by Ross King
Manet had sent two works to the Salon of 1864. Although Olympia had been completed as many as six months earlier, this latest painting of Victorine Meurent was not among them. The public ridicule to which Music in the Tuileries and Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe had been treated made him reluctant to open himself to further obloquy with what he must have realized was a daring work. Not knowing the composition of the Selection Committee at the time of the deadline for submissions meant, moreover, that he had cause to fear rejection from the main Salon and exile to the Salon des Refusés—a state of affairs he was unwilling to suffer for a second year in a row. Olympia therefore stayed in his studio while two other works were shipped to the Palais des Champs-Élysées.
The first of Manet's submissions was Incident in a Bull Ring, which he had managed to complete in spite of difficulties with the scene's perspective. The second, begun the previous November and painted on a canvas almost six feet high by five feet wide, was a biblical episode entitled The Dead Christ with Angels. Manet had painted a few religious scenes in his career, though these were done not out of any special feelings of piety or devotion so much as from a love of the works of Italian Renaissance artists like Titian and Tintoretto. Manet had a particular affection for Tintoretto, a sixteenth-century Venetian, sometimes known as II Furioso, who was renowned for his fa presto ("work quickly") style of painting in which he applied his pigments with brush-popping vehemence. Tintoretto's Self-Portrait, which featured the mournful face of the gray-bearded, baggy-eyed artist hovering against a pitch-dark background, was one of Manet's favorite paintings. He made a copy of the work in the Louvre and thereafter, as if paying court to a wise old sage, never failed to seek out the original on his visits to the museum.
Édouard Manet (Edgar Degas)
Tintoretto was predominantly a religious artist who, among his many scenes from the New Testament, depicted several of the dead Christ. Likewise, Manet's Dead Christ with Angels depicts precisely what its title describes—the figure of the dead Christ slumped between two winged, female figures. One of the angels has lifted the muscular, half-naked body of the crucified Christ into a sitting position, while the other weeps as in a Lamentation or a Pietà. Still, despite its allusions to Tintoretto and other Renaissance painters, Manet's work included touches that were unconventional to the point of eccentricity: one of his angels sported orange robes and unfolded a pair of blue wings, while—strangest of all—Christ's loincloth was pink.*
The Dead Christ with Angels was idiosyncratic for reasons beyond its unique choices in color. For some reason Manet placed the wound from the spear on Christ's left side rather than, as the Scriptures record, his right. Furthermore, an inscription in the foreground referred viewers to the verse in the Gospel of Saint John that recounts how the grief-stricken Mary Magdalen, having told the disciples that Christ's body is missing, returns to the tomb to see "two angels in white sitting where the body of Christ had lain." Yet Manet's work, with its curious disjunction between the text and the painting, cannot be taken for a straightforward presentation of the Resurrection, since the body of Christ, slumped lifelessly on the shroud, has neither gone missing from the tomb nor been resurrected. Was Manet simply confusing a Lamentation scene with a Resurrection? Or was he making a more abstruse and controversial point about religion and Christianity? The jurors would evidently have much to ponder.
Not surprisingly, the results of the judging in 1864 were radically different from those announced a year earlier. The percentage of refuse's fell dramatically from sixty percent to only thirty, meaning that seven works out of every ten were accepted. Many of the painters, such as Antoine Chintreuil, were as conspicuous by their acceptance in 1864 as they had been by their rejection the year before. In fact, one of Chintreuil's paintings admitted to the Salon, a landscape called The Ruins: Sunset, was even purchased by the government, a clear indication that Nieuwerkerke and the Emperor were attempting to make amends for the antics of the jurors in 1863.
The many painters hearing good news in 1864 included Fantin-Latour. Both of his works, including Homage to Delacroix, were accepted by the jury. Whistler, however, carelessly missed the deadline for submitting work to the Palais des Champs-Élysées. As for Manet, he saw both of his offerings approved. Evidently the jury had been undaunted by either the strange and difficult perspective of Incident in a Bull Ring or the obscure nature of the scene played out in The Dead Christ with Angels. When the Salon of 1864 opened on the first of May, his works were therefore displayed in Room M of the Palais des Champs-Élysées, together with the two paintings by Ernest Meissonier.
