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.