L'Amour au village

Overview

L'Amour au village (Village Love, Rural Love; 1882-83) is a large oil painting by Jules Bastien-Lepage: in a kitchen garden a girl, seen from behind, stands with her head lowered and a flower in her hand, leaning against a fence; on the other side of it a young man faces her, eyes down, fidgeting with his fingers. It is c. 194 × 180 cm and is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. It was Bastien-Lepage's main exhibit at the Salon of 1883. The Russian collector Sergei Tretyakov bought it in 1885 at the sale of the artist's studio at the Georges Petit gallery, and it passed to the Museum of New Western Art and the Pushkin Museum (1948). (Sources: English Wikipedia, « Village Love »; sources differ between 1882 and 1883 for the date.)

Marie and this painting

On 15 March 1883 Marie went with « toute cette société » to Bastien-Lepage's studio to see it before the Salon (098.0499), and describes it exactly: a girl with her back turned, head down, a flower in her hand, leaning on a hedge, a young man opposite with lowered eyes, looking at the fingers he fidgets with -- « d'une poésie pénétrante et d'un sentiment exquis. Pour ce qui est de l'exécution il n'y en a pas » (with a reader footnote). At the Salon she is less swept away: « Le tableau de Bastien ne m'enlève pas complètement. Les deux figures sont irréprochables » (099.0309, 1 May 1883). It was parodied at once -- in the Pierrot-and-Colombine farce that Marie and her circle played at home on 2 May 1883 (Marie as Colombine, with Bojidar as Pierrot), Pierrot shows Colombine his « parodies » of the Salon's successes, « tels que l'Amour au village de Bastien » (099.0319-0321) -- and on 9 May Clovis Hugues improvised thirty-four verses on it at a dinner with Bastien-Lepage (099.0394).

Her doubts grew sharper in the following weeks: the Bois is « si vert que c'est comme la suite de l'Amour au village » (099.0509); on 22 May she asks herself whether she would have given Bastien-Lepage the medal of honour for it, and answers no: he can give more than this Amour au village and so does not deserve it for it -- it would have been right for the Jeanne d'Arc (099.0541-0543); and on 28 May, visiting him, Saint-Marceaux (« l'illustre sculpteur ») prefers it to the Jeanne d'Arc (100.0026). On 16 June she writes that the painting « m'horripile » (100.0167); on 13 July the photograph of it that Bastien-Lepage sent her -- a studio parody with two young people posed among salad leaves -- lies on her piano (100.0323). On 6 September, riding in the countryside, she sees a kitchen garden whose woman wears the tones of L'Amour au village, « qui commence à me sembler un chef d'œuvre » (101.0314). In January 1884 she again ranks it « bien inférieur à Jeanne d'Arc » (103.0050). On 15 May 1884, as Bastien-Lepage lay ill, Dina embroidered the picture on a napkin which the family sent to him in Algiers through his brother (104.0174).

Related

See Jeanne d'Arc (Bastien-Lepage), Le Soir au village; the brother is Émile Bastien-Lepage; the embroiderer is Dina.