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Notes: Village romance, the covert encounter between rustic lovers, was a favourite subject with art patrons in the late nineteenth century. For the buyers of pictures - hard mercantile and industrial princes for the most part - the subject represented a lost innocence. Painters who looked back to the Pre-Raphaelites found it necessary to strip away the medievalism in works like Holman Hunt's Claudio and Isabella, 1850 (Tate Britain) and engage with the naturalism of J-F Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage in order to address these contemporary sensibilities.
Growing up in Middlesex, the son of a German Baroness and a British naval officer, Louis Welden Hawkins would have been aware of this body of precedent.1 Although not wealthy, Hawkins cut an impressive figure as an art student at the atelier Julian.2 Handsome, suave and fashionably dressed, he overawed the impressionable George Moore when they met shortly after the latter's arrival in Paris in 1873.3 Although Moore was to transfer his attentions to Manet and the circle of painters who convened at the Nouvelle Athènes, we can assume that Hawkins was also au fait with the avant-garde. We can also assume that as a young painter in Paris he would have witnessed the enormous popularity in France of Pre-Raphaelite painting, following the Exposition Universelle of 1878.4
However, like Bastien-Lepage and many others, Hawkins sought to combine the competing strands of contemporary painting in a successful Salon career. Fame came early when in 1881 he was awarded a third class medal for Les Orphelins (fig 1, formerly Musée du Luxembourg; on loan to Pouyastruc Mairie, Hautes-Pyrénées). He had shot from nowhere according to Albert Wolff in Le Figaro, and his work was 'parfaite' in the eyes of Daniel Bernard writing in the Goupil Salon.5 The British press was equally flattering and even suggested that the French authorities should award a first class medal to the newcomer.6
According to John Lavery, Les Orphelins began life as a meeting between two rustic lovers. The new title was proposed at the last minute on the advice of one of Hawkins' American comrades at Grez.7 Lavery admired Hawkins' resourcefulness. Never one to miss an opportunity, he reports that after a couple of years, when Hawkins was sinking into obscurity, he dressed in his best suit and, posing as a rich collector, toured the Paris dealers seeking examples of his own work, expressing disappointment when none could be found. He then hurried back to Grez to 'meet the revived market'.8
However, the relationship between Les Préludes and Les Orphelins merits further investigation. The transformation of the setting from meadow to graveyard has not occurred in the former, suggesting the possibility that it represents a return to Hawkins' original intentions - the portrayal of rustic lovers. It is implied that the boy has presented a knot of flowers, as a love token, to the girl in white, whose shy, admiring gaze and clasped hands recall the piety of a communiante. This demure figure reappears in Petite fille et oisillon (Private Collection, France) and Oissillon mort (unlocated), both works of 1882-3.9 While it is impossible not to dissociate her from the communicants painted by Jules Breton and Bastien-Lepage, the precision with which her simple shape is observed in Les Préludes, looks forward to Hawkins' deep interest in spirituality and symbolism.10 He was already a friend of the decadent Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac.11
The boy has an interesting derivation. Unlike the shaven-headed peasant boys of Bastien-Lepage and Dagnan-Bouveret, his hair is long and he wears a cap. His jacket, waistcoat and piped trousers suggest that he is a visitor to the village - an itinerant musician similar to those known as pifferari. Originally Neapolitan shepherds who descended from the hills into the towns and performed in the streets on rustic bagpipes and oboes, they were also frequently found in the Pyrenees and in the French borders of Savoy and Piedmont. Peasant bands were known in all the regions and artists like Léopold Robert, Thomas Couture, Jean-Léon Géôme (fig 2) and others would portray such romantic characters. In this case however, the boy carries a primitive harp-like instrument, suggesting that like the pifferaro, he is a troubadour.12
The setting is also significant. By 1880, when Hawkins is thought to have first gone there, Grez-sur-Loing had already acquired a reputation as an artists' haunt.13 Its church, ruined castle and medieval bridge were so celebrated by painters that they were, according to Robert Louis Stevenson, ubiquitous, 'beaming on the incurious dilettante from the walls of a hundred exhibitions'.14 Although Corot had painted at Grez in 1863, it was not 'discovered' until a group of British, Irish and American art students, finding Barbizon overcrowded, went there in the summer of 1875. Over the next six years it attracted Scots painters such as RAM Stevenson, Arthur Melville and James Campbell Noble, the Irish artist, Frank O'Meara and the American, Will H Low.15 Robert Louis Stevenson courted his American fiancé, Fanny Osbourne there, and some of his most poetic prose consists of descriptions of the forest glades and river landscapes around the village. Between 1880 and 1884 the colony greatly expanded and within a few years its luminaries included Americans such as Alexander Harrison, Lovell Birge Harrison, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Ruger Donoho, Kenyon Cox and Robert Vonnoh, the Canadian William Blair Bruce, and Scandinavian painters such as Carl Larsson and Karl Nordstrum. British and Irish numbers expanded to include John Lavery, William Stott of Oldham, William Kennedy, Mouat Loudan, William Warrener, Roderic O'Conor and David Gauld. Its prestige was enhanced by the numerous Salon successes which followed Les Orphelins.
