growing grass, and tell her of coming womanhood.

This light and spring-like picture, half realistic, half symbolical, would, perhaps, in spite of its simple charm, have left the public indifferent if it had not been accompanied by another, which suddenly brought the artist into the light, and was the success of the Salon of 1874.

During his last holiday at Damvillers, Bastien-Lepage had conceived the idea of painting the portrait of his grandfather, in the open air, in the little garden which the old man loved to cultivate.

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 retrouss?; the white forked beard spread itself over an ancient vest of the colour of dead leaves; the hands, painted like life, were crossed upon the grey trousers.

Before this picture, so true, so frank, of such marvellous intensity of familiar life, the public stood delighted, and the name of Bastien-Lepage, unknown before, figured the next day in the first place in the articles on the Salon.

It was in front of this picture that I first met Jules. Having looked in my catalogue for the name of the painter, I was delighted to find that he was from the Meuse, and born at that same Damvillers where I had once lived.

The heavy soil of our department is not fruitful in artists. When it has produced one it takes a rest for a few centuries.

Since Ligier Richier, the celebrated sculptor, born at the end of the fifteenth century, the Meuse could only claim credit for the painter Yard a clever decorator of churches and houses in the time of Duke Stanislas; so I was quite proud to find that Bastien-Lepage was a fellow countryman of mine. A few moments later a mutual friend introduced us to each other.

I saw before me a young man, plainly dressed, small, fair, and muscular; his pale face, with its square determined brow, short nose, and spiritual lips, scarcely covered with a blond moustache, was lighted up by two clear blue eyes whose straight and piercing look told of loyalty and indomitable energy. There was roguishness as well as manliness in that mobile face with its flattened features, and a certain cool audacity alternated with signs of sensitiveness and sparkling fun and gaiety.

Remembrances of our native province, our common love of the country and of life in the open air, soon established kindly relations between us, and after two or three meetings we had entered upon a close friendship.

The portrait of the grandfather had won for him a third medal, and had ensured him a place in the sunshine.

It was not yet a money success, but it was a certain degree of fame; he might go back to his village with his heart at rest, his head high. The State had just bought his picture, La Chanson du Printemps , and orders were beginning to come in.

In 1875 Bastien-Lepage reappeared in the Salon with La Communiante and the portrait of M. Simon Hayem, two excellent works which gave, each in its way, a new mark of his originality.

The portrait of M. Hayem was best liked by men of the world; artists were most struck by La Communiante.

This young girl's simple awkward bearing, as she stands out from a creamy background, with all the stiffness of her starched white veil, na?vely opening her pure hazel eyes, and crossing her fingers, ill at ease in the white gloves, is a marvel of truthful painting. It reminds one of the manner of Memling and of Clouet, though with quite a modern feeling. It is interesting, as being the first of those small, lifelike, characteristic portraits, in a style at once broad and conscientious, which may be reckoned among the most perfect of this painter's works.

At the time of these successes in the Salon, Bastien joined in the competition for the Prix de Rome. The subject chosen for 1875 was taken from the New Testament--L'Annonciation aux Bergers .

I remember as if it were yesterday that July morning when the gates of the Palais des Beaux Arts were opened, and the crowd of eager inquirers rushed into the hall of the competition.

After a few minutes Bastien's picture was surrounded, and a buzz of approval arose from the groups of young people gathered round that work, so real, so strongly conceived and executed that the other nine canvases disappeared as in a mist.

The artist had understood and treated the subject in a manner utterly different from the usual style of the Academy. It was familiar and touching, like a page of the Bible. The visit of the angel had surprised the shepherds sleeping by their fire in the open air; the oldest of them was kneeling before the apparition, and prostrated himself in adoration; the youngest was gazing with half-closed eyes, and his open lips and hands, with fingers apart, expressed astonishment and admiration. The angel, a graceful figure, with childlike almost feminine head, was showing with outstretched arm to the shepherds, Bethlehem in the distance surrounded by a miraculous halo.

This picture, which has both the charm of poetic legend and a manly grip of real life, was executed with uncommon grace and vigour; its very faults contributed to the realization of the effect aimed at.

Most of those who saw this work of Lepage declared that he would carry off the Prix de Rome with a high hand; yet the jury decided otherwise. It was an older and more correct competitor who was sent to the Villa Medicis at the cost of the State.

For a moment Bastien-Lepage was troubled and discouraged by this decision. Not that he felt himself strongly attracted towards Rome and Italian art, but he knew that many people judge of an artist by his success. Among the people down in his province and in his own family the Prix de Rome would have been considered as an official recognition of his talent, and he regretted, above all, not being able to give this satisfaction to his relations, who had undergone so many privations in order to maintain him at Paris. That he did not soon forget this unmerited check, we may gather from this fragment of a letter to a friend:

"I learned my business in Paris, I shall not forget that; but my art I did not learn there. I should be sorry to undervalue the high qualities and the devotion of the masters who direct the school. But is it my fault if I have found in their studio the only doubts that have tormented me? When I came to Paris I knew nothing at all, but I had never dreamed of that heap of formulas they pervert one with. In the school I have drawn gods and goddesses, Greeks and Romans, that I knew nothing about, that I did not understand, and even laughed at. I used to say to myself that this might be high art; I wonder sometimes now if anything has resulted from this education...."

