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Lot Essay
'It was finished … and Sarah confessed to me that she had grown utterly weary of the endless sittings and had led the painter a pretty dance in order to escape them. At last, he had arrived with his impedimenta and a camp stool upon which he planted himself outside her bedroom door, daring her to pass in or out without posing for him, and thus, by force and violence, the picture got itself completed.'1
Thus, Mlle Bernhardt recounted the completion of her portrait by Jules Bastien-Lepage to a young English art student named Walford Graham Robertson.2 There were, reputedly, forty-five of these tortuous encounters, in which preparatory works were produced, none rivalling the concentration of the Salon oil - the present canvas.3
Artist and sitter first met, probably in 1878, at a soirée held by the publisher, Charpentier. Apparently, the painter walked up to the actor without introduction and declared that he wished to paint her portrait. She replied that she would very much like him to do so because she had been following his rise to fame, and in fact she had seen his Prix de Rome entry in 1875, l’Annonciation aux Bergers, (fig. 1) when he narrowly missed the prize.
‘After the decision of the jury’, she reminded him,
‘… a bouquet was placed in front of your painting as a kind of anonymous protest in your favour. Do you recollect the circumstance?’ ‘Yes I do,’ replied Lepage, ‘And I have kept that bouquet to this day.’ ‘Have you!’ rejoined Sarah Bernhardt with a coquettish smile, ‘do you know that it came from me?’4
Thereafter the tussle between the stymied artist-stalker and mercurial sitter began. The struggle was as much conceptual as it was to do with practicability. Lepage knew exactly what he wished to achieve, and Mlle Bernhardt had a keen sense of what she was worth. Her fame inevitably enhanced the reputation of those to whom she granted her image. Managing the process and the result was as important to her as it was to the artist. One recalls Henry James’s advice to one of Sargent’s sitters to be ‘as difficult as possible’,
'… the more difficult you are the more the artist … will be condemned to worry over you, repainting, revolutionizing, until he, in a rage of ambition and admiration, arrives at the thing that satisfies him and enshrines and perpetuates you.'5
But how could such a picture achieve this at a time when scale, drama and painterly flourish meant so much? Could one of the biggest personalities of the day be contained in a painting little more than seventeen inches high? Public expectations were already furnished by Clairin’s portrait of three years earlier in which the vampire, swathed in silks, commands the viewer from an over-stuffed divan (fig. 2).
The answer was to reject the Clairin premise entirely and subject the sitter to forensic scrutiny, turning her away from the spectator and in profile to focus on her form - clad in figure-hugging silk brocades, offset by an extravagant chiffon bow at the neck. Surface, thus exposed, contained soul. The eye ranges freely over the narrow seventeen-inch waist, the ramrod line of her back, the measurement between ear, nose and mouth, carefully calibrated, and the shock of unruly tresses tamed, it was said, by no more than two pins. By its very nature, a profile is more intimate than a full face; we observe without being observed. The mask is not in place and the eyes do not distract. In this instance, they cast their gaze upon a sculpture as a connoisseur might, and the piece Mlle Bernhardt delicately fingers is that of Orpheus, given to her to hold at this moment by Bastien-Lepage, in order to compliment and express her aspirations as a sculptor (fig. 3).6
What is her reply, as she gazes open-mouthed at the ill-fated son of Apollo? What does the Orpheus myth mean? In the late nineteenth century, Orpheus, clutching his lyre, came to symbolize the forlorn poet whose art outlives him. The story of his distracted wanderings after the loss of Eurydice, as retold by Virgil, involves Orpheus’s dismemberment in a bacchic rampage, his head cast into the river Hebrus, still singing after death, 'And even when Oeagrian Hebrus rolled in mid-current that head, severed from its marble neck, the disembodied voice and the tongue, now cold forever, called with departing breath on Eurydice - ah, poor Eurydice! ‘Eurydice’ the banks re-echoed, all along the stream.'7
Orpheus thus embodies the ars longa that Bernhardt hoped to achieve in her sculpture and that was merely ephemeral in her stage appearances. Nevertheless, by 1879, these very performances, and the gossip they engendered, were at the root of her notoriety. Her starring roles in Racine’s Phèdre and as Dona Sol in Hugo’s Hernani were already legendary in Paris, and the celebrity conferred upon her by theatre critics, complemented by her escapades, and contretemps with her managers, meant that this new portrait by Bastien-Lepage was eagerly anticipated.8
