JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST.

T he 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.

MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.

MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.

M uch 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.

A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

T he 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.

In reading those pages of her journal which describe the picturesque Moorish palaces, the gloomy Gothic cathedrals, the dark, crooked streets with their groups of gipsies and the treasures of art stored away in museums and churches, it seems as if they were illumined by a mellower light than the rest of the book. Velasquez and Goya opened her eyes, and she “raised herself on tiptoe,” as she says, to master the secret of their unique method. Day after day she steeped herself in those glowing canvasses, and on her return to Paris she began to reap the benefit of this enthusiastic absorption. Soon afterwards she painted The Umbrella, in which she made a great leap forward.

Her method and style of painting now placed her definitely in the same school to which Bastien-Lepage belonged, or of which he was the master. It was the school which said: “We will let the open air into our pictures. Let us paint light just as it is out of doors, not the artificial studio effects from north aspects and skylights.” The Plein Air movement of the painters was precisely the same as that which Zola inaugurated in literature. It was nature taking the citadel of art by storm—at least, what these particular men and artists understood by nature.

At the head of this school stood Bastien-Lepage, the young painter who so early became what the French call Chef d’École . His pictures taken fresh from the country—his Haymakers, and Harvesters, and Potato Gatherers, and Rustic Lovers filled Marie Bashkirtseff with boundless delight. “He is not only a painter,” she says, “he is a poet, a psychologist, a metaphysician, a creator.” His perfect imitation of nature, the quality which ranked highest in her judgment, was beyond all praise in her eyes.

Many of the French critics called her the pupil of Bastien. But she had of course never been his actual pupil, having been trained in quite a different school, and it always gave her much annoyance to be called so. But in spite of the striking contrast between the origin and early associations of these two young painters they were singularly alike in their love of realism, their early fame, and premature end.

Look, on the one hand, at Marie, this offspring of Tartar nobles, with savage instincts lying like half-tamed wild beasts in the background of her consciousness. She was descended from owners of lands and serfs, and the instinct of command, the pride of power, the love of all things splendid became part of her inheritance. She was the idol of two women, her “two mothers,” who, in her master Julian’s incisive phrase, “would have burned down Paris to please her, or had themselves cut into a thousand pieces to satisfy one of her caprices.” Nature had endowed her with such lavish gifts that her very talents turned into a stumbling-block, threatening to divert her efforts into too many channels. Music, literature, sculpture, the stage, were successively the goal of her ambition; and each one of these arts was in her eyes only the means to an end—the one burning desire for fame. However, as the deep meaning of work, of the artist’s simple and disinterested absorption in what he is fashioning, became familiar to her she began to forget herself more and more in the things she did. Her devotion to art, her love and delight in it, grew steadily with her increasing mastery over its technical difficulties. She says truly: “Outside of my art, which I commenced from caprice and ambition, which I continued out of vanity, and which I now worship; outside of this passion—for it is a passion—there is nothing.”

Little by little—with many outcries, it is true, and kickings against the traces—Marie Bashkirtseff had begun to discover that there is no royal road to art. That to him only is given who is ready, also, to give up much. She found out that however great her natural gift might be, it would remain a diamond in the rough, unless she regularly applied herself to the task of acquiring technical mastery. After some years’ intense but interrupted application she would have admitted that no work of first-rate talent can be produced without the expenditure of as much courage, perseverance, and self-control as might have made a hero. For, as Schumann truly says: “The laws of morality are also the laws of art.”

What a widely different lot was that of Bastien-Lepage. He, the son of French peasant proprietors, came of people who are perhaps the most thrifty and industrious class in existence: people punctual to their daily task as the sun himself in his rising and down-going; clinging to the soil they till with the tenacity of rocks and trees; working much and wanting little, asking no joy of life except rest.

