The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  CHAPTER TEN

  Famous Victories

  ERNEST MEISSONIER HAD a passion, amounting almost to a mania, for sketching and drawing. His rare moments away from his easel were spent doodling on scraps of paper. As a young man he scribbled pencil drawings as he sat biding his time in the anterooms of book publishers; and after his election to the Institut de France he sketched his colleagues as they sat snoozing beside him at meetings. His mania was so pronounced that his handiwork sometimes spilled over from his paper onto anything within reach of his pencil or brush. His friend Philippe Burty, a frequent guest at the Grande Maison, observed how Meissonier "sometimes amused himself by tracing large, rather audacious drawings on the walls of the stairway and corridors leading to his studio."1 Two of these capricious sketches were comical versions of Polichinelle, the anarchic figure from the Italian commedia dell'arte that he had also created—while in the grip of a similar spasm of doodling—on the door of a friend, the courtesan Madame Sabatier.

  Meissonier's idle sketches were not limited to doors or stairwells. Another friend, Charles Yriartre, art critic for Le Figaro, passing through Poissy on his way to pay his respects at the Grande Maison, was once surprised by the sight of a life-size Napoleonic soldier sketched in charcoal on a newly whitewashed wall beside the Seine. "The perfect anatomical accuracy and boldness of the execution, the style of the costume as well as something indescribable," concluded Yriarte, "revealed the master as a great decorator."2 Even Meissonier's graffiti were masterpieces of detail and execution.

  Yriarte attributed this curious obsession to Meissonier's restless inability to put down his pencil or brush and stop working. Another friend, the Russian painter Vassílí Verestchagín, claimed—stretching the facts only slightly—that Meissonier "never knew any rest or holiday" and "worked unceasingly all the 365 days of the year."3 This dedication to his work inevitably meant that Meissonier led an increasingly retired life as he shut himself away in his studio in Poissy. His life at the Grande Maison was peaceable, disciplined and salubrious. An early riser, he would breakfast alone with a book at his elbow: heavyweight literature such as leather-bound editions of Shakespeare, Corneille, Moliere and Homer. Having finished eating, he would speak to the groom and, at six thirty, rouse his nineteen-year-old son Charles from his bed for a ride on horseback along the riverbank or into the Forest of Saint-Germain.

  Polichinelle (Ernest Meissonier

  Meissonier was a great lover and tireless painter of horses: there was in a horse, he said, "enough to study all one's life."4 Of the eight horses in his stable, his two favorites were a gray named Bachelier and a mare, Lady Coning-ham, which had been his mount at the Battle of Solferino. Also present for these early-morning excursions through the countryside were Meissonier's greyhounds, several of which had been given to him by his friend Alexandre Dumas fils.5So devoted was Meissonier to these dogs that he included greyhounds on the coat of arms he painted onto the doors of his fleet of expensive carriages. These elegant vehicles were sometimes used by Meissonier to ferry his family on fifty-mile excursions through the countryside to Auvers-sur-Oise, a town north of Paris to which his friend Daubigny had recently moved.

  Besides horses, greyhounds and fashionable carriages, Meissonier also had a passion for boats. A flotilla of skiffs, cutters and yachts was moored on his stretch of the riverfront; two of them, the Charles and the Therese, were named for his children. Dressed in a pilot coat and sou'wester, he often took them onto the river, with his children and their friends serving as his crewmates. The Seine at Poissy was more peaceful than at Asnières or Argenteuil, disturbed only by anglers in their skiffs or the occasional barge making its way upstream toward Paris. Meissonier would scud along the channels between the islands in the river, downstream past the Île-de-Villennes or upstream to where reflections of the twelfth-century bridge and a riverside inn, L'Esturgeon, shimmered in the water. The voyage finished, Meissonier would strike the sail and carry the rigging back to the house, looking, according to a friend, like an "Icelandic fisherman."6 He then sometimes started painting in his studio while still wearing his pilot coat.

