Part 6

Nothing is more frequently brought home to the student of modern painting than the truth that the work of the _salonnier_, the picture, that is, that is born of the exhibition and for the exhibition, wears its air of novelty and interest strictly for the season. If he meet it again in a house, or in the holocaust of a retrospective exhibition, its date is stamped upon it with the accuracy of a page of _Le follet_ or _Le moniteur de la mode_. And whether a picture be asserted at the date of its exhibition as advanced, or the contrary, as daring or dull, if it is born of the exhibition, it dies with the exhibition, and the brood to which it gives birth hold their life on the same tenure.

It was impossible, on seeing Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc at the Paris Exhibition of 1890, after a lapse of some years since its first appearance, to resist the conclusion that it falls inevitably under the heading of “_machin_.” In the composition, or in what modern critics prefer to call the placing, there is neither grace nor strangeness. The drawing is without profundity or novelty of observation. The colour is uninteresting, and the execution is the usual mechanically obtrusive square-brush-work of the Parisian schools of art. Dramatically, the leading figure is not impressive or even lucid; and the helpless introduction of the visionary figures behind the back of the rapt maid completes the conviction that it was an error of judgment for a painter with the limitations of Lepage to burden a touching and sanctified legend with commonplace illustration. A faithful copy of so strange and interesting a subject as Mme. Sarah Bernhardt cannot fail to be a valuable document, but Lepage’s portrait has surely missed altogether the delicacy of the exquisitely spiritual profile. The _format_ of the little panel portrait of the Prince of Wales evoked in the press the obviously invited reference to Clouet. The ready writer cannot have looked at so much as a single pearl in the necklace of one of Clouet’s princesses.

To judge fairly of an artist, however, we must follow him on to his own ground. In his portrait of his grandfather, at the same exhibition, it was quite possible to see Lepage at his best as a workmanlike and photographic copyist of a figure in repose. It was at the same time possible to turn from this picture straight to Manet’s _fifre_, and to his _bon bock_, and thus to measure the gulf that separates a meritorious workman from an inspired executant of the first rank. No useful end can be gained by obscuring this fact, and if, in league with the modern gigantic conspiracy of toleration, we are to speak of Bastien-Lepage as a master, what terms are left us for Keene and Millet, for Whistler and Degas?

WALTER SICKERT. _Chelsea, 1891._

A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

A STUDY OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

The brilliant sunshine of a glorious October morning poured through the tall windows of Marie Bashkirtseff’s studio on my last visit to the Rue de Prony. This mellow light bathing her canvasses brought them out in fullest relief, and I had never had such a favourable opportunity of judging her work in its entirety. I was struck more than ever by the vigour and vitality of these studies, sketches, pastels, and pictures struck off at a white heat of mental production between the ages of seventeen and four and twenty. Hanging above the gallery which runs along one side of the wall were her first studies from life, which astonished Julian so much that he pronounced them phenomenal; here were her numerous sketches showing the sincerity of her efforts to be true to nature; and her finished pictures full of individuality and power.

As the eye rested on these portraits where the keynote of character had been so unmistakably struck, on these bits of city life in their shabbier aspects, on these Paris street children with faces so prematurely sharpened or saddened, you became at once aware that this artist was a naturalist of the naturalists. Her chief object was to seize life――to seize the flying impression as she happened to see it; to render it with unflinching faithfulness to nature without any attempt at arrangement, composition, or beauty of treatment.

“Oh, to catch nature!” This is the cry of Marie Bashkirtseff, as it is the cry of Impressionism, as it was perhaps the cry of the primitive artist who with much labour and wrestling of the spirit modelled the first rude image of the lioness or painted the first likeness of an archer, bow in hand. Not quite the same, perhaps. For these early workers in clay or pigments saw nature with the eyes of children――those visionary eyes to which the leaves of the trees, the flowers of the field, the dogs and horses and cats and cows are as much part of the interminable fairy-tale in which they live as the more fantastic figures in more orthodox stories. For these primitive artists looked at the world with the eyes of children, and though they looked at her with clear, wide-open eyes, they could not help seeing her symbolically, seeing the analogy between men and beasts, between beasts and plants, between the articulate and inarticulate phases of nature, so that whatever they produced not only stood for itself but for a host of subtly apprehended affinities linked together by imaginative insight into the mystery of things. And in tracing the development of this primitive style of art a little further, in following it to its legitimate development into the loftiest forms of Greek art, we cannot help seeing that it was the consummate flower of this archaic symbolism. With this difference, that while Egyptian, Assyrian, and Indian artists invented the most grotesque and fantastic forms to express the wonder and mystery of the world, the Greeks tried to find outward expression for that archetype of beauty which has as yet only existed in the mind of man.

