by Ross King
Its small size was not, in the eyes of other critics, the only problem with Meissonier's work. The presence on the Selection Committee of Camille Corot had ensured that the Salon of 1864, unlike that of 1863, showcased a good number of landscapes, not the least of which was Corot's own dreamy river view, Memory of Mortefontaine, which was immediately purchased by the government. A number of fine landscapes were on show in Room M, including the work of a twenty-three-year-old pupil of Corot named Berthe Morisot, who was making her Salon debut with a woodland scene of sun-dappled greenery entitled Old Path at Auvers. Alas for Meissonier, the dusty, sunbaked Lombardian plain did not lend itself to a beautiful landscape. Critics seized on the apparent bleakness of the setting against which his battle unfolded. "The landscape seems to me the weakest part of the painting," a critic named Charles Clement complained in the Journal des Dibats. "It is painted a disagreeable color, harsh and meager, and strewn with infelicitous details." The critic for Les Beaux-Arts—the journal owned by the Marquis de Laqueuille, the benefactor of the Salon des Refusés—likewise found the landscape hard, dry and lacking in warm tones, while the artificiality of both the sky and land reminded another of the efforts of a painter of porcelain.12
These negative reviews detonated in the pages of the newspapers with a disheartening regularity through the months of May and June, deepening Meissonier's conviction that his painting had miscarried and giving him, after thirty years of exhibitions, the novel experience of watching one of his paintings disappoint the critics. Fortunately, the griping reviews were offset by the applause for The Campaign of France (plate 2B), which the critics judged far more favorably. In fact, Meissonier's portrait of Napoléon Bonaparte was one of the great successes of the Salon of 1864. Most critics rhapsodized over the grandeur and dignity with which Meissonier infused Napoléon as he and the doomed Grande Armée slogged their way through the snow. In offering a kind of moral lesson—courage and stoicism in the face of adversity—the painting answered the Académie's call for art to be patriotic, inspirational and heroic. Saint-Victor took the lead in a unanimous chorus of praise, poetically describing the image of Napoléon to his readers in La Presse: "His face is sublime with resigned despair. He feels that his genius is beaten but not dead. He sees his star fade in the dark sky."13
The most rapturous applause of all, though, came from Edmond About, an inexhaustible thirty-six-year-old journalist, playwright, pamphleteer and novelist whom the Westminster Review called "the literary grandson of Voltaire."14 In 1864 About added to his ever-growing tally of works a volume of art criticism in which Meissonier played the role of conquering hero. "Never, I think," he wrote, "has Meissonier been better inspired than this year; never has he attempted such great things; never has his genius taken so high a flight."15 He went on to scold those who complained about the small size of Meissonier's works, to stoutly (and almost uniquely) defend The Battle of Solferino, and to lambaste the judges for not decorating Meissonier with the Grand Medal of Honor. "Oh Frenchmen of Paris!" he lamented like a latter-day Jeremiah. "You do not deserve great artists, as you do not know how to reward them!"16
The measure of esteem that Manet had earned at the Salon des Refusés drained swiftly away as his two new works went on show at the 1864 Salon. Both canvases were roundly attacked by critics of almost every stripe, led by Théophile Gautier, whose normally charitable disposition deserted him when he found himself standing before Incident in a Bull Ring and The Dead Christ with Angels.
