The next years were devoted to competitive labours. To please his father and mother Bastien-Lepage twice contested the Prix de Rome. In 1873 he painted as a prize exercise a “Priam before Achilles,” and in 1875 an “Annunciation of the Angel to the Shepherds,” that now famous picture which received the medal at the World Exhibition of 1878. And he who afterwards revelled in the clearest plein-air painting here celebrates the secret wonders of the night, though the influences of Impressionism are here already visible. In his picture the night is as dark as in Rembrandt’s visions; yet the colours are not harmonised in gold-brown, but in a cool grey silver tone. And how simple the effect of the heavenly appearance upon the shepherds lying round the fire of coals! The place of the curly ideal heads of the old sacred painting has been taken by those of bristly, unwashed men who, nurtured amid the wind and the weather, know nothing of those arts of toilette so much in favour with the imitators of Raphael, and who receive the miracle with the simplicity of elemental natures. Fear and abashed astonishment at the angelic appearance are reflected in their faces, and the plain and homely gestures of their hands are in correspondence with their inward excitement. Even the angel turning towards the shepherds was conceived in an entirely human and simple way. In spite of this, or just because of it, Bastien failed with his “Annunciation to the Shepherds,” as he had done previously with his “Priam.” Once the prize was taken by Léon Comerre, a pupil of Cabanel, and on the other occasion by Josef Wencker, the pupil of Gérôme. It was written in the stars that Bastien-Lepage was not to go to Rome, and it did him as little harm as it had done to Watteau a hundred and sixty years before. In Italy Bastien-Lepage would only have been spoilt for art. The model for him was not one of the old Classic painters, but nature as she is in Damvillers,—Nature, the great mother. When the works sent in for the competition were exhibited a sensation was made when one day a branch of laurel was laid on the frame of Bastien-Lepage’s “Annunciation to the Shepherds” by Sarah Bernhardt. And Sarah Bernhardt’s portrait became the most celebrated of the small likenesses which soon laid the foundation of the painter’s fame.

The portrait of his grandfather, that marvellous work of a young man of five-and-twenty, is the first picture in which he was completely himself. The old man sits in a corner of the garden, just as usual, in a brown cap, his spectacles upon his nose, his arms crossed upon his lap, with a horn snuff-box and a check handkerchief lying upon his knees. How perfectly easy and natural is the pose, how thoughtful the physiognomy, what a personal note there is in the dress! Nor are there in that garden, bathed in light, any of those black shadows which only fall in the studio. Everything bore witness to a simplicity and sincerity which justified the greatest hopes. After that first work the world knew that Bastien-Lepage was a preeminent portrait painter, and he did not betray the promise of his youth. His succeeding pictures showed that he had not merely rusticity and nature to rely upon, but that he was a charmeur in the best sense of the word.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
BASTIEN-LEPAGE.THE HAY HARVEST.
Baschet.
BASTIEN-LEPAGE.   LE PÈRE JACQUES.

This ingenuous artist, who knew nothing of the history of painting, and felt more at home in the open air than in museums, was not ignorant, at any rate, of the portraits of the sixteenth century, and had chosen for his likenesses a scale as small as that which Clouet and his school preferred. The representation here reaches a depth of characterisation which recalls Jan van Eyck’s little pearls of portrait painting. In these works also he mostly confined himself to bright lights. Portraits of this type are those of his brother, of Madame Drouet, the aged friend of Victor Hugo, with her weary, gentle, benevolent face—a masterpiece of intimate feeling and refinement; of his friend and biographer André Theuriet, of Andrieux the prefect of the police, and, above all, the famous and signal work of inexorable truth and marvellous delicacy, Sarah Bernhardt in profile, with her tangled chestnut hair, sitting upon a white fur, arrayed in a white China-silk dress with yellowish lights in it, and carefully examining a Japanese bronze. The bizarre grace of the tragic actress, her slender figure, fashioned, as it were, for Donatello, the nervous intensity with which she sits there, her weird Chinese method of wearing the hair, and the profile of which she is so proud, have been rendered in none of her many likenesses with such an irresistible force of attraction as in this little masterpiece. In some of his other portraits Bastien-Lepage has not disdained the charm of obscure light; he has not done so, for example, in the little portrait of Albert Wolff, the art-critic, as he sits at his writing-desk amongst his artistic treasures, with a cigarette in his hand. Only Clouet and Holbein painted miniature portraits of such refinement. Amongst moderns, probably Ingres alone has reached such a depth of characterisation upon the smallest scale, and in general he is the most closely allied to Bastien-Lepage as a portrait painter in profound study of physiognomy, and in the broad and, one might say, chased technique of his little drawings. Comparison with Gaillard would be greatly to the disadvantage of this great engraver, for Bastien-Lepage is at once more seductive and many-sided. It is curious how seldom his portraits have that family likeness which is elsewhere to be found amongst almost all portrait painters. In his effort at penetrative characterisation he alters, on every occasion, his entire method of painting according to the personality, so that it leaves at one time an effect that is bizarre, coquettish, and full of intellectual power and spirit, at another one which is plain and large, at another one which is bashful, sparing, and bourgeois.