When first shown in its massive metal frame in 1879, the painting hung alongside Lepage’s very different Saison d’octobre, recolté de pommes de terre (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). A large plein air Naturalist painting of potato gatherers in the fields near the artist’s family home at Damvilliers in the Meuse, it might, at first glance, be almost the work of another painter, until, on closer inspection, one observes the concentration on surface that it and Sarah Bernhardt exemplify. The veteran Realist critic and friend of Gustave Courbet, Jules-Antoine Castagnary, citing this ‘oeuvre extraordinaire’, declared rhetorically that in a hundred years, of all the works on display in the current Salon, the present portrait of Mlle Bernhardt might be considered a masterpiece - ‘si les contemporains proposent, c’est la postérité qui dispose.’9 While many others gazed in astonishment and approval, J-K Huysmans was less convinced, finding the work ‘artful’ beside that of Fantin-Latour.10 Yet Le Figaro, in declaring that ‘son portrait de Sarah Bernhardt est une petite débauche de tons blancs, d’une rare distinction, d’une belle harmonie …’ alluded to its aesthetic probity.11 It matched, in other words, the subtleties of Whistler, but lacked his pretensions. In the end Arthur Baignères in the Gazette des Beaux Arts covered all the bases. Reporting on a subject whose beauty was ‘proverbiale’, he continued, 'A quoi bon avoir modelé un visage comme Albrecht Dürer, peint des mains dignes d’Holbein, coloré des chevaux comme Titien, brodé des étoffes blanches, des fourrures blanches, une tenture blanche … un poème japonais.'12
Dürer, Holbein, Titian, the Japanese - all may be implicated, but the conception was unique.13
More than one critic reached for what would become a common descriptor for Lepage’s work - that the Bernhardt portrait was ‘Holbeinesque’.14 Reaching back to the Tudor Renaissance court painter, the reference suggested an alternative extension from mid-century Realism, opposed to swift shorthand Impressionist taches. Its commitment to long looking was, according to Emile Zola, an insistence upon ‘verité strictement scientifique’, a documentary accuracy not seen since the sixteenth century. It was as if Flemish and Westphalian Renaissance finesse had been carried from the soil to the salon.
By the time critiques of Lepage’s controversial portrait were streaming in, its subject was preparing for her first London season, where she opened to rave reviews.15 If these were not enough, a selection of her paintings and sculpture was shown at a gallery in Piccadilly and she was feted by the British aristocracy. Her only regret was that the Prince of Wales, a well-known Francophile, had left for Paris the day she arrived, but they met soon after his return.16 By this stage, Lepage had followed the actress to London, and he too was introduced to the Prince, who, having been impressed with her portrait, commissioned his own portrait from the artist (fig. 4).17
After its completion this was dispatched to the Royal Academy, while the Bernhardt portrait hung in a special display at the Grosvenor Gallery.18 Here it was surrounded by other portraits as well as l’Annonciation aux Bergers, and Les Foins, 1877 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). It could easily be overlooked in a show that contained Edward Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs, (Tate) and portraits by John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, were it not ‘framed in steel, and thus at once noticeable as a thing apart, whether for good or ill’.19 The ‘crowd of worshippers’ for Bastien-Lepage as the show continued, left conservative critics and Academicians guessing.20 As the New English Art Club emerged in 1886, it was obvious that many had taken note. James Jebusa Shannon’s Madge, (fig. 5), for instance, looks back to the Bernhardt with great admiration.
What Shannon’s head study misses of course is the statuette, the object of curiosity, and the sense that in her delicate fingers, Mlle Bernhardt holds a kind of talisman.21 She calls to it, as Orpheus calls to Eurydice. Her own studio efforts, wryly reported by Graham Robertson, on visits to the well-appointed salon/studio in the rue Fortuny were banal. ‘Love’, he said, ‘was doing something or other - Triumphing, I think’, and ‘death was also somewhere about and a few other rather unconvincing allegories.’22 They may not be enough to assure her immortality, but the account of the sittings that led to Lepage’s portrait was another matter.
In France the portrait retained its presence, being shown at the Exposition Universelle in 1889, and being reproduced in the English monographs of the 1890s. It remained au courant throughout the life of its subject and in 1914 was eulogized in the monograph by Fr Castre as, 'une merveille d’expression et d’un art très délicat dans une sorte de symphonie claire où se marient harmonieusement les blancs les plus tendres et les ors les plus chauds.'23
At this point the great tragedienne’s career was turning increasingly to the new medium of film, and live performances were often restricted to single scenes from her most celebrated classics. Her death in March 1923 was almost a moment of national mourning with large crowds following the funeral cortège to Père Lachaise. The great celebrity lived on in popular memory and with prominent exhibitions in London, Paris and Nice in the 1930s, the present portrait continued to be admired as a latter-day Renaissance cameo, while her chimera bibelot self-portrait, a cast of which was presented to the prince, was consigned unused, to his desk in Marlborough House (fig. 6).24
‘M. Bastien-Lepage vivra encore,’ wrote Baignères back in 1879, ‘selon toute probabilité, dans le musée du Louvre, que son modêle sera peut-être oublié’, and it seemed in the post-war period that his prophecy had come true.25 If arriving at the finished portrait was a kind of torture for both artist and sitter, there is no doubt today that the final product fully qualifies as ‘an icon of an idol’, every bit as much as Picasso’s renderings of Sylvette David or Warhol’s Marilyn.26 With Mlle Sarah Bernhardt Bastien-Lepage’s place in the concert of modernité is assured.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.
