Bastien was born in Domremy, which was probably the reason he made such an admirable painting of Jeanne d’Arc, now in the Metropolitan Museum. He told us the details of the work. There was no one model, except for the body, and he used several to carry out his ideal of the head. You feel that she is a working girl and not a pretty peasant by Bougereau. Albert Wolff wrote a stinging criticism of it, commenting on the charm of the figure and the excellence of the drawing and painting, but saying that the visions in the air were idiotic. Bastien replied that the visions were not supposed to be those of a learned man like Wolff or, indeed, his own, but those born in the brain of Jeanne d’Arc, an uneducated girl of sixteen, whose only knowledge of kings and queens was of the figures of the saints she had worshiped in church.
He handled this canvas in quite an original way, and not a very successful one. It was painted in two pieces, so that it could be easily carried to the orchard where he worked. When finished, he and the village cobbler sewed them together by hand, with the best linen thread and cobbler’s wax. They then stretched it and hammered the joining, which was filled with white and siccatif and scraped down. When it was firm and dry, he went over it so there should be no question of the surface, and repainted it, and, as he said, “I wager anything that that crack does not show in a thousand years.” Alas, it is plainly evident in the Metropolitan to-day, and the repainting must have changed, as the color and tone where the crack is are all wrong.
Bastien was one of the most lovable men I ever met, bright, smiling, with a certain undercurrent of sadness—the mark of tuberculosis was upon him then. I remember one day attempting to tell him the meaning of an American negro song he had learned from one of the boys, but he refused to listen, not wishing to be disillusioned.
“No, no, Simmons, I do not wish to have it explained. I know what it says. It is a pathetic song of a lover mourning for one he has lost.”
And he rendered it in a voice that would have brought tears to the eyes of the average audience.
“Ze lobstere in ze lobstere pot
Ze bluefish in ze panne;
Zey suffere, oh, zey suffere not;
What I suffere for my Marie Anne.”
Poor Bastien! He was gone the next year.