Just as Marie’s parents lived apart in painful disunion, those of Bastien were united by the tenderest family affection. The shrewd, caustic, clear-headed old grandfather—a sort of village Nestor—the thoughtful father, the devoted mother, were helpful influences which unobtrusively helped in developing Bastien’s faculties. He began to draw as naturally as another child learns to talk; and his father, noticing his aptitude, very wisely set him to copy some object or other every evening from the age of five. Country life, with its primitive simplicity and its regular succession of daily tasks, sank deeply if unconsciously into the little fellow’s mind: it sank as the seed does, without question or self-analysis, to hide its time in silence and shoot up strong and vigorous when the appointed hour had come. Bastien probably never asked himself whether he should be a painter, a poet, a psychologist, or metaphysician. He became one very likely because he could not help painting. And I suppose he never asked himself whether in his pursuit of art he was sacrificing something that might be more precious. But he was not dazzled and enchanted by the sight of Italian cities and Carnival festivities and ball-room flirtations. Toil and hardship were the rule of life around him, and in his love for art he was willing to undergo any amount of it. Instead of rushing in express trains from Berlin to St. Petersburg and from St. Petersburg to Paris, he remained stationary in his low-roofed country home, seeing the same round of occupation going on year after year: the labourer following the plough; the haymakers in the mowing grass with the light beating on their sunburnt faces, or stretched in the shade of full-leaved trees in the luxury of repose; reapers reaping the orange-coloured corn; summer evening in the village, with the cattle coming home to their stalls, as their shadows deepen on the bright green meadows. Such were the impressions which graved themselves always afresh on the lad’s receptive memory, to turn themselves one day into those pictures of rural life which may truly be called “the harvest of a quiet eye.”

Though Bastien-Lepage’s lot—who had to make his living by turning post-office clerk while studying at the École des Beaux Arts—may appear so much harder than that of Marie Bashkirtseff, it was in reality more favourable to the development of an artist. For, according to Goethe, “Character is formed by contact with the world, while talent develops in seclusion.” Marie Bashkirtseff, with her penetrating intelligence, was quite aware of this. She, for whom nothing was ever sufficiently fine, would sometimes quite seriously envy her fellow-students’ their poverty, their humble way of life, their cares and hard work shared in common in a Paris garret. A stern necessity seemed to lend dignity to their art work, while hers was so often patted on the back by her fashionable friends as the pastime of a charming young Mondaine .

I was particularly fortunate this year in finding in Marie Bashkirtseff’s studio a picture by Bastien-Lepage, L’Annociation au Bergers, which he painted in 1875 to compete for the Prix de Rome. It was interesting to compare these two artists in their likeness in unlikeness. The same uncompromising realism applied in different ways, and the same power of catching expression and pinning it down as you would a butterfly without losing any of the delicate shades. This picture of a “far-off, divine event” is treated by Bastien-Lepage in a surprisingly naturalistic way, and yet without sacrificing that mystical element which sometimes belongs to the simplest aspects of life. Here is none of that conventional treatment of religious subjects against which Marie rebelled in those “old dusky pictures in the Louvre.” Here was real atmosphere, there were real shepherds, rough, homely, unsophisticated men, brown as the soil; and yet, in spite of the reality, this picture gave you a sense of unfamiliar awe. Sitting there in the twilight before the fire lit in the open air, they seem to have been more or less overcome by drowsiness. The first, an old man, an expressive, rugged figure, has bowed his head in adoration and is kneeling before the angel whose sudden apparition has taken the shepherds by surprise. Bewildered and amazed the second leans forward with gaping mouth and outstretched hands as if to assure himself by touch of the reality of what he sees. Hardly able to rouse himself from sleep the third one sits huddled together in the distance. It is as true as can be to simple shepherd life. The apparition itself has nothing supernatural. It might be purely human with only the angel light of tenderness beaming from the face. The grace of the figure is suggestive of the “eternally feminine” as the celestial messenger shows the shepherds the way to Bethlehem visible in the distance by the luminous haze encircling it like a halo.

