Le Soir au village

Overview

Le Soir au village is a small dusk scene by Jules Bastien-Lepage, which Marie first saw as one of several studies he had brought back from Damvillers in December 1882. She describes it as: the moon already showing and the windows lighting up; a man coming in from the fields turns to speak to a woman who is walking towards the house with the lit window (097.0238). The identification with a particular museum picture is not confirmed: a French study of his 1882 output lists Le Soir au village ou La Petite Coquette among that year's works, and an 1882 oil Evening at Damvillers (66.4 × 80.3 cm) is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but no source consulted states that they are the same picture. No image is given here for that reason. (Sources: Marie's own description; Eclectic Light Co., « Naturalists: Jules Bastien-Lepage 1882-84 », for the Philadelphia painting; unverified match.)

Marie and this painting

14 December 1882: Marie and her family visit the studio where the « vrai Bastien » is arranging the frames of the canvases just back from the country; she praises the rendering of twilight, the calm settling on everything, « seulement on entend aboyer quelque chien. C'est d'une couleur, d'une poésie, d'un charme ! » (097.0238). On 31 December 1882, at the rue de Sèze exhibition, she decides that the picture is not inferior to the poetry of Cazin (097.0322, with a reader footnote on Cazin).

On 15 June 1883 she judges it, though « une impression de petite dimension », the equal of Millet: « il n'y a là que deux petites figures perdues dans le crépuscule » (100.0165); it appears in her list of the five (100.0167). On 16 January 1884 she traces a « filiation » between Jeanne d'Arc, Le Soir au village and the planned Bergers à Bethléem (103.0041, 103.0042). On 4 April 1884 she calls it « un chef d'œuvre pur » and « d'un effet magique », a poetic note in the manner of Millet that he himself surpassed (103.0705).

Related

Les Bergers à Bethléem, Jeanne d'Arc (Bastien-Lepage).