The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  With the "terrible impression" of this spectacle still fresh in his mind, Meissonier had painted a harrowing vision of the tragic aftermath of civil strife—a work that in its shock tactics and ghastly realism was different from anything else in his body of work. A remarkable painting, Remembrance of Civil War (plate 1 A) was an unblenching piece of pictorial reportage that showed dead bodies heaped together beneath a shattered barricade. Shown at the Salon two years later, it attracted admiring reviews but also attention from the political authorities, who had it removed from the wall before the exhibition closed. However, the canvas made a deep impression on Delacroix, the "master of massacres" to whom Meissonier gave a watercolor study for the work. "I experienced one of the greatest pleasures of my life in making him a present of it," he later remembered.7

  Meissonier could therefore count on the vote of Delacroix, who had supported him in 1860, noting afterward in his journal that "the insipid Signol," a "nurseling of the École," had been chosen in favor of Meissonier because the other members were "shuddering at the idea that an original talent should enter the Academic"8 Meissonier probably also enjoyed the support of his old teacher, Cogniet, another close friend of Delacroix who had been elected to his own chair in 1849 following important public commissions for both the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles. Few other painters were prepared to endorse Meissonier, though, and his election in 1861 was achieved, after three rounds of voting, thanks to support from various of the sculptors, architects, engravers and musicians in the Académie—men whose prejudices were considerably less intractable than those of the painters.9

  Meissonier's election was explained in a number of newspapers as having been a concession by the Académie to his tremendous public appeal. Many of these same papers celebrated his election as a victory for youth—Meissonier was forty-six at the time—over "the old Académie" with its "mongrel Raphaelism" (as Delacroix called it) and uncompromising reverence for Rome.10 Certainly the robust painter, with his fondness for athletics, cut a conspicuous figure among the more elderly members of the Académie. "I was still vain enough of my youth," Meissonier later claimed, "to go running up the staircase of the Institut two steps at a time, and to jump seven or eight on my way down."11

  And yet Meissonier, with his lofty dreams of majestic historical scenes, did not intend to go completely against the grain of the Académie. Therefore, in 1861, in his letter of application to the Académie, he had promised to reward its members for their votes "with new efforts and works perhaps more worthy of its attention."12 He pledged to leave behind his bonshommes, in other words, and devote himself to elevated pictorial ventures with which he hoped to enhance both his own reputation and the grandeur of French art. If the members of the Académie wished to see this change with their own eyes, he had informed them, they were welcome to visit his picture-dealer Francis Petit, in whose gallery in the Rue Saint-Georges he had temporarily put on display (though it was still only half-finished) The Battle of Solferino.

  If most members of the Académie had been unpersuaded by Meissonier's claims in 1861—The Battle of Solferino, at two and a half feet wide, did not quite answer their demands for grande peinture—they remained equally unconvinced, in 1863, by his threatened boycott. The vast majority of them declined to sign the petition to Nieuwerkerke to which he so prominently attached his name, two exceptions being Delacroix and Ingres.13 The third exception was Jacques-Raymond Brascassat, who had been elected to the Académie in 1846. A successful animal painter, Brascassat earned his keep by visiting the country homes of wealthy aristocrats and painting portraits of their prize cattle—canvases that inevitably lacked the moral gravity of those produced by most of his colleagues. But the names of the other eleven painters in the Académie signally failed to appear among the 182 names, no doubt because most of them shared the same lofty goals for French art as Nieuwerkerke.

  * * *

  The petition was delivered to the Comte de Walewski by two artists selected by their peers. One of the delegates was Gustave Doré, a thirty-one-year-old painter and illustrator; the other was Édouard Manet. The choice of Manet as an artistic ambassador to the Minister of State showed both his strong commitment to the cause and the level of faith placed in him by the other artists, Meissonier no doubt among them. At thirty-one, he was clearly regarded by his peers as something of a bellwether in political activism as well as in artistic innovation.

  The fifty-two-year-old Walewski received the two men, the Courtier artistique reported, "with the greatest affability."14 The son of Napoléon's Polish mistress Maria Walewska, he had once enjoyed something of an artistic career. He had collaborated with Alexandre Dumas père on a wildly successful play, Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, and in 1840 his own work, L'École du monde, was produced at the Théâtre-française. But Walewski had found himself saddled with cumbrous political obligations when his cousin, Napoléon III, came to power. Therefore, however affably he received Manet and Doré, he had no wish to involve himself in a dispute with disgruntled artists. He simply turned for advice to Nieuwerkerke, who urged him to ignore the petition even though its signatories included, he conceded in a scribbled note, "a small number of artists having considerable merit"15—a reference to the three most celebrated artists on the petition, Meissonier, Delacroix and Ingres. Walewski duly accepted this advice, and the Chronique des arts was soon reporting that the regulations for the 1863 Salon would go into effect with no modifications whatsoever: artists would be allowed to submit no more than three works.

