Jean et Jacques

Overview

Jean et Jacques (1883, oil on canvas, 155 × 115 cm) is the picture that made Marie a prize-winning painter. Two small, deliberately unhandsome boys from the Paris outskirts walk hand in hand along a wall on their way to school. It was accepted at the Salon of 1883 — where she showed it beside La Parisienne and the pastel portrait of her cousin Dina — and the same year it took a **mention honorable at the Exposition internationale de Nice**, a detail recorded in the 1885 catalogue and missing from almost every account of her since.

It is also the canvas that shows what she had learned from Bastien-Lepage: a naturalist subject taken from the street, painted outdoors, at life scale, with none of the prettiness the Salon expected of a woman painter. The anxiety runs through the whole making of it — «Si mon tableau allait lui ressembler…» (098.0418). Its direct descendant is Un meeting, conceived five weeks after this one was hung.

Description

Marie's own account, 27 February 1883: «deux gamins qui marchent le long d'un troittoir, en se tenant par la main, l'aîné a [huit ans] et regarde dans le vague devant lui, une feuille entre les lèvres, le petit regarde le public, une main dans la poche de son pantalon» (098.0419) — two boys walking along a pavement holding hands, the elder staring into the middle distance with a leaf between his lips, the younger looking straight out at the viewer with one hand in his trouser pocket. Sixteen days earlier she had put it more plainly still: two small boys «qui vont a l'asile ou a l'ecole», one not yet six and the other just turned four, painted «dans la cour de l'asile, en plein air bien enveloppee» (098.0318–0319) — in the yard of the infant school, outdoors, well wrapped up. She was consumptive and knew it.

Her own verdict at the Salon was harsh: «le tableau m'a paru sombre et quoique fait en plein air, il n'en a pas l'air. Le mur n'a pas l'air d'un mur» (099.0311) — dark, and not looking painted outdoors even though it was; the wall does not look like a wall.

Where the picture is now is genuinely unresolved, and this entry asserts nothing. Three locations circulate in the literature: the Newberry Library in Chicago (repeated by several secondary sources, but not confirmed in the Newberry's own collections database), the Musée d'Orsay via the Louvre (per the Dom Russkogo Zarubezhya), and an unnamed private collection. None could be verified. There is likewise no free reproduction — nothing on Wikimedia Commons — which for one of her two or three most discussed canvases is among the largest image gaps in her œuvre.

Making of the Work

The conception comes on 30 January 1883, out of a bad night: «Je ne sais quel coup de vent passe… Je renais, j'ai trouvé un tableau» (098.0218), written immediately after a bout of despair over the Bastien-Lepage gossip. She begins on 7 February (098.0302), scraps the first canvas and restarts on the 11th (098.0318). With thirty days to the Salon deadline, Tony Robert-Fleury's first look is «très très bien» (098.0324, 098.0326). On 28 February the Canroberts come to see it and she counts the cost: nineteen days, where fifteen would have done if she had not had to repaint one of the boys, who «paraissait trop âgé» (098.0433). Then the verdicts: Tony again (098.0442), Émile Bastien-Lepage — «il sera bien vu au Salon», and she is ashamed to be showing him something so close to his brother's manner (098.0465) — and Julian (098.0489). On 27 March, after a day of confusion over the admission lists: «Je suis archi-reçue» (098.0603).

At the Salon it is not on the cimaise, though Tony insists it can still be seen (099.0129, 099.0177), and Émile Bastien-Lepage walks the critic Fourcaud past it with an article promised (099.0339). Then the peculiar morning of 23 May 1883: the picture is moved higher on the wall, above Benner's tulips, on the very day the mention honorable is announced — and the award label is attached to the pastel instead. Marie's letter to Tony and his reply are both copied into the entry (099.0393).

The picture went on working for her afterwards. In November 1883 the St Petersburg Illustration universelle put a drawing after it on its front page (102.0054); in March 1884 she sent it to Mme Bertaux's exhibition of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs with the Grande-Jatte landscape and the Dina pastel (103.0412, 103.0420); in August 1884 Périvier of Le Figaro illustré took note of "Jean-Jacques" and she promised a drawing after it for the Christmas number (105.0713, 105.0741). The prize itself is reported flatly, on 14 May 1884: «Mon tableau Jean et Jacques a obtenu une mention honorable à Nice. Tout le monde est fou de joie, excepté moi.» (104.0165)

Careful with the name. Marie never calls the picture Jean et Jacques while she is painting it — throughout 1883 it is simply «mon tableau» or «les deux gamins», and the title surfaces only when the Nice prize is announced. And the «portrait de Jacques à l'huile» she works on in 1884 (103.0132, 103.0136, 103.0169 «Fini Jacques !», 103.0649, 104.0443, 104.0625–0626) is a separate, later picture of the same child model, not this canvas.

References in Diary

- First mention: 1883-01-30 (098.0218) — the conception
- 1883-02-07 (098.0302) — «J'ai commencé mon tableau»
- 1883-02-11 (098.0318–0319) — restarted; the first description, painted in the school yard
- 1883-02-12 (098.0324, 098.0326) — thirty days to the deadline; Tony's first look
- 1883-02-27 (098.0418–0419) — the fullest description, and the fear of resembling Bastien-Lepage
- 1883-02-28 (098.0429, 098.0433) — the Canroberts visit; nineteen days' work
- 1883-03-03 (098.0442), 1883-03-08 (098.0465), 1883-03-14 (098.0489) — Tony, Émile Bastien-Lepage, Julian
- 1883-03-27 (098.0588, 098.0603) — «Je suis archi-reçue»
- 1883-04-15 (099.0129), 1883-04-22 (099.0177) — the hanging
- 1883-05-01 (099.0311) — her own verdict on it at the Salon
- 1883-05-04 (099.0339) — Fourcaud walked past it
- 1883-05-23 (099.0393) — moved higher; the mention honorable; the letter to Tony
- 1883-11-22 (102.0054) — reproduced on the front page of L'Illustration universelle
- 1884-03-01 (103.0412, 103.0420) — sent to Mme Bertaux's exhibition
- 1884-05-14 (104.0165) — the Nice mention honorable; the only time the title appears
- 1884-08-25 (105.0713), 1884-08-28 (105.0741) — Le Figaro illustré

Related Entries

- #Un_meeting — the picture it led to, conceived weeks after this one was hung
- #La_Parisienne — shown with it at the Salon of 1883
- #Salon and #Art_Practice
- #Bastien-Lepage — the model she feared resembling; #Émile_Bastien-Lepage, who took the critics to it
- #Tony_Robert-Fleury, #Rodolphe_Julian
- #Kharkiv_Lost_Works — what happened to the bulk of her œuvre, and why so few canvases can be located

Sources

- Catalogue des œuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Union des Femmes Peintres & Sculpteurs, preface by François Coppée, Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 9 February 1885 — no. 37, with both the Salon of 1883 and the mention honorable at the Exposition internationale de Nice recorded. Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r
- WikiArt — Jean and Jacques (1883)
- Dom Russkogo Zarubezhya — 160 years since the birth of M. K. Bashkirtseff (one of the circulating location claims)
- The diary, carnets 098–105