*The "boorishly intolerant" Saint-Victor was fit for service since he had wisely forgone a second voyage in Nadar's balloon, launched several weeks after the first one. This time, following a seventeen-hour flight, the vehicle had crash-landed near Hanover, resulting in two broken legs for Nadar and serious injuries for his wife Ernestine and a number of other passengers.
*Manet would later retouch this pink loincloth, turning it white.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Room M
FOR THE ARTISTS of Paris, the most important date in the social calendar always fell a day or two before the Salon opened to the public. Le jour du Vernissage, or Varnishing Day, saw hundreds of painters descend on the Palais des Champs-Élysées to put the finishing touches on their works, filling the exhibition hall with the scraping of ladders and the penetrating stink of varnishes, turpentine and drying oils. Over the years, however, this technical exercise had become a social occasion when the exhibiting painters held court beneath their works with their wives and friends in attendance, together with crinoline-clad members of the beau monde, all gathered both to preview the paintings and witness a sort of fashion show. The event marked the first time the artists had seen their works in almost six weeks. It also marked the first time they were allowed to see where their paintings had been hung—and what last-minute touches with the paintbrush might improve their appearance.
Varnishing Day in 1864 brought into the Palais des Champs-Élysées, besides the usual congregation of painters and their friends, a trio of distinguished visitors. Emperor Napoléon arrived for a tour with his wife Eugénie and the Prince Imperial, his eight-year-old son Eugène-Louis-Jean-Joseph, known as Loulou. An English journalist among the entourage was unimpressed by the appearance of the Emperor, who had celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday a week earlier. The dandyish figure who cut a dash through London society in the 1830s had metamorphosed, he observed, into a "rotund, easy-looking little man who strolled about the Palais des Champs-Élysées with both hands, and his stick along with them, thrust into the side pockets of his overcoat."1
The Emperor had both state and personal matters on his mind in the spring of 1864. Not only had his mistress Marguerite Bellanger given birth two months earlier to a child who she claimed was his son, but his latest inamorata, twenty-one-year-old Valentine Haussmann (daughter of Baron Georges Haussmann, the man responsible for Paris's grand new boulevards), had also become pregnant.2 Not surprisingly, Louis-Napoléon's relations with his wife were strained by these latest affairs. The Empress had never reconciled herself to his serial adultery: "I have such a disgust for life," she once wrote to her sister after learning of yet another of his infidelities.3 She had fallen ill in 1863 after learning about Marguerite Bellanger, canceling many of her public engagements and dyeing her copper-colored hair black as if in mourning—a change that was, one newspaper reported, "anything but becoming."4
More than a decade after her marriage, the Empress was still deeply unpopular with many Parisians, due mainly to her supposedly unfettered extravagance. She was rumored to sprinkle her hair each morning with 200 francs' worth of gold dust, while each pair of her underpants was said to cost 1,000 francs—the entire annual wage of the average construction worker. These stories may have been exaggerated, but entire rooms in the Tuileries were devoted to her collection of hats, shoes, gowns and furs; the latter included the skins of fourteen silver foxes
and several chinchilla-lined silk bodices. And, as if determined to taunt fate, Eugénie had recently become obsessed with Marie-Antoinette, decorating her apartments in the Tuileries with furniture and other articles once owned by the late queen, a portrait of whom was suspended above her bed.
