by Ross King
Théophile Gautier (Nadar)
"Carambaf" wrote Gautier in Le Moniteur universe!, the official government newspaper, after seeing Manet's The Spanish Singer. "There is a great deal of talent in this life-sized figure, which is painted broadly in true colors and with a bold brush."16 This seal of approval meant the canvas was singled out for public attention, soon becoming so popular with Salon-goers that it was placed in a more conspicuous location. An award even came Manet's way: an Honorable Mention. Still more gratifying, perhaps, was its reception by other young artists, who were intrigued by its vigorous brushwork, its sharp contrasts of black and white, and a slightly slapdash appearance that seemed to oppose the highly polished, highly detailed style of so many other Salon paintings. The Spanish Singer was painted in such a "strange new fashion," according to one of them, that it "caused many painters' eyes to open and their jaws to drop."17 Though he had yet to sell a single painting, Manet, at the age of twenty-nine, seemed emphatically to have arrived.
Édouard Manet's forebears on his father's side had been, if not quite aristocrats, then at least respectable members of the gentry. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Augustin-François Manet, the painter's great-great-grandfather, had been the local squire in Gennevilliers, a town on the Seine a few miles northwest of Paris. His son Clement, Manet's great-grandfather, had served King Louis XVI as treasurer for the Bureau des Finances for Alencon, north of Le Mans. Shrewdly switching sides after King Louis lost his head, he swore the civic oath, gobbled up even more land in Gennevilliers, and in 1795 became the town's mayor. His son, likewise named Clement, followed in his footsteps, serving his own term as mayor from 1808 to 1814.
Fifty years on, the family fortune consisted of two hundred acres of land in the suburbs of Gennevilliers and neighboring Asnières-sur-Seine, together with a house in Gennevilliers where the family spent part of every summer in order to escape the heat of Paris. Édouard Manet became an heir to this sizable estate in the year following his victorious Salon: still disabled by his stroke, Auguste Manet died in September 1862, at the age of sixty-six.18 Édouard was due to receive a third of the legacy, splitting with his two younger brothers, Gustave and Eugène, the proceeds of lands worth as much as 800,000 francs—a huge fortune—if sold on the open market.19
These ancestral acres lay fewer than five miles from Manet's modest studio in the Batignolles. Asnières and Gennevilliers were within easy reach of Paris by train, the former only a ten-minute ride from the Gare Saint-Lazare. Gennevilliers was a mile or so to its north, on a low-lying plain whose rich soil, fertilized by sewage from Paris, allowed numerous market gardens to grow vegetables for the dinner tables of the capital. Since the arrival of the railway in Asnières in 1851, however, another industry had developed. The Seine was two hundred yards wide at Asnières and, as such, perfect for sailing and rowing. A sailing club, Le Cercle de la Voile, had been founded, and on weekends during the summer Parisians descended on Asnières in the thousands to rent rowboats, swim in the river, picnic on the bank, or avail themselves of attractions such as the Restaurant de Paris, which served food and drinks on a large terrace overlooking the river. These crowds were tempted, according to a novel of the day, "by the idea of a day in the country and a drink of claret in a cabaret."20
Édouard Manet had arrived among this brigade of daytrippers one day in the late summer or early autumn of 1862, around the time of his father's death. He was in the company of a friend named Antonin Proust, the son of a politician and a fellow pupil from Couture's studio. More than thirty years later, Proust was to remember how the two young men had sunned themselves on the riverbank, watching skiffs furrowing the Seine and, in the distance, female bathers disporting in the shallows. Their talk turned naturally enough to painting, in particular to the nude. Nudes always attracted a great deal of attention at the Salon. Few things impressed the critics more than a well-turned heroic male nude, the execution of which, in the style of either the Ancients or the masters of the Italian Renaissance, made the strictest trial of an artist's abilities. Even more highly prized by the critics were female nudes.21 Such paintings were venerated so highly by the Académie des Beaux-Arts that painters referred to a nude study as an académie.22
Female nudes were not meant to titillate the viewer with their sensuality but to give physical form to abstractions such as ideal beauty or chaste love. What could happen if an artist strayed from portraying this ideal of beauty or virtue in favor of a more unvarnished illustration of the unclad female form had been demonstrated by French art's greatest bête noire, a blustering, bellicose painter named Gustave Courbet. A self-proclaimed socialist and revolutionary who had founded a school of painting he called Realism, Courbet had exhibited at the Salon of 1853 a canvas called The Bathers, which featured two young ladies in the woods, one sitting half-undressed beside a stream, the other presenting to the spectator, as she stepped naked from the water, copious layers of fat and a bountiful posterior. The critics were disgusted by such a show of lumpy female flesh; even Delacroix lamented Courbet's "abominable vulgarity" in depicting what he called "a fat bourgeoise."23 The canvas was swiftly removed from view by a police inspector, but not before the emperor Napoléon III was rumored to have struck it a sharp blow with his riding crop.
