Chapter VI (1)

On the 17th of the following March, at the Hôtel de Chimay, now connected with the École 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 exception 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 development of a beautiful plant――first in the drawings, so pure, so sober, and expressive; then in the sketches so truthful and sincere; and, lastly, in the finished pictures, so harmonious and luminous. By the side of the great pictures, Les Foins (The Hay), La Saison d’Octobre (October), Le Mendiant (The Beggar), Père Jacques (Father Jacques), and L’Amour au Village (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 execution 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 Blés Mûrs (Ripe Corn), or to those full of air and motion, like London Bridge and the Thames; then one stopped before La Petite fille allant à la École (The Little Girl going to School), or that poetic Idyl, Le Soir au Village (Evening in the Village).

_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]

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 passionate worship of what is simple and natural, hatred 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 Hôtel 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 produced 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 exhibition of the works of the talented young artist, Mdlle. Bashkirtseff, mown down like Bastien, in full youth, and at the same time as he. This cruel death seemed only a bad 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 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-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.

_By Augustus Saint-Gaudens._]

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST.

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 established rules, 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 still young men, many of them only now beginning to obtain full recognition; and yet it is perhaps long enough ago to enable his work to be considered as a whole, and his place in the art-movement to be 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 surroundings is better than to follow unquestioning on the old conventional lines. This is, roughly speaking, the modern standpoint, and it cannot be denied that 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, Rousseau, 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 acceptance 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 critic, referring to Claude Monet, “like nature? Yes; of course it’s like nature; but a man has no business to choose that aspect of it!”

Every picture may be said to appeal to the spectator from two sides or points of view――the literary and the æsthetic.

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 embrace both these points of view. The literary and æsthetic sides of art were very evenly balanced in him. If we take any individual work, as, for example, the 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 constitutes 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 you ask yourself, “What is he going to say? What does the artist wish to express?” You may 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 contrary, 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 he will not help you by any comment of his own.

And whereas with Millet the interest always centres in the 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 everything――on thinking it over, I begin to doubt. There is no room for doubt about Millet; no mistake about what he meant. With him the attention is always concentrated on the business in hand: and 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 admirable. 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 accepting 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 atmosphere 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,” the portraits of his parents, his grandfather, of M. Theuriet, Albert Woolf, Sarah Bernhardt, “Pas Meche,” and the Beggar. Each of these is a complete 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 painting 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 foregrounds 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 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 uncompromising and unconventional presentment of his subjects should be expressed by means of a most 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 been seen, or might reasonably have been expected; and one can understand some critics feeling that a man so thoroughly master of his art, so consummate a painter, must be 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 back for his mature inspiration not only to his first impressions, but 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, but they were soon over, and almost from the start he seems to have decided on his path.

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 Damvillers 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 contemporary 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 of 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 point cannot be discussed. Taking the word, however, 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 Bernhardt, 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 tendencies 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 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 words 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 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 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 would have shown a wider range of nature than that of any other artist, except perhaps Rembrandt. But it was not to be.

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.

_By Jules Bastien-Lepage._]

MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.

Much has been written about Jean François 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 has 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 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 unconscious, 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 reflection, in England, has been in an inartistic direction, 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 trickled its more sequestered course parallel with the broad flood 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 François Millet, and for a typical monument of its disregard, the 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 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 uninterrupted by the exigencies of execution, and his execution untrammelled by the fortuitous inconveniences incident on the moment of observation, and undisturbed, 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 ne 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 the labour of the plains, to the sordid toil of the greenroom and the hectic mysteries of stage illumination; but 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 he held his picture he knew it, and the execution was the singing of a song learned by heart, and not the painful performance in public of a meritorious feat of sight-reading. The result of this was that his work has 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 dragged 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 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 François 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 linespace, 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 painter of exhibition pictures, of what are called in Paris _machins_. He was an inveterate _salonnier_, with the ideals and the limitations of the typical uncultured Paris art-student, the _fort_ of his _atelier_. _Faire vrai_ is the sum 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 _tête-à-tête_ 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 naturalness 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 or a Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant in his own natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what is he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks it. That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise again. The potatoes, portraits every one, will 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 photography, 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 proposition that a stenographic report of events and words as they occurred would constitute the highest literary treatment of a given scene in life. A page of description is distinguished as literature from reporting when the resources of language are employed with cunning 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 personality, 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 style 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 of the _salonnier_, the picture, that is, that is born of the exhibition and for the exhibition, wears its air of novelty and interest strictly for the season. If he 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 without 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 helpless introduction of the visionary figures behind the back of the rapt maid completes the conviction that it was an error of judgment for a painter with the limitations of Lepage to burden a touching and sanctified legend with commonplace illustration. A faithful copy of so strange and interesting a subject as Mme. 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 have looked at so much as a single pearl in the necklace 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 his grandfather, at the same exhibition, it was quite possible to see Lepage at his best as a workmanlike 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 Bastien-Lepage as a master, what terms are left us for Keene and Millet, for Whistler and Degas?

