by Ross King
The viewing public was accustomed to standing close to paintings, studying them minutely and marveling over the delicacy of the handiwork. The work of a master like Meissonier even repaid, as John Ruskin would discover, the scrutiny of a magnifying glass. But Manet's apparently clumsy brushstrokes and lack of clarity in Music in the Tuileries did not lend themselves to this sort of appreciation. The work looked lackadaisical and incomplete because in places the undercoat of white primer and the weave of the canvas could clearly be seen. Elsewhere the marks of the paintbrush were visible. Most other painters used thin glazes and fine brushes made from sable to cover their traces, in effect brushing themselves—their labors and their personalities—out of their works. Manet, however, exploited the properties of his paints to reveal the nature of his workmanship. The vast majority of pigments sold in France were no longer mixed with linseed oil, which yellowed with age, but rather with poppy oil, whose use resulted in more buttery, textured pigments than the smooth ones produced by mixtures of linseed oil. Painters using pigments bound in poppy oil therefore needed to work harder to eliminate the bristle-marks from their canvases, though a number of them, notably Delacroix and Couture, had begun leaving behind the visible sign of the brush as a kind of signature of their individuality and workmanship.11 They were following in the tradition of painters of the Italian Renaissance such as Leonardo and Titian, some of whose works show how they even smeared paint with their fingertips. But by the nineteenth century this seemingly spontaneous approach—and the hand of the individual artist—had largely disappeared because of an insistence on a more burnished appearance.
Study for Music in the Tuileries (Édouard Manet)
From close range, therefore, Music in the Tuileries simply looked absurd to spectators in the Galerie Martinet, a half-completed sketch masquerading as a finished product. The subject matter of Music in the Tuileries seems to have been equally repellent. It did not shock in the same way as, for instance, The Death of Sardanapalus, a scene of orgy and murder inspired by one of Lord Byron's plays. But Parisians accustomed to paintings featuring models in historical dress—the Roman togas and plumed helmets of David and Ingres, the Louis XV costumes of Meissonier—found themselves confronted, to their surprise, by a canvas showing a cast of characters dressed much like themselves.
Top hats and frock coats were by 1863 a distinctly modern costume. The top hat had been invented in 1797 by the London haberdasher John Hetherington, who caused a riot when he stepped outside with one perched on his head: children screamed, women fainted, the arm of an errand boy was broken, and Hetherington was hauled before the courts to explain the meaning of his alarming new invention. Sixty years on, these fears had been conquered and the top hat was omnipresent on the heads of both the bourgeois and the aristocrat, worn, like the equally ubiquitous frock coat, for both business and pleasure. While the dress of men in previous centuries had been designed to indicate ranks or professions, by the middle of the nineteenth century—especially after the reign of King Louis-Philippe, the "Citizen King" who wore a bowler hat and carried a rolled-up umbrella—almost all men in Paris dressed identically in sober black clothes as a kind of sartorial recognition of their equality.12 As early as 1846 Baudelaire had been interested in the black frock coat as a worthy subject for artists, urging them to abandon the exotic fripperies of historical paintings and to concentrate instead on this modern-day uniform of the bourgeois age (this despite the fact that he himself was a famous dandy who favored resplendent dress and spent two hours each day making his toilet).13 The same argument was made by the novelist and art critic Jules Champfleury. This "supreme pontiff of Realism," as he was known, ordered artists to discard the costumes of Greece and the Renaissance and consider a "serious representation of present-day personalities, the derbies, the black dress-coats, the polished shoes or the peasants' clogs."14
Since Baudelaire and Champfleury both appear in Music in the Tuileries, the painting might be understood as a kind of artistic manifesto or, at the very least, as Manet's experimental response to the entreaties of these two friends as well as to Couture's demands for scenes of modern life. However, modern-day dress was still a controversial topic for a painting. The subject of one of Manet's other figures in Music in the Tuileries, Théophile Gautier, was far more dubious about the value of commemorating top hats and frock coats in paint, or indeed of representing scenes of contemporary life through any means whatsoever.15 Often seen sporting bright caftans and a fez, the longhaired Gautier despised bourgeois clothing, regarding it as unworthy of art since the sheer mundaneness of frock coats quashed the possibility of presenting visions of nobility or heroism. And Gautier believed, like many of his contemporaries, that these beautifully idealized visions were the highest and most proper subjects for art. Manet's depiction of humdrum everyday fashion therefore seemed a deliberate and provocative contrast to the signatures of masculine heroism—togas, helmets, swords—so familiar from the canvases and murals sanctioned by the Académie and put on show at each Salon. Nothing heroic or morally uplifting could be seen in Music in the Tuileries, merely an ill-defined mob of Parisians loitering and gossiping in a park.