And nature, plus the mind of man, plus that master faculty which refuses and chooses, and which reaches its highest results by making fresh combinations from what is widely diffused in nature: that, surely, is the secret of art. This faculty of selection and concentration, within the limits of some more or less conventional form, seems to belong to every manifestation of art, which can never under any circumstances be a simple reproduction of nature. How can it, indeed, since, as Blake so pithily puts it: “A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees”? And we question whether any two people, any two painters would ever see precisely the same thing――the same tree, however hard they might try to free themselves from the bias of personality; or would succeed in giving us an identical pictorial representation of any subject whatsoever. For the artist’s own mind, unlike a photographic apparatus, would always intervene so as to force him to see life through the medium of his temperament. Indeed, will not the circulation of the artist’s blood, the pitch of his nerves, the thoughts he has thought and the emotions he has felt from the beginning of consciousness, have to be taken into account as factors in any individual painter’s picture of a tree or any other object? For this reason a picture can never be truly likened to a window opening on nature unless, indeed, it be a stained-glass window. On the contrary, the artist for the time being lends us his eyes to see nature with. And as the eyes of a Titian or a Turner saw combinations and harmonies of tones and tints whose magnificent effect entirely escapes the eyes of ordinary mortals, it is much wiser to accept their interpretation than to go into hair-splitting discussions as to the precise exactitude of their copy to a reality which is eternally changing.

Take only the painters of the realistic modern French school――can we not tell at a glance, in going through the Louvre, whether it is nature according to Corot, to Rousseau, or to Millet that we are looking at? For whether the realists like it or no, the world will reflect itself in their brains according to the laws of their peculiar individuality, and the preciousness of all art expression seems precisely to consist in this rare flavour which the artist’s self impresses on nature outside himself. This priceless quality which we call style is as inseparable from the genuine artist as the shape of his nose. It clearly differentiates a peasant woman by Millet from any ordinary peasant woman we may chance on in a field, and is as marked in his simple pourtrayal of rustic subjects as in the most sublime compositions by Michael Angelo.

These few inadequate remarks may not be entirely out of place when speaking of the æsthetic views of our day; or of an artist who is peculiarly representative of them. For the new scientific spirit which has revolutionized our views of nature, has also penetrated the realms of literature and art, and impelled artists to attempt a perfectly unprejudiced reproduction of life. For the present this has led them to a grim realism, which loves to dwell exclusively on the material side of existence, scouting the romantic and ideal as figments of man’s fancy to be relegated into the limbo of unrealistics along with the dragons and griffins of the world’s childhood. The same movement which has produced the extremely powerful but one-sided novels of De Goncourt, Zola, and Guy de Maupassant may also be studied in the works of the realistic French painters in their almost fierce insistence on what is natural even to the pitch of repulsiveness.

Impressionism was in the air when Marie Bashkirtseff entered on her artistic career in 1877. It would amount to a truism to give any fresh account of her birth, parentage, and early life at this time. All the world has read her famous journal. All the world knows that she was born at Poltava, in the south of Russia, in 1860. That her parents were separated after a few years of marriage; that her mother and aunt came to the West of Europe with the two children――Paul and Marie, and a cousin Dina; that they travelled about after the fashion of their kind, afterwards settling down first at Nice, and later on in Paris. As Marie often bitterly laments, her education was carried on in a rather desultory fashion. But her faculty for acquiring knowledge was so surprising, her intellect so extraordinary, that she became an admirable linguist, a skilled musician, a splendid singer, a fair mathematician with a rapidity that seemed to amount to intuition. Her powers of observation had probably been much developed by all that she saw and heard on their travels. She had an early opportunity of seeing the master works of all time in Florence and Rome, and was an indefatigable frequenter of museums and picture galleries. At the age of fifteen, her judgment was already so independent that she had the audacity to speak of the “cardboard pictures of Raphael” and the “stupid if glorious Venuses of Titian.” She had never as yet lived in Paris, mixed with artists, or heard the talk of the studios, yet in many respects she seems already a full-fledged art student, with the last phrase of the hour on her lips. Already she sought in pictures that scrupulous resemblance to nature which was her chief aim when she herself took to painting. But though deeply interested in art, it did not at that time occupy the chief place in her thoughts. Music attracted her more, and the desire to be a singer was her greatest ambition. In fact, she laboured under the disadvantage of an _embarras de richesses_ in regard to her natural gifts, and for several years she found it difficult to make a choice.

