One day, my curious spirit sneaked into L’Ecole Des Beaux Artes, the old French fine arts school. This famous and enormous palace that stands between Boulevard Saint Germain and the Seine embraced me with its wings and hid me inside its walls. I wandered in the building pretending to be a student. I could have sworn that I saw the very young Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille running through the glass roofed courtyard with hard-bitten paintbrushes in their hands. I followed them.
They went to an atelier. The Swiss painter and professor, Charles Gleyre, walked among the easels, slowly and with a pleased smile in his eyes. He liked what he saw evolving on the canvases. Gleyre was proud of his students. They were like all other young men before and after: They did not want to follow the old masters. They wanted to find their own path. These young artists were full of hope, talent and paint smudge.
Gleyre looked up at the large window dazzled with sunlight and theatrically exclaimed: “Catch the light, messieurs, catch the light!” And some hours later, being tired of the unopened air, the professor ordered, “Go outside, go to the forest, go to Saint Cloud or Fontainebleau. I do not wish to see you here again. Leave now. You will not find whatever you want in here but out there. Go, go.” And swept them out of the massive walls.
Hereafter Renoir, Monet, Sisley, and Bazille went outside of Paris every day to catch the light. The four friends sat their easels next to each other and painted all day long. They noticed how colors changed depending on the time of day. They watched contours blurring into the shimmering air. I saw them bringing impressionism to the light.
Gleyre soon left his professorship for good and the four young friends had to stand on their own feet. They worked together en plein air creating little portraits for living. Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Bazille shared their art supplies and ideas. Renoir and Monet were very poor but Bazille often helped out his barren friends. He doubled up with Monet and Renoir in his studio. They welcomed their artist friends there, like Edouard Manet, Emile Zola, Camille Pissaro and their other classmate from L’Ecole, Paul Cezanne. Sisley lived nearby with his spouse and often went to visit them.
One day Bazille painted Renoir sitting on a chair with tucked legs. Renoir’s dark garment emerges from the cloudy white background. He keeps his hands loosely clasped on his knees. His gaze is fixed upon a serious and mysterious thought somewhere before him. Renoir is slightly bearded and wears a cool hairstyle as I see. He has a blazing red ear and nose tip. This is a casual moment that only a close friend can see. Later Renoir painted Bazille in return and Monet painted Renoir, and everybody painted everybody in some point in their friendship. But success still kept a distance from them.
If Renoir had no money for buying oil paint he did not paint at all. Monet, who now had a wife and a little child, had been starving along with his family. Renoir brought him bread so Monet did not have to die. Where were the world famous water lilies then?
Three years after Bazille’s free and easy painting of Renoir, on a shiny, summer day, Napoleon III declared war on Germany. It marched into history as the Franco-Prussian War. Monet quickly fled to London to avoid conscription. Renoir was conscripted into the cavalry regiment, got dysentery but recovered. Sisley, being a British citizen, did not go to fight but the war left his family financially troubled. Frederic Bazille volunteered into infantry and very soon, in his first battle, was killed. He was 29.
After the wartime months Monet came back to Paris and little by little became successful. He lived long enough to be an impressionist legend. Sisley never got French citizenship and success in his lifetime but found family happiness in the French countryside. Renoir became a legendary painter and kept Bazille’s painting of him in his whole life.
A rough sound woke me up. The school doors swung open and the four friends, Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Bazille slipped past me, laughing. They were there, young and full of hope, talent and paint smudge. I smiled at their distant figures with drowsy eyes. So this story was only a turbid dream. It did not happen. Yet.
I would willingly shout after Bazille and tell him not to go to that certain battle but who am I to chip on his fate? I am only a curious, sleepy little spirit.
