Portrait of Maurice Fenaille

By Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884)

This portrait of the art collector Maurice Fenaille is by the French naturalist artist Jules Bastien-Lepage. Fenaille was a businessman who traded in petroleum. We see him sitting proudly, in front of some of his acquisitions. And yet he hardly looks like a bourgeois businessman. In his relaxed dress and demeanor he might well be mistaken for an artist himself.

It’s a lovely portrait in its own right. But take a closer look at his hands and how the fold in the bottom right corner. They’re huge, almost like something Rodin would have sculpted. What are they doing in a realist portrait like this? Why such big hands for such a fine man?

It’s often said that one can see an artist’s truth in how they choose to depict hands. And indeed, here the hands are the key to Lepage’s style.

Jules Bastien Lepage was a French painter associated with what is known as ‘naturalism’, a style that bridged the gap between realism and Impressionism. He employed realistic techniques and often painted his subject in natural settings and poses.

But there’s nothing natural about those hands. In the hands we’ve made the transition from realism to Impressionism, and to the beginnings of cubism, expressionism, surrealism. Personally, I like to think of it as a joke between the sitter and the painter. As a collector and patron of ‘contemporary’ art, Maurice Fenaille was well aware of the way in which it rejected classicism and academical Art. And so despite sitting for a traditional portrait, he was the one who literally “laid his hands” on the new art.

On a side note, I’ve recently been seeing some AI images that are falsely attributed to Lepage. I wonder whether naturalism lends itself particularly well to the new AI aesthetic. And perhaps it’s ironic that whilst often AI “reveals itself” in the poor rendering of hands, Le Page in this portrait made the strange hands its signature feature.

It’s all in the hands.

Julian

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