  Following his disheartening experiences on the painting jury, Meissonier was more inclined than ever to forgo the bright lights of Paris in favor of his rural idyll in Poissy. The artistic controversies that culminated in the institution of the Salon des Refusés had marked a low point in his brilliant career. The failed campaign against Nieuwerkerke; the boycott of the Salon that prevented him from showcasing his new artistic direction; the subsequent eclipse of this boycott by the publicity surrounding the announcement of the Salon des Refusés; the contentious decisions of the jury of which he had been a member—all represented frustrating setbacks in a year he had hoped would witness the further exaltation of his reputation.

  These experiences had not dented Meissonier's aspirations to aesthetic grandeur, however, and he was still determined to fulfill his pledge to the Académie des Beaux-Arts to produce what he called "works perhaps more worthy of its attention." To that end, by June 1863 a new painting was on his easel. Like The Campaign of France, it would be an epic scene from the life of Napoléon, a canvas—grand in manner and monumental in subject—that he hoped would become his masterpiece. It would feature all his familiar hallmarks, including the same scrupulous enthusiasm for history and obsessive attention to detail. It would also be by far the largest he had ever attempted. His biggest painting so far, The Campaign of France, had measured a modest two and a half feet wide. Attempting to cast off his reputation for miniatures, he envisaged a canvas eight feet wide by four and a half feet high. These dimensions may have paled beside the largest paintings of the century, such as Gérôme's colossal Age of Augustus, with its thirty-three-foot span. But they marked an eye-catching escalation for the man Gautier once called the "painter of Lilliput."

  The new painting in question was to be entitled 1807: Friedland. Instead of showing Napoléon on the brink of defeat, as in The Campaign of France, Meissonier chose a different moment in French fortunes—the aftermath of a battle that Adolphe Thiers had called "a splendid victory."7 The Battle of Friedland had been fought in eastern Prussia on June 14, 1807. Eighteen months earlier, Napoléon and the Grande Armée had defeated a combined force of Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz; less than a year later, in October 1806, the Prussians had been routed at Jena. The victorious Grande Armée then marched eastward through the ensuing winter, capturing Prussian fortresses and bent on subduing Russia, France's last enemy on the Continent. Meeting a force of 60,000 Russians at the village of Friedland, on the River Alle, Napoléon won a victory so stunningly swift and decisive that Czar Alexander I had no option but to sue for peace. In an eighteen-month military expedition even more impressive, Thiers claimed, than the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Napoléon had made himself the master of an entire Continent. "Never had greater luster surrounded the person and the name of Napoléon," wrote Thiers, for whom—as for Meissonier—Friedland marked the Empire's glittering summit.8

  Meissonier was no stranger to the horrors of warfare. He had been in the thick of the carnage in the June Days and at Solferino, where conquest was achieved, he wrote, in a grim chaos of "broken weapons, shattered limbs, pools of blood."9 As a student of history, he knew the Battle of Friedland had been equally horrific, with the French gun crews suffering massive casualties (Delacroix's older brother among them) before utterly destroying the Russian cavalry. But just as The Battle of Solferino had soft-pedaled the violence of warfare, so too would Friedland downplay the terrible gore of Napoléon's great victory. Meissonier planned to depict a happier aftermath: the moment when Napoléon's cavalry saluted him, as he sat astride his white charger on the morning after the battle, with cries of " Vive l'Empereur!'10

  The painting was therefore to be a patriotic scene celebrating both the genius of Napoléon and the supremacy of the French military. It would give Meissonier plenty of opportunities to paint, over and over again, what had become his two favorite
subjects: soldiers and horses. The first studies for the work were made as early as the summer of 1863. The Battle of Friedland had taken place in the middle of June, and so precise was Meissonier that he never worked on plein-air studies except during the same season, and preferably the same month, that his painting was set—"the light and shadows," he once told a friend, "could not otherwise be the same."11 And so when they were not escorting him on early-morning gallops through the countryside near Poissy, his beloved horses Bachelier and Lady Coningham were serving him as models for the brave warhorses of the Grande Armée.