  Nieuwerkerke had called Meissonier's bluff. However, the painter's threat was not idly made. He had boycotted a previous Salon, that of 1847, in protest against the severity of the jury, which a year earlier had accepted fewer than half of the submissions, and which for the previous decade had systematically been excluding the work of landscapists such as Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet.16 The boycott had been a noble gesture on the part of Meissonier, a painter who had never had one of his paintings turned down by a jury. In 1863 he evidently still felt as strongly about a painter's right to exhibit at the Salon. He therefore declared that he would send nothing at all to the Palais des Champs-Élysées. The world would be forced to wait two more years for a glimpse of Meissonier's new style of painting. For the first time since 1847 the Salon would open without a contribution from France's most popular and acclaimed painter.

  *The Académie des Beaux-Arts was one of the branches of the Institut de France, which had been founded in 1795 to bring together five separate academies of learning: the Académie française, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The forty members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts were made up from 14 painters, 8 sculptors, 8 architects, 4 engravers and 6 composers (one of whom, since 1856, was Hector Berlioz).

  CHAPTER SIX

  Youthful Daring

  WHILE MEISSONIER WAS announcing his intention to boycott the Salon, Manet was doing everything in his power to ensure that his own paintings would be on the walls of the Palais des Champs-Élysées when its doors opened to the public in May. In what amounted to a campaign to generate publicity for himself in the run-up to the Salon, he arranged for an exhibition of fourteen of his canvases at the beginning of March, exactly a month before the painting jury was due to assess the submissions to the Salon. He no doubt reasoned that favorable attention from critics and the public would convince the jury to accept his three paintings for exhibition.1

  More than one hundred private galleries operated in Paris in the early 1860s; many of them displayed canvases for sale in their windows or hosted small exhibitions of artists both living and dead.2 Such venues—part of the city's vibrant visual culture—represented an opportunity for artists to show their wares outside the Salon. These exhibitions did not generate nearly the same widespread critical and public attention as the Salon, but art critics occasionally reviewed them, and the public, peering thro
ugh the window, could enjoy a free show and become familiar with an artist's name and work. The most popular and famous of these galleries was that of Adolphe Goupil, against whose windows the crowds pressed themselves in order to enjoy displays of engravings, photographic reproductions of Old Masters, and original paintings by modern artists, all of which were offered for sale. The enormous success of Jean-Léon Gérôme—a painter who was perhaps second only to Meissonier in terms of the prices he could command—was due in no small part to the fact that his works were always displayed in Goupil's windows, either in the original or in reproduction.3

  The Galerie Martinet, though new, was beginning to rival that of Goupil in terms of its prestige. It was owned by a fifty-three-year-old named Louis Martinet, the son of a Corsican architect. Martinet had enjoyed a highly successful career as a painter and, more especially, as an engraver. In 1857 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, one of only four engravers in the country to enjoy such a privilege. After an eye infection forced him to abandon this career, he opened a gallery in the Boulevard des Italiens, where in 1860, determined to give a wider exposure to artists, he showed a number of paintings controversially rejected from the 1859 Salon. Martinet was interested in discovering and promoting new talent, and in 1861 Édouard Manet's The Spanish Singer had caught his eye at the Salon. In September 1861 he therefore showed two of Manet's works, Boy with Cherries and The Reader, alongside works by Courbet and Daubigny. Neither painting was sold, but Boy with Cherries attracted the attention of none other than Adolphe Goupil, who offered to put the work on display in his own gallery in the Boulevard Montmartre. Encouraged by this success, early in 1863 Manet had begun arranging for another showing in the Boulevard des Italiens, this time a one-man exhibition.

  By the time his exhibition opened, Manet had virtually completed Le Bain following at least four months of work. The canvas had proved as defiant in execution as it had been in conception, since he continued to experiment with the "strange new fashion" that had so astonished onlookers at the 1861 Salon. Manet may have taken the poses for Le Bain from Raphael's The Judgment of Paris, but his admiration for the Old Masters did not extend to their intricately modulated painting techniques. In working toward a new style better suited to capturing the energy and spirit of the modern age, he abandoned chiaroscuro, a technique perfected by Leonardo da Vinci and exploited by successful Salon painters as part of their stock-in-trade. The art of chiaroscuro (Italian for "clear" and "dark") involved giving the appearance of depth and relief to a painting by means of carefully graduated contrasts of light and shade. These soft and subtle nuances in the tonal range may have been adequate for portraying winged angels and toga-clad heroes, but ordinary Parisians on a day's outing to Asnières required, Manet seems to have decided, quite a different treatment. He therefore did away with most of his half-tones—the transitions between highlights and shadows—such that his figures, particularly the nude Victorine, looked harshly lit. In contrast to her counterpart in The Judgment of Paris, where the contours of the water nymph's body were suggested through skillful hatching, Victorine appeared strangely two-dimensional.

  Manet also explored his new style by experimenting with his canvases themselves. Since an optical illusion makes light colors advance and dark ones recede, most artists painted on a dark undercoat in order to enhance the impression of depth and, therefore, the "realistic" appearance of their chosen scene. This undercoat, sometimes referred to as la sauce ("gravy"), was a translucent mixture of linseed oil, turpentine and often bitumen, a tarry hydrocarbon made from distilling crude oil and used in, among other things, the production of asphalt. Manet had abandoned these dark undercoats after The Absinthe Drinker, working instead on canvases treated with off-white primers. This lighter ground gave Le Bain a greater luminosity—desirable in an outdoor scene—but at the expense of the appearance of spatial recession that could be achieved by a painter working on a darker undercoat. Manet was not interested, however, in such illusions of depth, or in creating on his canvas a wholly persuasive fictional space. Painting had other purposes, he clearly believed, than such clever trickery.