1. W. G. Robertson, Time Was, The Reminiscences of W Graham Robertson, 1931 (Hamish Hamilton, 1955 imp), p. 112.
2. Walford Graham Robertson, (1866-1948), is chiefly remembered today as the model for Sargent’s celebrated portrait of 1894 (Tate). Painter, illustrator, collector of folk songs and the work of William Blake, he designed costumes for Bernhardt. Having studied at the Government Art Training School and under Albert Moore he travelled to Paris after the death of his father in 1884. His letters, Kerrison Preston, ed. and introd., Letters from Graham Robertson, 1953 (Hamish Hamilton), indicate that he managed to secure the last two chromolithographs of the Bernhardt, which he considered the ‘only really good portrait of her’ (pp. 362 & 513).
3. Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, nos. 235 & 236, and D237 & D238. The authenticity of these has been questioned and no 235 may be by another hand. D238 appears unrelated. Uncatalogued is a tiny watercolour replica, 11 x 8.5 cms, which returned to the saleroom in 2020 with a full attribution.
4. This story appears in various places in the Bastien-Lepage literature. My earliest reference is drawn from ‘Sarah Bernhardt’s Portrait’, Edinburgh Evening News, 22 April 1879, p. 3, drawing upon an unidentified French source.
5. Quoted in Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent, his portrait, 1986 (Macmillan), p. 189.
6. Contemporary critics, French and English, often mistakenly credited Sarah Bernhardt with this statuette. When seen by the present author in 1981, the original plaster was in the Emile Bastien-Lepage succession. It was subsequently sold at Mes Libert et Castor, Nouveau Drouot, Paris, 1 July 1987, lot 59; see Lobstein 2007, pp. 102-3. A related oil painting, (Auburn, no 125), passed through the Paris art trade in 1979 and remains unlocated. A drawing (sold Christie’s, 6 December 2012, and subsequently with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, London) is in a Private Collection.
7. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1-6, 1916 (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press reprint 2004, trans., H Rushton Fairclough), pp. 257-7: tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice reulsum/ gurgite cum medio portans Oeagrius Hebrus/ volveret, Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua,/ a miseram Eurydicen! Anima fugiente vocabat:/ Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae. Reference to this sequence is contained in a letter from the artist to his parents in January 1877, recounting the legend, in which Orpheus, ‘distrait ou plutôt tourmenté par le désir de revoir Eurydice, on sentira qu’il vas bientôt tourner la tête …’; see Henri Amic, ‘Jules Bastien-Lepage, lettres et souvenirs’, Revue Générale Internationale, 1896, p. 518. The theme was immensely popular with Symbolists such as Moreau, Watts and Delville.
8. ‘All Paris will hurry to the Salon to see and admire [it]’, wrote the Edinburgh Evening News, as at note 3; see also The Yorkshire Post, 22 April 1879, p. 6. Bernhardt had, for instance, scandalized Paris by taking to the air in a balloon advertising her current role, during the Exposition Universelle in 1878. This then was blown off course by a storm, much to the dismay of her director, Émile Perrin. Such was her command over the Comédie Française that she could not be fired when she engaged in outrageous publicity-garnering stunts.
9. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, Salons, (1871-1879), Tome Deuxième, 1892 (Bibliothèque G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, éditeurs), p. 361.
10. J-K Huysmans, ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art Moderne, 1883 (Plon-Nourrit et Cie, Paris), pp. 72-3; see also J-K Huysmans, Modern Art, (L’Art Moderne), 2019 (Dedalus Classic, trans. Brendan King), p. 82for an excellent annotated translation. Fantin-Latour was showing La Leçon de Dessin (Musées Royaux, Brussels) at the 1879 Salon. Elsewhere Philippe Burty in La République Française, 27 Mai 1879, compared the picture to a bas-relief, while Eugène Guillaume in Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Juillet 1879, p. 197 took the opportunity to reflect on the relationship between the painted portrait and photography, and Eugène Véron in ‘La Peinture au Salon de Paris’, L’Art, Tome 2, Juillet 1879, pp. 146-8, simply supplied a paean of praise for the work.
