Jules Bastien-Lepage and his art

by André Theuriet; Mathilde Blind; George Clausen; Walter Sickert

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.