Given the hostile reactions of both the newspapers and the visitors to the Galerie Martinet, Manet cannot have been surprised that his works failed to elicit commercial attention. Yet when Martinet inquired as to the price of one of the works, Boy with a Sword, he responded quickly. "I would like one thousand francs for it," he wrote with stern emphasis, before adding: "but I authorize you, if you see fit, to let it go for eight hundred."16 Nonetheless, the painting languished on the wall of Martinet's gallery, and Manet would make, in the end, not a single sale from the exhibition.
One of Manet's few consolations at this time was the support from a fellow artist. Though seriously ill with tuberculosis, Delacroix left his home in the Rue de Furstemberg to pay a visit to the Galerie Martinet. He and Manet had met as early as 1857, the year of Delacroix's election to the Académie. Two years later, as a member of the painting jury, he had voted for The Absinthe Drinker, an endorsement from which Manet took much consolation. In 1863 Delacroix remained a fierce champion of the younger painter. Appalled by the rude comments and contumelious scenes around the paintings, he loudly proclaimed as he left the Galerie Martinet: "I regret having been unable to defend this man."17
Delacroix's spirited advocacy aside, Manet's exhibition had undermined some of the reputation he had built for himself two years earlier with The Spanish Singer. This failure obviously did not bode well for the Salon of 1863. His strategy in showing his canvases seemed dismally to have backfired.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Baffling Maze of Canvas
ALTHOUGH His PAINTINGS were not destined to appear at the Salon of 1863, Ernest Meissonier would at least make his presence felt in another important way. His election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts had given him the privilege of serving on the painting jury. He would therefore be one of the men charged with reviewing several thousand works of art and deciding which among them were worthy of exposure in the Palais des Champs-Élysées.
The deadline for submissions was the first of April, a month before the Salon was due to open. Frenetic scenes always took place in the studios of Paris in the days preceding the deadline as artists worked desperately to put the finishing brushstrokes on their works, many of which arrived at the Palais des Champs-Élysées—the 250-yard-long cast-iron exhibition hall where the judging took place—with the paint still wet to the touch. Transporting a work of art to the hall, especially a piece of sculpture or a large canvas, posed logistical difficulties. The more affluent artists hired porters to convey them, while the rest were forced to do the job themselves, pushing handcarts and wheelbarrows through the streets. Masterpieces of painting and sculpture were thereby exposed to the elements, the perils of cobblestones, and the curious glances of passersby, who occasionally witnessed amusing spectacles, such as the exertions of the Swiss sculptor James Pradier, who often gave his w
ork finishing touches with a hammer and chisel while it was en route. Onlookers in 1855 would have witnessed the arresting sight of Jean-Léon Gérôme's The Age of Augustus, a gargantuan painting thirty-three feet long by twenty-three feet high, making its stately progress through the streets.
