Intérieur d'une boutique au Mont-Dore

Overview

Intérieur d'une boutique au Mont-Dore is a genre interior Marie painted in August 1880 in the workshop of a carpenter and wood-carver at Le Mont-Dore, the spa in the Auvergne where she was taking the waters. It is no. 74 in the 1885 memorial catalogue, 0,60 × 0,55 m. Its whereabouts are unknown. The image above is the reproduction printed in the Nouveau journal inédit of 1901 under the same title; it is not a photograph of the canvas.

Description

Marie described the picture in the diary on 17 August 1880 (089.0356): "La scène se passe chez le menuisier; à gauche, la femme essaie au petit, qui a dix ans, le costume d'enfant de chœur; la petite fille assise sur une vieille caisse, regarde son frère, ébahie; la grand-mère est auprès du poêle, au fond, les mains jointes, et sourit en regardant l'enfant. Le père, près de l'établi, lit “La Lanterne” et regarde de travers la soutane rouge et le surplis blanc." The joke is political: a father reading Rochefort's radical, anticlerical paper scowls at his son dressed as an altar boy.

The 1901 plate matches this description figure for figure: the seated woman at left fitting the white surplice on the boy, the girl on a crate, the old woman with joined hands by the stove at the back, and the bearded father at the workbench holding a newspaper. That match, together with the identical title, is the basis for treating the plate as this picture.

Making of the Work

The family appears in the diary before the picture does. On 29 July 1880 Marie notes that the boy she will paint with his goat is "le fils d'un sculpteur en bois et menuisier qui a dessiné dans les ateliers de Paris. La femme est couturière et les trois enfants sont jolis", and that their shop, lit from the north, will serve on rainy days for "une étude de la boutique très sombre" (089.0253–0254). On 1 August, in a downpour, she began "un coin de boutique du menuisier artiste, sur une toile de six", carried to and from the shop in a chair (089.0274). That small canvas may be a first study for this picture or a separate work; the diary does not say.

By 17 August she was painting at the carpenter's every day, her open-air picture abandoned because of the weather, and had started a second canvas, "une toile de 15" (089.0354–0355). A no. 15 figure canvas measures 65 × 54 cm, close to the 0,60 × 0,55 m printed in 1885. She said plainly why she painted it: "Des êtres en pied, le plancher, les autres détails m'épouvantaient … Maintenant cela me connaît, non pas que je le fasse bien, mais je n'en ai plus peur" (089.0357), and she counted the difficulties: the dresses, and "six mains et demie" (089.0359). She left it unfinished: "Je n'ai pas le temps de finir" (089.0357).

References in Diary

Related Entries

Sources