In 1870 he sent his first picture to the Salon. It passed unnoticed. I have just seen this picture again. It is the portrait of a man, quite young, dressed in a coat of strong green, the whole flooded with a greenish light. It is rather in the manner of Ricard, but the solid construction of the head and the expression of the face already indicate a painter who sees clearly and seeks to enter into the character of his model.
A short time later the war broke out. Jules Bastien enlisted in a company of volunteers, commanded by the painter Castellani, and did his duty bravely at the outposts.
One day in the trenches a shell burst near him and sent a clod of hardened earth straight at his chest. He was taken to the ambulance, where he remained during the last month of the siege, while another shell fell upon his studio, and there destroyed his first composition, a nymph, nude, her arms clasped over her blonde head, and bathing her feet in the waters of a spring.
On the re-opening of communications he hastened back to his village, where he arrived, like the pigeon in the fable, disabled,
“Trainant l’aile et tirant le pied.”
There he spent the remainder of the year 1871, recovering his shattered health in his native air, making long excursions as far as to the Moselle, and painting various portraits of relations and friends. He did not return to Paris until sometime in the year 1872.
Then the struggling life of the débutant began again. In order to make both ends meet he tried to get some of his drawings into the illustrated journals; but his manner of illustrating was not what was wanted by the editors, who sought above all things to please the ordinary public.
Weary of the struggle he began to paint fans.
One day a manufacturer of antéphelic milk (lait antéphelique) asked him to make a sort of allegorical picture intended for an advertisement for his Elixir of Youth. The artist, making a virtue of necessity, painted a bright gay picture, after the manner of Watteau’s landscapes, with groups of young women dressed in modern style approaching a fountain, where Cupids were gambolling.
The painting finished, Bastien explained to the manufacturer his intention to exhibit it first of all in the Salon.