  Meissonier was not alone in his passion for horses: they were one of the great enthusiasms of the age. The annual equestrian competition at the Palais des Champs-Élysées, which featured leaping and pirouetting stallions, rivaled the Salon for popularity. Horse racing was equally in demand. The French Oaks, the Prix de l'Empereur and the Poule d'Essai des Poulains (the French 2,000 Guineas) were highlights of both the social and sporting calendars. In 1857 a new racecourse, the Hippodrome de Longchamp, opened on a large plain west of the Bois de Boulogne, with grandstands for 100,000 racegoers. The course was administered by Le Jockey-Club, whose wealthy members, when not gambling, carousing and setting new trends in men's fashion, oversaw the improvement of French bloodlines. By 1863 several successful new types of horse, including the Anglo-Arab, had been bred, and legends of the track born, such as Mademoiselle de Chantilly, a filly who in 1858 crossed the Channel to win the City and Suburban Handicap at Epsom.

  Two weeks after the Salon des Refusés opened, on May 31, a Sunday, les turfistes enjoyed a new attraction when the Grand Prix de Paris, a race for three-year-old colts and fillies, was run for the first time. Sponsored by five rail companies, it was held at Longchamp with a purse of 100,000 francs. The favorite, a French colt named Le Toucques, was cheered on by, among others, Emperor Napoléon. A victory over the English contender, The Ranger, would see voters swept to the ballot boxes, the Emperor hoped, on a surge of patriotism—for May 31 was also the first day of the 1863 election. Alas for Louis-Napoléon, The Ranger spoiled the party, taking victory by a length. Worse still, good news had not arrived from Mexico on time for polling day, since word of the French victory at Puebla, where the Juaristas had finally been defeated on May 7, did not reach Paris until ten days after the election.

  At least the outcome of the Grand Prix de Paris, unlike that of the election, had not been decided in advance. Unsurprisingly, the Emperor won a handy majority, receiving seventy-three percent of the more than 5 million votes, with his candidates claiming 250 of 282 seats in the Legislative Assembly. Of course, these elections had not exactly been free and fair. They featured vandalized posters, vote-rigging, stuffed ballot boxes, and legal intimidation and physical threats against opposition candidates; and even under universal manhood suffrage only a quarter of the French population had the right to vote.12 Yet despite his seemingly overwhelming victory, the 1863 election left the Emperor with a good deal to ponder. Not one of his candidates had been returned in Paris, where almost two thirds of the electorate had rejected his rule: 150,000 people voted against his government compared to only 82,000 in favor. Republicans claimed eight of the nine Parisian seats in the Legislative Assembly. Among their number was Adolphe Thiers, who, despite being the torchbearer for Napoléon—Karl Marx derided him as Napoléon's "historical shoeblack"13—was one of Louis-Napoléon's fiercest and most articulate critics.

  The Emperor responded to this debacle with a number of measures designed to appease the disgruntled Parisians. He dismissed the Comte de Persigny, his pompous and inept Minister of the Interior, hitherto his most faithful and fanatical supporter, and replaced him with a sixty-two-year-old lawyer named Paul Boudet. He also brought into his cabinet a number of moderate reformers, such as the respected historian Jean-Victor Duruy, a well-known republican. Then, in keeping with his dictum that a sovereign's first duty was to "amuse his subjects of all ranks," he promulgated a number of decrees regarding the arts. The first, announced on June 22, was that in 1867 Paris would host a Universal Exposition, a six-month-long festival of arts and industry. Two days later, Le Moniteur universel published a number of announcements about the Salon, the first of which stated that henceforth it would be held annually instead of biennially. Furthermore, evidently having decided that his decree to "let the public judge" had been a success, the Emperor declared that in 1864 the Salon des Refusés would be repeated. Lastly, the paper reported that the Emperor had promoted the Comte de Nieuwerkerke to the post of Superintendent of Fine Arts. Whereupon, suffering from arthritis, neuralgia and hemorrhoids, Louis-Napoléon departed with his mistress, Marguerite Bellanger, for the reviving mineral baths of Vichy.

  The office of Superintendent of Fine Arts had been specially created for Nieuwerkerke at the behest of his mistress, Princess Mathilde. Commanding a considerable annual salary of 60,000 francs, this post invested Nieuwerkerke with even more sweeping powers over the government's fine arts policy. With the blessing of the Emperor, he immediately set about making further reforms to the Salon. The first was unveiled six weeks later, at the beginning of August, while Louis-Napoléon was still in Vichy. Dramatically scrapping the terms of his 1857 regulations, which had turned the Selection Committee over to the members of the Académie, Nieuwerkerke announced that, beginning in 1864, three quarters of the seats on the jury would be elected by artists, with the remainder appointed by the government—which meant, in effect, by Nieuwerkerke himself.