However, one day in October, 1877, there entered M. Julian’s now famous life-school in the Passage des Panoramas two very tall ladies, all in black, accompanied by a young girl dressed in pure white from head to foot, as if she were a lily of the field. This strange and striking trio made quite a sensation. M. Julian himself, with his happy picturesqueness of phrase in describing the first appearance of Marie Bashkirtseff in his studio, spoke of her as _une blancheur_――something bright and startling, which seemed to have little in common with the severe work-a-day routine of studio life. Nevertheless, she had come, accompanied by her mother and aunt, to be entered as a pupil; and in the letter which she brought him from an eminent physician, he found this curt word by way of introduction: “I have sent you a monster.”

All this was very unlike the usual order of things. But it was there and then settled that Marie Bashkirtseff was to attend his classes, and every morning found her duly at place, working away as if her life depended upon it. At first, her master took this wish to paint for the caprice of a spoilt child, which would soon pass when confronted by the difficulties of execution. Before long, however, he recognized his mistake; he felt that she was a power; that there was something which lifted her out of the ranks and placed her apart among her fellow pupils. Something which gave to her first efforts, however crude and tentative, a vigour and spontaneity which were truly astonishing. And he discovered, too, that so far from playing at art she was in deadly earnest. Instead of being less regular in her attendance than the other art students, she flung herself into her work with the passionate zeal of an enthusiast. Morning, noon, and night found her either at her easel, or else taking private lessons in anatomy and modelling, or haunting sales and picture galleries――always, on the alert to improve herself. Indeed, Julian found her a little monster of energy, of talent, of ambition, of concentrated will. Whatever she took into her head to do, she did and accomplished the seemingly impossible.

In a surprisingly short time she had mastered the elements of art, and her studies from the nude were considered wonderful by her masters. By the intensity of her attention and fever of work joined to her native endowment she managed after only two years of study to produce a picture of a woman reading, which was hung in the Salon. It evinces all her characteristic qualities――masterly vigour of drawing, and a vivid and striking manner of painting human faces. Her extreme sensitiveness to impressions gave her a peculiar facility for catching likenesses and bringing out the salient and personal traits in her models.

After some few years devoted to painting in the studio, Marie Bashkirtseff began to feel very unhappy about her work as a colourist. It fell so far below her own standard as to plunge her into fits of despair. In the midst of this profound dissatisfaction, in the autumn of 1881, she went to Spain, and there she seemed to awaken to a new sense――for the first time to awaken to the full, glorious significance of colour in the painter’s sense.

In reading those pages of her journal which describe the picturesque Moorish palaces, the gloomy Gothic cathedrals, the dark, crooked streets with their groups of gipsies and the treasures of art stored away in museums and churches, it seems as if they were illumined by a mellower light than the rest of the book. Velasquez and Goya opened her eyes, and she “raised herself on tiptoe,” as she says, to master the secret of their unique method. Day after day she steeped herself in those glowing canvasses, and on her return to Paris she began to reap the benefit of this enthusiastic absorption. Soon afterwards she painted The Umbrella, in which she made a great leap forward.

Her method and style of painting now placed her definitely in the same school to which Bastien-Lepage belonged, or of which he was the master. It was the school which said: “We will let the open air into our pictures. Let us paint light just as it is out of doors, not the artificial studio effects from north aspects and skylights.” The _Plein Air_ movement of the painters was precisely the same as that which Zola inaugurated in literature. It was nature taking the citadel of art by storm――at least, what these particular men and artists understood by nature.

At the head of this school stood Bastien-Lepage, the young painter who so early became what the French call _Chef d’École_. His pictures taken fresh from the country――his Haymakers, and Harvesters, and Potato Gatherers, and Rustic Lovers filled Marie Bashkirtseff with boundless delight. “He is not only a painter,” she says, “he is a poet, a psychologist, a metaphysician, a creator.” His perfect imitation of nature, the quality which ranked highest in her judgment, was beyond all praise in her eyes.

Many of the French critics called her the pupil of Bastien. But she had of course never been his actual pupil, having been trained in quite a different school, and it always gave her much annoyance to be called so. But in spite of the striking contrast between the origin and early associations of these two young painters they were singularly alike in their love of realism, their early fame, and premature end.

