The Art of Jules Bastien-Lepage - Jeanne d'Arc / Joan of Arc, 1879. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Joan of Arc, the medieval teenaged martyr from the province of Lorraine, gained new status as a patriotic symbol after France ceded the territory to Germany following the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Bastien-Lepage, a native of Lorraine, depicts the moment when Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine appear to Joan in her parents’ garden, rousing her to fight against the English invaders in the Hundred Years War. When the painting was exhibited in the Salon of 1880, critics praised the expressiveness of the principal figure, but found the saints’ presence at odds with Bastien-Lepage’s naturalistic style.

The Painting:

How to represent an otherworldly moment in the everyday life of an extraordinary girl? This was the challenge Bastien-Lepage faced when setting himself the task of a large-scale depiction of the thirteen-year-old Joan of Arc (ca. 1412–1431) hearing the voices of three saints while winding wool in her backyard in Domrémy. In preparation for the picture, Bastien-Lepage visited the village, not far from his birthplace of Damvillers (McC[onkey] 1980). The detailed garden setting is said to be based on the yard of his family home (Studio 1885), and it is informed by a careful study of the region’s plant life.

The Art of Jules Bastien-Lepage - Joan of Arc, 1879. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Contrasting with this fidelity to nature is the miraculous apparition of Saints Michael (in armor), Margaret, and Catherine hovering in the air at the upper left. Joan is caught between these two worlds. The model for her figure has been identified as Marie-Adèle Robert, Bastien-Lepage’s cousin, who had posed for two of his previous Salon genre scenes, but her face is said to be a composite of two young local girls (see Studio 1885, Weir 1896, Feldman 1973, and Aubrun 1985). Joan pauses in her chores, abandoning her spinning wheel and overturning her chair, and stares into the distance. Her seemingly-possessed wide-open clear blue eyes, feverishly flushed cheeks, and upturned gaze suggest that she has been transported into a moment of mystical communion with the saints, who have come to convince her to fight against the English invaders in the Hundred Years War. Still, she remains tied to the earthly realm, standing barefoot with her toes clenched, digging into the ground, wearing the traditional peasant dress of Lorraine: a loose-necked white blouse, long grey overblouse with puffed sleeves, and long brown skirt that covers her down to her dirty feet. Her clenched foot betrays the tension of her body (and the intensity of her vision), while her proper left hand hangs on to the end of a tree limb, steadying her while she listens to the voices of the saints.

Evolution of the Composition:

In 1875, Bastien-Lepage painted a portrait of Henri Alexandre Wallon (see Additional Images, fig. 2), a biographer of Joan of Arc (on Wallon’s influence on the painter, see Studio 1885 and Feldman 1973); that same year, he began to make studies for a picture of her. The composition evolved from a more conventional conception of Joan kneeling in prayer before an altar, to a scene of the girl at her spinning wheel in her father’s orchard, to the final image (de Fourcaud 1885, McC[onkey] 1980). Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch (1890), a friend of Bastien-Lepage’s, recalled that the composition was inspired by an incident in which the artist’s mother experienced a vision after returning from the fields, weary from farming. Bastien-Lepage decided to place the saints behind Joan, while she looks forward and up, out of the picture, only after a heated discussion over whether to include the saints in his depiction with his friend and biographer André Theuriet, who believed it would be a mistake (Theuriet 1892, McC[onkey] 1980, and McConkey 1982). There are several historical and contemporary precedents for this formal arrangement that Bastien-Lepage may have known, including Léon Benouville’s 1859 picture, which hung in Joan’s family cottage in Domrémy and served as the frontispiece for Wallon’s biography of Joan (see Additional Images, figs. 3–5).

Preliminary Studies:

Early on, Julia Cartwright (1894) noted that the painter had made seven or eight studies for the painting. Marie-Madeleine Aubrun (1985) catalogued fourteen drawings as studies for it. The black chalk study at the Yale University Art Gallery (see Additional Images, fig. 6) illustrates Bastien-Lepage’s working method. The study was divided into two sheets just as the painter subsequently used two large canvases, sewn together in the middle, to paint this over-life-size scene. Masters in Art: Bastien-Lepage (1908) indicated that the artist doubled the size of the work to incorporate the saints into the composition. If correct, this statement confirms that Bastien-Lepage started with the figure of Joan, perhaps intending that viewers would simply imagine her holy vision, and only later added the embodiments of the saints.

Reception:

In its first major public appearance at the Paris Salon of 1880, the picture was widely discussed in the press but received mixed reviews. Many critics appreciated Bastien-Lepage’s compellingly lifelike portrayal of Joan and his evocation of her inner state. Fellow naturalist artists like Marie Bashkirtseff, Jules Breton, and Benjamin-Constant praised the picture, and several commentators vociferously bemoaned the fact that the French state failed to purchase it before the American collector Erwin Davis quickly acquired it from the artist in 1880.

However, numerous contemporary critics objected mightily to the disjunction between the representation of the saints, floating in mid-air, and the otherwise highly realistic scene (see the many references below, particularly Joris-Karl Huysmans’ [1883] discussion of its "false naturalism"). Bastien-Lepage was so disappointed in the critical reception of the picture that he soon fled Paris to exhibit in London, leaving incomplete his painting of Ophelia, a similar composition showing the tragic young maiden of Shakespeare’s Hamlet surrounded by greenery (1881; see Additional Images, fig. 7).

The Theme:

Much has been written about Joan of Arc, both factual and theoretical. That at a young age this medieval figure had visions of the saints that brought her to her calling as a warrior for her people appears to be fact, but the source of those visions has been debated. Recent scholars (both historical and medical) have discussed such possible sources as epilepsy, migraines, tuberculosis, and schizophrenia. In the painter’s time, critics compared the hysterics who populated the Salpêtrière sanitarium of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot with Bastien-Lepage’s own image of Joan (Feldman 1973, McConkey 1982, and Berman 1982).

