The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  Louis-Napoléon was nothing if not a shrewd politician. His decree to let the people decide had pleasingly democratic overtones in the weeks before an election, providing a riposte to those who complained about the illiberal nature of his regime. But other motives might also have been behind the decree. "One of the first duties of a sovereign," he once claimed, "is to amuse his subjects of all ranks in the social scale."30 If his subjects could be entertained, he reasoned, then perhaps they would fail to notice or to care about the fact that most of their liberties had vanished. This was the man, after all, who had suppressed an insurrection in Algeria in 1856 by sending the magician Robert-Houdin to Algiers to bamboozle the locals with his repertoire of amazing tricks, including his famous "bullet catch" routine. And what worked on unruly Algerians would likewise, Louis-Napoléon hoped, work for the unruly French. As a correspondent for The Athenaeum, an English journal, noted in 1862: "So long as Parisians are amused, there is less probability of their thoughts dwelling on political slavery."31 The people of Paris were accordingly treated during the years of the Second Empire to endless military parades, illuminations and fireworks, gala opera performances, state balls in the Tuileries, grand openings of new parks and boulevards, and public beheadings such as that in the Place de la Roquette of the would-be assassin Orsini.32

  The Emperor no doubt realized that Lezay-Marnésia's suggestion for an alternative exhibition would provide yet another distracting spectacle for the public in the weeks before the May elections. In any case, two days after his visit to the Palais des Champs-Élysées the government's official newspaper, Le Moniteur universel, carried the following announcement:

  Numerous complaints have reached the ear of the Emperor on the subject of works of art which have been refused by the Salon jury. His Majesty, wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints, has decided that the rejected works of art are to be exhibited in another part of the Palais des Champs-Élysées. This exhibition will be voluntary, and artists who may not wish to participate need only inform the administration, which will return their works to them.33

  The Salon des Refusés—as this impending exhibition soon came to be called—was scheduled to open on May 15, a fortnight after the official Salon commenced at the start of the month. So, provided Manet elected not to reclaim it from the Palais des Champs-Élysées, Le Bain would be seen by the public after all.

  Napoléon Ill's decision to exhibit in the Palais des Champs-Élysées the works rejected by the 1863 Selection Committee was met, at first, with a flurry of excitement. A week after the announcement, the art critic Ernest Chesneau wrote that Parisians interested in artistic matters had "received this ruling with real joy."34 No less joyous were the rejected artists themselves. "It's delightful, it's delightful for us, this business of the rejects' exhibition!" Whistler wrote excitedly to Fantin-Latour from Amsterdam, where he had been marveling over Rembrandt's Night Watch and purchasing shedloads of blue-and-white porcelain for his house in London.35 At the Café de Bade, Whistler's Paris friends were busy mobilizing themselves. Zacharie Astruc, the journalist and critic, made plans to publish a daily newspaper in which he would herald the virtues of Manet and others of his friends while savaging the works in the official Salon; and schemes for a book declaiming the artistic genius of the rejected artists were set in motion by Fernand Desnoyers, a poet and art critic.

  The bulk of the leadership in preparing for the Salon des Refusés was assumed, however, not by the eager young artists and writers in the Café de Bade but by a more prominent and seasoned team of painters centered around forty-nine-year-old Antoine Chintreuil, the veteran landscapist. Chintreuil was a protégé of Camille Corot, who urged his students to seek a spontaneous and personal response to the landscape. "We must never forget to envelop reality in the atmosphere it first had when it burst upon our view," Corot once wrote. "Whatever the sight, whatever the object, the artist must submit to the first impression."36 Chintreuil specialized in these "first impressions" of the effects of sunlight on fields and meadows near Septeuil, some thirty miles west of Paris, where he had become the leading light in a group of landscapists known as the École de Septeuil. Though several of his works had been purchased by the government in the 1850s, all three of his offerings for the 1863 Salon were turned down. Having suffered poverty and rejection from the Salon in his early days (when he had been obliged to work as a bookseller to make ends meet), Chintreuil wished neither to repeat the unpleasant experience nor see the younger generation share it. Therefore, with his friend Jean Desbrosses, another member of the Septeuil group, he formed a committee of eight men, the Comite de salut des refusés, to assist the rejected artists. The center of their operations was the studio of Jean Desbrosses in the Rue de Seine—ironically, just around the corner from the Institut de France.