  On the face of it, this reform looked remarkably progressive, since it would give the artists the right to choose who sat in judgment over their work. No longer would arch-conservatives like François Picot or "the insipid Signol," or any of the Académie's other hidebound exponents of "mongrel Raphaelism," automatically qualify for seats on the Selection Committee. Such a reform would never have been implemented had not the public and the critics, as well as the Emperor himself, recognized the blinkered intransigence at work in the jury's decisions.

  Yet Nieuwerkerke, a conservative for whom "democrat" was a term of abuse, did not wish to see a complete liberalization of the Selection Committee. Indeed, nothing could have been more distasteful to him. Crucially, therefore, the jury would not be elected by universal suffrage; the announcement in Le Moniteur universel stressed that those entitled to cast their votes would be limited to "the painters who had been awarded medals."14 This important qualification meant that the vast majority of French artists—including all but a handful of those who had exhibited in the Salon des Refusés—would not actually have a vote. The Selection Committee would be elected, rather, by an elite of artists who had been rewarded for their efforts by previous Selection Committees—a group that the progressive critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary denounced as "an intolerant and jealous aristocracy."15 There was therefore no guarantee that the jury for 1864 would be any less narrow-minded than that for 1863. In the Selection Committee no less than in the elections for the Legislative Assembly, the appearance of democratic fair play was belied by strategic rigging of the votes.

  Nieuwerkerke was not finished with his reforms, however. He next turned his attentions to the École des Beaux-Arts and, three months later, in November, issued in the name of the Emperor a decree that drastically reorganized its teaching and administration.16 Hitherto the École, though officially under the government's jurisdiction, was for all intents and purposes run by the Académie, whose members appointed its faculty (usually themselves) and adjudicated prizes such as the Prix de Rome, which always went to the students who best conformed to their own artistic ideals. The decree of November 13 changed all of that, as Nieuwerkerke took the administration of the École back into the hands of the government through the creation of a supervisory body whose members would be appointed by the government. More deleterious to the prestige of the Académie than the August decree, this reform effectively wiped out the virtually monopolistic control its members had exerted over the training and education of French artists. The blow
was especially devastating coming as it did so soon after the Académie had seen its authority challenged by the inauguration of the Salon des Refusés. A small consolation for the members of the Académie was that one of their own, the history painter Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, was named Director of the École.

  Yet another blow was to come. Hitherto painting had not formed part of the school's curriculum, with students receiving lessons in drawing only. This lack of practical instruction in how to paint was the result of a bias against color on the part of the Neoclassicists in the Académie: Ingres had once famously declared that thirty years was needed to learn to draw but only three days to learn to paint. Nieuwerkerke, however, decided that the time had come for color to enter the École, and so in November he appointed three artists to instruct students in painting techniques: Gérôme, Cabanel and a fifty-two-year-old former student of François Picot and winner of the Prix de Rome named Isidore Pils.17 Cabanel's appointment capped what had been, for him, a remarkable year. Not only had he scored a triumph with The Birth of Venus, but at the end of the summer he had been elected to fill the chair in the Institut made vacant by the death earlier in the year of Horace Vernet, the battle painter.

  Before the summer of 1863 was out, another chair in the Institut had suddenly become vacant. The health of Delacroix had continued to decline throughout the spring and into the summer. After falling ill at the end of May while at his small house in Champrosay, near Fontainebleau, the painter had been taken back to his home in Paris, where, knowing the end was nigh, he wrote his will and began sharing out his possessions. By the middle of July he was spitting blood, and a month later, on August 13, he passed away at the age of sixty-five. Even at the end, he had been filled with loathing for the members of the Académie with whom he had locked horns on so many occasions. A few days before his death one of his fellow members arrived at his house to inquire about his health. "Haven't these people caused me enough trouble," Delacroix complained, "haven't they insulted me enough, haven't they made me suffer enough?"18