The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  Courbet had spent the latter half of 1862 and the first few months of 1863 in Saintes, north of Bordeaux, on an estate called Rochemont that belonged to a young art collector and republican named Étienne Baudry. His absence from Paris meant that he missed the excitement over both the petition to Walewski and the announcement of the Salon des Refusés. Still, he made the most of his days at Rochemont, conducting an affair with the wife of a draper and astounding the locals with his capacity for drink. On one memorable occasion he was said to have downed, before dinner, six bottles of wine and a bowl of coffee half-filled with cognac.6 He managed to produce a number of paintings, mainly of flowers, though he also began work on a canvas of quite a different sort. Return from the Conference, which depicted seven drunken priests staggering back home from an assembly, was deliberately intended to shock and offend. After sending the provocative work to the Salon jury in April, Courbet had relishingly predicted to a friend that, if this work were selected, "there will be an uproar. I expect that so audacious a painting has never been seen."7

  Courbet need hardly have worried about his painting slipping past the Selection Committee. Two of his works were indeed selected for the Salon, Fox Hunt and a portrait of Laure Borreau, his mistress in Saintes. His inebriated priests, however, stood no chance. "I painted the picture so it would be refused," he boasted to a friend after the deliberations were announced in April, adding triumphantly: "I have succeeded."8 Not only was the work rejected from the Salon, it was likewise banned by the government from the Salon des Refusés. "I have been accused of immorality," he complained with crocodile tears in a letter to Le Figaro.9As a protest against this censorship, he promptly put the painting on show in his Left Bank studio. Here, he claimed, large crowds flocked to admire the canvas, giving him the inspiration for a plan to embark with his controversial painting on a one-man tour of the great cities of Europe, starting with London.

  Courbet was a relentless braggart and self-publicist; he was, in his own words, "the most arrogant man in the world."10 His style was every bit as bold as he claimed, with textured layers of paint, muddy colors, eccentric perspectives, and unusual and often unsettlingly vulgar subjects that were a world away from the pleasingly anodyne and effortlessly burnished scenes of contemporaries like Gérôme and Cabanel. Few painters could match his flair for ruggedly realistic scenes that, at its best, produced masterpieces of almost primeval beauty such as A Burial at Ornans (plate 3B), a striking panorama of black-clad mourners gathered for a rural funeral (in fact, that of his beloved grandfather). Still, Courbet was wrong about one thing: Return from the Conference was not the most audacious painting ever seen in France. That honor belonged to the work, catalogued number 363, on show in the last room of the Salon des Refusés.

  Despite the absence of Courbet's Return from the Conference, the 7,000 people who poured into the Palais des Champs-Élysées on Friday, May 15, the opening day of the Salon des Refusés, had no shortage of scandalous and amusing works to view. Most of them came fully expecting to be shocked and entertained by an exhibition of the most freakish art. Their appetite for the event had been whetted by the newspapers, which gave widespread coverage to the opening of what they variously dubbed the "Salon of the Vanquished," the "Salon of the Pariahs," the "Salon of the Banished," and the "Salon of the Heretics."11 One newspaper even christened it the "Salon of the Comics," guaranteeing its readers a rare glimpse of incompetent artistic drolleries: "No, nothing is more comic, nothing is more grotesque, nothing is more ridiculous than these works."12

  If Hippolyte Taine lamented that the regular Salons were treated by spectators as circuses or pantomimes, how much worse was the frame of mind of the typical visitors to the Salon des Refusés, who were described by a friend of Manet's as "an ignorant goggle-eyed rabble."13 One visitor, the English poet Philip Hamerton, wrote disapprovingly that spectators were forced "to abandon all hope of getting into that serious state of mind which is necessary to a fair comparison of works of art. That threshold once past, the gravest visitors burst into peals of laughter."14 The laughter was so loud, in fact, that visitors at the door cursed the slowness of the turnstiles in their eagerness to join the fun. "People entered as if to Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors in London," sighed the rejected painter Charles Cazin.15 Five days after the exhibition opened, Manet's friend Zacharie Astruc complained that serious art-lovers who dared set foot in the Salon des Refusés needed to be "extra strong to keep erect beneath the tempest of fools, who rain down here by the million and scoff at everything in the most outrageous fashion."16