This picture with its effect of gloaming light is an idyl of shepherd life. It breathes that simplicity of nature which invests the calling of the herdsman, the ploughman, the mower, the reaper, with the poetry of primitive existence, I shall never forget the impression once produced on me by a Highland shepherd and his flock slowly winding along the solitary road of an upland moor. The long white line of the wavering sheep with that sombre figure of the solitary shepherd was thrown into relief by the smouldering purple of the barren hillsides. It was a scene which seemed to carry one back to remote ages. Even so in the mythic East might the flocks and their shepherds have passed along similar roads in the vast silence of deepening twilight. This same feeling of nearness given to what is dimly remote appeared to me one of the chief attractions of Bastien-Lepage’s work.

As Bastien by the country, so is Marie Bashkirtseff inspired by the town. The boulevards and squares of Paris became to her what the hay and harvest-fields had been to Lepage. Her pictures were imbued with the atmosphere of Paris—those delicate, pearly greys which strike one as its keynote of colour. She caught that misty light which you see clinging to masses of architecture as you look from one of the bridges along the blue-grey Seine to the picturesque old Cité with the iron-grey towers of Notre Dame outlined against the clouded azure above. Effects of roofs and clusters of buildings half seen through the confusing haze of early morning; drab-coloured walls enlivened by black and white placards and the flashy tints of rival advertisements; narrow streets with masses of shadow emphasizing the value of light on wall and pavement—these became the dominant note in Marie Bashkirtseff’s work as a colourist.

Her subjects, too, are usually taken from the every-day life of the French capital as you may meet it round every street corner. The blouse of the artisan, the cap of the milliner, the rags of the gamin appeared better adapted to Marie Bashkirtseff for pictorial treatment than the thousand freaks of fashion with which society annually delights to astonish the world. As a painter she preferred the Boulevard de Batignolles or Avenue Wagram to the Champs Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne. The faces of weary people sitting on public benches casually seen in passing or caught sight of across the counter of a shop had hints and suggestions of meaning which she missed in the sleek features of the swells whom she met in the drawing-rooms of her friends.

So it happens that instead of painting the pretty, neat, carefully brushed children marshalled by stately bonnes in the Parc Monceaux, she chose in preference the unkempt ragamuffins running wild in the streets. She found more scope there for the exercise of that scrupulous and powerful realism which was the secret of her strength. In the Jean and Jacques, The Girl with the Umbrella, Le Meeting, she has vividly rendered some of the incidents in the town life of children. The faces of these little boys and girls, so pathetic in their premature maturity, in their shrewd or sad or pathetic outlook on the world, are extraordinary in their truth to life. With most of the childhood taken out of their childish features, they look at us, if we consider them well, with eyes where experience has already taken the place of innocence—the experience taught them by the teeming streets, those books of the poor, for ever unfolding fresh pages before their inquisitive eyes.

A Meeting.
( By Marie Bashkirtseff. )

They cannot be called beautiful, these pictures, in the sense that fine forms, nobility of outline, charm of expression are beautiful. But they are interesting, vivid, quick with life. Take that little piteous figure clutching the big, gamp-like umbrella, while she draws her battered shawl more closely around her. With what a look of stolid, inarticulate suffering she seems looking through the rain on the life that is dark and dreary as the prospect before her. You see the hair actually blown back from the forehead, and one mesh has got caught round the handle of the umbrella as she meets the force of the wind with tight-shut lips—a humble subject, but remarkable for the solidity of its handling. Indeed there is a Holbeinesque quality in the vigour of the drawing and the truth of the pose.