So far in his career Manet had not sent a nude, either male or female, to the Salon. But the sight of Parisians taking a dip in the Seine reminded him of Titian's Le Concert champêtre in the Louvre, a painting that featured two women and two men in a rural landscape, the women nude, the men fully clothed.24 Proust remembered how Manet stared at the bodies of the women leaving the water before remarking: "It seems that I must paint a nude. Very well, I shall paint one."25 However, he explained to Proust that his own painting would include "people like those you see down there"—modern-day Parisians instead of the elegant sixteenth-century Venetians of Titian's work. "The public will rip me to shreds," he mused philosophically, "but they can say what they like." Whereupon, according to Proust, the young artist gave his top hat a quick brush and clambered to his feet.26
The notion of painting modern-day Parisians was a relatively new one, though as long ago as 1824 the novelist Stendhal had urged artists to depict "the men of today and not those who probably never existed in those heroic times so distant from us."27 This imperative had been adopted more recently by Manet's teacher, Thomas Couture. Though his own most famous work was The Romans of the Decadence, a historical tableau showing the moral decline of the Roman Empire, Couture had urged his students to take their subjects from nineteenth-century France. "I did not make you study the Old Masters so that you would always follow trodden paths," he told his pupils before exhorting them to represent such contemporary sights as workmen, public holidays and examples of modern technology such as locomotives. Artists of the Renaissance did not paint such sights, he pointed out, for the sole reason that in those days they did not exist.28
Visions of the past may have abounded in France, but so too did unmistakable signs of the present, of a world that over the past few decades had been dramatically transformed through technology and invention. "Everything advances, expands and increases around us," wrote the photographer and traveler Maxime du Camp in 1858. "Science produces marvels, industry accomplishes miracles."29 By the early 1860s, France was crisscrossed by 6,000 miles of railway track and 55,000 miles of telegraph wire. Over the previous ten years, eighty-five miles of wide new streets—made out of macadam and asphalt instead of cobblestones—had been laid in Paris under the guidance of Baron Georges Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine. In 1863 a three-wheeled wagon powered by an internal combustion engine, the invention of an engineer named Lenoir, rode these boulevards on a fifteen-mile return journey to Joinville-le-Pont. Those witnessing this triumphant progression must truly have believed themselves to be living in what a German critic, writing of Paris, would later call the "capital of the nineteenth century."30
While Ernest Meissonier shunned this audacious new world by retrea
ting into an eighteenth-century idyll of periwigs and cavaliers, not everyone remained convinced of the suitability of such a response. Du Camp, for one, found absurd the fact that, in an age of electricity and steam, artists were still producing mythological scenes featuring Venus and Bacchus. In a similar spirit, Baudelaire had written a treatise entitled The Painter of Modern Life in which he encouraged artists to abandon "the dress of the past" and take their subjects from modern life instead. He called on painters to embrace what he christened la modernite, by which he meant the fleeting and seemingly trivial world of contemporary life. Like Couture, he believed the task of an artist was not to regurgitate the forms of past centuries but to produce visions of this modern world—crowds, street scenes, vignettes of middle-class life—in all their splendor and all their ugliness.31
The Boulevard Saint-Michel, designed by Baron Haussmann
With his devotion to the art of previous centuries, Édouard Manet may have seemed an unlikely convert to this cause. The inspiration for his early paintings came mostly from Old Masters he had sketched in the Louvre and the Uffizi rather than from the everyday life he saw along the boulevards of Paris or in the cafés of Asnières. Fishing at Saint-Ouen, begun about 1860, was set on the banks of the Seine a mile or so downstream from Asnières, in the industrial suburb of Saint-Ouen; modeled on a work by Peter Paul Rubens, however, it showed not modern-day factory workers or boisterous holidaymakers but a couple in seventeenth-century dress posing beside the river. Still, Manet had begun paying heed to the advice of Baudelaire and Couture with canvases such as The Absinthe Drinker and The Old Musician. The latter canvas, painted in 1862, portrayed a number of indigents from the Batignolles, including a violinist from a gypsy colony—though even in this work Manet had borrowed some of his poses directly from paintings in the Louvre.