Louis-Napoléon had greater worries, however, than his wife and his mistresses. His Mexican adventure, following various mischances, was reaching a critical stage. After his troops defeated Benito Juárez the previous May, he had set about establishing a pro-French, pro-Catholic monarchy in Mexico. Specifically, he was planning to install on the Mexican throne Maximilian von Habsburg, the Archduke of Austria and the younger brother of the Emperor Franz Joseph.* The thirty-one-year-old Maximilian had required a good deal of persuasion before agreeing to the plan. With his wife Charlotte, the daughter of Leopold I, King of the Belgians, he had been enjoying a quiet life at the Castello di Miramare, the beautiful seaside mansion near Trieste where his days were spent indulging his passion for botany. Mexican monarchists had approached him as early as 1859, but he declined their offer and promptly departed on a plant-collecting expedition to the jungles of Brazil. Four years later, Emperor Napoléon had come calling. In October 1863, after much wavering, Maximilian agreed to accept the throne, only to suffer an attack of nerves and reject the offer five months later. Much diplomacy on the part of Louis-Napoléon, including a ball in Maximilian's honour at the Tuileries, convinced the reluctant Archduke, once again, to assent to the scheme. On April 14 he and Charlotte, a beautiful green-eyed brunette, had finally bid farewell to their beloved Castello di Miramare and set sail for Mexico. Ominously, instead of reading books on Mexican affairs, Maximilian spent the voyage designing uniforms and medals for his army and composing a manual of court etiquette that stipulated, among other things, which waltzes and polkas would be played at his balls. His ship, the Novara, was due to arrive in Veracruz at the end of May.
The outcome of this Mexican enterprise was foremost in the Emperor's thoughts at the end of April. His plan to crown Maximilian could be jeopardized not only by Juárez and his fighters but also by the Americans, who viewed the French intervention in Mexico as a breach of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which stated that the whole of the Americas should be free from European interference. Fortunately for Louis-Napoléon, the American Civil War, then entering its fourth year, had turned into the longest and bloodiest war fought by any major power since 1815, keeping American troops preoccupied north of the Rio Grande. The war seemed destined to continue as the summer of 1864 approached, with the Confederates in a deadly struggle against the Union. Although officially neutral, the Emperor had been privately cheered a year earlier when the Army of Northern Virginia, led by the seemingly invincible Robert E. Lee, inflicted a blow to the North at the Battle of Chancellorsville. In further good news, a Confederate privateer named the C.S.S. Alabama had been wreaking havoc with Union shipping, capturing or destroying merchantmen in waters ranging from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico to the East Indies.
All appeared to be unfolding according to the Emperor's plan. Even so, he may have learned from his friend Lord Malmesbury the portentous words of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian patriot who in April 1864 was being feted on his visit to London. At a dinner for Garibaldi in the London home of the Earl of Clanricarde, someone speculated that the career of Napoléon III had been even more successful than that of Napoléon I, to which, Malmesbury claimed, Garibaldi retorted: "We must wait for the end of the story."5
* * *
The Emperor was undoubtedly brought to Room M on Varnishing Day in 1864. Altogether, seven works in this room alone had either been commissioned by his government or would be purchased at his command after their appearance at the Salon. And he would have been eager to see one of his commissioned works in particular. Vain about his appearance, Louis-Napoléon had posed over the years for various busts and oil portraits. Most recently he had requested that Alexandre Cabanel execute his likeness, in part to erase from public memory the shifty-looking portrait by Hippolyte Flandrin shown at the Salon of 1863—a work the Emperor despised so much that he had tried to cancel the commission. He must therefore have been anxious to see his portrayal in Meissonier's The Battle of Solferino, for which both he and his horse Buckingham had posed several years earlier.
Though Meissonier was, along with Cabanel, one of the few artists whose name the Emperor would have recognized, Louis-Napoléon's opinion of the Solferino painting went unrecorded. The small size of the work—the Emperor, seated on Buckingham, was a mere two inches high—may well have failed to gratify the vainglorious instincts of a man who at that moment was making plans for an "Arc de Napoléon III," an awe-inspiring monument to be erected near the Place du Trône on the southeast edge of Paris. This arch was to feature twelve marble columns, larger-than-life bronze statues of warriors, and an enormous archway inscribed "To the Emperor Napoléon III, To the Armies of the Crimea, of Italy, of China, Cochin-China and Algeria, 1852-1862."*
The Empress Eugénie generally showed even less interest in art than did her husband. Manet's Incident in a Bull Ring may have caught her attention in Room M, though, since she was a great aficionado of her national sport. She had even attempted to introduce bullfighting into France, inviting a number of famous Spanish picadors to Versailles, the previous Christmas, to participate in a bizarre battle between bulls and boars—and thereby giving her enemies the chance to paint her as a pitiless degenerate.6 No evidence confirms that she paid any attention to Manet's depiction of a bullfight, though her critics could have argued that the canvas's dead matador was a sight guaranteed to make her swoon with ecstasy.
