Jules Bastien-Lepage

Jules Bastien-Lepage
Self-Portrait
Born	(1848-11-01)1 November 1848 Damvillers, Meuse, France
Died	10 December 1884(1884-12-10) (aged 36) Paris, France
Nationality	French
Education	École des beaux-arts
Known for	Painting
Movement	naturalism

Jules Bastien-Lepage (November 1, 1848 – December 10, 1884) was a French painter closely associated with the beginning of naturalism, an artistic style that emerged from the later phase of the Realist movement.

Life and work

Bastien-Lepage was born in the village of Damvillers, Meuse, and spent his childhood there. Bastien's father grew grapes in a vineyard to support the family. His grandfather also lived in the village; his garden had fruit trees of apple, pear, and peach up against the high walls. Bastien took an early liking to drawing, and his parents fostered his creativity by buying prints of paintings for him to copy.

Education

Auguste Rodin, Jules Bastien-Lepage, on display at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts on the Stanford University campus in Stanford, California

Jules Bastien-Lepage's first teacher was his father, himself an artist. His first formal training was at Verdun, and prompted by a love of art he went to Paris in 1867, where he was admitted to the École des Beaux-arts, working under Cabanel. He was awarded first place for drawing but spent most of his time working alone, only occasionally appearing in class. Nevertheless, he completed three years at the école. In a letter to his parents, he complained that the life model was a man in the pose of a mediaeval lutanist. After exhibiting in the Salons of 1870 and 1872 works which attracted no attention, in 1874 he made his mark with his Song of Spring, a study of rural life, representing a peasant girl sitting on a knoll looking down on a village. His Portrait of my Grandfather, exhibited in the same year, was a great success at the Paris Salon it gained critical acclaim and received a third-class medal.

Early work

When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, Bastien fought and was wounded. Bastien was a man by this time, medium height and stout. After the war, he returned home to paint the villagers and recover from his wound. In 1873 he painted his grandfather in the garden, and this painting later became a favorite for many art lovers for its true-to-life qualities.

Prix de Rome

Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt 1879

This success was confirmed in 1875 by the First Communion, a picture of a little girl minutely worked up as to color, and a Portrait of M. Hayern. In 1875 he took the second Prix de Rome with his Angels appearing to the Shepherds, exhibited again in 1878. His next endeavour to win the Grand Prix de Rome in 1876 with Priam at the Feet of Achilles was again unsuccessful (it is in the Lille gallery), and the painter determined to return to country life. To the Salon of 1877 he sent a full-length Portrait of Lady L. and My Parents; and in 1878 a Portrait of M. Theuriet and Haymaking (Les Foins). The last picture, now in the Musée d'Orsay, is regarded as a typical work from its stamp of realistic truth.

All Souls' Day, c. 1882

Acclaim

Thenceforth Bastien-Lepage was recognized in France as the leader of a school, and his Portrait of Mlle Sarah Bernhardt (1879), painted in a light key, won him the cross of the Legion of Honour. In 1879 he was commissioned to paint the Prince of Wales. In 1880 he exhibited a small portrait of M. Andrieux and Joan of Arc listening to the Voices; and in the same year, at the Royal Academy, the little portrait of the Prince of Wales. In 1881 he painted The Beggar and the Portrait of Albert Wolf; in 1882 Le Père Jacques; in 1885 Love in a Village, in which we find some trace of Gustave Courbet's influence. His last dated work is The Forge (1884).

Death and legacy

Self-portrait drawn a few days before his death.

Between 1880 and 1883 he traveled in Italy and enjoyed his voyage very much. The artist, long ailing, had tried in vain to re-establish his health in Algiers. He died in Paris in 1884, when planning a new series of rural subjects. His friend, Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch, was with him at the end and wrote,

"At last he was unable to work anymore; and he died on the 10th of December, 1884, breathing his last in my arms. At his grave's head his mother and brother lovingly planted an apple-tree, which every spring showers down its wealth of pearly petals over the last resting-place of the great master whose loss we all mourn.

After his death, a special exhibition of more than 200 of his pictures was formed at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1889 some of his best work was shown at the Paris Exposition.

Among his more important works, may also be mentioned the portrait of Mme J. Drouet (1883); Gambetta on his death-bed, and some landscapes; The Vintage (1880), and The Thames at London (1882). The Little Chimney-Sweep was never finished. An exhibition of his collected works was opened in March and April 1885. A museum is devoted to him at Montmédy. A statue of Bastien-Lepage by Rodin was erected in Damvillers. An obituary by Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch, appeared in the Magazine of Art (Cassell) in 1890. In October 2011 the statue was given to Armenia. The gift was dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Armenia's Independence and symbolizes friendship between the two nations.

One of probably more painters that were influenced by Bastien-Lepage was the Scottish painter Robert McGregor (1847–1922), who was of a similar age too.

Impact on Impressionism

Influential English critic Roger Fry credited the wider public's acceptance of the Impressionists, especially Claude Monet, to Bastien-Lepage. In his 1920 Essay in Æsthetics, Fry wrote:

Monet is an artist whose chief claim to recognition lies in the fact of his astonishing power of faithfully reproducing certain aspects of nature, but his really naive innocence and sincerity was taken by the public to be the most audacious humbug, and it required the teaching of men like Bastien-Lepage, who cleverly compromised between the truth and an accepted convention of what things looked like, to bring the world gradually around to admitting truths which a single walk in the country with purely unbiassed vision would have established beyond doubt.

Relationship with Marie Bashkirtseff

Ukrainian-born painter Marie Bashkirtseff formed a close friendship with Bastien-Lepage. Artistically, she took her cue from the French painter's admiration for nature: "I say nothing of the fields because Bastien-Lepage reigns over them as a sovereign; but the streets, however, have not still had their... Bastien". Her best-known work in this naturalist vein is A Meeting (now in the Musée d'Orsay), which was shown to wide acclaim at the Salon of 1884. By a curious coincidence she succumbed to chronic illness the same year as her mentor.

Paintings

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  The Annunciation to the Shepherds, 1875, National Gallery of Victoria

• 

  Achilles and Priam, 1876

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  Haymaking (Les Foins), 1877, Musée d'Orsay

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  October, 1878, National Gallery of Victoria

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  Joan of Arc, 1879, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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  Young Girl, 1881

• 

  Pauvre Fauvette, 1881

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  Marie Samary of the Odéon Theater, c. 1881, Cleveland Museum of Art

• 

  Ophelia, 1881, Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy

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  Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing), 1882, Scottish National Gallery

• 

  Going to School, 1882

• 

  L'Amour au Village, 1882

Sources

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• André Theuriet, Bastien-Lepage (1885; English edition, 1892); L de Fourcaud, Bastien-Lepage (1885).
• Serge Lemoine, Dominique Lobstein, Marie Lecasseur, et al., Jules Bastien-Lepage 1848-1884 (Paris: Musée d'Orsay, 2007).
• Marnin Young, "The Motionless Look of a Painting: Jules-Bastien Lepage, Les Foins, and the End of Realism," Art History, vol. 37, no. 1 (February 2014): 38-67. [1]

External links

• Analysis of Joan of Arc
• Art Gallery at MuseumSyndicate.com