Manet must have entertained strong misgivings about Incident in a Bull Ring, a work that had given him much trouble. Even so, he could hardly have been prepared for such a critical mauling from Gautier, especially given the critic's enthusiasm for The Spanish Singer three years earlier. Manet may have hoped the painting's Spanish theme (which inspired a satirical journal to lampoon him as "Don Manet y Courbetos y Zurbarán de las Batignolas"17) might once again appeal to a Hispanophile like Gautier. However, Gautier could find nothing good to say about the work, denouncing it as "completely unintelligible" before describing to his readers the awkward and apparently nonsensical scene in which "a microscopic bull stands on its hind legs, astonished, in the middle of an arena spread with yellow sand."18
This "microscopic bull" was the source of much amusement to both the public and the critics alike, appearing to them a deplorably amateurish stab at conveying on canvas the recession of three-dimensional space in the bull ring—with the result that the bull, placed in the background, looked like it had shrunk. The journalist Hector de Callias, writing in L 'Artiste, mocked how the matadors seemed to be laughing at "this little bull which they could crush under the heels of their pumps," while Edmond About joked that the dead toreador laid out in the foreground looked as if he had been "killed by a horned rat."19 The painter and engraver Louis Leroy, writing in Le Charivari, a satirical journal that poured its rather sophomoric brand of scorn on hairstyles and fashions as well as art and literature, speculated that Manet had to be suffering from "an acute affliction of the retina" since "Nature could not appear this way without an aberration of the optic nerve." He went on to suggest that Manet should be placed in a special box in the Paris slaughterhouse until he learned the correct way to paint a bull.20
Manet's novel approach to linear perspective may have found such disfavor in part because Room M contained, a few feet away, a masterful example of how the impression of a receding three-dimensional space could be created. In a composition at once diabolically complex and exquisitely executed, Meissonier's The Campaign of France showed Napoléon and his generals riding diagonally across the picture plane, from left to right, in a flawless escalation of both scale and detail, leading from the soldiers at the periphery, along the or-thogonals formed by the ruts in the snow, to Napoléon on his white charger at the very center of the scene. Besides a convincing depth in the visual field, Meissonier achieved, through his flow of marching figures, one of the most satisfactory images of motion in the history of art. Next to such a master-class in perspective construction, Manet's awkward and implausible bullfight scene could hardly have been rated by the critics of the day as anything other than a dismal flop.
Worse still for Manet were the reviews accorded his second work, The Dead Christ with Angels. Gautier, once again, was appalled by the scene, calling Manet a "frightful Realist" and pointing out that his Christ was so filthy that "not even the Resurrection would cleanse him."21 This portrayal of Christ—with, to all appearances, dirty hands and a grubby beard—offended most critics. "We have never seen such audaciously bad taste," thundered the critic for the Gaiette des Étrangers, who complained how lampblack seemed to have been smeared on the face of "the most beautiful of men."22 Another journal, La Vie Parisienne, jested that the painting was actually meant to portray "the poor miner rescued from a coal pit."23
These reviews were in many ways unfair to Manet. While Christ was usually portrayed by artists as the ideal man, paintings of the Crucifixion and, even more, the Entombment often emphasized his grotesque physical sufferings and horrific death with wincing particulars of torture, disfigurement and rigor mortis. One of the most famous images of the Entombment ever painted was that done in 1507 by Raphael, whose slit-eyed, gaping-mouthed Christ makes a no less unglamorous corpse than Manet's. The problem for Manet was that he had sailed, however unintentionally, into some very choppy theological waters. As the critic for La Vie Parisienne put it, Manet's Christ seemed to have been "painted for Monsieur Renan."24
The "Monsieur Renan" in question was, in 1864, the most controversial man in France, enjoying a reputation in France as the Church's most dangerous foe since Martin Luther. Born in 1823 to a Breton fisherman, Ernest Renan was a brilliant scholar of Hebrew who had studied for the priesthood before leaving the Church because of his disenchantment with its teachings. He spent a decade working at the Imperial Library, where he honed his knowledge of ancient languages and published translations of the Book of Job and the Song of Solomon before applying in 1859 for
the chair of Hebrew and Chaldaic at the College de France (then known as the College Imperial). When the Roman Catholic Church opposed his candidacy, he was dispatched by Napoléon III, in a sort of compromise, on an archaeological expedition to the Middle East. There, in 1861, in a hut in Lebanon, he wrote The Life of Jesus, which interpreted the Bible in historical and scientific terms rather than theological ones. Crucially, Renan's Christ was a man, a mere mortal, rather than the Son of God. He appeared in The Life of Jesus as an itinerant Galilean preacher whose miracles, such as the raising of Lazarus, were tricks played on a credulous population. His supposed divinity owed itself to myths about the Resurrection spread by frenzied followers after his death (which Renan diagnosed, in his confident scientific spirit, as having been the result of a ruptured vessel in the heart). Returning to Paris with his manuscript, he assumed the vacant post at the College Imperial in 1862 and in the following year published his book—coincidentally, six weeks after the Salon des Refusés had opened. Within a few months The Life of Jesus had sold 60,000 copies, run through a dozen printings, and provoked so much outrage and indignation that Renan, at the insistence of conservative Catholics, was deprived of his academic position.
