by Ross King
Manet had decided that his new canvas should be a tableau of young people bathing and picnicking beside the water. He would feature two men dressed in modern costumes as well as a young woman—his nude figure—reposing on the ground. On the few occasions when he required a nude model, Manet had turned to his mistress, Suzanne Leenhoff. In about 1860 she had posed for a work called Nymph and Satyr, which featured her sitting beside a woodland stream, her hair unfastened and her clothing discarded beside her.2 For Le Bain (plate 5B), however, Manet decided to use a different model, a nineteen-year-old redhead named Victorine Meurent. The daughter of an engraver, Victorine came from a working-class district in the east end of Paris, where she was baptized, in February 1844, in the church of Saint-Elisabeth. By 1863 she was living in an apartment in the Latin Quarter, near the Sorbonne, some two miles from Manet's studio in the Batignolles. Manet probably met her through his former teacher, since she had begun modeling in Couture's studio in 1861 for a wage of twenty-five francs per month.3 She would have been what was known as a modèle-occasionnel, someone who posed for whomever she could, either on short contracts or for a few francs a sitting, at the same time that she supplemented this slender income with other low-paid work.4
Little seemed to distinguish Victorine, her looks included, from the scores of other young women who hovered on the margins of Parisian artistic life. Nicknamed La Crevette ("The Shrimp") because of her short stature, she was nothing like the exotically beautiful women favored by members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Her face was round and expressionless, her eyes hooded, her nose blunt above a small mouth, her limbs short, her trunk fleshy. Manet nonetheless seems to have been captivated by her appearance, or at least by the visual possibilities of dressing her in exotic costumes and placing her in beguiling poses. He first used her, in the spring or summer of 1862, for a painting called The Street Singer, in which, holding a guitar and a bunch of cherries, she fixes the viewer with her gaze as—in a gesture both challenging and suggestive—she raises two cherries to her lips. Next he hired her for Young Woman Reclining in a Spanish Costume, a work of mild eroticism that saw her stretched out on an upholstered divan in a black bolero. Finally, she had posed as a female matador for a third canvas, a strange bullfight scene called Mile V . . . in the Costume of an Espada that Manet was planning to send to the 1863 Salon.
These paintings had all seen Victorine fixing the viewer with an arrestingly direct gaze and—in the latter two at least—cross-dressing in a manner evoking the morally dubious world of gaslit boulevards and women of easy virtue that an 1855 play by Alexandre Dumas fls had christened le demi-monde. If, however, these three paintings seemed risque, Le Bain, in which Victorine posed for Manet for the first time in the nude, would be all the more so.
For a period of at least several weeks during the autumn of 1862, Victorine had regularly found herself making the two-mile journey to Manet's studio, possibly traveling on one of the horse-drawn omnibuses, nicknamed Batignol-laises, that linked the Batignolles with the center of Paris. Many of these omnibuses were driven, oddly enough, by male models who had retired from the business, which meant that Parisians of Manet's day were transported around the city by men who had once posed as valiant biblical heroes or the vindictive deities of classical mythology.5 Models lived a hard life in Paris. During the eighteenth century, posing for artists had been, at least for male models, a quite respectable occupation. Those who worked for members of the prestigious Académie Royale de la Peinture et de la Sculpture had worn royal livery, carried swords, lived in the Louvre and, when they retired, received generous pensions.6 By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, models enjoyed a much less exalted status. Even the most successful earned well under 1,000 francs per year, or only a half to a third of the average factory worker's annual salary. Their earnings were little better than those of Paris's lowest-paid workers, such as ragpickers, cobblers, washerwomen and milliners.
Female models were paid even less than men. Couture, for instance, offered his male models nineteen francs per week,7 compared to the twenty-five that Victorine, when she posed for his students, received per month. Moral squeamishness about women removing their clothes meant they were barred from posing at the École des Beaux-Arts, where wages for models were higher than in private studios.8 Indeed, such shame and ill repute attached itself to the profession of modèle-femme that many women were reluctant to admit their vocation. "She follows it on the sly," one writer claimed of the typical female model. "She does laundry, she embroiders, she works in a boutique, but she is never a model!"9 Female bodies may have been celebrated in paintings as incarnations of ideal beauty, but their flesh-and-blood prototypes, at two francs per sitting, were treated with considerably less esteem.