  Several paintings attracted especially clamorous attention from this tempest of fools, among them Whistler's The White Girl. This work displayed a young redhead—in fact, Whistler's Irish mistress Joanna Hiffernan—dressed in white and standing on a bearskin rug. Its real subject, though, was color and form. Whistler was less concerned about executing a true-to-life portrait than he was about using his model and her wardrobe to investigate the optical effects of different shades of white; he would eventually rename the canvas Symphony in White, No. i. Such subtle explorations were lost, however, on the crowds in the Palais des Champs-Élysées. Hamerton claimed that everyone catching sight of the canvas—himself included—"stopped instantly, struck with amazement. This for two or three seconds, then they always looked at each other and laughed."17 The White Girl nevertheless received a number of positive reviews, all of them dutifully scissored from the papers by Fantin-Latour and posted to Whistler's address in London. Le Boulevard, for example, called the work "a piece of painting of indisputable beauty," while in Le Figaro Arthur Stevens, the critic who accused Cabanel of immorality, wrote: "I recognise in this work an artist of great purity."18 Better yet, Whistler's painting soon enjoyed an enviable word-of-mouth reputation, with both Baudelaire and Courbet singing its praises and Arséne Houssaye, editor of La Presse, making inquiries about purchasing it for himself. Houssaye was an influential figure in the Paris art world, having formerly served as both director of the Théâtre-Français and editor of the Revue de Paris at the time when it serialized Madame Bovary. Back home in Chelsea, Whistler was beside himself with delight.

  Édouard Manet's paintings, Le Bain in particular, attracted even more attention than The White Girl. His three works were conspicuously featured in the last of the twelve rooms that made up die Salon des Refusés. Manet's cousin Ambroise Adam, a sixty-three-year-old lawyer, summed up the painter's ambiguous feelings about both this prominence and the Salon des Refusés more generally: "The poor boy has one of the best positions, but would rather have had a less good one in the real Salon."19 This eye-catching location was accounted for in part because of the monumental size of Le Bain but also because the Selection Committee, which oversaw the hanging, suspected the painting of being ripe for public ridicule. Their inmition was quickly proved correct as the hilarity and hostility that had greeted Manet's work in the Galerie Martinet was reprised two months later. Le Bain raised, one of Manet's friends wrote, "a veritable clamor of condemnation."20 Spectators astonished and amused by the puzzling scene of Victorine Meurent sitting naked on the grass between two men in modern dress quickly dubbed the work Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, or "The Luncheon on the Grass," a name by which even Manet himself began referring to the painting.

  The White Girl (James McNeill Whistler)

  "Never was such insane laughter better deserved," one critic observed of these scenes of gleeful mockery before Manet's canvases.21 Many critics viewed his bewildering work with varying degrees of animosity and incredulity. A number of them faulted his technique, pointing out how the work lacked the subtle gradations of tone and careful definitions of relief that were the bread and butter of students at the École des Beaux-Arts. His palette "misses the nuances," complained one. Another quipped that the brushwork was so lacking in finesse that it could have been done with a floor mop.22 Others found the human figures poorly executed and utterly unconvincing: "Manet's figures make us automatically think of the marionettes on
the Champs-Élysées."23

  A good many critics also expressed their troubled mystification over what exactly Manet had intended to depict. "A commonplace woman of the demimonde, as naked as can be, lolls shamelessly between two dandies dressed to the nines," wrote one named Louis Étienne, who added: "This is a young man's practical joke, a shameful open sore not worth exhibiting this way."24 The idea that Manet's painting was some sort of jest—a perverse burlesque perpetrated by a rebellious young artist laughing up his sleeve at the audience—was widespread. Few were prepared to accept that the artist could have created such a bizarre scene in good faith. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, for instance, claimed to see in the work, besides an incompetent application of paint, a "lack of conviction and sincerity."25