11. ‘Le Salon’, Le Figaro, 11 mai 1879, p. 1.
12. Arthur Baignères, ‘Le Salon de 1879’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, Juin 1879, p. 558.
13. To this impressive roll call of precedents, Lobstein 2007, p. 110 adds Baldovinetti and Bronzino.
14. This was especially the case after Bernhardt was shown in London the following year (see note 18). Julia Cartwright, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1894 (Seeley & Co), p. 27, quotes Lepage on Holbein’s influence from a conversation with André Theuriet. His claim to this heritage had already been staked with La première communiante, 1875 (Musée des Beaux Arts, Tournai). It will be recalled that on hearing of Lepage’s premature death in 1884, Jules Breton is reported to have remarked ‘En Bastien-Lepage la France a perdu son Holbein.’ In a striking coincidence, during the autumn of 1879, John Singer Sargent, Charles-Edmond Daux and Jean Benner all painted profile head studies of young peasant women at Capri, one of which, by Daux, appeared at the 1879 Salon.
15. In the spring of 1879, the Théâtre Française was closed for repairs and a season of extracts - scenes from its company’s most famous recent productions - was arranged at the Gaiety Theatre in London. While the company stayed at Dieudonné’s hotel in Ryder Street, Bernhardt rented a house at 77 Chester Square for the six-week season. Although, at this point sociétaire of the Comédie Française, she insisted on a separate contract in her favour with the added stipulation that she could conduct solo performances in private houses, for fees in the region of £400 an evening; see Sir George Arthur, Sarah Bernhardt, 1923 (William Heinemann), p. 66.
16. The account of one of these meetings when the Prince introduced his ‘brother-in-law’ (the King of Greece), to Bernhardt, between the acts of one of her plays is recounted from a French source in ‘The Prince of Wales and Sarah Bernhardt’, Edinburgh Evening News, 30 June 1879, p.2. The Prince did attend the opening of Bernhardt’s exhibition along with William Ewart Gladstone and other notables.
17. Reported belatedly in The Freeman’s Journal, 26 July 1879. The Prince had been introduced to Lepage by Marie Samary, one of the Comédie Française actresses staying at Dieudonné’s, and had already given sittings for his portrait by this date; see Kenneth McConkey, ‘After Holbein: A Study of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Portrait of the Prince of Wales’, Arts Magazine, vol 59, no 2, October 1984, pp. 103-107. The prince then visited both Bernhardt and Lepage in Paris in November 1879 and March 1880. See also Oliver Millar, introd., Princes as Patrons, 1998 (exhibition catalogue, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff), p. 125 (no 121).
18. Kenneth McConkey, ‘Un petit cercle de thuriféraires” Bastien-Lepage et la Grande-Bretagne’, 48/14, La revie du Musée d’Orsay, no 24, Printemps 2007, pp. 20-35.
19. ‘Grosvenor Gallery’, London Evening Standard, 3 May 1880, p. 2. See also inter alia, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’ The Glasgow Herald, 3 May 1880, p. 7; The Morning Post, 4 May 1880, p. 5, The Era, 30 May 1880, p. 3. It appears that the frame was designed specifically to the sitter’s taste although she failed to acquire it. Alice Meynell, ‘Madame Sarah Bernhardt’, The Art Journal, 1886, p. 139, notes that the present work was ‘chief among all [her portraits] … delicately rendered by Bastien-Lepage, which she has not prized sufficiently to keep.’
20. McConkey 2007, as note 16.
21. It should be noted that the idea of a woman contemplating an art object had a distinguished pedigree in Whistler’s Symphony in White No2, The Little White Girl, 1864, and continued after 1879 in works such as Robert Brough’s Fantaisie en Folie, 1897 (both Tate) and George Henry’s East and West, 1904 (National Galleries of Scotland).
22. Robertson 1931, as note 1, p. 109. After admiring the portrait at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880, along with the sombre work of Legros and the ‘jewelled fantasies of Gustave Moreau’, Robertson studied in Paris, c. 1885-6, where he became friendly with Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, who wrote him a letter of introduction to Mlle Bernhardt. Frequent visits to Bernhardt’s rue Fortuny salon/studio followed, and for her he became cher petit Graham; see Preston 1953, p. xiii.
23. F. Crastre, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1914 (Pierre Lafitte et Cie, Paris), p. 45.
24. Oliver Millar introd. 1998, pp. 139-140.
25. Baignères, 1879, as at note 11.
26. Kenneth McConkey, Edwardian Portraits, Images of an Age of Opulence, 1987 (Antique Collectors’ Club), p. 72.
Please note that this work has been requested for the exhibition Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) organized by the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, to take place from 14 April-27 August 2023.