Jean et Jacques, the picture of two boys, of seven and four years old, is an equally striking work. They stand so naturally on their legs, these little fellows, their attitudes are so unstudied, their expressions so admirably true to life. The eldest has already that responsible look which the offspring of the poor acquire so early. With his cap at the back of his head, a shabby umbrella tucked under his right arm, he steps along in his clumsy boots with the resolute air of a little man; the handkerchief tied cravat-wise, but all on one side, the leaf stuck between the lips as a make-believe cigar, show Marie Bashkirtseff’s close observation of the ways of his kind. With one hand he grips the unwilling Jacques, dawdling obstinately on his way to school, while with the other in his pocket he pensively fingers the seductive marbles that invite him to play.

Le Meeting, her most important work, is a fine, powerfully painted, vividly realized picture. Just a group of Paris gamins met in council at a street corner, discussing the use to which a piece of string is to be applied, with the excitement of stockbrokers buying and selling shares on the steps of the Bourse. It is a triumph of realism. The faces speak, the limbs are informed with life; it seems as if any moment their legs and arms might begin to move quite naturally. There is nothing conventional about these figures, so fresh in their unstudied attitudes and gestures. These faces, bathed in the pale air of a Paris back street, breathe quite as much of town life as the discoloured walls and palings in the background. How pert, how Parisian, how wide-awake they are, with their thin, sharp-edged features and their gimlet eyes which allow nothing to escape them. The biggest of the six, with his back to the spectator, is eloquently holding forth to his intently listening comrades, even as he may one day hold forth to quite a different kind of audience, when, after due graduation in the philosophy of rags, he shall begin to practise the lessons which the stony streets have taught him. Quite a different lesson from that which Bastien-Lepage’s shepherds have learnt on the hillsides of the wooded Meuse. The execution of this picture, hung in a place of honour at the Luxembourg, is extremely good. There is a genuine feeling for colour in the grey and sombre tones in harmony with the nature of the subject. The open-air effect is happily caught, and the faces stand out in brilliant light. The powerful realism, scrupulous technique, and excellence of the painting, make a great success of Le Meeting, and it is a performance which at once secured a wide recognition for Marie Bashkirtseff, not only in artistic circles, but from the general public.

Marie loved to recall Balzac’s questionable definition that the genius of observation is almost the whole of human genius. It was natural it should please her, since it was the most conspicuous of her many gifts. As we might expect, therefore, she was especially successful as a portrait painter, for she has a knack of catching her sitter’s likeness with the bloom of nature yet fresh upon it. She seems to me equally good in her men and women and children, the contrast of many of her heads showing the range and variety of her power. Her portraits are noticeable for that absence of family likeness which is often seen even in the works of great painters, as if the artist had some ideal head before his mind’s eye to which he was unconsciously trying to assimilate the faces of his models.

Marie Bashkirtseff’s impressionable nature was a safeguard in that respect. All her likenesses are singularly individual, and we realize their character at a glance. Look, for example, at her portrait of a Parisian swell, in irreproachable evening dress and white kid gloves, sucking his silver-headed cane, with a simper that shows all his white teeth, and then at the head and bust of the Spanish convict, painted from life at the prison in Granada. Compare that embodiment of fashionable vacuity with this face, whose brute-like eyes haunt you with their sadly stunted look. What observation is shown in the painting of those heavily-bulging lips, which express weakness rather than wickedness of disposition—in those coarse hands engaged in the feminine occupation of knitting a blue and white stocking. Again, take those three heads expressive of different kinds of laughter. And nothing is perhaps more difficult than to paint laughing or singing faces: the open mouth being apt to give a foolish, strained, and unnatural look to the face. But Marie Bashkirtseff evinces great skill in painting a natural effect of laughter. The little smiling boneless baby face is a delightfully realistic study of an infant, and equally good is that of the pert little girl whose mouth bubbles over with a child’s artless laugh. Much more knowing is the wicked laughter of the young woman with the stylish hat and bunch of violets fastened coquettishly in her sealskin cape. She surely must be laughing at somebody—at some lovelorn swain, whose antics make all her features twitch with amusement.

