Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Tuesday, 15 January 1884

I repaint a picture outdoors — the weather is fine.
Wednesday, 16 January 1884 The architect told me: among his many plans for paintings there is The Shepherds at Bethlehem.
For two days my mind has been at work, and this afternoon I had a very clear vision of it. Yes, The Shepherds at Bethlehem. A sublime subject, and one he will make more sublime still.
Yes, I had so clear a vision of it, and my impression is such... that I can compare it only to that of the Shepherds themselves; a holy enthusiasm and a complete adoration. Yes, for two or three hours I was madly in love — by admiration. You simply cannot understand this... It will be set at evening, I am sure of it; the famous Star. Do you feel all the mystery, tenderness, and [blacked out: and if possible] grandeur he will put into it? One can imagine it when one knows his work, and by tracing mysterious and fantastic connections between Joan of Arc and Evening in the Village, whose effect will be reproduced in some fashion in the Shepherds. Come now — do you not find me perfectly charming to catch fire over paintings I have not seen and that do not yet exist! Let us say I am ridiculous to the majority; two or three dreamers will be with me, and if necessary I could do without them...
And then the effect of the Shepherds is the same as that of the Holy Women... No, but only because it is set at evening, for the feeling is entirely different. There it will be grand, strong, tender, radiant, mysterious — holy and gentle emotion, a troubling and ecstatic mystery. Mine will also be set at evening, but desolate, terrible, with an exhausted tenderness; something has been accomplished and the dominant note is: consternation. Come — I am mad to dare compare myself to a man of genius... but I am not comparing myself; I am only saying how I understand the painting I would like to make.
In any case... how to do it, to get through, how to communicate a conviction to the masses?! And why should one? Have the masses ever understood truly elevated art?... In any case... since you grant genius to Millet — how does that come about?
Joan of Arc was not understood in France; one kneels before it in America. Joan of Arc is a masterpiece of technique and feeling.
One should have heard Paris talk about it. It was a disgrace. But is it really possible that success goes to the Phaedra and the Aurora of Cabanel, Bouguereau, Lefèbvre and company! And did the public love Millet, Rousseau, Corot? It loved them when they became fashionable.
What is shameful for our age is the bad faith of enlightened people who pretend to believe that this art is neither serious nor elevated, and who praise those "who follow the tradition of the masters." Is there any need to insist and explain the stupidity of such reasoning?
What then is elevated art, if not art that, while painting [blacked out: the furniture], hair, garments, trees in perfection — so perfectly as to make us almost touch them — also paints souls, minds, whole lives?
Joan of Arc is not elevated art because he shows her as a peasant girl at home, and not with white hands and armour.
No, his Love in the Village is inferior — far inferior to Joan of Arc — and the idiotic or treacherous critics praise it in order to confine him to a specialty. Furious that this man who painted peasants should presume to paint something else, a historical peasant girl like Joan of Arc. Hypocritical Pharisees.
For we all — anyone — can paint flesh, but we do not have the beyond, the divine breath... which he possesses, in short. Who else but him? No one. In the eyes of his portraits I see the lives of his subjects; I feel as if I know them. I have tried to give myself the same impressions before other canvases and I could not.
Can you prefer the Siege of Corinth, the Execution of Lady Jane Grey, or some random Bajazet to the limpid and living eye of a little girl passing by?
What this incomparable artist possesses is found only in the Italian religious paintings, when artists both painted and believed.
The memory of an Adoration of the Magi by Gherardo delle Notti has remained with me like a dazzlement.
I remember neither the technique nor the academic merits (that was eight years ago), but I remember having seen shepherds in ecstasy before the divine child — and to say everything in a word, O France, so unpoetic: the shepherds, the Virgin, the child, and I who was looking at the painting, we were all convinced that it had happened! Yes — make the public believe it happened; that is everything, and nothing else is needed.
For the idiots who will say to me that stupid, cowardly phrase: but how can you, a naturalist (oh! the brutes), paint subjects from the past that you have not seen?
I will say to these contemptible creatures, taking the shepherds as my example: has it never happened to you to find yourself in the countryside in the evening, alone beneath a very clear sky, and to feel troubled, invaded by a mysterious feeling, by aspirations toward the infinite, to feel yourself as if in expectation of some great event, of something supernatural — and have you never had reveries that carried you away into unknown worlds...
If not... you will never understand, and I advise you to buy an Aurora by Bouguereau or a historical canvas by Cabanel.
All this, dear angel, just to say that you adore the genius of little Bastien? Yes.
Very well then — go to bed on that note.
Amen.
Thursday, 17 January 1884