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Jules Bastien-Lepage and his art

Chapter 3: AS MAN AND ARTIST.
By André Theuriet
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About This Book

This volume presents a memoir that traces a rural-born artist’s upbringing, training, and pursuit of visual truth, emphasizing close observation, technique, and depictions of everyday life. Complementary essays analyze his artistic methods and situate his approach within modern realism, examining subject choice, palette, and critical reception. A separate essay offers a focused biographical and artistic study of a contemporary female painter. Illustrated reproductions accompany the texts, and the sequence balances personal anecdote, formal analysis, and examples of works to show how realist aims shaped subject treatment and studio practice.

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 Montmédy.

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 fortifications 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 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 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.