Thus, Mlle Bernhardt recounted the completion of her portrait by Jules Bastien-Lepage to a young English art student named Walford Graham Robertson.2 There were, reputedly, forty-five of these tortuous encounters, in which preparatory works were produced, none rivalling the concentration of the Salon oil - the present canvas.3
Artist and sitter first met, probably in 1878, at a soirée held by the publisher, Charpentier. Apparently, the painter walked up to the actor without introduction and declared that he wished to paint her portrait. She replied that she would very much like him to do so because she had been following his rise to fame, and in fact she had seen his Prix de Rome entry in 1875, l’Annonciation aux Bergers, (fig. 1) when he narrowly missed the prize.
‘After the decision of the jury’, she reminded him,
‘… a bouquet was placed in front of your painting as a kind of anonymous protest in your favour. Do you recollect the circumstance?’ ‘Yes I do,’ replied Lepage, ‘And I have kept that bouquet to this day.’ ‘Have you!’ rejoined Sarah Bernhardt with a coquettish smile, ‘do you know that it came from me?’4
Thereafter the tussle between the stymied artist-stalker and mercurial sitter began. The struggle was as much conceptual as it was to do with practicability. Lepage knew exactly what he wished to achieve, and Mlle Bernhardt had a keen sense of what she was worth. Her fame inevitably enhanced the reputation of those to whom she granted her image. Managing the process and the result was as important to her as it was to the artist. One recalls Henry James’s advice to one of Sargent’s sitters to be ‘as difficult as possible’,
'… the more difficult you are the more the artist … will be condemned to worry over you, repainting, revolutionizing, until he, in a rage of ambition and admiration, arrives at the thing that satisfies him and enshrines and perpetuates you.'5
But how could such a picture achieve this at a time when scale, drama and painterly flourish meant so much? Could one of the biggest personalities of the day be contained in a painting little more than seventeen inches high? Public expectations were already furnished by Clairin’s portrait of three years earlier in which the vampire, swathed in silks, commands the viewer from an over-stuffed divan (fig. 2).
The answer was to reject the Clairin premise entirely and subject the sitter to forensic scrutiny, turning her away from the spectator and in profile to focus on her form - clad in figure-hugging silk brocades, offset by an extravagant chiffon bow at the neck. Surface, thus exposed, contained soul. The eye ranges freely over the narrow seventeen-inch waist, the ramrod line of her back, the measurement between ear, nose and mouth, carefully calibrated, and the shock of unruly tresses tamed, it was said, by no more than two pins. By its very nature, a profile is more intimate than a full face; we observe without being observed. The mask is not in place and the eyes do not distract. In this instance, they cast their gaze upon a sculpture as a connoisseur might, and the piece Mlle Bernhardt delicately fingers is that of Orpheus, given to her to hold at this moment by Bastien-Lepage, in order to compliment and express her aspirations as a sculptor (fig. 3).6
What is her reply, as she gazes open-mouthed at the ill-fated son of Apollo? What does the Orpheus myth mean? In the late nineteenth century, Orpheus, clutching his lyre, came to symbolize the forlorn poet whose art outlives him. The story of his distracted wanderings after the loss of Eurydice, as retold by Virgil, involves Orpheus’s dismemberment in a bacchic rampage, his head cast into the river Hebrus, still singing after death, 'And even when Oeagrian Hebrus rolled in mid-current that head, severed from its marble neck, the disembodied voice and the tongue, now cold forever, called with departing breath on Eurydice - ah, poor Eurydice! ‘Eurydice’ the banks re-echoed, all along the stream.'7
Orpheus thus embodies the ars longa that Bernhardt hoped to achieve in her sculpture and that was merely ephemeral in her stage appearances. Nevertheless, by 1879, these very performances, and the gossip they engendered, were at the root of her notoriety. Her starring roles in Racine’s Phèdre and as Dona Sol in Hugo’s Hernani were already legendary in Paris, and the celebrity conferred upon her by theatre critics, complemented by her escapades, and contretemps with her managers, meant that this new portrait by Bastien-Lepage was eagerly anticipated.8
When first shown in its massive metal frame in 1879, the painting hung alongside Lepage’s very different Saison d’octobre, recolté de pommes de terre (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). A large plein air Naturalist painting of potato gatherers in the fields near the artist’s family home at Damvilliers in the Meuse, it might, at first glance, be almost the work of another painter, until, on closer inspection, one observes the concentration on surface that it and Sarah Bernhardt exemplify. The veteran Realist critic and friend of Gustave Courbet, Jules-Antoine Castagnary, citing this ‘oeuvre extraordinaire’, declared rhetorically that in a hundred years, of all the works on display in the current Salon, the present portrait of Mlle Bernhardt might be considered a masterpiece - ‘si les contemporains proposent, c’est la postérité qui dispose.’9 While many others gazed in astonishment and approval, J-K Huysmans was less convinced, finding the work ‘artful’ beside that of Fantin-Latour.10 Yet Le Figaro, in declaring that ‘son portrait de Sarah Bernhardt est une petite débauche de tons blancs, d’une rare distinction, d’une belle harmonie …’ alluded to its aesthetic probity.11 It matched, in other words, the subtleties of Whistler, but lacked his pretensions. In the end Arthur Baignères in the Gazette des Beaux Arts covered all the bases. Reporting on a subject whose beauty was ‘proverbiale’, he continued, 'A quoi bon avoir modelé un visage comme Albrecht Dürer, peint des mains dignes d’Holbein, coloré des chevaux comme Titien, brodé des étoffes blanches, des fourrures blanches, une tenture blanche … un poème japonais.'12