One of Marie Bashkirtseff’s first portraits, and an admirably painted one, is that of her cousin Dina. It was her first work exhibited at the Salon, and shows a young woman with her elbow resting on a table and her face in her hand. Her loose gown of light blue damask, white muslin fichu and soft, pale golden hair harmonize very happily with the green plush of the table-cover, the white of the book, and the flowers beside the bare arm. The delicate flesh tints of a buxom blonde are admirable in tone, and the face extremely characteristic. It has the unmistakable Tartar type in the low brow, slightly oblique eyes, flattened nose, and broad lips with their expression of sensuous indolence. Here there is nothing of that vivacious charm which is so marked an element in the portrait of Mdlle. de Canrobert. This sketchy portrait looks as if the painting had been done at the first stroke. The round hat, the well-fitting clothes, the plants in the background seem dashed in with the facility of a master. The face sparkles at us from the canvas as if about to utter a witticism. This cleverly-painted figure is all life, all movement, and in its style of treatment and freedom of pose is suggestive of Mr. Whistler’s manner.

Her portrait of herself, palette in hand, painted in the last year of her life, is extremely interesting. It is a three-quarters length, and she is standing looking straight in front of her with a harp a little behind to the left. She is done in that becoming black studio uniform with the broad white frills and jabot which has been so often described, and the gown fits as if moulded on the body. Her deep blonde hair, thickly coiled on the top of the head, ends in a fringe over her forehead. Her features are more refined and spiritual than we know them from the photographs. It seems as if the invisible presence of death had already laid a finger on her fair body and fined it down to a greater delicacy and had given that expression of questioning pathos to the profound wide-open eyes.

It is not possible here to enumerate all her portraits, admirable as many of them are. Her likenesses of Mdlle. Armandine, of a Parisienne, of Prince Bojidar Karegeorgevitch, of Georgeth, and of Mdme. Paul Bashkirtseff, have the same convincing air of intense realism which she adored in Bastien-Lepage’s works of that kind. The enthusiastic words, full of light and colour, in which she describes his portraits, might in many an instance be applied to her own without exaggeration.

Not to be overlooked are some of her landscapes and townscapes, if one might be allowed to coin such a word. There is an extremely good little picture of a portion of a street near the Rue Ampère. A plot of fenced-in building ground gives it a dismally, unfinished look. The houses and walls behind, seen through a pale morning mist, are bathed in an atmosphere, whose grey tones are delicately touched with pink. Two heavy cart-horses are standing at rest in the bit of waste ground, in the centre of which a flame of fire shoots up from a rubbish heap—a spot of brilliant colour amid the general dimness. This is just a finely felt, finely rendered impression. As characteristic and full of atmosphere is the study of a landscape in autumn—a long, straight avenue, with the look of trees about to lose their foliage. Wan clouds, waning light, withering leaves blending their tones in a harmony of grey in grey. The mournfulness of the misty avenue is like a feeling in the air. A mood of nature has been caught which corresponds to a mood of the human mind. The sense of desolation, decay, and impending death seems to breathe from the canvas, as from some actual presence, which though unseen, is none the less there. I cannot help thinking that the artist’s own state must, by some subtle process, have literally passed into her canvas. How intensely Marie Bashkirtseff had identified herself with this picture is shown by Julian’s remark on meeting her just after she had painted it. Without knowing the subject she had been at work upon, he exclaimed, “What have you been doing with yourself? Your eyes look full of the mists of autumn.”

I have only picked out the most important of her works here, but there are many more—bold designs, original little sketches, studies of all kinds, with always a characteristic touch of expression.

