Portrait de Mme Drouet (Bastien-Lepage)
Také známý jako: Portrait de Mme Drouet, le portrait de Mme Drouet, un petit portrait de Mme Drouet, Portrait de Juliette Drouet
Overview
A small oil portrait (36 × 31 cm) of Juliette Drouet (1806-1883), the actress who became Victor Hugo's companion for fifty years, painted by Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1883, a few months before her death on 11 May 1883. Signed and dated lower left "J. BASTIEN-LEPAGE 1883". It stayed with the painter, appeared in the sale of his studio on 11-12 May 1885 as "Portrait de Mme X." (identified by the annotated catalogue as "Drouet", 11,500 francs, bought by Boussod-Valadon / Goupil), and eventually passed to Marie-Henriette Rodriguez-Péreire, who bequeathed it to the museum; it entered the collection in 1931. It is held by the Maisons de Victor Hugo (Paris Musées, Hauteville House inventory no. 266). (Source: Paris Musées Collections record, via the Wikimedia Commons file description.)
Marie and this work
Marie sees it in Bastien-Lepage's studio and later in his exhibition, and it is part of her obsessive measuring of herself against him:
- 1883-03-15 (098.0500): the day the whole circle goes to Bastien's to see L'amour au village, she calls "un petit portrait de Mme Drouet, le vieil ange gardien de Victor Hugo" "un miracle de vérité, de sentiments, de ressemblance". "Ce n'est pas un peintre, c'est un poète, c'est un psychologue."
- 1884-01-27 (103.0153): in a rueful aside: "Le portrait de Mme Drouet m'a paru bien mince et cartonneux. Ah ! non ! je suis folle, c'est superbe et je ne lui arrive pas à la cheville."
- 1884-04-04 (103.0702): cataloguing Bastien's exhibition (at Georges Petit's gallery, per the LAN note): "il y a 1. le portrait de Mme Drouet de l'année dernière".