When he came back from the kitchen, carrying the teapot and cups, he found Bongrand installed astride a chair, smoking his short cutty, amidst the din which had again arisen. Bongrand himself was holding forth in a stentorian voice. The grandson of a farmer of the Beauce region, the son of a man risen to the middle classes, with peasant blood in his veins, indebted for his culture to a mother of very artistic tastes, he was rich, had no need to sell his pictures, and retained many tastes and opinions of Bohemian life.
‘The hanging committee? Well, I’d sooner hang myself than belong to it!’ said he, with sweeping gestures. ‘Am I an executioner to kick poor devils, who often have to earn their bread, out of doors?’
‘Still, you might render us great service by defending our pictures before the committee,’ observed Claude.
‘Oh, dear, no! I should only make matters worse for you—I don’t count; I’m nobody.’
There was a chorus of protestations; Fagerolles objected, in a shrill voice:
‘Well, if the painter of “The Village Wedding” does not count—’
But Bongrand was getting angry; he had risen, his cheeks afire.
‘Eh? Don’t pester me with “The Wedding”; I warn you I am getting sick of that picture. It is becoming a perfect nightmare to me ever since it has been hung in the Luxembourg Museum.’
This ‘Village Wedding’—a party of wedding guests roaming through a corn-field, peasants studied from life, with an epic look of the heroes of Homer about them—had so far remained his masterpiece. The picture had brought about an evolution in art, for it had inaugurated a new formula. Coming after Delacroix, and parallel with Courbet, it was a piece of romanticism tempered by logic, with more correctness of observation, more perfection in the handling. And though it did not squarely tackle nature amidst the crudity of the open air, the new school claimed connection with it.
‘There can be nothing more beautiful,’ said Claude, ‘than the two first groups, the fiddler, and then the bride with the old peasant.’