FIGURE 29 Jean-Jacques Henner. La petite bergère. c. 1890. Photo © Musée d’Unterlinden, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/image Musée Unterlinden de Colmar.

‘It was only when I turned back from the card and locked into the gaze that I suddenly found my way into deep fascination, for although La petite bergère is delicately painted and depicts a physically graceful woman, it is also the portrait of an incredibly powerful will force, of an inner life of great intensity. Before long I realized that I too was becoming willingly mesmerized by the way in which every atom of her being is with the object of her attention. The physical calm cannot hide her great determination, and there is clearly an element of dissent concerning whatever it is that is consuming her, apparently something or someone some distance away to our left, well out of frame.

Then something shifted and I found myself becoming further intrigued by the notion that her focus might instead be on something on her mind, that she is working through in her imagination. We cannot know, but what is not in dispute is that it means a very great deal to her, for her connection is utterly alive: there is room for nothing else within her Seele. She is, as the oft-memed phrase has it, burning inside with an outer ease. La petite bergère is a portrait of utter concentration and imminent action that, when it comes, will undoubtedly be unwavering, clear and consequential. Were an actor to play her, she would have to create and sustain a very powerful inner stream indeed, in order to experience and radiate out to us this perfectly still tempest of life flowing so wildly, freely, this great breathtaking seelisch-geistig movement, as she sat there in the blue smock costume, serenely poised, hands resting gracefully in her lap.’

Excerpted from The Paris Manuscript: The Early Draft Rediscovered by Michael Chekhov and edited by Hugo Moss. 

Copyright The Estate of Michael Chekhov and Hugo Moss, 2025

Book available to purchase via the Bloomsbury website here.