The village remains little more than a single street of houses, the backs of which appear in virtually all of Hawkins' compositions - as well as those of his contemporaries. Details such as the fences, fruit-trees and the low roofs of outbuildings are transferred from one picture to another. The wheelbarrow in the background of Les Préludes is similar to that which appears in Jeune fille à corde, c. 1881 (Frederick Gallery, Dublin), and both were adopted for Lavery's On the Loing, An Afternoon Chat, 1884 (Ulster Museum, Belfast).16 However the most important aspects of the present work, which would have commended it as an object of study for newcomers to Grez, were the treatment of space and light. Hawkins represents strong sunlight falling on his figures. The short shadows indicate that it is close to midday. The trees have recently come into leaf, suggesting that this is a bright day in early summer. Attention is given to spatial strategy in that the old rusty watering can touching the bottom edge of the canvas, helps to locate the figures at a distance from the spectator. Such staging devices were later borrowed by Lavery.
Nevertheless, these tactics for establishing the mise-en-scène, studied in the work of Bastien-Lepage, merely provided the envelope in which the painter's sentiment was contained. It was Bastien-Lepage's objective to produce the definitive treatment of village love in L'amour au village, 1883, (fig 3, Pushkin Museum, Moscow). This, like Les Préludes, shows a couple meeting furtively by the fence at the back of the kitchen gardens. While Bastien delights in prosaic detail, Hawkins' figures in their reminders of rustic piety, folk music, and the world of troubadours contain other messages which were to be acted out in the 'idealist' painting of Jean-Charles Cazin, Luc-Olivier Merson and Henri Lerolle. The full story of this proto-Symbolism, in which Hawkins played such an important role, has never been told.
KMc
1 For a brief account of Hawkins' early life see Bonekamp 1993, pp. 7-8
2 He went to Paris during the Commune and at Julian's, studied under Bouguereau and Lefèbvre from 1870.
3 Hawkins is variously recollected in Moore's semi-autobiographical writings, especially in Confessions of Young Man, (1888), and Vale, volume 3 of Hail and Farewell, (1937). In the former, written during Hawkins' lifetime, he is presented under the pseudonym, Marshall. Adrian Frazier, George Moore 1853-1933, 2000 (Yale University Press), p. 30, indicates that Moore was 'in love' with Hawkins.
4 J Lethève, 'La Connaisance des peintres Pre-Raphaelites Anglais en France', Gazette des Beaux Arts, Mai-Juin 1959.
5 For Wolff see Bonekamp, 1993, pp. 26-7; for Bernard, see McConkey 2000, pp. 56-7, 256. 6 John Forbes-Robertson, 'The Salon of 1881', The Magazine of Art, 1881, p. 428.
7 John Lavery, The Life of a Painter, 1940 (Cassell and Co), p. 54, quoted in Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery, 1993 (Canongate), p. 28; Lucas Bonekamp, 1993, pp. 26-7; McConkey 2000, pp. 56-8, 256. Lavery declares that 'When the work was framed and on the eve of being sent to the Salon, Hawkins gave a party and invited a number of us to wish him luck and to criticize. It was here that George [one of the Americans] came forward and suggested that in view of the fact that the young lovers were looking so miserable it would be better to call them orphans'. As a result of this sudden intervention, the work achieved immediate success. This is likely to have been an apocryphal tale since it can only have occurred two years before Lavery's first visit to Grez and he could not have been present at the time. Nevertheless the close relationship between this and the present picture is underlined by the fact that the boy wears a similar cap to that in Les Préludes.
8 Lavery, 1940, p. 55.
9 Bonekamp,1993, p. 30.
10 See for instance, Hans H Hofstätter et al., Le Symbolisme en Europe, 1976, (exhibition catalogue, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam) p. 78; Andrew Wilton et al., The Age of Rosetti, Burne-Jones and Watts, Symbolism in Britain, 1860-1910, p. 273.
11 Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust, l'écriture et les lettres, 1999, (exhibition catalogue, Gallimard/Bibliothèque Nationale), p. 201.
12 The instrument is an unusual combination of a harp with strings stretched on an arc-shaped bridge over a guitar-like resonator. It operates on the same principle as an ancient lyre.
13 For a full account of British, Irish, Scandinavian and Japanese artists at Grez, see Toru Arayashiki ed., 2000, with contributions by William H Gerdts and Torsten Gunnarsson and Maekawa Masahide.
14 RL Stevenson, 'Fountainbleau: Village Communities of Painters IV', The Magazine of Art, 1884, p. 341.
15 The early years are described in Will H Low, A Chronicle of Friendships, 1873-1900, 1908, (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons).
16 For further reference see McConkey 1993, pp. 34-5, The motif of the long low barrow used for both transporting hay and washing, was familiar in the work of Julien Dupré and Léon Lhermitte.
KMc
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