The Portland daily press., 1880-05-26
The New Joan of Arc.
The Remarkable Picture at This Years
Salon.
Correspondence New York World.

Correspondence New York World.
The picture of the year is Bastien Lepage's
Joan of Arc" 1t is grand work, worthy
companion of that wonderful laboring woman
in the bayfield, which, if 1 remember rightly,
first brought him into very prominent notice.
He is quite young man, and it is most fortu-
nate for him, for his sureifuture of honor, glory
and riches will be all the longer ON that ac-
count. He has given us for the first time ON
canvas possible Joan of Arc She is per-
fectly natural, 1 was going to say, village
maid, but prefer to say village wench, because
that better expresses the character of the pic
ture. His genius is shown in his having made
new picture of such an exceedingly trite SUBJ
iecS. suppose that if all the Joans that have
been painted from the dawn of French art
could be catalogued we should have book
considerably larger than the list of all these
paintings in the Palais de l'Industrie taken to-
gether. We have seen the maid listening to
the voice that called her forth on her great
mission, we have seen her in full armor slay-
ing English by the score, we have seen her at
the stake; but in each and all of these things
she has been idealized with more or less exc
cradle taste. Painters have paid the incest
attention to her frocks, and have made her
look like fashionable lady assuming the part
in tableau vivant, while some have gone to
the extreme length of oiling her hair. There
was but one other thing left to do, and Lepage
has done it. He has painted her as what she
probably was-a clodhopper who happened to
have the soul of a saint. The heroism of her
atsmRt And ths FsnqsRr s Of hes eharastsy get
bored poverty of the details with which he sur
rounds her. She is standing in field in
wretchedly shabby attre-a most forlorn petit
coat made of two old ones basted together with
stitches as coarse as the work of a packing
needle.
Her stomacher is laced. To look at her is to
understand at glance what havoc the Eng
lish invasion had wrought in France. The
population is wasting to death under the
scourge. The hint of her visionary mission is
seen in semi-transparent view in the back
ground which embodies the shapes of her wax
ing dreams, but all else is strictly and fearfully
true to the life. 1t is as though we had gone
back some hundreds of years and by good hap
had come across some contemporary gossip
who "knew the family" and could tell us au-
thoritatively "thus she looked" The gossip
has whispered it into the ear of Bastien Lepage
and amid all the homely plainness of surround
ings she has not forgotten the inspiration of
the blue eyes in the wasted face. 1t is not q
beautiful face by any means, but the light in
it makes amends, and it has almost positive
beauty in a negative quality-the absence of
self-consciousness. Joan does not quite know
why she is going to deliver France. She has
no foresight of the historical consequences of
her act: she only feels great pity for her
country with anger against the cruel spoilers
love and wrath intensified till they become a
force of the hand of God. An utter absence of
pose, which characterizes lthe whole work is
nowhere more conspicuous than in this beauti-
full sincere face. The picture stands every
test. 1t has been much talked about, and yet
when you see, there is still room for delighted
surprise. You can never tire of it, it IS as true
as Niagara or the sea. To my mind this work
is decisive of the course to be run by the paint
ing of the immediate future. 1t not only gives
a man his place in art but it is likely to deter
mine the movement of art itself for the next
quarter of century 1t POUNDS a school, for
surely all the young men will be trying to look
at nature in this way for years to come, and
we must be humbly prepared for any amount
of history from the point of view of the cow
house and the brickyard. This is no more
than to say that Bastien Lepage's imitators
will miss the spirit of their master.