Dürer, Holbein, Titian, the Japanese - all may be implicated, but the conception was unique.13
More than one critic reached for what would become a common descriptor for Lepage’s work - that the Bernhardt portrait was ‘Holbeinesque’.14 Reaching back to the Tudor Renaissance court painter, the reference suggested an alternative extension from mid-century Realism, opposed to swift shorthand Impressionist taches. Its commitment to long looking was, according to Emile Zola, an insistence upon ‘verité strictement scientifique’, a documentary accuracy not seen since the sixteenth century. It was as if Flemish and Westphalian Renaissance finesse had been carried from the soil to the salon.
By the time critiques of Lepage’s controversial portrait were streaming in, its subject was preparing for her first London season, where she opened to rave reviews.15 If these were not enough, a selection of her paintings and sculpture was shown at a gallery in Piccadilly and she was feted by the British aristocracy. Her only regret was that the Prince of Wales, a well-known Francophile, had left for Paris the day she arrived, but they met soon after his return.16 By this stage, Lepage had followed the actress to London, and he too was introduced to the Prince, who, having been impressed with her portrait, commissioned his own portrait from the artist (fig. 4).17
After its completion this was dispatched to the Royal Academy, while the Bernhardt portrait hung in a special display at the Grosvenor Gallery.18 Here it was surrounded by other portraits as well as l’Annonciation aux Bergers, and Les Foins, 1877 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). It could easily be overlooked in a show that contained Edward Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs, (Tate) and portraits by John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, were it not ‘framed in steel, and thus at once noticeable as a thing apart, whether for good or ill’.19 The ‘crowd of worshippers’ for Bastien-Lepage as the show continued, left conservative critics and Academicians guessing.20 As the New English Art Club emerged in 1886, it was obvious that many had taken note. James Jebusa Shannon’s Madge, (fig. 5), for instance, looks back to the Bernhardt with great admiration.
What Shannon’s head study misses of course is the statuette, the object of curiosity, and the sense that in her delicate fingers, Mlle Bernhardt holds a kind of talisman.21 She calls to it, as Orpheus calls to Eurydice. Her own studio efforts, wryly reported by Graham Robertson, on visits to the well-appointed salon/studio in the rue Fortuny were banal. ‘Love’, he said, ‘was doing something or other - Triumphing, I think’, and ‘death was also somewhere about and a few other rather unconvincing allegories.’22 They may not be enough to assure her immortality, but the account of the sittings that led to Lepage’s portrait was another matter.
In France the portrait retained its presence, being shown at the Exposition Universelle in 1889, and being reproduced in the English monographs of the 1890s. It remained au courant throughout the life of its subject and in 1914 was eulogized in the monograph by Fr Castre as, 'une merveille d’expression et d’un art très délicat dans une sorte de symphonie claire où se marient harmonieusement les blancs les plus tendres et les ors les plus chauds.'23
At this point the great tragedienne’s career was turning increasingly to the new medium of film, and live performances were often restricted to single scenes from her most celebrated classics. Her death in March 1923 was almost a moment of national mourning with large crowds following the funeral cortège to Père Lachaise. The great celebrity lived on in popular memory and with prominent exhibitions in London, Paris and Nice in the 1930s, the present portrait continued to be admired as a latter-day Renaissance cameo, while her chimera bibelot self-portrait, a cast of which was presented to the prince, was consigned unused, to his desk in Marlborough House (fig. 6).24
‘M. Bastien-Lepage vivra encore,’ wrote Baignères back in 1879, ‘selon toute probabilité, dans le musée du Louvre, que son modêle sera peut-être oublié’, and it seemed in the post-war period that his prophecy had come true.25 If arriving at the finished portrait was a kind of torture for both artist and sitter, there is no doubt today that the final product fully qualifies as ‘an icon of an idol’, every bit as much as Picasso’s renderings of Sylvette David or Warhol’s Marilyn.26 With Mlle Sarah Bernhardt Bastien-Lepage’s place in the concert of modernité is assured.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.