The behavior of models was a common source of worry and complaint for artists. "When I start something," Manet once told a friend, "I always tremble to think that models will let me down, or that I won't see them as often as I would like, or that the next time will be under conditions I don't like."10 However, he seems to have had no trouble with Victorine, who proved herself exemplary—patient, obedient, uncomplaining and not given to idle chitchat.11 Arriving at the studio, she would have been carefully positioned into the prescribed stance—that of a young woman reclining on the grass after having taken her bath in the river. Seated on the floor with her right leg retracted and her right elbow bent and supported by one knee, she would cup her chin with her right hand and turn her head to the right to gaze at Manet as he stood behind his easel. This pose was not especially uncomfortable in an age when many artists were obliged to suspend from the ceilings of their workshops systems of rings and pulleys for the models to use in maintaining their balance or supporting their limbs as they struck the required heroic postures. Even so, she would have held the position for long periods at a stretch, suffering the strains—and the tedium—that were the occupational hazards of the model.
Though Le Bain was an outdoor scene, Victorine was not obliged to pose anywhere other than in Manet's studio. Manet was not given to erecting his easel on riverbanks or mountains, like Meissonier, and painting enplein air. His works were the products, on the contrary, of visits to museums and print shops rather than of any kind of face-to-face communion with nature: the external world was always mediated, for Manet, by other works of art. Moreover, unlike Meissonier, he did not concern himself with realistically transcribing nature or ensuring that the flesh tones of his subjects correctly matched their outdoor setting. He may have made a few preliminary on-the-spot sketches of trees on the îie Saint-Ouen, the location on the Seine, near Asnières, sometimes identified as the setting for Le Bain. However, the stream and saplings of his river-scape were inspired more by another work of art—Titian's Jupiter and Antiope, which he had copied in the Louvre—than by any actual foliage in Asnières or Saint-Ouen.12
Manet used two further models for Le Bain. The pose for one of the young men seated beside Victorine was struck by his brother Gustave, while that for the other by Suzanne Leenhoff's twenty-one-year-old brother Ferdinand, an aspiring sculptor and engraver who had followed his sister to Paris in order to study art.13 In the background, Manet included a fourth figure, a young woman in a white negligee wading in the shallows of the river, a much less detailed figure for whom Victorine may also have posed.
Manet's earlier bathing scene, Nymph and Satyr, had featured Suzanne Leen-hoff preserving her modesty through the strategic disposition of her limbs while turning her gaze unflinchingly to the viewer. The picture resembled works known to Manet from his studies in the Louvre and elsewhere, especially Susannah and the Elders by Rubens, an engraving of which was in the Louvre's Print Room. For Nymph and Satyr he transcribed the pose of Rubens's Susannah virtually line for line, albeit reversing the image, a trick frequently used by artists to disguise their borrowings.
This entire formula—a woodland stream, a seated nude, a bold gaze, an echo of an Old Master painting—was rehearsed again as Manet painted Le Bai
n. He did not select the positions of his models at random. The pose of Gustave, placed to Victorine's right, was particularly interesting. Manet instructed him to recline as if on a sloping patch of ground, bending his right leg slightly, supporting the weight of his body on his left elbow, and extending his right arm toward Victorine. This posture was an exact copy—albeit in reverse—of one of the most famous images in the history of art: that of Adam in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on the vault of the Sistine Chapel. Though Manet was familiar with this fresco from his visit to Rome, Gustave's recumbent pose in Le Bain was not actually borrowed directly from Michelangelo, but rather from Michelangelo's young admirer and rival, Raphael, who had reversed the famous image and placed it in one of his own works, The Judgment of Paris. Dating from about 1518, The Judgment of Paris was a drawing specially executed by Raphael for engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi—an engraving that Manet knew from his foraging in the Print Room of the Louvre. Besides the central scene showing Paris choosing which of the three goddesses, Juno, Minerva or Venus, was the most beautiful,* the engraving included a small vignette of three nude figures—two bearded river gods and a water nymph—seated on the reedy ground beside a stream. For the pose of one of these river gods, Raphael carefully reversed the image of Michelangelo's Adam.
