Un meeting

Overview

Un meeting (1884, oil on canvas, 193 × 177 cm) is Marie Bashkirtseff's best-known painting and the only major work of hers that has always stayed in public view. It hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 442, as French state property administered through the Louvre's Department of Paintings. It was her sole submission to the Salon of 1884 (catalogue no. 116), where it was the popular success of her short career -- and where the jury withheld from her the medal the public had, in François Coppée's phrase, unanimously awarded her.

The picture entered the national collections within months of her death, but exactly how is not perfectly settled. The Joconde/POP record and the Musée d'Orsay attach the purchase to the Salon of 1884; the transcriber of the 1885 posthumous exhibition catalogue states that the state bought it on the occasion of that memorial exhibition, in February 1885. Both accounts agree on the buyer and on the period; the project does not assert which of the two occasions was the transaction.

Description

Six working-class boys in smocks stand in a close circle on a Paris faubourg pavement, heads together over something the viewer cannot see, in front of a hoarding covered with graffiti and torn posters. The eldest is about twelve, the youngest about six; the tallest is seen almost from behind. At the right edge a little girl of four, also seen from behind, walks out of the group with her head raised and her arms crossed behind her back -- excluded from the conference, and the detail that gives the picture its social sting.

Marie's own first description of the composition, written more than a year before the Salon, is more explicit about the unseen object than the finished canvas: the biggest boy "tient un nid" -- holds a bird's nest (099.0034). The subject is programmatic naturalism of the kind Jules Bastien-Lepage had made current: no anecdote, no charm, the street given the scale and seriousness of history painting. She was well aware of the risk of imitation, and the press found the resemblance at once.

Making of the Work

The idea arrived whole on 4 April 1883 (099.0033–0035) and the picture took fourteen months. Marie first planned the boys half-length, then in late April scaled the whole thing up to life-size figures at a street corner beside a lamp-post (099.0239), and on 7 May restarted the canvas entirely: "Je recommence entièrement les gamins, je les fais en pied, en toile plus grande, c'est bien plus amusant" (099.0349). Tony Robert-Fleury had "craintes sérieuses" about the ambition of it (099.0210–0212), and she brought in Rodolphe Julian not for advice but as a specimen of "la majorité bien-pensante" -- a test of how the ordinary Salon-goer would react (099.0363–0364).

It was painted out of doors, and the weather fought it: a storm knocked the canvas over and holed it in July 1883 (100.0100), and again in September, though "pas dans les figures" (101.0434). By August she was writing "Les gamins ne sont pas finis !!!" (100.0180). In October, Bastien-Lepage gave her the counsel she followed -- let it rest over the winter and finish selected passages in the spring, with "Bastien et la nature" as the two standards of comparison (101.0526). Through the autumn she stalled: "je suis restée trop longtemps devant les gamins pour y retravailler à présent, j'ai voulu, je ne peux pas" (102.0018). In November 1883 a photograph her mother had carried to St Petersburg was reproduced on the front page of L'Illustration universelle (102.0054) -- the picture was famous in Russia before it was finished in France.

The title appears in the diary only on 9 March 1884, in Tony's verdict, and in her own spelling: "mes gamins intitué: Un Metting, ont beaucoup gagné et qu'en somme c'est sérieusement bien et que ça comptera au salon" (103.0473). Five days later she decided it would go to the Salon alone, her Douleur de Nausicaa sculpture being unfinishable in time (103.0487).

The Salon of 1884 gave her everything except the medal. Charles Baude photographed and engraved it (104.0082); Düsseldorf asked to engrave and publish it (104.0119); "il n'y a pas un journal qui ne parle de mon tableau" (104.0124), and later "cinquante journaux qui parlent de mon Salon" (104.0649). Le Journal des Arts wrote that it had thought it was seeing a Bastien-Lepage, which she read as malice (104.0035–0036). Then came the rumour that she had not painted it herself -- "mon tableau est si bien qu'on croit que je me suis fait aider. C'est atroce" (104.0261–0263) -- which she believed cost her the award: "ils ont dû penser beaucoup d'entre eux que je m'étais fait aider" (104.0690). Villevieille offered a blunter explanation: no medal because she had called the 1883 jury idiots in public (104.0481). Her letter to Julian on the subject is the coldest thing she wrote about prizes: "Les médailles ne sont faites que pour les nullités" (104.0370–0376).