Look, on the one hand, at Marie, this offspring of Tartar nobles, with savage instincts lying like half-tamed wild beasts in the background of her consciousness. She was descended from owners of lands and serfs, and the instinct of command, the pride of power, the love of all things splendid became part of her inheritance. She was the idol of two women, her “two mothers,” who, in her master Julian’s incisive phrase, “would have burned down Paris to please her, or had themselves cut into a thousand pieces to satisfy one of her caprices.” Nature had endowed her with such lavish gifts that her very talents turned into a stumbling-block, threatening to divert her efforts into too many channels. Music, literature, sculpture, the stage, were successively the goal of her ambition; and each one of these arts was in her eyes only the means to an end――the one burning desire for fame. However, as the deep meaning of work, of the artist’s simple and disinterested absorption in what he is fashioning, became familiar to her she began to forget herself more and more in the things she did. Her devotion to art, her love and delight in it, grew steadily with her increasing mastery over its technical difficulties. She says truly: “Outside of my art, which I commenced from caprice and ambition, which I continued out of vanity, and which I now worship; outside of this passion――for it is a passion――there is nothing.”

Little by little――with many outcries, it is true, and kickings against the traces――Marie Bashkirtseff had begun to discover that there is no royal road to art. That to him only is given who is ready, also, to give up much. She found out that however great her natural gift might be, it would remain a diamond in the rough, unless she regularly applied herself to the task of acquiring technical mastery. After some years’ intense but interrupted application she would have admitted that no work of first-rate talent can be produced without the expenditure of as much courage, perseverance, and self-control as might have made a hero. For, as Schumann truly says: “The laws of morality are also the laws of art.”

What a widely different lot was that of Bastien-Lepage. He, the son of French peasant proprietors, came of people who are perhaps the most thrifty and industrious class in existence: people punctual to their daily task as the sun himself in his rising and down-going; clinging to the soil they till with the tenacity of rocks and trees; working much and wanting little, asking no joy of life except rest.

Just as Marie’s parents lived apart in painful disunion, those of Bastien were united by the tenderest family affection. The shrewd, caustic, clear-headed old grandfather――a sort of village Nestor――the thoughtful father, the devoted mother, were helpful influences which unobtrusively helped in developing Bastien’s faculties. He began to draw as naturally as another child learns to talk; and his father, noticing his aptitude, very wisely set him to copy some object or other every evening from the age of five. Country life, with its primitive simplicity and its regular succession of daily tasks, sank deeply if unconsciously into the little fellow’s mind: it sank as the seed does, without question or self-analysis, to hide its time in silence and shoot up strong and vigorous when the appointed hour had come. Bastien probably never asked himself whether he should be a painter, a poet, a psychologist, or metaphysician. He became one very likely because he could not help painting. And I suppose he never asked himself whether in his pursuit of art he was sacrificing something that might be more precious. But he was not dazzled and enchanted by the sight of Italian cities and Carnival festivities and ball-room flirtations. Toil and hardship were the rule of life around him, and in his love for art he was willing to undergo any amount of it. Instead of rushing in express trains from Berlin to St. Petersburg and from St. Petersburg to Paris, he remained stationary in his low-roofed country home, seeing the same round of occupation going on year after year: the labourer following the plough; the haymakers in the mowing grass with the light beating on their sunburnt faces, or stretched in the shade of full-leaved trees in the luxury of repose; reapers reaping the orange-coloured corn; summer evening in the village, with the cattle coming home to their stalls, as their shadows deepen on the bright green meadows. Such were the impressions which graved themselves always afresh on the lad’s receptive memory, to turn themselves one day into those pictures of rural life which may truly be called “the harvest of a quiet eye.”

Though Bastien-Lepage’s lot――who had to make his living by turning post-office clerk while studying at the École des Beaux Arts――may appear so much harder than that of Marie Bashkirtseff, it was in reality more favourable to the development of an artist. For, according to Goethe, “Character is formed by contact with the world, while talent develops in seclusion.” Marie Bashkirtseff, with her penetrating intelligence, was quite aware of this. She, for whom nothing was ever sufficiently fine, would sometimes quite seriously envy her fellow-students’ their poverty, their humble way of life, their cares and hard work shared in common in a Paris garret. A stern necessity seemed to lend dignity to their art work, while hers was so often patted on the back by her fashionable friends as the pastime of a charming young _Mondaine_.