Manet's newfound devotion to painting scenes of contemporary life did not mean that he had jettisoned his regard for—and his imitations of—the art of previous centuries. If Raphael borrowed an image from Michelangelo and then transposed it, Manet, at least in the case of Le Bain, did not even bother with the transposition: he simply appropriated the poses of these three figures in the engraving and arranged his models into their exact attitudes. Victorine was therefore given the role of the water nymph, Gustave and Ferdinand those of the river gods. Still, his painting was not a mere line-by-line reproduction of the figures in the Raimondi engraving. In keeping with his desire to capture something of the roisterous spirit of the Asnières daytrippers, he wittily updated Raphael's scene. Thus while Victorine, like the water nymph, appeared in the nude, her male companions were turned out resplendently in black frock coats, fob-chains and bright cravats—the very height of Second Empire fashion. Gustave even wore a bohemian hat on his head and held a cane (instead of the river god's trident of reeds) in his hand. In place of the plumed helmet and shield abandoned on the ground in The Judgment of Paris, Manet added a wickerwork picnic basket with its debris of bread and fruit, together with a jumble of discarded clothing: a blue polka-dot dress and a beribboned straw hat.
The Judgment of Paris (Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael)
Le Bain was therefore, despite its origins in a Renaissance print, a daringly modern scene not unlike the works of Realism painted by Courbet. It was, in many ways, a defiant painting. Manet had copied or adapted numerous Old Masters, but never had he given his source such an audacious spin. He was not simply copying Raphael—he was cheekily reworking him, turning a mythological scene from one of the most celebrated engravings of the Renaissance into a tableau of somewhat vulgar Parisian holidaymakers in whom the morally fastidious might detect indecent undertones.
Manet's painting therefore marked an assault on the bastions of nineteenth-century art. Raphael was revered above all other painters by the conservative members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, most of whom viewed his achievement as the pinnacle of artistic perfection. His paintings were a vital part of the pedagogical program at the École des Beaux-Arts, where copies of fifty-two images from his most celebrated frescoes were permanently on display for the edification of students.14 Those fortunate enough to win the Prix de Rome were sent forth from Paris to spend five years absorbing the artistic style of the Italian Renaissance by making further copies of masterpieces by Raphael and other artists such as Michelangelo.* Of all Raphael's admirers in France, by far the greatest was Ingres, who claimed he endeavored always to follow the path of the Renaissance master. Raphael, he once proclaimed, was not a man but "a god come down to earth."15
With its clever refashioning of Raphael, Le Bain was not a work guaranteed to please Ingres. Indeed, Manet can hardly have been entirely optimistic about his chances for success with so brazen a painting.
*Paris chose Venus. All three of the goddesses bribed him, but Venus won the day—and set in motion the events leading to the Trojan War—with her promise to give Paris the world's most beautiful woman, Helen of Troy.