As a painter of peasant life he made his first appearance in 1878.

Baschet.
BASTIEN-LEPAGE.JOAN OF ARC.

In the Salon of this year a sensation was made by a work of such truth and poetry as had not been seen since Millet; this was the “Hay Harvest.” It is noon. The June sun throws its sultry beams over the mown meadows. The ground rises slowly to a boundless horizon, where a tree emerges here and there, standing motionless against the brilliant sky. The grey and the green of these great plains—it is as if the weariness of many toilsome miles rose out of them—weighed heavily upon one, and created a sense of forsaken loneliness. Only two beings, a pair of day-labourers, break the wide level scorched by a quivering, continuous blaze of light. They have had their midday meal, and their basket is lying near them upon the ground. The man has now lain down to sleep upon a heap of hay, with his hat tilted over his eyes. But the woman sits dreaming, tired with the long hours of work, dazzled with the glare of the sun, and overpowered by the odour of the hay and the sultriness of noon. She does not know the drift of her thoughts; nature is working upon her, and she has feelings which she scarcely understands herself. She is sunburnt and ugly, and her head is square and heavy, and yet there lies a world of sublime and mystical poetry in her dull, dreamy eyes gazing into a mysterious horizon. By this picture and “The Potato Harvest,” which succeeded it in 1879, Bastien-Lepage, the splendid, placed himself in the first line of modern French painters. This time he renders the sentiment of October. The sandy fields, impregnated with dust, rest in a white, subdued light of noon; pale brown are the potato stalks, pale brown the blades of grass, and the roads are bright with dust; and through this landscape, with its wide horizon, where the tree-tops, half despoiled already, shiver in the wind, there blows le grand air, a breeze strong as only Millet in his water-colours had the secret of painting. With Millet he shares likewise the breath of tender melancholy which broods so sadly over his pictures. “The Girl with the Cow,” the little Fauvette, that child of social misery—misery that lies sorrowful and despairing in the gaze of her eyes—is perhaps the most touching example of his brooding devotion to truth. Her brown dress is torn and dirty, while a grey kerchief borders her famished, sickly face. A waste, disconsolate landscape, with a frozen tree and withered thistles, stretches round like a boundless Nirvana. Above there is a whitish, clear, tremulous sky, making everything paler, more arid and wearily bright; there is no gleam of rich luxuriant tints, but only dry, stinted colours; and not a sound is there in the air, not a scythe driving through the grass, not a cart clattering over the road. There is something overwhelming in this union between man and nature. One thinks of the famous words of Taine: “Man is as little to be divided from the earth as an animal or a plant. Body and soul are influenced in the same way by the environment of nature, and from this influence the destinies of men arise.” As an insect draws its entire nature, even its form and colour, from the plant on which it lives, so is the child the natural product of the earth upon which it stands, and all the impulses of its spirit are reflected in the landscape.

Baschet.
LEPAGE.   THE BEGGAR.

In 1879 Bastien-Lepage went a step further. In that year appeared “Joan of Arc,” his masterpiece in point of spiritual expression. Here he has realised the method of treating historical pictures which floated before him as an idea at the Academy, and has, at the same time, solved a problem which beset him from his youth—the penetration of mysticism and the world of dreams into the reality of life. “The Annunciation to the Shepherds,” “In Spring,” and “The Spring Song” were merely stages on a course of which he reached the destination in “Joan of Arc.” His ideal was “to paint historical themes without reminiscences of the galleries—paint them in the surroundings of the country, with the models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken place yesterday evening.”