Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Sunday, 6 May 1883

I should very much like to invite Bastien for Wednesday but I dare not. The entire day is spent roughing in the Saintes femmes. It seems Bastien works this way — he blocks in first without a model… That is what I have done. It is at full definitive scale, and so one has a very good sense of it. Tony lent me a genuine Bethlehem robe, and Irma is here — not to pose seriously… but for reference. It is not very large: 3 metres 26 long by 2 metres 50 high. It could be so beautiful. But if…
The Princess, Alexis, the priest to dinner. There is an enormous buzz about the young Rochegrosse's large canvas — Andromache losing her son Astyanax, torn from her to be hurled from the ramparts. It is antique, original, and modern. He follows no one and draws on no one. The colour and painting are of unparalleled vigour. There is no one at this moment who could do that. Add to this that he is the stepson of M. Théodore de Banville — there, as far as the press is concerned. In any case, setting aside that detail, it is a prodigious temperament. He is barely twenty-four years old and this is only his second exhibition. That is how one should be: composition, drawing, colour — all of incomparable fire.
And the name: Rochegrosse — there is a name that rolls like thunder! Enormous, magnificent, a name for history. And Bastien-Lepage — idyllic, pastoral, something simple and pleasant in a meadow. And Bashkirtseff — nervous, tormented, but with a fierce allure, one must admit, something uncommon, something that pricks at the memory. Tony Robert-Fleury: cold, epitaph-like, the name of a man who would be correct and forgotten. Bonnat: vigorous but brief, rather common. Manet: an incomplete student who never quite finished. Breslau: powerful, sonorous, a blow from a fist. Saint-Marceaux: nervous, less tormented than Bashkirtseff. Henner: mysterious, graceful, something antique and remote. Carolus Duran: pure disguise — no one could really be called that. Dagnan: subtle, enveloped in something. Sargent: a false Velázquez, a false Carolus — but not without merit.