In the run-up to the 1863 deadline, the Champs-Élysées and surrounding avenues and bridges grew thick with swaying trolleys and wobbling carts as the artists descended on the Palais des Champs-Élysées to have their works registered and measured. Despite Nieuwerkerke's new regulations, some 5,000 works of art—paintings, sculptures, engravings and photographs—were submitted to the Selection Committee, which began its deliberations on the second of April. The process of judging was, as always, an arduous one. The works were ranged around the Palais des Champs-Élysées in alphabetical order according to the artists' surnames, creating what one writer called a "baffling maze of canvas."1 The jurors were obliged to tramp around the hall—and through the warren of upstairs rooms into which the overflow spilled—to view the works one at a time, separated from the canvases they were appraising by a white rope held by two attendants. Votes for and against each work were taken by a show of hands, with a simple majority prevailing. The chairman of the jury was armed with a little bell, which he rang each time the jurors turned their attention to a new work, whose fate was carefully recorded by a secretary. Canvases receiving unanimous favor from the jurors were awarded a "number one" ranking, which gave them the privilege of hanging "on the line" at the Salon, that is, at the ideal viewing height. Those turned down by the jury, on the other hand, were carried away ("like corpses after a battle," as a commentator put it)2 by white-coated attendants and then—most humiliatingly—stamped on the back with a red R that stood for refuse: "rejected." This symbol was the kiss of death to a work, not only ruling it out of the Salon but also hampering any chance of its selling to a private buyer.
The painting jury for the 1863 Salon faced a daunting prospect as its deliberations began. The annual equestrian exhibition due to be held at the Palais des Champs-Élysées during the latter half of April gave the jurors a mere ten days to evaluate all of the submissions. At least five hundred works therefore needed to be appraised every day, and given that the judges spent six-hour days in the Palais des Champs-Élysées, more than eighty pieces passed before their eyes each hour—with the result that most works received less than a minute of attention. Painting on which artists had spent months or even years were declined, in other words, on the basis of an assessment, made by a team of dazed and exhausted jurors, that lasted no more than a few seconds.3
The règlement did provide a slim chance for reprieve: at the end of the judging a special session called the repêchage, or "fishing again," was convened, when the jury took a second look at the refusés in order to reconsider their verdicts. As well, each of the jurors had the right of a "charity" pick—a work that, no matter how unworthy in the eyes of his colleagues, would be accepted without quibble. Still, an artist enjoyed only a fifty—fifty-chance of having his work accepted.
The odds against the artists appeared to become even more unfavorable when, as judging for the Salon of 1863 commenced, Nieuwerkerke urged the jury to treat the submissions severely.4 Given the composition of the jury, most of whose members shared Nieuwerkerke's elevated objectives, this imperative was hardly necessary. Those eligible to serve on the jury included six former winners of the Prix de Rome as well as one runner-up for the prize, Victor Schnetz, a seventy-six-year-old who, in a long and distinguished career, had served as Director of both the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de France in Rome, the two main training grounds for French artists.5 However, the physical rigors involved in judging so many works, together with the advanced age of many members of the Académie, prevented a number of those eligible for service, including Schnetz, from appearing at the Palais des Champs-Élysées on April 2. All told, Ingres, Delacroix, Cogniet, Schnetz and Hippolyte Flandrin—a friend and former pupil of Ingres—declined to accept their places, while another member of the Académie, the battle painter Horace Vernet, had died in January at the age of seventy-three. To Manet, anxiously awaiting news of the deliberations, the absence of a strong supporter like Delacroix was a cause for serious concern. He even went so far as to exhort Delacroix to attend the voting sessions, but the older artist was simply too ill to participate.6
The jury was therefore reduced to eight members, with the votaries of Raphael and Rome well-represented among them.* Indeed, one of their number, seventy-seven-year-old Jean Alaux, even went by the nickname "The Roman." François Heim, another septuagenarian veteran of the controversial 1859 jury, epitomized the majority. A renowned history painter, he had won the Prix de Rome fifty-six years earlier, in 1807, for Theseus and the Minotaur. After five years of studies in Rome he had returned to Paris to teach at the École des Beaux-Arts and to paint ceiling murals for the Louvre. Manet could not have expected him to provide a friendly reception for a work such as Le Bain. Nor could he count on encouragement from Émile Signol, a famously intolerant conservative who could be outraged by the sight in a painting of "a certain red."7 Another juror, a seventy-seven-year-old named François Picot, was bound to be equally intransigent. A sensation thirty years earlier at the Salon of 1833 with allegorical paintings such as Cybele Protects the Towns of Stabiae, Herculaneum, Pompeii and Resina from Vesuvius, he had distinguished himself by repeatedly voting against the inclusion in the Salon of Gustave Courbet and other proponents of Realism.