  This review by Castagnary, in L'Artiste, would have been dismaying for Manet given that the thirty-three-year-old critic was a supporter of Courbet and the more adventuresome brands of modern painting. Furthermore, L'Artiste had contributed one of the few good reviews to Manet's show in the Galerie Martinet. The author of the review on that occasion, Ernest Chesneau, the man who had praised Manet's "youthful daring," likewise expressed his reservations about Le Bain. Writing in Le Constitutionnel, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 30,000, he chided the painter on moral grounds: "We cannot find it altogether chaste," he wrote, "to show seated in the woods, surrounded by students in overcoats, a young woman clad in nothing but the shade of the trees."26

  Chesneau's prudish comment was one of the few moralistic objections to Manet's work, which attracted far less spleen on this count than Cabanel's more flagrantly sexual Birth of Venus?27Most people did not object to Vic-torine's nudity, for Salon-goers were perfectly accustomed to seeing nudity on the walls, even if the nudes were usually of beautiful women rather than, as one critic wrote of Victorine, "the ideal of ugliness."28 Nor did they seem unduly troubled by the possibility (if indeed it occurred to them) that Victorine was meant to personify a prostitute, a state of affairs hinted at by the presence in the foreground of a frog (grenouille was a slang term for a prostitute in the 1860s).29 Cabanel's wanton Venus, not Victorine with her love handles and pasty skin, was widely regarded to have been the morally precarious fille de joie inside the Palais des Champs-Élysées. Victorine may well have been intended by Manet to represent a streetwalker from the Rue Bréda—but, seated naked beside her picnic basket, she was regarded by the public more as a source of mirth than of danger.

  Disquiet over Manet's painting was expressed, instead, over the fact that Victorine's companions were dressed, as Hamerton distastefully observed, in "horrible modern French clothing."30 The critic and Vermeer collector Théophile Thoré admonished Manet for creating such an "absurd composition" in which the clothed and unclothed mingled together: "The nude does not have a good figure, unformnately, and one cannot imagine anything uglier than the man stretched out next to her, who hasn't even the presence of mind to remove his horrid ring-shaped cap. It is the contrast of a creature so inappropriate in a pastoral scene with this undraped bather that is shocking."31

  The clothes, therefore, more than the nudity, were what shocked. Victorine's naked body, unsightly as it was for anyone weaned on the scrumptious nudes of Ingres or Cabanel, caused far less horror than the strange hat perched on Gustave Manet's head or the fact that the two men were wearing dark overcoats in a forest glade. To an audience habituated to the exotic Oriental costumes of Gérôme or the olden-days aristocratic fashions of Meissonier, these two boorish-looking students in their Left Bank apparel were an unhappily discrepant sight. The ambrosial world of nymphs and shepherds had been gate-crashed, it seemed, by a pair of vulgar Asnières daytrippers.

  Yet for all the criticism, Manet's work received a number of favorable notices—some of them composed, albeit, by his friends.32 His strongest supporter was Zacharie Astruc, whose daily newspaper shouted his genius from the rooftops, declaring him "one of the greatest artistic characters of the time" and lauding his "brilliance" and "inspiration."33 Other writers saw in Manet the future of French art. "Manet, I hope, will one day become a master," wrote a critic using the name Capitaine Pompilius. "He has the sincerity, the conviction, the strength, the universality—that is to say, the stuff of great art."34 Another glowing review came from a twenty-three-year-old named Édouard Lockroy, an ardent republican who made a bold prediction: "Manet will triumph some day, we have no doubt, over all the obstacles he encounters, and we shall be the first to applaud his success."35

