Constantin Meunier
Belgian, 1831-1905

June, 1893 ca.
bronze on marble base
22 1/2 x 17 3/4 in.

SBMA, Museum purchase, The Suzette and Eugene Davidson Fund
1991.126

RESEARCH PAPER

June is a near-life-size bust of a young man identified as a mower, dating from the period before McCormick's mechanical reaper made that profession obsolete. The subject's youth and musculature show the sculptor's debt to Greek classical sculpture, but the protruding ears tell us that June is a human and not an idealized athlete or a perfect god . June has a classical Roman nose, and his face shows stoicism and individuality in the classic Roman style, but a Roman bust would have an upright head with eyes level, and would probably express pride of accomplishment.

June is a product of Meunier's training in the classical style, but is a departure from classical subject matter. June is a contemporary laborer, not an historic figure nor a god. Even though it is a bust, one can see from the position and musculature of the shoulders that his arms are outstretched.

June's head is bowed down, as if by the weight of the world or by a surfeit of hard work. And the head leans slightly to the right (the viewer's left) in a fashion that would be familiar to any Catholic church-goer; with his sad eyes, all he needs is an actual crown of thorns to fulfill the conventions of depicting Christ on the Cross. June is an archetypal example of Meunier's deification of the laborer.

Every successful man is a product of his own past, but rarely do you see a life where the components of success are so episodic, so compartmented and separately identifiable, as with Constantin Meunier. Each part of his life led directly to June . 
1831-1843 Meunier's childhood was marked by poverty and ill health 1 . His father abandoned the family when Constantin was two, so the young boy became familiar with, and sympathetic to, the poor. 
1843-1847 Constantin 's older brother was an engraver by profession. Constantin worked with him and learned the patience and exactitude necessary for engraving 2 . Along the way, he picked up a good sense of form and line, allowing him entrance to the Brussels Academy of Beaux Arts. 
1849-1853 He studied sculpture with Louis Jehotte and Charles-Auguste Fraikin. From them, he was well-schooled in the classic academic style. At that point, he felt confined by the strictures of that style, so he abandoned the Academy and abandoned sculpture. 3 
1854-1871 Meunier was a working commercial painter in this period, affiliated with other students of Navez in the Atelier St. Luc. 4 He was also a religious young man who established a long-lasting working relationship with Catholic churches; he had several commissions to paint altar pieces and Stations of the Cross for newly established parish churches. At various times in this period, he stayed at Trappist monasteries. 5 In 1858, he made oil sketches of a mower; these images later appeared in various religious paintings, and finally in June 6 . In 1868, Meunier and other St. Luc members founded the Realist "Societe Libre de Beaux Arts" in Brussels. Paintings he did for himself (not for commission) show his alignment with the Realist movement; his subjects were working-class people, but Meunier portrayed them as valiantly overcoming adversity rather than as downtrodden. 
1871-1877 In this period Meunier turned to history painting, large in scale and carrying a message. His historic period of choice was the Peasants' War. Near the end of this period, Meunier moved beyond the traditional Realist subject matter of the peasant and the urban poor, when he began depicting the industrial worker. This set him apart from other Realists like Gericault, Courbet, and LePage. 
1878-1879 Meunier visited the Black Country, the mining and industrial area of Belgium. He sketched and painted the miners and their families in times of tragedy, and these works became the source material for his future efforts. 7 
1879-1884 He produced numerous engravings and paintings that glorified the industrial worker. Many of the images and motifs of his religious period were reborn as miners and millworkers. "He had merely exchanged cathedral and cloister for factory and furnace. His monks became miners, his sisters of charity, colliery girls . . . the figure of Christ, which he used many times..." 8 
1885 At the age of 54, Meunier could look back on an undistinguished life. He could barely support himself and his family. He had achieved some recognition for his recent work, but he was certainly no standout among all the painters of the Realist movement of the time. At this point in life, the proper path is to ask oneself, "What do I know better than anyone else? What can I do better than anyone else?" We don't know whether Meunier consciously went through this process, but we do know the result. All the pieces of Meunier's life fit together when he returned to sculpture after thirty years absence. There were many Realist painters, but few were doing Realism in three dimensions. There were many sculptors, but most were stuck in the classical mode or doing expressly religious subjects; very few focused on the laboring class. "Infolding draperies, soft as the sea-foam from the Aegean, have been exchanged for rough blouse and leather apron." 9 As the pre-eminent sculptor of working-class subjects, Meunier's success was almost immediate and accolades fell around him. But he was not universally acclaimed. In glorifying the working class, Meunier was championed by and often unfairly lumped with the Socialists and Communists, even though he was never involved politically. After his death, sixty years of Soviet social realist art showed the influence of Meunier in portraying workers as heroic, often striding forcefully into the future..

Meunier never allowed mass production of his works. He limited each edition to seven or eight casts, all made under his personal supervision. 10 In addition to the bust of June (1900), there is also June, Mower Resting, as a full-size statue (1890) and the smaller version (1898); The Mower (1890) and the smaller version (1892). The same figure may also be found as part of a group sculpture, The Harvest, as a large frieze (1898) and a smaller preliminary version (1895). 11

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Guy Strickland, March 2012

Footnotes
1. Pierard, p.1
2. ibid.
3. Grove, p. 369
4. "... the real starting point of Belgian art... finally rescued Flemish painting from the shackles of rigid classicism and the smoldering fires of romanticism and brought her face-to-face with the troubled yet inspiring appeal of everyday existence." Brinton, p. 38
5. Grove, p. 369
6. Brinton, p. 74
7. At the same time in this corner of Belgium, there was an unsuccessful itinerant preacher from Holland named Vincent Van Gogh. I wonder if the religious Constantin Meunier ever heard him preach or encouraged him to paint? There is no record of any contact; but soon after, when Van Gogh went to study art, he went to the Brussels Academy of Beaux Arts, not a Dutch school.
8. Brinton, p. 74
9. Brinton, p. 54
10. Van Gelder, p. 37
11. Brinton, index

Bibliography
Constantin Meunier by Christian Brinton, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo NY, 1913 (reprints from the collection of the Univ. of Michigan Library)
Constantin Meunier by Max Liebermann in Wikipedia
Constantin Meunier by Louis Pierard, 1908 excerpted and translated from the French in www.creativemcom/vos/C_MEUNUK.html
Constantin Meunier: A Conversation with Allan Sekula, Hilde van Gelder ed., 2005, Leuven University Press
Meunier, Constantin in Grove Dictionary of Art, Jane Turner ed., 1998 pp 369-370


SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

In the Belgian painter and sculptor Constantin Meunier, Van Gogh recognized a kindred spirit. Like Van Gogh, Meunier focused on the industrial worker, including miners. As Van Gogh put it in a letter to Theo, “What I’m not indifferent to is that a man who is far superior to me, Meunier, has painted the female thrutchers of the Borinage and the shift going to the pit and the factories, their red roofs and their black chimneys against a delicate grey sky—all things I’ve dreamed of doing, feeling that it hadn’t been done and that it ought to be painted.”

Like the French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, Meunier often repurposed certain aspects of larger works. This powerful bust probably derived from a full-length figure representing a mower at rest, focusing all our attention on the wearied expression of the laborer at the close of day.

- Through Vincent's Eyes, 2022