Le Printemps

Overview

Le Printemps -- the picture Marie herself proposed calling Avril -- is the large canvas she painted out of doors at Sèvres between March and June 1884, in the last spring of her life. It is generally dated 1884, oil on canvas, and measured at 215,5 × 199,5 cm (reported elsewhere with the figures transposed).

Its present location is probable, not established. It is attributed to the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg by AWARE, which is published in partnership with the Musée d'Orsay -- but the museum does not publish the work in its online catalogue (it publishes only one Bashkirtseff painting of the eight it states it holds), and goskatalog.ru is not reachable from outside Russia. The identification with *no. 34, Avril, 2,15 × 2,00 m* in the 1885 posthumous catalogue is a very close dimensional match and is almost certainly right, but it too is an inference rather than a documented equivalence.

No adequate photograph of this picture is freely available. The only file on Wikimedia Commons measures 373 × 400 pixels -- far too small for a canvas over two metres tall; it is shown above at that size until a better image can be had. The second image is a wood engraving published in The Woman's World in 1888 (p. 455), made after a drawing lent by Ludovic Baschet. It shows the whole composition clearly, but in black and white and at second hand.

An early owner. A footnote in the same 1888 article reports that "Spring", "painted at Sèvres in April, 1884", had just been bought by Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, "the cousin of the Czar", and hung in his gallery at the Marble Palace in St Petersburg. It calls this the first of her pictures to reach Russia. The Russian Museum's printed catalogues of 1912 and 1917 do not list it among the works her mother gave. How the picture reached the museum, if it is there, is not documented here.

Description

A peasant girl lies dreaming at the foot of a flowering apple tree, in grass full of violets and small yellow flowers. Marie's own account of it, on the day it had her by the throat, is the best description there is: "Ce tableau m'empoigne ! Le pommier est en fleurs... dans l'herbe, des violettes, des fleurs jaunes qui éclatent comme des petits soleils." And the figure: "Et la fille qui rêve au pied de l'arbre, 'alanguie et grisée' comme dit A. Theuriet" -- borrowing the phrase from the novelist and poet André Theuriet (104.0003–0002).

Making of the Work

She went out to Sèvres every day through April 1884. The subject then did to her what plein-air painting does: the season moved on and the picture could not follow. "Le paysage a tellement changé qu'on ne peut plus y toucher, ce n'est plus le printemps," she wrote on 25 May, adding a painter's confession -- "Et puis mes fleurs de pommiers sont devenues jaunes (sur le tableau), j'y avais fourré de l'huile" (104.0329). By mid-June she had turned against it: "Ça ne m'intéresse plus ce pommier en fleurs et ces violettes ! Et cette paysanne assoupie !... C'est du mauvais Bastien !" (104.0597) -- the charge of imitating Jules Bastien-Lepage, which she feared from critics, she here levels at herself. Three days later: "Le tableau de Sèvres et le portrait de Jacques, deux cauchemars !!" (104.0606).

The canvas came to the studio in early July, and with it the title: "Il est ici le tableau de Sèvres, à l'atelier. On peut l'appeler Avril. Ça m'est égal, mais cet Avril me paraît si exécrablement mauvais !!!" (105.0025). The next day Tony Robert-Fleury went over it point by point -- the hair, the hand, the apron, the background too green -- but concluded that "comme ébauche c'est très bien"; and Ducros, to her disgust, rated it above Un meeting: "Cet imbécile la met au-dessus du Meeting !!" (105.0027–0038). It was finished by the end of August, and its finishing marks the beginning of the last barren stretch of her working life: "Depuis que le tableau de Sèvres est fini, je n'ai rien fait. Rien, sauf deux misérables panneaux" (105.0708).

*Do not confuse it with the allegorical Printemps*** -- a sculpted composition or relief, planned with seventeen or eighteen figures, that she never executed. That project appears at 100.0389 and 100.0552–0205 (July–August 1883), 103.0580 (March 1884: "on doit sentir les effluves du printemps qui font rêver la femme") and 104.0502 (June 1884). The two share a title and a mood and nothing else.

References in Diary

Related Entries

Sources