  One of the Committee's first tasks was to prepare a catalogue listing the works of the rejected artists that would be on show. Hardly had this started, though, than the enthusiasm of many of the rejected artists rapidly began to wane. Letting the public decide the merits of the works—the public that had so recently ridiculed Manet's works in the Galerie Martinet—did not seem, on reflection, quite so appealing an idea after all. Many artists soon thought better of showing their work, and within a few days more than 600 paintings were quietly reclaimed from the Palais des Champs-Élysées. So many of the rejected paintings were removed that, as the expatriate English poet and art critic Philip Hamerton ruefully observed, it would become "impossible to determine, in any satisfactory manner, how far the jury has acted justly towards the refused artists as a body."37 One of the artists who withdrew his work was a twenty-two-year-old former pupil of Émile Signol named Pierre-Auguste Renoir. A former painter in a porcelain factory, Renoir redeemed his canvas, a mythological scene featuring a nymph and a faun, so as to avoid enraging his mentor at the École des Beaux-Arts. Rumored to have been the most inflexible member of the jury, Signol would hardly have looked kindly upon the sight of his former student flouting the jury's authority in this rebel Salon.

  Also contemplating the recovery of his works was Fantin-Latour. But as he prepared to fetch his two canvases, a sinew-stiffening letter arrived from Amsterdam: "Certainly you must send my picture there!" Whistler urged him. "And yours too! It would be madness to withdraw them . . ."38 And so Fantin-Latour, like Whistler, permitted his paintings—one of which was entitled Fairyland—to risk its fortunes in the Salon des Refusés.

  Manet no doubt also had conflicting ideas regarding the proper course of action to take. To exhibit in the Salon des Refusés was to risk not only public derision—which, thanks to Music in the Tuileries, he knew only too well—but also the wrath of the Académie, whose judgment and authority the exhibition put into question. He had little desire to alienate the members of the Académie since he was no less hungry than anyone else for official recognition. And he would much rather have competed for medals against established artists than have been forced to enter the Palais des Champs-Élysées through the back door, where his works would inevitably be hung alongside the amateurish productions of anonymous painters. The jury's decisions may have been harsh in many cases, but for every Chintreuil or Jongkind unjustly excluded from the Salon there were bound to be numerous dabblers whom the jury had quite rightly refused. Rumors were circulating, in fact, that all of the best artists had withdrawn their work from the Salon des Refusés, thereby turning it into an arena for only the most laughably incompetent. Equally concerning was the fact that the jury had authority over hanging the paintings in the Salon des Refusés—a task that would unavoidably become an exercise in self-justification whereby the vengeful jurors took care to hang the worst pictures in the most conspicuous places.

  In the end, Manet reasoned that any exposure was better than none. After all, as the petition to the Comte de Walewski had argued three months earlier—and as Manet no doubt had explained to Walewski when they met in person—exhibitions such as the Salon served the essential funct
ion of introducing an artist and his work to a public that would not otherwise know about him. For Manet, of all painters, to refuse to exhibit his work would have been hypocrisy. And so the deadline of May 7 passed without his reclaiming his three canvases from the Palais des Champs-Élysées. Le Bain would go on show, for better or worse, with all of the other works in the Salon des Refusés.

  *The remaining jurors were Jean Alaux, Jacques-Raymond Brascassat, Auguste Couder, Émile Signol, François Heim, Joseph Robert-Fleury, François Picot and Ernest Meissonier.

  *Lead-based paints were responsible for poisoning many artists over the centuries. One of the symptoms of lead poisoning—spasmodic pains in the stomach—came to be known as "painter's colic." Besides Whistler, a second artist poisoned by his pigments was Vincent Van Gogh. Another symptom of lead poisoning, a swelling of the retina that creates the illusion that objects are encircled by halos, seems to have had repercussions for Van Gogh's painting as well as his health.