Determined to capture another scene from modern life, Manet began a canvas called Le Bain, or "The Bath," soon after his return from Asnières. A nude scene of modern-day Parisians, Le Bain would be, in its own way, as striking a vision of modernity as Haussmann's boulevards or Lenoir's gasoline-powered engine.
*To put these figures into context, the most well-attended art exhibition in the year 2003 was Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Over the course of a nine-week run, the show drew an average of 6,863 visitors each day, with an overall total of 401,004. El Greco, likewise at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, averaged 6,897 per day during its three-month run in 2003-4, ultimately attracting 574,381 visitors. The top-ranked exhibition of 2002, Van Gogh and Gauguin, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, drew 6,719 per day for four months, with a final attendance of 739,117.
CHAPTER THREE
The Lure of Perfection
IF SOMETHING WAS worth doing, Ernest Meissonier always maintained, it was worth doing properly. He had been conscientious even as a child, showing remarkable patience in tasks like blacking his boots or, when put to work in the druggist's shop, tying up parcels of medicine for customers.1 He applied the same exacting standards to his paintings, each of which took months, if not years, of concentrated effort. "Although I work under great pressure from all sides," he claimed, "I am always altering. I am never satisfied."2 Because he often spent one day scraping away the paint he had spent the previous day laboriously applying, he referred to his works-in-progress as "Penelope's webs," an allusion to how each night Odysseus's wife Penelope would unravel the shroud she was weaving on her loom for Laertes, her father-in-law. Sometimes Meissonier did not even bother to scrape away the offending part of the work; he simply repainted the entire canvas, often so many times that the finished product was merely the uppermost layer of a series of palimpsests. "Perfection," he claimed, "lures one on."3
Meissonier always spent many months researching his subject, finding out, for example, the precise sort of coats or breeches worn at the court of Louis XV, then hunting for them in rag fairs and market stalls or, failing that, having them specially sewn by tailors. Historical authenticity was taken very seriously in the nineteenth century, not just by Meissonier but also by other artists who likewise went to great lengths to ensure the authenticity of their works. When Théodore Géricault began his masterpiece, The Raft of the "Medusa"—a huge canvas depicting survivors of a notorious shipwreck—he had shown exceptional diligence. Starting work in 1818, two years after the event, he pored over published accounts of the ill-fated voyage, interviewed a number of survivors, employed some of them as models, and studied corpses in a hospital morgue. He even hired the carpenter of the Medusa to build him an exact replica of the raft. The resulting canvas was shockingly grisly and violent—but accurate in its every gory detail.*
This kind of historical reconstruction had always been Meissonier's stock-in-trade. Recently he had spent more than three years on a painting that was a mere thirty inches wide by seventeen inches high: The Emperor Napoléon III at the Battle of Solferino (plate 2A). The work, a battle scene, had been something of a departure for the painter of bonshommes and musketeers. Marking the new direction in Meissonier's career, it took as its subject a victorious battle fought by the French against the Austrians in 1859, when the emperor Napoléon III, together with Victor Emmanuel II, King of Piedmont and Sardinia, tried to oust the Habsburgs from their territories in northern Italy. When hostilities commenced early in the summer of 1859, Meissonier had received a commission from the government to illustrate several scenes from the campaign. He set off for the front in Lombardy, taking with him a servant, two horses and a supply of pencils and paints. Arriving in time to witness a bloody battle fought outside the village of Solferino, he made numerous on-the-spot sketches of the action, barely escaping with his life after several bullets whizzed past his head when he accidentally strayed into the thick of the action in his quest for a good vantage point.
