L'Enfant de chœur (planned picture, 1883)

Overview

L'Enfant de chœur was a picture Marie planned in spring 1883 and, as far as the diary shows, never began. On 29 April 1883 she lays out her working programme: the six boys of Un meeting life-size, then Russia, then Jerusalem in October; and "en janvier ... à Paris où je ferai le tableau d'intérieur, moins grand que nature dont l'idée a été rapportée du Mont-Dore, l'Enfant de chœur", while she pushes on the statue; "pourtant je ne pense pas que l'Enfant de chœur se fasse si je fais les Saintes femmes et vice versa" (099.0246). On 3 May she is more definite: "Le 1er septembre je commence l'enfant de chœur. Il faudra six mois pour le faire. Ce sera le premier grand tableau." (099.0339). After that the title does not occur again in the diary.

Marie and this work

"L'idée a été rapportée du Mont-Dore" almost certainly points to the carpenter's workshop she painted there in August 1880, in which a mother fits a choirboy's red cassock and white surplice on her ten-year-old son while the father reads La Lanterne (#Interieur_boutique_Mont_Dore; diary 089.0356). That identification is the project's inference from the subject, the place and the words "d'intérieur"; Marie does not link the two in so many words. If it is right, L'Enfant de chœur would have been a larger, more finished version of that interior, the "first grand tableau" after the Salon picture, to be set against her fear of interior compositions that she had confessed in 1880 (089.0357). The competing project, Les Saintes Femmes, is a biblical subject (#Les_Saintes_Femmes); neither was painted. The reader footnote in 099.0246 describes L'Enfant de chœur as "a planned interior painting, conceived during her stay at Mont-Dore".

References in Diary

Related Entries

Sources