  *Hortense-Eugénie de Beauharnais, born in 1783, was the daughter of Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais and Marie-Josephe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, i.e. Josephine. Josephine separated from Vicomte de Beauharnais in 1785, nine years before he was guillotined. In 1796 she married Napoléon Bonaparte, from whom she was divorced in 1810.

  *Napoléon-Francis-Joseph-Charles Bonaparte, the Due de Reichstadt, known as "The Young Eagle," had been born in 1811, the son of Napoléon and Marie Louise, the Archduchess of Austria, whom the Emperor had married following his divorce from Josephine. Napoléon abdicated in his favor in 1814, which made him, at the age of three, Emperor Napoléon II. Events, however, conspired to keep this title from being anything more than nominal, and he spent most of his short life in exile in Vienna.

  *To avoid confusion, I will refer to the Corps Législatif—as this body was known—as the "Legislative Assembly," as opposed to the Constituent Assembly of the Second Republic and the National Assembly of the Third Republic.

  †For his part in the 1840 Boulogne expedition, Jean-Gilbert-Victor Fialin, the Comte (and later Due) de Persigny, was imprisoned at Versailles, where he wrote a treatise called On the Purpose and Permanent Use of the Pyramids. This work, published in 1845, advanced the theory that the ancient Egyptians had constructed the pyramids in order to stop the Nile from clogging up with silt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Salon of Venus

  THE PARIS SALON, as the novelist and theater critic Jules Janin once claimed, was "the event of the year," an occasion always preceded by "two months of feverish exhilaration."1 Besides exhilaration, the Salons were also heralded by hard work and careful organization. The exhibition hall that hosted, among other attractions, expositions of cheeses, pigs and poultry needed to be transformed for the display of thousands of works of art. The mess from the recent equestrian exhibition had to be scrubbed from the floor, blinds fitted on the windows, thousands of paintings hung on the walls, the statues trundled into position, buffet luncheons arranged, the catalogue printed, the medals for the Awards Ceremony ordered, the diploma for the Grand Medal of Honor engraved, and dozens of guards hired to both keep watch over the paintings and discourage the pickpockets for whom Salon crowds were a lively source of income. Decisions even had to be made regarding which beggars would be allowed to work the grounds of the Palais des Champs-Élysées.

  Since 1852 most of these tasks had fallen, not to Nieuwerkerke himself, but to his harassed deputy, a forty-three-year-old named Philippe de Chennevières-Pointel, who described the weeks before the Salon's opening as a time of "unspeakable anxiety and fatigue."2 The Marquis de Chennevières was a former law student who had traveled in Italy and published short stories and poems under a variety of pseudonyms before starting work, at the age of twenty-six, in the Louvre, which he called "that holy house."3 The Palais des Champs-Élysées, on the other hand, Chennevières did not regard as being quite so divine. Ironically, he entertained ambiguous feelings about the virtues of such a large and popular exhibition to which hundreds of thousands of visitors of every social description flocked to gawp at whatever was put on show. In many ways, he deplored the success of the venture over which he had charge. The enormous crowds at the Salon did not suggest to him that Parisians were a cultivated people with an insatiable appetite for the fine arts. They told him, instead, that the fine arts must have debased themselves in order to appeal to the vulgar tastes of the ignorant masses.

  Raised among fervent royalists and Catholics as the stepson of a Norman aristocrat, Chennevières was a political conservative who despised both democracy and the common man. "Democracy has always horrified me," he once wrote, "and I see in it only principles that are corrosive and destructive for every society."4 Seventy years after the French Revolution, he harked back nostalgically to the institutions of the ancien regime, claiming that the aristocracy, "in which the sound and strong head directs and contains the tail, is worth more than democracy, where the insolent and churlish tail drags along the weak and diminished head."5 Chennevières's fellow Norman, Gustave Flaubert, a friend of Nieuwerkerke, had coined the word democrasserie (crasse meaning both "filth" and "dirty trick") to describe the way in which democracy led, in his opinion, to a lowering of artistic standards. Chennevières likewise detested the effects of democracy on the arts, where the tail, in his opinion, was threatening to wag the dog. He had little use for most modern art, dismissing the work of Courbet and other Realists as "democratic painting" and maintaining that Honoré Daumier (a friend of Meissonier from their student days on the îie Saint-Louis) should have his paints and brushes confiscated.6 He was nostalgic for the time when the Salon had been an exclusive preserve where members of the Académie Royale de la Peinture et de la Sculpture, founded by Louis XIV in 1648, showed examples of their recent work. But after the French Revolution, the Académie Royale had been abolished and the Salon thrown open to all artists who could impress the jury. And while Manet and others found the juries too draconian in preventing the exposure of their work, Chennevières, like many conservatives, bemoaned what he regarded as the aesthetic free-for-all and galloping commercialization of the Salon.

  Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century the Salon had become, in the eyes of many of its critics, little more than a marketplace for which commodities—such as easel paintings for the walls of middle-class apartments—were manufactured by the thousand. Chennevières's reservations about this commercialization were expressed by Ingres, another arch-conservative, who fulminated against this "bazaar" in which business ruled instead of art: "Artists are driven to exhibit there," he wrote, "by the attractions of profit, the desire to get themselves noticed at any price, by the supposed good fortune of an eccentric subject capable of producing an effect and leading to an advantageous sale."7 In this view, little difference existed between the paintings shown at the Palais des Champs-Élysées and the expositions of cheeses or pigs that followed them. Both were commodities produced for no other purpose than a profitable commercial transaction. And the visitors to this bazaar were to be treated, in 1863, to a strange new variety of art.

  The 1863 Salon opened, with even more than the usual excitement and anticipation, on the first of May, a Friday. The Palais des Champs-Élysées grew as crowded as ever as thousands of visitors poured through the enormous, flag-stoned entrance hall and made their way up the monumental staircases to the rooms on the first floor. Negotiating one's way through a 250-yard-long exhibition hall in which more than two thousand works of art were on display in a maze of rooms and indoor courtyards and gardens was a daunting task, but Chennevières and his helpers had tried to guide visitors through the labyrinth. The enormous exhibition hall had been partitioned, as usual, into several dozen rooms, each of which featured a letter of the alphabet above its door. Paintings by artists whose surnames began with A were hung in the first room, those with B in the next room, and so forth, allowing Salon-goers to make their way unerringly from A through Z.

  Once inside each room, however, visitors were
confronted by a disorderly confusion of paintings stacked on all four walls from floor to ceiling; some rooms were home to as many as two hundred canvases. These works were hung together in a promiscuous jumbling of styles and genres that witnessed, for example, portraits of pious Christian martyrs occupying space beside lubricious depictions of red-blooded satyrs or the undraped habitués of Turkish baths. Huge canvases were suspended next to tiny portraits, with almost every inch of wall space occupied. Viewing conditions were far from ideal. Paintings that had been "skyed"—that is, hung high on the wall—could not be appreciated without either sore necks or telescopic aids to vision, while the space in front of works by the most famous artists always grew dense with spectators jostling one another for a better view. "They come as they would to a pantomime or a circus," the philosopher Hippolyte Taine complained of these hordes.8 In order to find their way through this maze—and also to help themselves form opinions on what they had seen—visitors could purchase the numerous guides, known as salons, that were written for newspapers of every description by the hundred art critics who stalked Paris.9

  The Palais des Champs-Élysées

  The Salon of 1863 had any number of eye-catching works on show. One of the most popular paintings—and what would become one of the most celebrated paintings of the nineteenth century—was The Prisoner by Jean-Léon Gérôme. A perennial favorite with the public if not always with the critics, Gérôme was, at the age of thirty-nine, one of France's most successful painters. He specialized in exceptionally detailed, delicately erotic scenes from ancient Greece and Rome as well as from modern-day Egypt and the Holy Land, through which he had traveled on several occasions. His patrons occupied the very highest levels of French society. His Greek Interior, a brothel scene shown at the Salon of 1850, had been bought by the Emperor's cousin, Prince Napoléon-Jerome, who then hired him to add to the decor of his spectacularly tasteless Paris mansion, the Villa Diomède. No sooner were these murals finished than the painter of belly dancers and snake charmers received a commission from Pope Pius IX to decorate the interior of His Holiness's private railway carriage.