JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST.
The work of Bastien-Lepage ranks, to my mind, with the very best in modern art. He brought to us what was in some ways a new view of nature—one whose truth was at once admitted, but which was nevertheless the cause of much discussion and criticism. It was objected to mainly, I think, as not being in accord with established rules, but nevertheless the objectors expressed their admiration for the skill of the painter; while, on the other hand, for those who accepted him (chiefly the younger men these), no praise was too great, no admiration too enthusiastic.
It is only a few years since his untimely death was mourned as a loss to the whole art-world, for his whole career is so recent that his fellow-students are still young men, many of them only now beginning to obtain full recognition; and yet it is perhaps long enough ago to enable his work to be considered as a whole, and his place in the art-movement to be seen. For although he was an innovator, and one showing in all he did a strong individuality, the general direction of his genius was given him by the artistic tendencies of his time.
It will be generally admitted that if painting has made any advance in our day, if it shows in any direction a new departure, or fresh revelation of the beauty that exists throughout nature, it is in the development of the problems which have arisen from the study of landscape and of the effects of light. There now prevails a close and sincere study of nature, founded on the acceptance of things as they are, and an increasing consciousness on the part of artists (or perhaps it would be more correct to say an increasing courage on the part of artists to express their conviction) that a picture should be the record of something seen, of some impression felt, rather than be formally constructed. And men have awakened at length to see that all nature is beautiful, that all light is beautiful, and that there is colour everywhere; that the endeavour to realize truly the natural relation of people to their surroundings is better than to follow unquestioning on the old conventional lines. This is, roughly speaking, the modern standpoint, and it cannot be denied that it is an enormous advance on the accepted artistic ideals of thirty or forty years ago. And to the men who have brought this about—to the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood; to Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Courbet, Manet, and Mr. Whistler—to all those who have fought the battle and to whom our present clearer outlook is due, we owe a lasting debt of gratitude.
It is a little surprising now, that the work of Bastien-Lepage, based as it is on the simple acceptance of nature, should have caused so much discussion on its first appearance. For time has justified him; we feel on comparing his work with other men of his time that it marks a new departure, and we realize that it has helped to form our present standpoint. But as the majority of people tune their eyes by pictures and not by nature, and only admire in nature that which is made manifest to them by their artistic prophet, it may be taken as a compliment to a man of independent genius that when he discloses a fresh view of nature, it is not for some time accepted. “Good gracious, sir!” said an eminent critic, referring to Claude Monet, “like nature? Yes; of course it’s like nature; but a man has no business to choose that aspect of it!”
Every picture may be said to appeal to the spectator from two sides or points of view—the literary and the æsthetic.
A picture may tell its story to perfection—may point a moral and all the rest of it, and so fulfil the purpose of its author—and still, or, as some extreme persons would say, therefore—may be bad art, may indeed be not worthy to rank as art at all. Such pictures are frequently seen. And again, a picture may, by raising and defining to some inner sense emotions dimly felt by us before nature, leave us with a fuller sense of beauty, a feeling of something revealed to us. And yet it need have no subject or story. We are convinced that this picture is beautiful: that no other form of artistic expression can precisely so touch us. Such pictures are rare, but happily they do exist. Yet, from the nature of things, it is impossible but that such a picture should speak to some—ever so slight—extent to the mind; and also the most literary picture is never without evidence of some desire to please the eye.
The work of Bastien-Lepage seems to me to embrace both these points of view. The literary and æsthetic sides of art were very evenly balanced in him. If we take any individual work, as, for example, the Beggar, we find a most perfect realization of character: the whole life-history of the man seen and brought before us—evidently this was the motive of the picture; yet the painting is in itself so full of charm, the perception of colour so fine, that we feel he was equally interested in that. He tried to hold the balance even. His work shows an extraordinary receptive power, an unequalled (almost microscopic on occasion) clearness of vision, allied with an absolute mastery of his material. His attitude towards nature is one of studied impartiality, and seems to show the resolute striving of an intensely sympathetic nature to get at the actual optical appearances and to suppress any hint of his own feelings. And his subjects are presented with such force and skill that their truth to nature is at once felt, and if a painter, you cannot fail also to feel the charm of his simple and sincere method. You cannot tally it by any other painter’s work: it stands by itself.
His impartial attitude towards his model constitutes one of Bastien-Lepage’s distinctions. I am not sure that it is not the distinct note of all his work. He paints a man—and the man stands before you, and you ask yourself, “What is he going to say? What does the artist wish to express?” You may make what you can of him; Lepage gives you no clue. To me, I confess, this quality is a very high one; it seems to indicate a great gift, and to be, if I may presume to say so, akin to Shakespeare’s method of presenting his characters without a hint of his own feelings towards them.
