It is a tender dreamer who gives himself expression here—and love came to him also.

L’Art.
LÉON L’HERMITTE.

Enthusiastically adored by the women in his school of painting, he had found a dear friend in Marie Baskirtscheff, the distinguished young Russian girl who had become his pupil just as his fame began to rise. It is charming to see the enthusiasm with which Marie speaks of him in her diary. “Je peins sur la propre palette du vrai Bastien, avec des couleurs à lui, son pinceau, son atelier, et son frère pour modèle.” And how the others envy her because of it! “La petite Suédoise voulait toucher à sa palette.” With Marie he sketched his plans for the future, and in the midst of this restless activity he was summoned hence together with her, for she also died young, at the age of twenty-four, just as her pictures began to create a sensation. A touching idyll in her diary tells how the girl learnt, when she was dying of consumption, that young Bastien had also fallen ill, and been given up as hopeless. So long as Marie could go out of doors she went with her mother and her aunt to visit her sick friend; and when she was no longer allowed to leave the house he had himself carried up the steps to her drawing-room by his brother, and there they both sat beside each other in armchairs, and saw the end draw near, merciless and inevitable, the end of their young lives, their talents, their ambition, and their hopes. “At last! Here it is then, the end of all my sufferings! So many efforts, so many wishes, so many plans, so many —— ——, and then to die at four-and-twenty upon the threshold of them all!”

Her last picture was one of six schoolboys, sons of the people, who are standing at a street corner chattering; and it makes a curiously virile impression, when one considers that it was painted by a blond young girl, who slept under dull blue silken bed-curtains, dressed almost entirely in white, was rubbed with perfumes after a walk in hard weather, and wore on her shoulders furs which cost two thousand francs. It hangs in the Luxembourg, and for a long time a lady dressed in mourning used to come there every week and cry before the picture painted by the daughter whom she had lost so early. Marie died on 31st October 1884, and Bastien barely a month afterwards. “The Funeral of a Young Girl,” in which he wished to immortalise the funeral of Marie, was his last sketch, his farewell to the world, to the living, alluring, ever splendid nature which he loved so much, grasped and comprehended so intimately, and to the hopes which built up their deceptive castles in the air before his dying gaze. He died before he reached Raphael’s age, for he was barely thirty-six. The final collapse came on 10th December 1884, upon a sad, rainy evening, after he had lain several months upon a bed of sickness. His frame was emaciated, and as light as that of a child; his face was shrivelled—the eyes alone had their old brilliancy.

ROLL.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
THE WOMAN WITH A BULL.
(By permission of the Artist.)

On 14th December his body was brought up to the Eastern railway station. The coffin was covered with roses, white elder blossoms, and immortelles. And now he lies buried in Lorraine, in the little churchyard of Damvillers, where his father and grandfather rest beneath an old apple-tree. Red apple-blossoms he too loved so dearly. His importance Marie Baskirtscheff has summarised simply and gracefully in the words: “C’est un artiste puissant, originel, c’est un poète, c’est un philosophe; les autres ne sont que des fabricants de n’importe quoi à côté de lui.... On ne peut plus rien regarder quand on voit sa peinture, parce que c’est beau comme la nature, comme la vie....”

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
ROLL.   MANDA LAMÉTRIE, FERMIÈRE.

This tender poetic trait which runs through his works is what principally distinguishes him from L’hermitte, the most sterling representative of the picture of peasant life at the present time. L’hermitte, also, like most of these painters of peasants, was himself the son of a peasant. He came from Mont-Saint-Père, near Château-Thierry, a quiet old town, where from the great “Hill of Calvary” one sees a dilapidated Gothic church and the moss-grown roofs of thatched houses. His grandfather was a vine-grower and his father a schoolmaster. He worked in the field himself, and, like Millet, he painted afterwards the things which he had done himself in youth. His principal works were pictures of reapers in the field, peasant women in church, young wives nursing their children, rustics at work, here and there masterly water-colours, pastels and charcoal drawings, in 1888 the pretty illustrations to André Theuriet’s Vie Rustique, the decoration of a hall at the Sorbonne with representations of rustic life, in his later period occasionally pictures from other circles of life, such as “The Fish-market of St. Malo,” “The Lecture in the Sorbonne,” “The Musical Soirée,” and finally, as a concession to the religious tendency of recent years, a “Christ visiting the House of a Peasant.” He has his studio in the Rue Vaquelin in Paris, though he spends most of his time in the village where he was born, and where he now lives quietly and simply with the peasants. Most of his works, which are to be ranked throughout amongst the most robust productions of modern Naturalism, are painted in the great glass studio which he built in the garden of his father’s house. Whilst Bastien-Lepage, through a certain softness of temperament, was moved to paint the weak rather than the strong, and less often men in the prime of life than patriarchs, women, and children, L’hermitte displays the peasant in all his rusticity. He knows the country and the labours of the field which make the hands horny and the face brown, and he has rendered them in a strictly objective manner, in a great sculptural style. Bastien-Lepage is inclined to refinement and poetic tenderness; in L’hermitte everything is clear, precise, and sober as pale, bright daylight.

RAFFAELLI.Cassell & Co.
PLACE ST. SULPICE.
(By permission of the Artist.)
Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
RAFFAELLI.   THE MIDDAY SOUP.
(By permission of the Artist.)