WALTER SICKERT.
_Chelsea, 1891._

A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

In Possession of her Mother.] [Engraved by C. State.

MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

(_From a Portrait by Herself._)]

A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

The brilliant sunshine of a glorious October morning poured through the tall windows of Marie Bashkirtseff’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, sketches, 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 first studies from life, which astonished Julian so much that he pronounced them phenomenal; here were her numerous sketches showing the sincerity of her efforts to be true to nature; and her finished pictures full of individuality and power.

As the eye rested on these portraits where the keynote 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 Impressionism, as it was perhaps the cry of the primitive artist who with much labour and wrestling of the spirit modelled the first rude image of the lioness or painted the first likeness of an archer, bow in hand. Not quite the same, perhaps. For these early workers in clay or pigments saw nature with the eyes of children――those visionary eyes to which the leaves of the trees, the flowers of the field, the dogs and horses and cats and cows are as much part of the interminable fairy-tale in which they live as the more fantastic figures in more orthodox stories. For these primitive artists looked at the world with the eyes of children, and though they looked at her with clear, wide-open eyes, they could not help seeing her symbolically, seeing the analogy between men and beasts, between beasts and plants, between the articulate and inarticulate phases of nature, so that whatever they produced not only stood for itself but for a host of subtly apprehended affinities linked together by imaginative insight into the mystery of things. And in tracing the development of this primitive style of art a little further, in following it to its legitimate development into the loftiest forms of Greek art, we cannot help seeing that it was the consummate flower of this archaic symbolism. With this difference, that while Egyptian, Assyrian, and Indian artists invented the most grotesque and fantastic forms to express the wonder and mystery of the world, the Greeks tried to find outward expression for that archetype of beauty which has as yet only existed in the mind of man.

And nature, plus the mind of man, plus that master faculty which refuses and chooses, and which reaches its highest results by making fresh combinations from what is widely diffused in nature: that, surely, is the secret of art. This faculty of selection and concentration, within the limits of some more or less conventional form, seems to belong to every manifestation of art, which can never under any circumstances be a simple reproduction of nature. How can it, indeed, since, as Blake so pithily puts it: “A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees”? And we question whether any two people, any two painters would ever see precisely the same thing――the same tree, however hard they might try to free themselves from the bias of personality; or would succeed in giving us an identical pictorial representation of any subject whatsoever. For the artist’s own mind, unlike a photographic apparatus, would always intervene so as to force him to see life through the medium of his temperament. Indeed, will not the circulation of the artist’s blood, the pitch of his nerves, the thoughts he has thought and the emotions he has felt from the beginning of consciousness, have to be taken into account as factors in any individual painter’s picture of a tree or any other object? For this reason a picture can never be truly likened to a window opening on nature unless, indeed, it be a stained-glass window. On the contrary, the artist for the time being lends us his eyes to see nature with. And as the eyes of a Titian or a Turner saw combinations and harmonies of tones and tints whose magnificent effect entirely escapes the eyes of ordinary mortals, it is much wiser to accept their interpretation than to go into hair-splitting discussions as to the precise exactitude of their copy to a reality which is eternally changing.

Take only the painters of the realistic modern French school――can we not tell at a glance, in going through the Louvre, whether it is nature according to Corot, to Rousseau, or to Millet that we are looking at? For whether the realists like it or no, the world will reflect itself in their brains according to the laws of their peculiar individuality, and the preciousness of all art expression seems precisely to consist in this rare flavour which the artist’s self impresses on nature outside himself. This priceless quality which we call style is as inseparable from the genuine artist as the shape of his nose. It clearly differentiates a peasant woman by Millet from any ordinary peasant woman we may chance on in a field, and is as marked in his simple pourtrayal of rustic subjects as in the most sublime compositions by Michael Angelo.