The subject of Joan of Arc had been popular throughout the nineteenth century, but the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 provided the catalyst for the fervent revival of her cult. Her native region of Lorraine was annexed to Germany at the end of the war, making Joan an ideal symbol of France’s hoped-for resurgence in the wake of a crushing military defeat. Even as late as 1879, when Bastien-Lepage painted this picture, postwar morale throughout France was low, and sculptures and paintings of Joan of Arc flooded the Salons of the time. As Bastien-Lepage was also from Lorraine, he would have been keenly aware of Joan of Arc’s legendary power. However, rather than take up the more typical image of Joan dressed for battle in a man’s metal armor, leading French troops to victory—like Emmanuel Frémiet’s 1874 gilded bronze equestrian statue in the Place des Pyramides—, he seized on the story of her patriotic awakening, a fitting subject given France’s sunken national spirits.

The Artist:

Jules Bastien-Lepage lived for only thirty-six years, but he made a large impact on the French art world of the second half of the nineteenth century (see Additional Images, fig. 1, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s medallion made in tribute to him, The Met, 12.76.4). Like Joan of Arc, he was a product of a poor family from the rural province of Lorraine in the northeast of France. The painter became a student of Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1867 and began to exhibit at the Salon in 1870. In 1874, a portrait and a rustic landscape he showed at the Salon brought him success in both genres, launching his renown as an academically-trained proponent of naturalism. In his later years, including the period of this painting, he had begun to respond to the Impressionists’ use of freer brushwork and lighter colors. Previously wounded in the chest during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he died young in 1884 of stomach cancer (McC[onkey] 1980).

Additional Images:

Fig. 1. Photograph of Jules Bastien-Lepage (from Weisberg 1980, p. 268)

Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s medallion made in tribute to him, The Met, 12.76.4

Fig. 2. Jules Bastien-Lepage, Henri-Alexandre Wallon, 1875, oil on canvas, 103.5 x 81 cm (Chateau de Versailles)

Fig. 3. Unknown Artist, Joan of Arc, ca. 1485, miniature (Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris)

Fig. 4. Léon Bénouville, Joan of Arc, 1859, oil on canvas (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims)

Fig. 5. Eugène Thirion, Jeanne d’Arc, 1876, oil on canvas (Church of Notre Dame, Chatou)

Fig. 6. Jules Bastien-Lepage, Study for “Joan of Arc,” 1879, black chalk, two sheets, left: 24 3/16 x 18 3/8 in.; right: 24 3/16 x 14 13/16 in. (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven)

Fig. 7. Jules Bastien-Lepage, Ophelia, 1881, oil on canvas (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy)

Joan of Arc - Jennifer Warnes & Leonard Cohen

Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc 

as she came riding through the dark; 

no moon to keep her armour bright, 

no man to get her through this very smoky night.

She said, "I'm tired of the war, 

I want the kind of work I had before, 

a wedding dress or something white 

to wear upon my swollen appetite."

Well, I'm glad to hear you talk this way, 

you know I've watched you riding every day 

and something in me yearns to win 

such a cold and lonesome heroine.

"And who are you?" she sternly spoke 

to the one beneath the smoke.

"Why, I'm fire," he replied, 

"And I love your solitude, I love your pride."

"Then fire, make your body cold, 

I'm going to give you mine to hold," 

saying this she climbed inside 

to be his one, to be his only bride.

And deep into his fiery heart 

he took the dust of Joan of Arc, 

and high above the wedding guests 

he hung the ashes of her wedding dress.

It was deep into his fiery heart 

he took the dust of Joan of Arc, 

and then she clearly understood 

if he was fire, oh then she must be wood.

I saw her wince, I saw her cry, 

I saw the glory in her eye. 

Myself I long for love and light, 

but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?

The story of Joan of Arc is one of the most wonderful stories in the history of any nation of Europe. In the hour of France's need, when she was being conquered by English armies, when her forces were so divided by civil war that it seemed as if there were no true Frenchmen, but that every lord and district were for themselves, when she had no recognized king, but only an uncrowned Dauphin.......in this hour of her need there appeared for France a Maiden, a deliverer.

Joan died a cruel death, but the work which she had begun in France did not die with her. She had united the French and they did not fall apart again into quarrelsome factions. King Charles showed a new spirit as he began his reign. Even through the dangers of war he took time to unite his nobles and keep them in order under him. The English were driven out by this newly roused French nation. The Hundred Years' War was ended, and a peace was concluded by which France was left free within her own provinces, untroubled by foreigners.

Many movies, books, poems, songs have been written on the subject of Joan of Arc. In this video, the Leonard Cohen song, "Joan of Arc" is featured as sung by Jennifer Warnes with several images that are hopefully interwoven to reflect a variety of Joan of Arc facets in the past and in our present day. I chose to focus on the face of Renée Maria Falconetti from the 1928 movie "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc" -The director, Dreyer, wrote in his "Thoughts on My Craft", "Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring". Dreyer's film was a visionary work of art which has to be seen to be appreciated. But, Falconetti's performance was so intense for her that she suffered a mental breakdown after the filming.

Songs, poems, symbols are all able to carry multiple messages, depending on who is interpreting them (or when in their life they are doing the interpreting). I have chosen to interpret the fire as being God (Jesus for Joan). Some have said that they saw the fire as the Devil. Not I.

Courtesy Jane R. Becker The Metropolitan Museum of Art