  He further broke with artistic tradition as he worked on Le Bain, once again in a way that seemed designed to shatter the centuries-old obsession with perspectival space. Painters were usually trained to create a subtle relief on the surface of their canvases by applying their darks and lights in contrasting styles. Dark colors, such as those used for shadows, were spread very thin while highlights were "loaded" or "impasted"—applied, that is, in thick layers. This procedure was employed, together with the darker undercoat, to devise a subtle illusion whereby the whites would advance and the darks retreat. Yet Manet boldly disregarded this practice in Le Bain, loading his dark colors—the blacks of the men's coats—as well as the lights. Though a few other painters, such as Géricault and Courbet, had already experimented with this technique, the boldness of Manet's application witnessed his pursuit of a new direction in art.4

  Le Bain was completed in good time for Manet to send it for appraisal to the Palais des Champs-Élysées. His other two entries were Mile V . . . in the Costume of an Espada and yet another Spanish-style portrait, Young Man in the Costume of a Majo. This latter work, painted early in 1863, featured as its model not a real-life majo, or Spanish dandy, but the youngest of Manet's two brothers, twenty-seven-year-old Gustave, who posed for him in a bolero and white sash taken from Manet's trunkful of Andalusian costumes—an exotic costume for a young man who was, in fact, a lawyer. By the time the three canvases went before the jury, however, Manet's new style of painting had begun receiving a truly ominous reception.

  A one-man exhibition at the Galerie Martinet was a great honor for Manet, and he offered to public view some of the finest paintings he had completed over the previous few years, including The Street Singer—his first painting of Victorine Meurent—and a number of Spanish-flavored works, including another portrait of Victorine, Young Woman Reclining in a Spanish Costume. He also showed, for the first time in public, Music in the Tuileries (plate 3A), a scene, painted in 1860, of a dense mob of Parisians, including Baudelaire and Gautier, leisurely disporting themselves among the chairs and trees of the Jardin des Tuileries. In the finest tradition of Renaissance frescoists such as Perugino and Raphael, Manet had included his own self-portrait: a bearded and frock-coated figure standing on the left.

  As a bid to garner public attention, the exhibition was a success. As a bid to sway votes on the painting jury, however, it was a disaster. Manet did receive one good notice, that of a young critic named Ernest Chesneau, a great enthusiast for Meissonier as well as a pioneer in the study of Japanese art. Writing in L 'Artiste, he observed that Manet's work generally provoked more condemnation than sympathy. "Nonetheless, I confess that a certain amount of youthful daring is not unpalatable," he went on, "and that, even if I willingly grant that Manet still lacks much to justify his audacity, I do not despair of seeing him triumph over ignorance to become a fine painter."5 Other reviews were less inclined to indulge Manet's youthful daring. The critic for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paul Mantz, a republican who supported Delacroix and Romanticism, was someone from whom Manet might have expected a few words of praise and encouragement. But Mantz was thoroughly unimpressed by the fourteen canvases, calling Manet a "Parisian Spaniard," denouncing his work as "unhealthy," and declaring that he would by no means "plead Monsieur Manet's case" before the Salon jury.6

  More was to come as Paul Bins, the Comte de Saint-Victor, reviewed the exhibition for La Presse, a mass-market daily newspaper with a circulation of some 30,000. Though this paper, edited by a dandyish impresario named Ar-séne Houssaye, was generally liberal in outlook, the thirty-six-year-old Saint-Victor was a venomous reactionary, with even his friends accusing him of "boorish intolerance" in matters of art.7 True to form, he dismissed Manet in a few words: "Goya gone native in the depths of the Mexican pampas."8

  Worse still, however, was the response of the public. One of M
anet's friends would later write that all "original" works of art were fated to suffer the gibes and taunts of "bourgeois imbeciles."9 Many Parisians were as hostile and intolerant in matters of artistic taste as the disdainful Saint-Victor, and paintings not meeting with their approval sometimes risked being shown the business end of a riding-crop or walking-stick (as Courbet had discovered in 1853). Occasionally even the artists themselves came in for rough treatment. At the Salon of 1828, Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus aroused such widespread revulsion with its brilliant colors and wild sensuality that one visitor threatened to put a stop to the painter's controversial career by amputating his hands.10

  For several weeks in March, the Galerie Martinet witnessed similarly unruly scenes as indignant visitors threatened violence to Manet's canvases. Most offensive to their sensibilities was Music in the Tuileries, a chaotic-looking blaze of figures painted with a smeary lack of fine detail. Inauspiciously enough, it shared many of the same hallmarks as Le Bain, such as an off-white undercoat, impasted shadows and a lack of chiaroscuro—all of which made it drastically dissimilar in style to most of the works put on show in the Palais des Champs-Élysées.