There is that dare-devil sketch of a nude model sitting astride on a chair looking at the skeleton, between the lips of which she has stuck a pipe while waiting for the artist. The sardonic humour conveyed by the contrast of this fair young woman in her fresh exuberance of form facing the skeleton with a challenging attitude is an unparalleled piece of audacity for a young girl to have painted. It is especially good, too, as an arrangement of colour, and shows perhaps more originality of invention than anything else this artist did. The Fisher with Rod and Line is an interesting study of a brown Niçois with the deep blue sea-water below. And last, not least, there is the unfinished sketch for the picture of The Street by which she was so completely engrossed only a few weeks before her death. The background of houses, the bench with the people sitting back to back in various attitudes expressive of weariness, destitution, or despair—one with his head hidden by his arm leaning on the back of the seat, another with crossed legs staring straight before him with the look of one for whom there is no more private resting-place than this—all these half-finished figures, even when only consisting of a few scratches, are as true to every-day life as can be. But when all the preliminary studies for this characteristic picture were done, when the canvas had been placed and all was ready, the artist found but one thing missing, and that, alas, was herself!

Though all the work accomplished by Marie Bashkirtseff is strictly modern and realistic, the dream of her last years was to paint a great religious picture. The subject was to be the two Maries mourning beside the tomb of Christ. She imagined these women not as they had hitherto been represented by the old masters, but as forlorn outcasts, wayworn and weary, the “Louise Michels” of their time, shunned of all pharisaic, respectable folk. They were to embody the utmost depth of love and grief. Her descriptions of this picture that was to be, as given in her journal, are highly suggestive and poetical. The figures of these women—one standing, the other in a sitting posture—would have shown in their pose and attitude different phases of sorrow. The woman on the ground abandoning herself to the violence of unrestrained mourning; the other as rigid as a statue, as if in confirmation of Mrs. Browning’s line, “I tell you hopeless grief is passionless.” Only a few inadequate sketches, however, are left of this pictorial vision in which the crescent moon was described as floating in an ensanguined sunset sky above a waste dark with the coming night.

This word-picture never took shape in line and colour. But it haunts you with a suggestion of lofty possibilities to be reached by Marie Bashkirtseff as an artist had she only lived to carry out her conceptions. And as the poet declares “songs unheard” to be sweeter than any that we may ever hear, so it is with this unpainted picture as compared to the painted ones; for, remarkable as her work is, it is to a great extent remarkable as having been done by so young a girl after only a few years of study. It is as a promise even more than a performance that it claims our admiration.

As we already know, Marie Bashkirtseff belongs to the modern French school of naturalists, more particularly to that branch of it of which Bastien-Lepage was the most representative man. But her work is not exclusively French. There is in it also a pronounced Russian element. There is a marked race-likeness between her work and that of other eminent Russian painters and novelists. Matthew Arnold’s definition of the Russian nature in his article on Count Leo Tolstoï might with very little alteration be applied to Marie Bashkirtseff herself. “Russian nature,” he says, “as it shows itself in the Russian novel, seems marked by an extreme sensitiveness, a consciousness most quick and acute, both for what the man’s self is experiencing and also for what others in contact with him are thinking and feeling. He finds relief to his sensitiveness in letting his perceptions have perfectly free play, and in recording their reports with perfect fidelity. The sincereness with which the reports are given has even something childlike and touching….”

This was ever Marie Bashkirtseff’s paramount aim, both as a painter and writer, to make a perfectly faithful report of nature, of human nature and what is external to it—to give a living picture of gesture and manner as well as of thought and feeling—in short, to produce human documents. Her mind and temperament, happily for her, were in touch with the times. For the specially Russian alertness to impressions and its genius for recording them has also become the mark of the latest phase of European art. And Marie Bashkirtseff took to it as if to the manner born (as indeed she was), rather than in imitation of the modern French style, or of Bastien-Lepage in particular.

In realizing this dominant quality, one wonders how it had fared with this impressionable artist if, instead of being surrounded by Parisian influences, she had lived in her native land, the South of Russia. Supposing she, with her intense receptivity, had imbibed those primitive aspects of life still to be found amid the remoteness of the Steppe? Faithful to what lay around her, Marie has painted dreary houses blurred by mist, waifs and strays of the Paris boulevards, unlovely children in unlovely rags. The critic who blames her preference for what is ugly and sordid does not do so without cause. But when he asks why she does not paint the elegances by which she is surrounded, she replies on her part, “Where, then, shall I find any movement, any of that savage and primitive liberty, any true expression?”