Ernest Meissonier was the one member of the jury from whom Manet may have hoped for some support. They had been allies in the fight against Nieuwerkerke's new regulations, and Meissonier enjoyed a close friendship with Manet's strongest advocate, Delacroix. Moreover, on the 1863 jury he found himself among a group of académiciens who, on two separate occasions within the previous three years, had voted against exalting him to their ranks.
"I flatter myself that I can be of use there," Delacroix had written in 1857 regarding his own presence on the Salon jury, "because I shall be nearly alone in my opinion."8 On his own first stint on the jury, Meissonier must likewise have resigned himself to holding the minority opinion. Most interested observers could reasonably have concluded that he was the ideal candidate to assume the mantle of the ailing Delacroix and vote for the artists who dwelt beyond the charmed circle of the École des Beaux-Arts.
Meissonier's presence notwithstanding, the results of the jury's deliberations were, perhaps, only too predictable. On April 5, three days into the judging, rumors about widespread rejections made the rounds of the cafés and studios of Paris. When the results were announced a week later, stories of a massacre in the Palais des Champs-Élysées were brutally confirmed: only 2,217 works were accepted out of the more than 5,000 submitted, a failure rate of almost sixty percent. Of the 3,000 artists who had submitted work, only 988 heard good news.
Among the more than 2,000 refusés were a number of well-known painters. Foremost among them were the landscapists Antoine Chintreuil, an exhibitor since 1847, and Johan Barthold Jongkind, a forty-four-year-old Dutch painter whose work had been awarded a gold medal in 1852. In another surprise, more than forty students and former students of Léon Cogniet—Meissonier's old teacher and a fellow member of the Académie—were also given the thumbs-down. Among their number was one of the rising stars of French art, Amand Gautier, a thirty-seven-year-old painter and engraver who had won great plaudits at the Salon of 1857 for The Madwomen of La Salpetriere—a study of lunatics in a Paris asylum—and again in 1861 for a portrait of his friend and former roommate, Paul Gachet, a doctor specializing in psychiatry and homeopathy.9
As for Manet, he received the same bad news as the more than 2,000 other refuse's. A letter on notepaper headed "Ministry of State," and signed with a flourish by Nieuwerkerke, tersely explained how the Directeur regretted that his three works "were not admitted by the jury." There was no explanation for the rejection: the artist was simply told that he had to recl
aim his work from the Palais des Champs-Élysées "without delay."10
The jury's wholesale rejections spurred into action groups of artists who had already been mobilized several months earlier by the campaign against Nieuwerkerke. They did not on this occasion muster on the steps of the Institut de France, as they had done four years earlier, or protest noisily beneath Nieuwerkerke's windows in the Louvre. Instead, in the days that followed many of them gathered to drown their sorrows and discuss strategy in the Café de Bade, close to the Galerie Martinet in the Boulevard des Italiens. A number of the 12,000 cafés in Paris had become important forums for artistic life. cafés offered to painters and writers a bohemian atmosphere of pipesmoke, bonhomie, and drinks that tasted, in the words of one habitué, like a mixture of cheap mouthwash and soot.11 Manet had been a regular at the Café de Bade for the previous eight or nine years, spending each evening there before making his way home to Suzanne, Léon and what passed for his domestic obligations. The café offered a slightly raffish clientele of men-about-town, prostitutes and devotees of le whist, a card game recently imported from England. It had become the preferred hangout of a group of young artists who abandoned their former haunt on the Left Bank, the Café Moliere, to enjoy its hospitality. Included among them were Fantin-Latour and his close friend, the painter and engraver Alphonse Legros; a young art critic named Zacharie As-true; and, whenever he was in Paris, a twenty-nine-year-old expatriate American named James McNeill Whistler.