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 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 (The Song of Spring), and orders were beginning to come in.
In 1875 Bastien-Lepage reappeared in the Salon with La Communiante (The Communicant) 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, naïvely 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 (The Annunciation to the Shepherds).
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 (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 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 Réville, 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 Reposing), La Prairie de Damvillers (The Meadow at Damvillers), the two sketches for the picture Les Foins (The Hay), Les Jardins au Printemps (Gardens in Spring), Les Foins Mûrs (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 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.
Jules Bastien was always the leader. When we arrived at our resting place in an evening, after a day of walking in the rain, he almost deafened us with scraps of café-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.
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 (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.[1] 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 d’œuvre of Ligier Richier, before beginning his Christ in the Tomb.
Shortly afterwards he gave an account of this visit in a letter to his friend Baude, the engraver:
“Our too short walk through the Argonne has been very interesting, and ended with a visit to the grand chef d’œuvre 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 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 (letter to M. Victor Klotz), 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.
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 said.
He already complained of stomach trouble, and lived by rule. We used to smoke a cigarette, and then he began to work. He painted with a feverish rapidity, and with a certainty of hand quite astonishing. 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 Hayfield), 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….”
“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 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 warmly discussed.
In the hall where it was placed, among the pictures which surrounded it, this picture gave an extraordinary sensation of light and of the open air. It had the effect of a large open window.
The meadow, half mown, went back 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 conventional peasant whose hands look as if they had never touched a tool, but 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, so powerfully rendered, had a considerable influence on the painting of the day. From the time of this 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.
[1] See La Chanson du jardinier in Sous Bois.