That natural movement and primitive liberty she could certainly not expect in Paris night-life. But in the Ukraine she might have found it without admixture of ugliness; she might have been inspired by its coquettish villages gleaming white amid orchards; by the robust and handsome peasantry still clad in their picturesque national garb. What splendid models a realist like herself would have had to paint from in those well-shaped peasant girls, whose movements had never been hampered by anything more artificial in the way of clothes than an embroidered chemise and a petticoat reaching no further than the ankles. Here she would still have met something of the “savage and primitive liberty” which her soul longed for preserved in many an old Cossack custom and village rite. Still more so in the aspects of primitive nature—in the boundless expanse of the Steppe, “that green and golden ocean” as Gogol calls it, “variegated by an infinite variety of iridescent tints.” What a virgin soil for an artist in love with nature! What new types! What splendid opportunities for the expression of beauty in form and colour! Perhaps it is idle to speculate on such possibilities, but it seems as if Marie Bashkirtseff might have produced work of a much higher order had her astonishing gift for recording impressions found impressions more pictorially attractive to record; had she lived in an atmosphere bathed in an ampler light, amid a population still partial to the display of brilliant colours in their dress. However that might have been will never be known now.

There is a passage in her Journal where, speaking of the sacrifices which art exacts, she says she has given up more for it than Benvenuto Cellini when he burn his costly furniture; indeed, it was her life itself which she gave. To quote her own striking words: “Work is a fatiguing process, dreaded yet loved by fine and powerful natures, who frequently succumb to it. For if the artist does not fling himself into his work as unhesitatingly as Curtius did into the chasm at his feet, or as the soldier leaps into the breach, and if when there he does not toil with the energy of the miner beneath the earth, if, in short, he stays to consider difficulties instead of overcoming them like those lovers of fairyland who triumph over ever fresh difficulties to win their princesses, his work will remain unfinished and die still-born in the studio. The general public may not understand, but those who are of us will find in these lines a stimulating lesson, a comfort, and an encouragement.”

Marie Bashkirtseff’s work, unfortunately for us, was left unfinished, but it has not died still-born in the studio. It is astonishingly alive. More alive to-day than on the day it was painted, and resembles that plant of basil which throve so luxuriantly, rooted in a dead man’s brain. For the energies of her glowing vitality are now alive in her pictures.