With Varnishing Day over, the rest of Paris was permitted into the Salon. The first of May 1864 was a Sunday, when admission was free, and so the crowds pushing through the turnstiles were even larger than usual for an opening day. Though the previous year's favorite, Cabanel, was not exhibiting in 1864, plenty of other painters attracted admiring huddles. Gérôme scored another success with an Oriental scene, Dance of the Almeh, a small painting of a belly dancer before which, as Gautier observed in his favorable review of the work, "there was always a crowd."7 Another popular Oriental scene came from the brush of a newcomer, a twenty-eight-year-old Dutch painter named Laurens Tadema (later to earn fame as Lawrence Alma-Tadema), whose Pastimes in Ancient Egypt, inspired by a wall painting in the British Museum, portrayed a group of ancient Egyptians amusing themselves with music and dance in an exotic-looking interior. Tadema's success with Salon-goers would be followed by a gold medal at the awards ceremony six weeks later—a huge honor for such a young artist.
But Room M was the main attraction in 1864. It included paintings by Jean-François Millet as well as one of the most arresting scenes in the entire exhibition, Oedipus and the Sphinx by Gustave Moreau, a thirty-eight-year-old former student of François Picot. Having taken some three years and thirty studies to complete, Oedipus and the Sphinx drew rave reviews from major critics such as Gautier, Saint-Victor and Maxime du Camp, all of whom heralded Moreau as a force to be reckoned with. "We welcome this new name," wrote a critic for Le Temps, "which represents unflagging effort and work, devotion to the Old Masters, and the knowledge and application of sound principles and traditions."8 But most Salon-goers had flocked to Room M to see, for the first time in three years, the two new paintings by Meissonier.
The year 1864 marked Meissonier's thirtieth anniversary at the Salon: he had shown work at seventeen Salons since his debut with A Visit to the Burgomaster in 1834. Yet he had not been looking forward to this new Salon with any special enthusiasm. Ever the perfectionist, he was suffering from self-doubts over The Battle of Solferino. Four years of hard work on this important commission had still, he feared, failed to capture the Emperor at his moment of glory. "It is really grievous for me, after so many years of work and effort," he wrote a few weeks before the Salon was opened, "at the moment when I thought I could count on what I had learned, to acknowledge that I have found m
yself powerless to succeed, as well as I could have wished, at the first thing that His Majesty asked of me."9
Meissonier did not specify precisely how The Battle of Solferino had failed, but critics also had their doubts about the painting. Many questioned its small size, which seemed inappropriate, even somewhat ludicrous, for a battle scene. A familiar sight at Salons, battle paintings were almost always sprawling panoramas that covered half a wall and plunged the viewer into the thick of the action. Solferino certainly seemed to call for such treatment. The largest battle fought in Europe for almost fifty years, it had featured a front fifteen miles long, a quarter of a million soldiers, and as many as 40,000 casualties. In 1861, an artist named Adolphe Yvon tried to do justice to the battle with a painting that consumed more than 500 square feet of canvas and featured a fully life-size Napoléon III directing the action on a battlefield almost thirty feet across. Meissonier's painting was, by contrast, a dainty thirty inches wide. Paul de Saint-Victor protested at such an extreme economy of scale: "One doesn't use a microscope to paint three nations fighting at close quarters, as though it were a matter of observing amoebae battling each other in a drop of water."10 Likewise, the critic for Le Figaro joked that it looked as if the French had gone to war against Lilliput, and a writer in Le Nain Jaune claimed to be reminded of the illustration on a box of chocolates.11