References in Diary

- First mention: 1883-04-04 (099.0033–0035) -- the entire conception set down in three paragraphs, six boys with a nest, "Ça a l'air commun d'après la description mais en réalité toutes ces têtes ensemble forment quelque chose d'excessivement intéressant"
- 1883-04-27 (099.0210–0212) -- Tony's serious misgivings, and her retort on copying "avec l'âme comme avec les yeux"
- 1883-04-29 (099.0239) and 1883-05-07 (099.0349) -- enlargement to life-size, the canvas restarted
- 1883-05-12 (099.0363–0364) -- Julian shown it as a proxy for public opinion
- 1883-07-21 (100.0100), 1883-08-05 (100.0180), 1883-09-26 (101.0434) -- storm damage and the summer's frustration
- 1883-10-08 (101.0526), 1883-10-09 (101.0542) -- Bastien-Lepage's advice; "Oui, il faut achever les gamins"
- 1883-10-17 (102.0018), 1883-11-21 (102.0053), 1883-12-16 (102.0077) -- the stalled autumn
- 1883-11-22 (102.0054) -- front page of L'Illustration universelle, St Petersburg
- 1884-03-09 (103.0473) -- the title first written down, as "Un Metting"
- 1884-03-14 (103.0487) -- her only Salon submission for 1884
- 1884-03-30 (103.0584–0585, 103.0622) -- the placement panic; Franceschi and Émile Bastien predict a medal
- 1884-04-30 (104.0035–0036, 104.0043) -- press day; the Bastien-Lepage comparison; Carolus-Duran and Julian both confident
- 1884-05-01 (104.0061) -- her own doubt: "Mon tableau à moi est d'une peinture vieille"
- 1884-05-03 (104.0082, 104.0084), 1884-05-07 (104.0119, 104.0124) -- Baude's engraving, the Düsseldorf request, the press
- 1884-05-18 (104.0219–0235), 1884-05-20 (104.0261, 104.0263) -- the whisper that she had been helped
- 1884-05-24 to 05-31 (104.0316–0438, 104.0481–0483) -- the medal refused, the letter to Julian, Villevieille's explanation, Baude's engraving published with an article saying the public is disappointed
- 1884-06-02 (104.0509), 1884-06-15 (104.0600) -- Hayem angling to buy it cheap; his advice to ask 2,500 francs
- 1884-06-20 (104.0629, 104.0632), 1884-06-25 (104.0688, 104.0690) -- the photograph sent to Émile in Algiers; her retrospective on the medal
- 1884-07-05 (105.0038) -- Ducros ranks the new Sèvres canvas above it: "Cet imbécile la met au-dessus du Meeting !!"

Related Entries

- #Art_practice -- Marie's work as an artist, and what survives of it
- #Salon -- the annual Paris exhibition
- #Medaille -- the award she did not receive
- #Jules_Bastien_Lepage -- the model and the measure; the comparison that both made and shadowed this picture
- #Emile_Bastien_Lepage -- his brother, her constant practical helper
- #Tony_Robert_Fleury -- her teacher, and the first judge of the canvas
- #Rodolphe_Julian -- brought in as the voice of conventional opinion
- #Le_Printemps -- the Sèvres canvas of the same year
- #La_Rue -- the picture she began after this one, and never finished

Sources

- Musée d'Orsay, Un meeting
- POP/Joconde notice 000PE031739 -- inv. RF 442, 193 × 177 cm, Salon 1884 no. 116
- Catalogue des œuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Union des Femmes Peintres & Sculpteurs, préface de François Coppée, Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 9 February 1885, no. 5 (as 1,90 × 1,75 m) -- Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r
- Image: Wikimedia Commons, A meeting (Google Art Project), public domain
- All diary quotations from the French originals in `/content/_original/`