1. W. G. Robertson, Time Was, The Reminiscences of W Graham Robertson, 1931 (Hamish Hamilton, 1955 imp), p. 112.
2. Walford Graham Robertson, (1866-1948), is chiefly remembered today as the model for Sargent’s celebrated portrait of 1894 (Tate). Painter, illustrator, collector of folk songs and the work of William Blake, he designed costumes for Bernhardt. Having studied at the Government Art Training School and under Albert Moore he travelled to Paris after the death of his father in 1884. His letters, Kerrison Preston, ed. and introd., Letters from Graham Robertson, 1953 (Hamish Hamilton), indicate that he managed to secure the last two chromolithographs of the Bernhardt, which he considered the ‘only really good portrait of her’ (pp. 362 & 513).
3. Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, nos. 235 & 236, and D237 & D238. The authenticity of these has been questioned and no 235 may be by another hand. D238 appears unrelated. Uncatalogued is a tiny watercolour replica, 11 x 8.5 cms, which returned to the saleroom in 2020 with a full attribution.
4. This story appears in various places in the Bastien-Lepage literature. My earliest reference is drawn from ‘Sarah Bernhardt’s Portrait’, Edinburgh Evening News, 22 April 1879, p. 3, drawing upon an unidentified French source.
5. Quoted in Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent, his portrait, 1986 (Macmillan), p. 189.
6. Contemporary critics, French and English, often mistakenly credited Sarah Bernhardt with this statuette. When seen by the present author in 1981, the original plaster was in the Emile Bastien-Lepage succession. It was subsequently sold at Mes Libert et Castor, Nouveau Drouot, Paris, 1 July 1987, lot 59; see Lobstein 2007, pp. 102-3. A related oil painting, (Auburn, no 125), passed through the Paris art trade in 1979 and remains unlocated. A drawing (sold Christie’s, 6 December 2012, and subsequently with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, London) is in a Private Collection.
7. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1-6, 1916 (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press reprint 2004, trans., H Rushton Fairclough), pp. 257-7: tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice reulsum/ gurgite cum medio portans Oeagrius Hebrus/ volveret, Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua,/ a miseram Eurydicen! Anima fugiente vocabat:/ Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae. Reference to this sequence is contained in a letter from the artist to his parents in January 1877, recounting the legend, in which Orpheus, ‘distrait ou plutôt tourmenté par le désir de revoir Eurydice, on sentira qu’il vas bientôt tourner la tête …’; see Henri Amic, ‘Jules Bastien-Lepage, lettres et souvenirs’, Revue Générale Internationale, 1896, p. 518. The theme was immensely popular with Symbolists such as Moreau, Watts and Delville.
8. ‘All Paris will hurry to the Salon to see and admire [it]’, wrote the Edinburgh Evening News, as at note 3; see also The Yorkshire Post, 22 April 1879, p. 6. Bernhardt had, for instance, scandalized Paris by taking to the air in a balloon advertising her current role, during the Exposition Universelle in 1878. This then was blown off course by a storm, much to the dismay of her director, Émile Perrin. Such was her command over the Comédie Française that she could not be fired when she engaged in outrageous publicity-garnering stunts.
9. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, Salons, (1871-1879), Tome Deuxième, 1892 (Bibliothèque G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, éditeurs), p. 361.
10. J-K Huysmans, ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art Moderne, 1883 (Plon-Nourrit et Cie, Paris), pp. 72-3; see also J-K Huysmans, Modern Art, (L’Art Moderne), 2019 (Dedalus Classic, trans. Brendan King), p. 82for an excellent annotated translation. Fantin-Latour was showing La Leçon de Dessin (Musées Royaux, Brussels) at the 1879 Salon. Elsewhere Philippe Burty in La République Française, 27 Mai 1879, compared the picture to a bas-relief, while Eugène Guillaume in Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Juillet 1879, p. 197 took the opportunity to reflect on the relationship between the painted portrait and photography, and Eugène Véron in ‘La Peinture au Salon de Paris’, L’Art, Tome 2, Juillet 1879, pp. 146-8, simply supplied a paean of praise for the work.