Although it is no doubt owing to Millet that Lepage’s eyes were opened to the paintableness of country life, he saw his subjects in his own way and approached them from his own point of view. With Millet the subject and type were everything—the individual nothing. He was passionately moved by his subject, and once its action and sentiment were expressed, everything was subordinated to them. He cared nothing for the smaller truths of detail provided the general impression were true to his mental image, and his aim was avowedly to impose his mental impression on the spectator. Lepage, on the contrary, appears to avoid communicating his mental impression. He will give you the visual impression, as truly as he possibly can; you may, if you please, find—as he has found—pathos and poetry in it: as before the same scene in nature, if you have sympathy; but for his part he will not help you by any comment of his own.
And whereas with Millet the interest always centres in the subject, in Lepage it centres in the individual. His pictures become portraits. He chooses a good type, and sets himself to paint him at his work and amid his natural surroundings, and, somehow or other, the subject, as motive and reason for the picture, takes a subordinate place. And yet this is not because anything belonging to the subject is slurred, but because the attention is taken beyond the subject to the actors in it. For his figures not only live; they convince us of their identity as individuals, and gradually we get so interested in them that we begin to forget what they are doing, and almost to wonder why they are there. We are, in fact, brought so close to them that we cannot get away from the sense of their presence. It is no small tribute to Lepage’s skill that his people do so interest us; but is not this interest a conflicting element in the picture? Is it to the advantage of the picture that the interest should be so equally divided? I cannot tell: when before a picture of Lepage’s I accept it in everything—on thinking it over, I begin to doubt. There is no room for doubt about Millet; no mistake about what he meant. With him the attention is always concentrated on the business in hand: and without desiring to qualify the great respect and admiration which I have for Lepage’s work, it seems to me that the point of view of Millet included more essential truths (or perhaps excluded those which were not essential to the expression of the subject); and that for this reason Lepage’s most successful pictures depend least upon the interest of subject, and most upon the interest of portraiture.
For it is in his portraits that the great capacity of the man is best seen; and they are altogether admirable. His people stand before you, and you feel that they must be true to the very life. He loves to place them in an even, open, light, and simply accepting the ordinary conditions of his sitters, produces a surprisingly original result. There is no forcing of effect, no slurring of detail—everything is searched out relentlessly, lovingly. There is the same impartial standpoint—the same apparent determination to keep himself out of the picture. From the artist’s point of view they are altogether delightful; modelled with the thoroughness of a sculptor, the colour and atmosphere are always true, and the execution is unlaboured and direct. It would be difficult to point to any modern portraits which surpass for technical mastery and charm such works as the “First Communion,” the portraits of his parents, his grandfather, of M. Theuriet, Albert Woolf, Sarah Bernhardt, “Pas Meche,” and the Beggar. Each of these is a complete picture, as well as being a portrait. The elaborate dress of the actress, the cheap muslin and ill-fitting gloves of the child, in the “First Communion”—all the matters of minor detail are dwelt on with, in each case, the fullest sense of their literary importance to the picture, and yet the painting of these things, as of all else, is so delightful in itself that the artist desires no other reason.
While landscape entered as a matter of course into his rustic pictures, it was always subordinate to the figures; although he carried the finish of the foregrounds in these pictures to the farthest possible point, delighting to express the beauty of everything—weeds, sticks, stones, the clods of earth—all was felt, and shown to be beautiful. But he painted also some admirable landscapes: of these I have seen but few, and the recollection of one in particular remains with me as one of the most beautiful things I have seen. It is a field of ripe golden corn; beyond are the distant fields and low hills, and overhead in the clear blue sky a few clouds. The corn is swaying and rustling in the breeze, and small birds are flitting about. The whole scene is bathed in daylight and fresh air: with no great stretch of fancy one can see the corn moving, and hear the singing of the birds. One is filled with a sense of the sweetness of nature and the beauty of the open fields. And the picture is so simple—no effort in design, no artifice apparent—it impresses as a pure piece of nature.
This love of nature and resolute determination not to depart from the strict literal truth as he saw it, marks all the work of Bastien-Lepage. As far as it was possible for an artist nowadays, he appears to have been uninfluenced by the old masters. The only lesson he seems to have learnt from them was that nature, which sufficed for them, should suffice for him also. It is this attitude of mind which brings him into kinship with the early painters, and which led to his being styled “the primitive.” He did not set out to form his art on the methods of the older painters, but going as they did, direct to nature, he resolutely put on one side (as far as was possible to one familiar with them) the accepted pictorial artifices. He seems to have set himself the task of going over the ground from the beginning; and the fact that his uncompromising and unconventional presentment of his subjects should be expressed by means of a most highly accomplished, very modern, and very elegant technique, was one of the things which, while it greatly charmed, at the same time puzzled and surprised people. It was so different from what had been seen, or might reasonably have been expected; and one can understand some critics feeling that a man so thoroughly master of his art, so consummate a painter, must be wilfully affected in the treatment of his subjects, his simple acceptance of nature appearing to them as a pose. But it was not long before he was understood; and one has only to read the very interesting memoir of M. Theuriet to see how mistaken this view was, and how simply and naturally his art developed from his early life and associations. It is seldom indeed that one finds an artist so completely adjusted to his surroundings—so much so that he is able to go back for his mature inspiration not only to his first impressions, but to the very scenes and, in some cases no doubt, the individuals who awakened them. As a rule an artist nowadays is led in many directions before he finds himself. Bastien-Lepage had his doubts and hesitations, of course, but they were soon over, and almost from the start he seems to have decided on his path.