  All told, in the annals of French art criticism, Manet had actually escaped rather lightly. Vicious reviews were all too frequent in nineteenth-century France; no one was immune from the venomous quills of the critics. Ingres, for example, had been the recipient of dozens of poisonous reviews throughout his career. His Grande Odalisque, exhibited at the Salon of 1819, attracted such hateful notices (the critics had seized on the fact that the reclining woman had three vertebrae too many) that he was moved to lament how his work had become "so much prey for ravenous dogs."36 Fifteen years later, at the Salon of 1834, his Martyrdom of Saint-Symphorian was assailed so fiercely that he shut his studio, left Paris for the next seven years, and for more than two decades refused to exhibit at the Salon. His long-awaited return, in 1855, was promptly met with a review of unbridled malevolence: "Before this antiquated and non-majestic painting," a critic for Le Figaro informed his readers, "my nostrils are invaded by whiffs of warm, sour and nauseating air . . . I'm sorry to say this to delicate readers, but it's like the taste of a sick man's handkerchief."37 Delacroix fared no better. His Massacre of Chios had been treated to unanimously hostile reviews at the Salon of 1824, where it was mocked as "the massacre of painting."38 Worst of all, though, was the fate of Baron Gros, a talented student of Jacques-Louis David. Hercules and Diomèdes received such merciless reviews at the 1835 Salon that Gros drowned himself in a tributary of the Seine.

  Manet was not the only refuse spared, for the most part, the wrath of the critics, many of whom sheathed their daggers as they surveyed the rest of the exhibition, which was not the critical catastrophe for which the members of the Selection Committee had been hoping. Though far from impressed by the exhibition, Charles Brun claimed that at least the paintings were not as dreadful a sight as the sneering crowds standing in front of them.39 Chesneau even questioned the extent of this mockery, pointing out that while the majority of those who came to the Salon des Refusés found all of the paintings equally bad, some visitors, at least, shook their heads and questioned the harshness of the jury.40 Other writers took the jury itself sternly to task. In Le Figaro, a critic calling himself Monsieur de Cupidon wrote that if one entered the Salon des Refusés with a smile, one departed feeling "serious, anxious and disturbed" at the injustices perpetrated against the Refusés, who, he noticed, "bore their name proudly."41 The journalist and art critic Théodore Pelloquet likewise bearded the jury. He wrote in his biweekly review that the Salon des Refusés included some fifty paintings that were superior to the standard of the canvases accepted by the Selection Committee for the official Salon. "If we add to this figure those paintings which their authors withdrew," he further noted, "the Institut's inadequacy at continuing in its present role is beyond debate."42

  Pelloquet raised a question that had been on the lips of many people even before the Salon des Refusés opened its doors: given their controversial performance, should the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts continue to staff the Selection Committee? Was this team of eminent painters really to be trusted with their hands on the rudder of French art?

  From the works on show in the Salon des Refusés, educated observers, not least the artists themselves, could see that the jury was systematically barring from the Salon a particular style of painting in favor of the sort of art practiced by many of its own members and taught at the École des Beaux-Arts. The difference was one of both subject matter and technique. Many of the refusés had favored landscapes, while the jury instinctively sanctioned historical or mythological wo
rks from which moral lessons could be extracted. And whereas the jury preferred the smooth finish seen in the works of Gérôme and Cabanel, where all marks of the brush were deftly effaced, the canvases of many of the refuse's, Manet's included, featured a skimpiness of detail that aimed for an overall aesthetic impact—what Corot called the "first impression"—rather than an exactingly precise depiction of minutiae.

  One of the most perceptive art critics, Théophile Thoré, summed up the aims of many of these rejected painters: "Instead of seeking what the connoisseurs of classic art call 'finish,' they aspire to create an effect through a striking harmony, without concern for either correct lines or meticulous detail."43 This battle—between "finishers" and "sketchers"—was ultimately one, Thoré claimed, between "conservatives and innovators, tradition and originality."44 If the conservatives held the bastion of the Institut de France, the innovators were grouping together and organizing themselves outside its walls, whether in Jean Desbrosses's studio or the Café de Bade. Those who pushed through the turnstiles of the Palais des Champs-Élysées amid peals of laughter may have little suspected it at the time, but they had seen, Thoré and many others believed, the future of painting.