B orn in Boston, Charles Sprague Pearce joined fellow expatriate artists and moved to Paris in 1882, working in the studio of Léon Bonnat, just as John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins had before him. In August 1884, Pearce purchased a farm in Auvers-sur-Oise, a town some twenty miles northwest of Paris on the banks of the Oise river. While many other artists had worked in the area, including Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, and Camille Pissarro (in nearby Pontoise), this relocation more closely aligned Sprague Pearce with his French Naturalist contemporaries. As Mary Lublin writes:

Pearce painted in a studio with a glassed-in extension, taking in the wheat fields extending to the horizon line and posing models from the village to capture his vision of the French peasant — especially shepherdesses, with Sainte Geneviève a particularly evocative and lasting icon within his oeuvre.

Sainte Geneviève was first exhibited to acclaim at the Paris Salon of 1887, where Pearce, one year before, achieved success with his A Shepherdess— Souvenir of Picardy (fig. 1). While Pearce had produced many paintings of picturesque fieldworkers, A Shepherdess— Souvenir of Picardy, with its sweeping perspective and detailed depiction of a weary figure set in an expansive, rugged landscape, revealed the influence of Bastien-Lepage. As the contemporary critic Theodore Child noted, the accomplishments of Pearce’s rural subjects like A Shepherdess— Souvenir of Picardy proved him to be “definitively amongst the most successful painters of rustic landscape and figure subjects, treated with all the technical skill, close observation, and simple handling which the modern French school demands, but at the same time with a point of sentiment dominating the general realism” (Theodore Child, “American Artists at the Paris Exhibition,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 79, September 1889, p. 514, as quoted in Weisberg, Beyond Impressionism, p. 153). As A Shepherdess— Souvenir of Picardy travelled through Europe’s annual exhibitions, the medals and accolades it won reflected the public’s connection with its theme: a contemplation of the loss of country life in an ever-industrializing society (Lubin, p. 36). The emotional resonance of the work shows Pearce’s interest in combining his rustic Naturalism with larger symbolic meanings, a new direction he would masterfully explore with Sainte Geneviève.

Sainte Geneviève depicts the youth of the patron saint of Paris, who lived a life of constant prayer, charity, and austerity. Born to pagan Roman and Greek parents in Nanterre, outside of Paris, in 422, Geneviève gave her life to God at the age of seven upon the visit of Saint Germain to her village. Following traditional depictions, Pearce captures Geneviève’s piety as a young shepherdess before she became a nun at fifteen and, later, legendarily averted an attack on Paris from the invading Huns, preventing famine in the city and founding its first Christian church. Pearce had painted Biblical subjects in his early career and depicting the lives of France’s saints was a popular subject after the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Pearce’s specific choice of subject may have been inspired by Puvis de Chavanne’s first cycle of murals (1874-1879) portraying the childhood of the saint for the decoration of the Panthéon (previously l’église de Ste-Geneviève), one of the most important public projects in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s (Lubin, p. 37) (fig. 2). Yet, upon Sainte Geneviève's debut at the Paris Salon of 1887, some critics found more powerful connections to Bastien-Lepage and his Jeanne d'Arc (fig. 3, 1879, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

As Bastien-Lepage captured the teenage Jeanne overcome by the entreaties of Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine, Pearce’s Geneviève is similarly absorbed in a moment of adoration, her head encircled by a pale blue halo, as her flock grazes unattended in the background. Some critics found Bastien-Lepage’s ghostly saints a distraction from the work’s realism and they found Sainte Geneviève a curious combination of a well-observed "everyday” peasant with a lofty, sacred subject. This critique was shortsighted, according to a writer for the Chicago Tribune, who echoed the artist’s admirers, applauding: Pearce’s “necessary combination of halos and patches” proving “he is a daring challenger of prevailing fashions of figures…. He dares to be a little more lofty, a little more coherent; to mingle a soupcon of poetry and piety with his fields, his skies, and his landscapes” (“Pictures on Exhibition,” Chicago Tribune, p. 8). It was in its realism that the pious devotion of Sainte Geneviève became a powerful symbol of rural life.

Sainte Geneviève further propelled the artist’s international career. In addition to a well-received exhibition in Brussels in 1887, the painting travelled to the United States in 1888, first to Philadelphia and then to Chicago’s Industrial Exposition. Designed to promote Chicago’s recovery from the great fire of 1871, the annual Industrial Exhibition took place from 1873 to 1890. Vast displays of manufactured goods reclaimed the city’s role as a major commercial center, while an art gallery (now the site of the Art Institute of Chicago) highlighted the region’s cultural sophistication. Within this setting, Pearce’s work celebrated both American talent and the French agrarian subjects that Gilded Age patrons increasingly desired after their own travels to the Continent. As the Chicago Tribune reported, works like Sainte Geneviève proved Pearce was part “of that admirable group of young Americans in Paris who yield in nothing to their Parisian contemporaries in the field of art” (“Art at the Exposition, Chicago Tribune, p. 4).

Through the 1890s, Sainte Geneviève continued to be exhibited internationally, its image reproduced in widely circulated newspapers and in popular media such as an illustrated volume of the lives of saints written for children. Held in private collections through the twentieth century, in 1993 the painting was included in The Jordon-Volpe Gallery’s artist retrospective, which brought a revived appreciation to Pearce’s oeuvre. Through subsequent extended loans to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia and Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, Sainte Geneviève has earned a new generation of captivated admirers.

Artist

Charles Sprague Pearce