These few inadequate remarks may not be entirely out of place when speaking of the æsthetic views of our day; or of an artist who is peculiarly representative of them. For the new scientific spirit which has revolutionized our views of nature, has also penetrated the realms of literature and art, and impelled artists to attempt a perfectly unprejudiced reproduction of life. For the present this has led them to a grim realism, which loves to dwell exclusively on the material side of existence, scouting the romantic and ideal as figments of man’s fancy to be relegated into the limbo of unrealistics along with the dragons and griffins of the world’s childhood. The same movement which has produced the extremely powerful but one-sided novels of De Goncourt, Zola, and Guy de Maupassant may also be studied in the works of the realistic French painters in their almost fierce insistence on what is natural even to the pitch of repulsiveness.

Impressionism was in the air when Marie Bashkirtseff entered on her artistic career in 1877. It would amount to a truism to give any fresh account of her birth, parentage, and early life at this time. All the world has read her famous journal. All the world knows that she was born at Poltava, in the south of Russia, in 1860. That her parents were separated after a few years of marriage; that her mother and aunt came to the West of Europe with the two children――Paul and Marie, and a cousin Dina; that they travelled about after the fashion of their kind, afterwards settling down first at Nice, and later on in Paris. As Marie often bitterly laments, her education was carried on in a rather desultory fashion. But her faculty for acquiring knowledge was so surprising, her intellect so extraordinary, that she became an admirable linguist, a skilled musician, a splendid singer, a fair mathematician with a rapidity that seemed to amount to intuition. Her powers of observation had probably been much developed by all that she saw and heard on their travels. She had an early opportunity of seeing the master works of all time in Florence and Rome, and was an indefatigable frequenter of museums and picture galleries. At the age of fifteen, her judgment was already so independent that she had the audacity to speak of the “cardboard pictures of Raphael” and the “stupid if glorious Venuses of Titian.” She had never as yet lived in Paris, mixed with artists, or heard the talk of the studios, yet in many respects she seems already a full-fledged art student, with the last phrase of the hour on her lips. Already she sought in pictures that scrupulous resemblance to nature which was her chief aim when she herself took to painting. But though deeply interested in art, it did not at that time occupy the chief place in her thoughts. Music attracted her more, and the desire to be a singer was her greatest ambition. In fact, she laboured under the disadvantage of an _embarras de richesses_ in regard to her natural gifts, and for several years she found it difficult to make a choice.

However, one day in October, 1877, there entered M. Julian’s now famous life-school in the Passage des Panoramas two very tall ladies, all in black, accompanied by a young girl dressed in pure white from head to foot, as if she were a lily of the field. This strange and striking trio made quite a sensation. M. Julian himself, with his happy picturesqueness of phrase in describing the first appearance of Marie Bashkirtseff in his studio, spoke of her as _une blancheur_――something bright and startling, which seemed to have little in common with the severe work-a-day routine of studio life. Nevertheless, she had come, accompanied by her mother and aunt, to be entered as a pupil; and in the letter which she brought him from an eminent physician, he found this curt word by way of introduction: “I have sent you a monster.”

All this was very unlike the usual order of things. But it was there and then settled that Marie Bashkirtseff was to attend his classes, and every morning found her duly at place, working away as if her life depended upon it. At first, her master took this wish to paint for the caprice of a spoilt child, which would soon pass when confronted by the difficulties of execution. Before long, however, he recognized his mistake; he felt that she was a power; that there was something which lifted her out of the ranks and placed her apart among her fellow pupils. Something which gave to her first efforts, however crude and tentative, a vigour and spontaneity which were truly astonishing. And he discovered, too, that so far from playing at art she was in deadly earnest. Instead of being less regular in her attendance than the other art students, she flung herself into her work with the passionate zeal of an enthusiast. Morning, noon, and night found her either at her easel, or else taking private lessons in anatomy and modelling, or haunting sales and picture galleries――always, on the alert to improve herself. Indeed, Julian found her a little monster of energy, of talent, of ambition, of concentrated will. Whatever she took into her head to do, she did and accomplished the seemingly impossible.

In a surprisingly short time she had mastered the elements of art, and her studies from the nude were considered wonderful by her masters. By the intensity of her attention and fever of work joined to her native endowment she managed after only two years of study to produce a picture of a woman reading, which was hung in the Salon. It evinces all her characteristic qualities――masterly vigour of drawing, and a vivid and striking manner of painting human faces. Her extreme sensitiveness to impressions gave her a peculiar facility for catching likenesses and bringing out the salient and personal traits in her models.

After some few years devoted to painting in the studio, Marie Bashkirtseff began to feel very unhappy about her work as a colourist. It fell so far below her own standard as to plunge her into fits of despair. In the midst of this profound dissatisfaction, in the autumn of 1881, she went to Spain, and there she seemed to awaken to a new sense――for the first time to awaken to the full, glorious significance of colour in the painter’s sense.