Meissonier's studies for The Battle of Solferino had continued long after the war ended. At the army camp in Vincennes, east of Paris, he painted further sketches of soldiers, and at the Château de Fontainebleau he did portrait studies of both Napoléon III—who was going to be the focus of the scene—and his horse, Buckingham. He even made a return trip to Solferino, a year after the battle, to make still more studies of the bleak, dusty landscape. The painting was accepted by the judges, sight unseen, for the Salon of 1861, where Meissonier had been hoping to show the critics that he had risen above his lucrative "musketeer style" to paint something more ambitious in conception. It failed to materialize: the master was still perfecting the work in his studio. Nor did it appear the following year, as announced, at the Universal Exposition in London. Meissonier would not complete the painting until January of 1863, almost four years after his first expedition to Solferino.
The Campaign of France, commissioned while The Battle of Solferino was still on his easel, required equally prolonged and unstinting researches. Starting work in 1860, he consulted Adolphe Thiers, both in person and in print. He interviewed survivors of the 1814 campaign, such as the Due de Mortemart, one of Napoléon's generals. He also consulted Napoléon's valet, an old man named Hubert. He made a special journey to Chantilly to see Napoléon's groom, Pillardeau, whose home was a bizarre shrine dedicated to the memory of Napoléon and the Grande Armée, complete with papier-mache replicas of the kind of bread eaten by the soldiers. Meissonier thereby became an expert on every aspect of Napoléon's life, from how he changed his breeches every day because he soiled them with snuff, to how he undressed himself—for reasons of modesty—only in total darkness.4
Meissonier did not begin the actual painting of any of his works until he had first made numerous preparatory sketches and studies. And he did not begin these until he had worked out the composition of the painting in the most elaborate detail, usually by means of a three-dimensional scale model of the scene. A number of painters had resorted to this strategy, from Michelangelo, who made wax figurines of many of the characters he painted, to the eighteenth-century English landscapist Thomas Gainsborough, wh
o fashioned tabletop models with sand, moss, twigs, bits of mirror for water or sky, and miniature horses and cows. But Meissonier, as ever, took matters a step or two farther. Thus, for The Campaign of France he sculpted in wax a series of highly detailed models, some six to eight inches high, of Napoléon and his generals, as well as the horses on which they sat. These models he then arranged in his studio on a wooden platform four feet square. He also made models of tumbrils and wagons, which he proceeded to drag across a muddy landscape—carefully molded from clay spread on top of the platform—to create the furrowed road along which Napoléon trekked with his generals. He prided himself on these creations, considering himself, according to a friend, "by turns tailor, saddler, joiner, cabinetmaker."5
Absolutely nothing was left to chance or imagination; everything had to be rigorously and impeccably correct. Meissonier had faced a problem, though, with his tableau vivant for The Campaign of France. Despite the presence of Napoléon and his generals, this new painting was conceived as, first and foremost, a snowscape: a panorama in which the Grande Armée plods across a vast expanse of snow beneath a leaden sky.6 And since Meissonier would not paint anything without first having the correct specimen before his eyes, he had naturally found himself in need of snow. So across the expanse of furrowed clay he had sprinkled handfuls of finely granulated sugar and, to give his snow its glitter, pinches of salt. With a shod hoof, likewise executed in miniature, he then meticulously pressed the imprints of the horses' feet. The leadership of the Grande Armée was thereby devised in perfect effigy against a snowy landscape.