The next morning, early, we went up to the studio to see L’Amour au Village, which was to go to Paris that day.
The subject of this picture is well known; it is one of the most real and the most original that the artist has painted: the daylight is waning; at the gate of a village garden, a lad of twenty, who has been binding sheaves, and still wears his leggings of leather, is talking, leaning against a fence, with a young girl, who turns her back to the spectator; what he is saying to her may be guessed from his awkward manner of twisting his stiff fingers, and also from the attentive but embarrassed air of the young girl. One feels that they are not saying much, but that love exhales from every word, so difficult to speak. Around them summer spreads the robust verdure of the country. The fruit trees stand lightly silhouetted against a background of kitchen herbs, gently sloping up to the houses of the village, whose brown roofs and pointed spire come against the soft and misty twilight sky. All this, bathed in a subdued light, is marvellously painted. The young girl, her short plaits falling over her shoulders, her neck bent, the form of her back, so young, so delicate, is an exquisite figure; the face of the young harvester, so energetic, so ingenuously in love, is charming in expression; the treatment of the hands, the bust, the dress, is masterly. There is in this picture a true and manly poetry, which is strengthening and refreshing, like the odour of ripe corn.
Bastien was glad to have completed this difficult work, and his satisfaction enabled him to bear with cheerfulness the pains in his loins, and the digestive troubles which were becoming more and more frequent.
It was long since I had seen him so gay and unreserved. This happy holiday-week spent at Damvillers was the pendant to the walk through the Argonne. The sullen sky, continually blotted out by chilling showers, allowed us few walks in the open air; but every morning we went up to the studio. Jules dismissed the little sweep, who was sitting for a picture that he had on hand, and, taking a sheet of copper, he made us pose for an etching. I have this plate before me now; it did not bite well. It represents the whole family, including the grandfather, making a circle round our friend F., who, standing up and very grave, is reciting one of La Fontaine’s fables. While I look at it, I seem to hear again the merry laughter which filled the studio, alternating with the rattling of the hail against the windows.
In the evening, after supper, we placed ourselves at the round table, and played at Diable or Nain rouge. Jules, throwing away his best cards, always managed to let the grandfather win; and when the octogenarian, quite proud of his success, took up the stakes, he would pat him on the shoulder, and cry out, with a merry twinkle of the eye, “Ha! what a lucky man! he will ruin us all!” and the laughter began again.
We did not go to bed till well on into the night, after having roused the little domestic, Felix, who had dozed off in the kitchen while copying a portrait of Victor Hugo.
Father Jacques, the Woodman.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.
In the intervals of sunshine, Bastien-Lepage took us to visit “his fields.” He had a peasant’s love for the land, and he employed his gains in adding to the paternal domains. He had just bought an orchard situated in the old moat of the town, which had belonged to an unfrocked priest. He intended to build a châlet there, where his friends, painters or poets, might come and live in their holidays and dream at their ease. He explained to us with the delight of a child, his plans for the future. When, with his portraits, he should have gained an independent fortune, he would execute at his ease and in freedom, the grand rustic pictures that he dreamed of, and among others, that burial of a young village girl, for which he had already made many notes and sketched the principal details. We only took one long walk, and it was in those woods of Réville which form the background of his landscape, Ripe Corn. The weather had remained cold, and there were still patches of snow on the backs of the grey hills, though the sun shone sometimes. Except a few downy buds on the willows, the woods were without verdure; but the ploughed fields had a beautiful brown colour; the larks sang; the tops of the beeches began to have that reddish hue, which indicates the rising of the sap, the swelling buds. “Look,” said Bastien to me, when we were in the forest, “my Wood-cutter in the last Salon was reproached with want of air…. Well, here we are in a wood, and the trees are still without leaves, yet look how little the figure stands out from the undergrowth of trees and bushes. There is a great deal of routine and prejudice in that criticism of the perspective of my pictures done in the open air. It is the criticism of people who have never looked at a landscape, except crouching down or sitting. When you sit down to paint, you naturally see things quite differently from the way you see them standing. Sitting, you see more sky and you have more objects—trees, houses, or living beings standing out sharply in silhouette against the sky, which gives the illusion of a greater distance and a wider atmosphere. But it is not in this way that we generally see a landscape. We look at it standing, and then the objects, animate or inanimate, that are nearest to us, instead of being seen in profile against the sky, are silhouetted upon the trees, or upon the fields, grey or green. They stand out with less clearness, and sometimes mix with the background, which then, instead of going away, seems to come forward. We need to renew the education of our eye, by looking with sincerity upon things as they are in nature, instead of holding as absolute truths the theories and conventions of the school and the studio.”