11. ‘Le Salon’, Le Figaro, 11 mai 1879, p. 1.
12. Arthur Baignères, ‘Le Salon de 1879’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, Juin 1879, p. 558.
13. To this impressive roll call of precedents, Lobstein 2007, p. 110 adds Baldovinetti and Bronzino.
14. This was especially the case after Bernhardt was shown in London the following year (see note 18). Julia Cartwright, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1894 (Seeley & Co), p. 27, quotes Lepage on Holbein’s influence from a conversation with André Theuriet. His claim to this heritage had already been staked with La première communiante, 1875 (Musée des Beaux Arts, Tournai). It will be recalled that on hearing of Lepage’s premature death in 1884, Jules Breton is reported to have remarked ‘En Bastien-Lepage la France a perdu son Holbein.’ In a striking coincidence, during the autumn of 1879, John Singer Sargent, Charles-Edmond Daux and Jean Benner all painted profile head studies of young peasant women at Capri, one of which, by Daux, appeared at the 1879 Salon.
15. In the spring of 1879, the Théâtre Française was closed for repairs and a season of extracts - scenes from its company’s most famous recent productions - was arranged at the Gaiety Theatre in London. While the company stayed at Dieudonné’s hotel in Ryder Street, Bernhardt rented a house at 77 Chester Square for the six-week season. Although, at this point sociétaire of the Comédie Française, she insisted on a separate contract in her favour with the added stipulation that she could conduct solo performances in private houses, for fees in the region of £400 an evening; see Sir George Arthur, Sarah Bernhardt, 1923 (William Heinemann), p. 66.
16. The account of one of these meetings when the Prince introduced his ‘brother-in-law’ (the King of Greece), to Bernhardt, between the acts of one of her plays is recounted from a French source in ‘The Prince of Wales and Sarah Bernhardt’, Edinburgh Evening News, 30 June 1879, p.2. The Prince did attend the opening of Bernhardt’s exhibition along with William Ewart Gladstone and other notables.
17. Reported belatedly in The Freeman’s Journal, 26 July 1879. The Prince had been introduced to Lepage by Marie Samary, one of the Comédie Française actresses staying at Dieudonné’s, and had already given sittings for his portrait by this date; see Kenneth McConkey, ‘After Holbein: A Study of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Portrait of the Prince of Wales’, Arts Magazine, vol 59, no 2, October 1984, pp. 103-107. The prince then visited both Bernhardt and Lepage in Paris in November 1879 and March 1880. See also Oliver Millar, introd., Princes as Patrons, 1998 (exhibition catalogue, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff), p. 125 (no 121).
18. Kenneth McConkey, ‘Un petit cercle de thuriféraires” Bastien-Lepage et la Grande-Bretagne’, 48/14, La revie du Musée d’Orsay, no 24, Printemps 2007, pp. 20-35.
19. ‘Grosvenor Gallery’, London Evening Standard, 3 May 1880, p. 2. See also inter alia, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’ The Glasgow Herald, 3 May 1880, p. 7; The Morning Post, 4 May 1880, p. 5, The Era, 30 May 1880, p. 3. It appears that the frame was designed specifically to the sitter’s taste although she failed to acquire it. Alice Meynell, ‘Madame Sarah Bernhardt’, The Art Journal, 1886, p. 139, notes that the present work was ‘chief among all [her portraits] … delicately rendered by Bastien-Lepage, which she has not prized sufficiently to keep.’
20. McConkey 2007, as note 16.
21. It should be noted that the idea of a woman contemplating an art object had a distinguished pedigree in Whistler’s Symphony in White No2, The Little White Girl, 1864, and continued after 1879 in works such as Robert Brough’s Fantaisie en Folie, 1897 (both Tate) and George Henry’s East and West, 1904 (National Galleries of Scotland).
22. Robertson 1931, as note 1, p. 109. After admiring the portrait at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880, along with the sombre work of Legros and the ‘jewelled fantasies of Gustave Moreau’, Robertson studied in Paris, c. 1885-6, where he became friendly with Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, who wrote him a letter of introduction to Mlle Bernhardt. Frequent visits to Bernhardt’s rue Fortuny salon/studio followed, and for her he became cher petit Graham; see Preston 1953, p. xiii.
23. F. Crastre, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1914 (Pierre Lafitte et Cie, Paris), p. 45.
24. Oliver Millar introd. 1998, pp. 139-140.
25. Baignères, 1879, as at note 11.
26. Kenneth McConkey, Edwardian Portraits, Images of an Age of Opulence, 1987 (Antique Collectors’ Club), p. 72.
Please note that this work has been requested for the exhibition Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) organized by the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, to take place from 14 April-27 August 2023.