Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff

Les Désolés (Jean Carriès)

Also known as: Les Désolés, les Désolés, Les Déshérités, bustes de Carriès

Culture · Art
A patinated plaster bust of a bearded ragged man in a fur-trimmed hat, head lowered, eyes cast down, with a heavy, mournful expression
Buste dit Le Mendiant russe ou Le Déshérité (c. 1881), Jean Carriès, patinated plaster, 43 × 59 × 37 cm, Petit Palais, Paris (PPS1209). Illustrates the series; not necessarily one of the busts Marie bought. Petit Palais, Paris Musées; CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Overview

Les Désolés is Marie's name for a series of twenty-four busts of outcasts by the young sculptor Jean Carriès (1855-1894), shown at a « Cercle » (100.0280). The title is not found in the sources consulted: French Wikipedia says that in 1882 Carriès exhibited at the Cercle des arts libéraux (the rue de Sèze venue that Marie visited in December 1882) his plaster busts « issus de la série des Déshérités », portraying marginals and the poor, mixing naturalism and symbolism; it also lists a Mendiant russe, ou Le Déshérité (c. 1881) and a Désespéré au grand chapeau (1882). Whether Marie's « Désolés » is the same series under a variant title is the editors' inference from the date, the venue and the subject. (Source: French Wikipedia, « Jean Carriès »; Petit Palais record for PPS1209.)

Marie and Carriès

On 3 July 1883 Marie and her family go with the Russian Tchoumakoff to the studio in the rue Boissonnade, behind Montparnasse, of « un M. Carriès sculpteur, annoncé comme futur homme de génie, artiste du XVIe siècle, sauvage, primitif, désenchanté » (100.0279). She is struck by how he talks of himself « avec la plus vive admiration », finds his talent « très original, fantastique même et qui fatigue » (100.0283), and reports the series of twenty-four busts called Les Désolés (« Ça sent Rollinat », 100.0280-0281). He sells busts at 100 francs each and she buys two (100.0284). On 25 July 1883 he delivers them and stays to dinner; she finds him ill at ease and extremely poor (according to Émile Bastien-Lepage) and is « honteuse d'avoir payé deux œuvres d'art, le prix d'un chapeau » (100.0431-0436), wishing she could send him another hundred francs. Which two busts she bought is not stated, and their present whereabouts are unknown.