The advantage of this to him in his work must have been enormous, as any one who has painted in the country will know; for villages contain no surplus population—every one has his work to do; and the peasant is slow to understand, and distrustful of all that lies outside his own experience: so that it is difficult, and in many cases impossible, for an artist to get models in a village. But one can imagine Lepage to have been friends with all his models, and that his pictures excited as lively an interest (though, of course, on different grounds) in Damvillers as in Paris; and it was, I think, due to some extent to this, as well as to his own untiring energy, that he was enabled to complete so much. As far as I am aware, he was unique among contemporary artists in being so happily circumstanced; and it is evidence of the simple sincerity of the man that he found his ideal in the ordinary realities of his own experience: feeling, no doubt, that beauty exists everywhere waiting for him who has eyes to see.
It has been frequently said of Bastien-Lepage that he had no feeling for beauty—or, at any rate, that he was indifferent to it; but as it is impossible to arrive at any satisfactory definition of beauty, this point cannot be discussed. Taking the word, however, in its obvious and generally accepted meaning, that of personal beauty, it seems to me that there is no fair ground for the charge; for such works as the “First Communion,” the portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, and “Joan of Arc,” all show a most refined and delicate appreciation of personal beauty, and should surely have led his critics to consider whether the man who painted them had not very good reasons for painting people who were not beautiful, too. For all work cannot be judged from one point of view; we recognize that a work of art is the outcome of a personal impression, and that the artist’s aim is to give expression to his views; and the deeper his insight into nature, the greater the result. And yet, curiously enough, the fact that Bastien-Lepage’s insight into nature was exceptionally deep and wide renders it difficult to form a clear judgment, as his work appeals equally from different points of view. His love of beauty, for instance, seems to go hand-in-hand with a psychological, or even pathological interest: and this equal prominence of different tendencies is a very puzzling element in his work. We expect an artist to give us a strongly personal view; but here is one who gives us something very like an analysis, and whose personal view it is impossible to define—and the premature ending of his career leaves it now for ever doubtful which was the strongest bias of his mind. It seems to me that his sympathies were so wide as to try and include everything, and that he has helped to widen the bounds of beauty, by showing its limitless possibilities. The words of Blake, “To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” suggest, I think, his general feeling towards nature.
In spite of the wide range of his work and the extraordinary versatility of his execution, he kept, as a rule, within certain limitations of treatment. He did not care for the strong opposition of light and shadow, and he seems almost to have avoided those aspects of nature which depend for their beauty on the changes and contrasts of atmosphere and light. All that side of nature which depends on memory for its realization was left almost untouched by him, and yet it is idle to suppose that so richly gifted a man could not have been keenly sensible to all nature’s beauty; but I think he found himself hedged in by the conditions necessary to the realization of the qualities he sought. For in painting a large figure-picture in the open air, the painter must almost of necessity limit himself to the effect of grey open daylight. This he realized splendidly: at the same time it may be said that he sought elaboration of detail perhaps at the expense of effect, approaching nature at times too much from the point of view of still-life. This is not felt in his small pictures, in which the point of view is so close that the detail and general effect can be seen at the same time; but in his large works much that is charming in the highest degree when examined in detail, fails to carry its full value to the eye at a distance necessary to take in the whole work. This was the case with “Joan of Arc” in the Paris Exhibition of two years ago; and it was instructive to compare this picture with Courbet’s “Stone-breakers,” which hung near it on the same wall. Courbet had generalized as much as possible—everything was cleared away but the essentials; and at a little distance Courbet showed in full power and completeness, while the delicate and beautiful work in “Joan of Arc” was lost, and the picture flat and unintelligible in comparison. No doubt Bastien-Lepage worked for truth of impression and of detail too, but it is apparently impossible to get both; and this seems to show that the building-up or combining a number of facts, each of which may be true of itself and to the others, does not in its sum total give the general impression of truth. It is but a number of isolated truths. Bastien-Lepage has carried his endeavour in this direction farther than any of his predecessors—in fact it may be said that he has carried literal representation to its extreme limit: so much so as to leave clearly discernible to us the question which was doubtless before him, but which has at any rate developed itself from his work, whether it is possible to attain literal truth without leaving on one side much of that which is most beautiful in nature? And further, the question arises, whether literal truth is the highest truth. For realism, as an end in art, leads nowhere; it is an impasse. Surely it is but the means to whatever the artist has it in him to express.
I feel convinced that realism was not the end with Bastien-Lepage. I believe that his contribution to art, great as it was, and covering as it does an amount of work which might well represent a whole life’s work instead of the work of a few short years, was but the promise of his full power, and that, had he lived, his work would have shown a wider range of nature than that of any other artist, except perhaps Rembrandt. But it was not to be.
He gave his best, and the world is richer for his work; his name will not die.
“Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave.”
GEORGE CLAUSEN.
MODERN REALISM IN PAINTING.
The Little Sweep.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.