*The Prix de Rome was founded in 1663, during the reign of Louis XIV. There were competitions in painting, sculpture, architecture, etching and, after 1803, musical composition. The winners, determined by the members of the Institut de France, were sent to Rome to study at the Académie de France, which had been founded in 1666.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dreams of Genius
ERNEST MEISSONIER HAD signed his name on the petition to the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, with a certain amount of pretension and pride, as "E. Meissonier, Membre de l'lnstitut." He had been elected to a chair in the Institut de France a little more than a year earlier, in the autumn of 1861, when the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts voted for him to join their ranks. For Meissonier, already dripping with medals and bristling with ribbons, including that of the Legion of Honor, membership in the Institut was the latest and undoubtedly the greatest honor so far bestowed on him.*
Yet Meissonier's consecration by the French artistic establishment was not without incident. His election to the Académie had actually succeeded only on the second attempt, since in 1860 he was defeated for a vacant chair when the members of the Académie instead cast their votes for Émile Signol, a former student at the École des Beaux-Arts who had won the Prix de Rome in 1830 with a weighty scene from classical mythology entitled Meleager Taking Up Arms Once More at the Insistence of His Wife. Though Signol was a comparatively youthful fifty-eight, many members of the Académie were, quite literally, men from a different age, ten of the fourteen painters having been born in the eighteenth century. Their average age was sixty-eight, with the venerable and vituperative Ingres their elder statesman at eighty. A good number had spent large chunks of their careers on ladders and scaffolds, like Michelangelo and Raphael, executing murals on the walls and ceilings of churches and government buildings. In nineteenth-century France, murals were still what they had been during the Italian Renaissance, the most exalted form of painting. Their difficulty of execution as well as their obvious grandeur of design—what one writer called their "gravity" and "elevation"—made works painted on walls and vaults far more prestigious than oil paintings done on canvas.1 "It's to the decoration of churches," Ingres had once declared, "of public palaces, of halls of justice, that art must dedicate itself. That is its true and unique goal."2 Or as Géricault more bluntly expressed it: "Real painting means working with buckets of color on hundred-foot walls."3
The career of Meissonier did not come close to matching this profile. He had not studied at the École des Beaux-Arts; he had not competed for, much less won, the Prix de Rome; he had not spent years honing his skills in Rome; he had not worked in fresco; and his little bonshommes and cavaliers, however popular with the public, hardly answered the Académie's call for classical subjects of profound moral earnestness. His artistic compass was oriented toward the north, to the work of the Flemish and Dutch painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Meissonier's candidacy in 1861—when his main rival was sixty-six-year-old Nicolas-Auguste Hesse, yet another alumnus of the École des Beaux-Arts and winner of the Prix de Rome—must therefore have seemed no more likely to succeed than his bid the year before.
Any artist failing to conform to the standards of the Académie could be sure of a rough ride whenever the votes were cast to elect a new member of this self-perpetuating elite. A case in point had been the fate of Delacroix, the leading exponent of Romanticism. A movement specializing in depictions of storms and massacres, Romanticism produced canvases that were a far cry from the staid forms and austere style favored by most painters in the
Académie. Ingres had derided Delacroix as a "drunken broom," a reference to how he subordinated fine detail to bright color and emotional effect. This challenge to the artistic orthodoxy meant Delacroix was elected only at the seventh attempt, having been rejected a total of six times between 1839, when his name was first put forward, and 1857, when he finally claimed his chair at the age of fifty-nine.
Meissonier was good friends with Delacroix, who used to visit the Grande Maison, together with Adolphe Thiers, for games of boules4Meissonier was also a great admirer of Delacroix's work, claiming never to pass through the Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre, on whose ceiling his friend had painted Apollo Slaying Python, without doffing his hat as a mark of respect for what he called a "dream of genius."5 Delacroix may have seemed an unlikely artistic ideal for Meissonier, since the shipwrecks and slaughters of Delacroix's paintings were the antithesis of Meissonier's sedate, well-dressed bonshommes. Yet Meissonier was also capable of producing the kind of violent and impassioned scenes of revolutions and massacres for which Romanticism was both renowned and reviled. He had witnessed bloodshed at close hand long before the Battle of Solferino, since in 1848 he saw active service as a captain in the National Guard, the citizen militia that was the duty of every able-bodied man between twenty and fifty-five. He fought on the side of the newly formed republican government during the "June Days," an insurrection in Paris by thousands of unemployed workers in June 1848. Stationed near the Hôtel de Ville, Meissonier witnessed, he later recalled, "all the horror of such warfare. I saw the defenders shot down, hurled out of windows, the ground strewn with corpses, the earth red with blood." In the end, some 1,500 men died on the barricades or in reprisals afterward. Meissonier was chilled by the words of an officer in command of the National Guard who, when asked if all the men shot without trial were guilty, casually replied: "I can assure you that not more than a quarter of them were innocent."6