I subjoin here a complete list of Marie Bashkirtseff’s works:—

• 1. Portrait de Mdlle. Bashkirtseff.
• 2. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.
• 3. Portrait de Mme. P. B.
• 4. Jeune femme lisant.
• 5. Le Meeting.
• 6. Fleurs.— Salon , 1884.
• 7. Fleurs.
• 8. Les trois Rires.
• 9. Tête (Étude).
• 10. Profil.
• 11. Nature morte.
• 12. Intérieur d’une chaumière à Nice.
• 13. Portrait du Général Pélikan.
• 14. Georgette.
• 15. Portrait de Mdlle. Bashkirtseff.
• 16. Esquisse.
• 17. Tête d’enfant.
• 18. Coco.
• 19. Étude des mains.
• 20. Esquisse.
• 21. Marine.
• 22. Monsieur et Madame (Étude).
• 23. L’Atelier, Julian.
• 24. Tête (Étude).
• 25. Tête d’enfant.
• 26. Le Soir.
• 27. Ophélie (Étude).
• 28. Paysan de Poltava (Étude).
• 29. Tête (Étude).
• 30. Grand-Père malade.
• 31. Copie.
• 32. Étude.
• 33. La Rue.
• 34. Avril.
• 35. Portrait du Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch.
• 36. Le Parapluie.
• 37. Jean et Jacques.
• 38. Étude d’enfant.
• 39. Paysage d’Automne.
• 40. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.
• 41. Étude de femme.
• 42. Portrait de Jacques Rendouin.
• 43. Jeune Garçon (Étude).
• 44. Tête de femme.
• 45. Étude.
• 46. Coin de Rue.
• 47. Portrait de Mdlle. de Canrobert.
• 48. Une Vague.
• 49. Étude de mains.
• 50. Paysage à Sèvres.
• 51. Paysage à Sèvres.
• 52. Paysage.
• 53. Portrait de son frère.
• 54. Portrait de femme.
• 55. Étude de Main.
• 56. Vielle femme (Étude).
• 57. Tête (Étude).
• 58. Esquisse.
• 59. Mendiant (Étude).
• 60. Projet du tableau: “Les Saintes Femmes.”
• 61. Les Saintes Femmes (Esquisse)
• 62. Mendiant de Grenade.
• 63. Une Dame.
• 64. Parisienne.— Salon , 1883.
• 65. Tête de Forçat.
• 66. Irma (Étude).
• 67. Paysage de Nice.
• 68. Copie d’après Velasquez.
• 69. Chiffonière.
• 70. La Rue Brémontier.
• 71. Étude de mains.
• 72. Gommeux.
• 73. La Bohémienne.
• 74. Intérieur d’une boutique au Mont Dore.
• 75. Portrait de Mdlle. C.
• 76. Intérieur de bric-à-brac à Madrid.
• 77. Écluse à Asnières.
• 78. Étude d’enfant.
• 79. Étude (Modèle).
• 80. Modèle.
• 81. Pêcheur à Nice.
• 82. Esquisse.
• 83. Au bord de la mer.
• 84. A la fenêtre.
• 85. Thérèse.
• 86. Wanka.
• 87. Paysage à Nice.
• 88. Étude.
• 89. Étude.
• 90. Marine.
• 91. Bébé.
• 92. Marine.
• 93. Étude pour le tableau: “Les Saintes Femmes.”
• 94. Convalescente.
• 95. Mendiant Italien.
• 96. Portrait.
• 97. Étude.
• 98. Portrait de Mme. Gredelue.
• 99. Portrait de Mme. Nachet.
• 100. Japonaise.

Marie Bashkirtseff.
( After a Photograph. )

PASTELS.

• 101. Portrait de Louis de Canrobert.
• 102. Portrait de Mdlle. de Villevielle.
• 103. Portrait de Mdlle. Eral.
• 104. Portrait de Mdlle. Babanine.
• 105. Portrait de Mdlle. Armandine.
• 106. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.

DESSINS.

• 107. Portrait.
• 108. Tête.
• 109. Soirée Intime.
• 110. Projet de tableau.
• 111. Coco, Chèvres.
• 112. Un Monsieur.
• 113. Une Dame.
• 114. Le Sommeil.
• 115. Les Cartes.
• 116. La Lecture.
• 117. La Cigarette.
• 118. Un Monsieur et une Dame.
• 119. Une Dame.
• 120. Une Dame.
• 121. Une Tête.
• 122. Mimi.
• 123. Marie.
• 124. Rosalie.
• 125. L’Orateur.
• 126. Ophélie.
• 127. Les Enfants.
• 128. Bojidar.
• 129. L’Orpheline.
• 130. Amélie.
• 131. Devant la Cheminée.
• 132. Madame B.
• 133. Une partie.
• 134. Salon d’essayage chez Doucet.
• 135. Carnaval de Nice.
• 136. Tête.
• 137. Tête.
• 138. Mademoiselle D.
• 139. Les Cartes.
• 140. Étude.
• 141. à 144. Études d’après le Modèle.

SCULPTURE.

• 1. La Douleur de Nausicaa.
• 2. Femme appuyée.
• 3. Le Bras.
• 4. Petit Garçon.
• 5. Une Femme.

MATHILDE BLIND.