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.