However, he did not consider himself beaten. The following year, at the same time that he was exhibiting his portrait of M. Wallon, he went in again for the Prix de Rome competition. This time it was less for his own sake than to give a satisfaction to his family and friends. He did not enter with any real feeling into this competition, the subject for which was: Priam suppliant Achille de lui rendre le corps de son fils Hector . This picture, though a vigorous composition, tells almost nothing of the deep and poignant emotion of this episode of the Iliad.

Once more he failed to gain the prize, but this time he did not take it much to heart. He was occupied with more absorbing prospects: his last visit to Damvillers had bent his mind toward another ideal. Whatever he might say, his studies in the school had not been without their use to him. They had developed in him the critical faculty. His repugnance to factitious and conventional art had driven him with more force to the exact and attentive observation of nature.

At Paris he had learned to compare, and to see better. The Meuse country, so little heroic, with its low hills, its limited horizons, its level plains, had appeared to him suddenly more attractive and more worthy of interest than the heroes of Greece and Rome. Our labourers driving the plough across the field; our peasant women with their large liquid eyes, prominent jaws, and widely opening mouths; our vine-dressers, their backs curved with the labour of the hoe, had revealed themselves to him as models much more attractive than those of the atelier. It was a work for a great artist to bring out the poetry pervading the village folk and their belongings and to give it a real existence, as it were, by means of line and colour. To represent the intoxicating odour of the mown grass, the heat of the August sun on the ripe corn, the life of the village street; to bring into relief the men and women who have their joys and sorrows there; to show the slow movement of thought, the anxieties about daily bread on faces with irregular and even vulgar features;--this is human art, and consequently high art. This is what the Dutch painters did, and they created masterpieces. Bastien, while lounging among the orchards of Damvillers and the woods of R?ville, 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 , La Prairie de Damvillers , the two sketches for the picture Les Foins , Les Jardins au Printemps , Les Foins M?rs , L'Aurore --all these canvases bear the date of 1876.

It was in the autumn of the same year that we carried out a long-talked-of plan for making an excursion together on foot into the Argonne. I went to join him in September at Damvillers.

Thanks to him, I saw with a very different feeling the town that formerly I thought so dull. Cordially and hospitably received in the house at the corner of the great square, I made the acquaintance of the father, with his calm, thoughtful face; of the grandfather, so cheerful in spite of his eighty years; of the mother, so full of life, so devoted, the best mother that one could wish for an artist. I saw what a strong and tender union existed between the members of this family whose idol and whose pride was Jules.

We set out along with one of my old friends and the painter's young brother. For a week we walked with our bags on our backs through the forest country of the Argonne, going through woods from Varennes to La Chalade, and from Islettes to Beaulieu. The weather was rainy and unpleasant enough, but we were none the less gay for that, never winking when the rain came down, visiting the glass-works, admiring the deep gorges in the forests, the solitary pools in the midst of the woods, the miles of green and misty avenues at the foot of the hills.

I seem still to hear in the dripping night that voice, clear and vibrating, now silent for ever....

As we went along he told me of his plans for the future.

He wanted to tell the whole story of country life in a series of large pictures: hay-making, harvest, seed-time, the lovers, the burial of a young girl.... He also wanted to paint a peasant woman as Jeanne d'Arc, at the moment when the idea of her divine mission is taking possession of her brain; then, a Christ in the Tomb.

Together we made a plan for publishing a series of twelve compositions: Les Mois Rustiques , 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.

Shortly afterwards he gave an account of this visit in a letter to his friend Baude, the engraver:

He had scarcely been six weeks at Damvillers again when he lost his father, who was suddenly carried off by pulmonary congestion. Death entered the house for the first time, and it was a rude shock for a family where each loved the other so well.

"We were too young to lose such a good friend," he wrote to me; "in spite of all the courage one can muster, the void, the frightful void is so great, that one is sometimes in despair...."

"... Happily remembrance remains , and what a remembrance it is! ... the purest that is possible;--he was goodness and self-abnegation personified; he loved us so!... What is to be done? We must try to fill the void with love for those who remain, and who are attached to us, always keeping in mind him who is gone, and working much to drive away the fixed idea."

And indeed he did work furiously: at Damvillers, at a Job that remains unfinished, and at Paris at the full-length portrait of a lady, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1877.

He had left the Rue Cherche Midi and had settled in the Impasse du Maine, where his studio and his apartment occupied one floor of a building, at the end of a narrow neglected garden, whose only ornaments were an apricot tree and some lilac bushes.

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