The rumpus caused by The Life of Jesus may well have motivated Manet to paint his Dead Christ with Angels, a work begun at the height of the storm. Whatever the case, a portrait of Christ painted by an artist with Manet's reputation was bound to draw fire at a time when orthodox opinion was so incensed by Renan's own depiction of Christ. Moreover, Manet's presentation of the dead Christ as less than the beau idéal, with a sooty face and grimy hands, appeared to endorse Renan's conclusion that he was a man rather than a divinity.
The most contentious passages in The Life of Jesus came near the end, in a chapter entitled "Jesus in the Tomb," where Renan speculated that the Resurrection had not actually taken place. "Had Christ's body been taken away," he asked his readers, "or did enthusiasm, always credulous, create afterwards the group of narratives by which it was sought to establish faith in the Resurrection?" Renan inclined toward the latter, concluding that "the strong imagination of Mary Magdalen played an important part in this circumstance. Divine power of love! Sacred moments in which the passion of one possessed gave to the world a resuscitated God!"25 The Resurrection was, in this view, a fabrication founded on the wishful thinking of an ex-prostitute unhinged by grief.
Manet's inclusion of the biblical verse recounting how Mary Magdalen had arrived at the tomb to see that Christ's body was missing could be taken as another approving nod at Renan's demolition of the Resurrection.26 Still, a true attempt to quash all supernatural aspects of the Bible would surely not have included the brace of winged angels that feature so conspicuously in Manet's painting. Renan put no stock, naturally, in stories about angels materializing in Christ's tomb, since for him they were simply the figments of Mary Magdalen's overheated imagination. For Manet the "two angels in white" described in the Gospel of Saint John may have mutated into the blue-winged creatures in orange and black robes—but they are angels nonetheless. Their presence suggests that, whatever some of the critics believed, his work was actually influenced more by the canvases of Tintoretto than the pages of Renan.
Manet's reputation may have dipped somewhat with these two unpopular canvases. But Gautier, for one, suspected that more would be heard from Manet, who possessed, he allowed, "the true qualities of a painter." He also recognized that, whatever his poor reputation among most critics, Manet had his share of "fanatical" admirers: "Already some satellites are circling around this new star and describing orbits of which he is the center."27
As he wrote these lines, Gautier may have been thinking of another painting in the Salon, Fantin-Latour's eight-foot-wide Homage to Delacroix, in which a ginger-bearded Manet, surrounded by friends and allies such as Baudelaire and Whistler, cut a conspicuous figure to the right of the framed portrait of Delacroix. The work was, besides a tribute to Delacroix, a celebration on canvas of prominent artists from the "Generation of 1863"—Manet, Whistler, Legros, the engraver Félix Bracquemond, and Fantin-Latour himself, all veterans of the Salon des Refusés. One by one through the early months of 1864 these artists and writers had come to Fantin-Latour's small studio in the Rue Saint-Lazare, in front of the train station, to pose for the group portrait. Yet despite the appearance of solidarity and earnest purposefulness that Fantin-Latour conveyed, those of the Generation of 1863 shown in the painting had largely left Paris by the time it was shown. Having missed the deadline for the Salon, Whistler was a no-show in Paris in 1864; instead, he submitted two works to the Royal Academy in London, receiving favorable reviews from both The Athenaeum and The Times. He had in any case more or less permanently relocated to London, to a house in Lindsey Row, Chelsea, which was crammed with his collection of blue-and-white porcelain and Japanese fans. Another painter, Alphonse Legros, had also moved to London, sharing accommodation with Whistler for a few months before marrying an Englishwoman in 1864. Baudelaire, of course, had left for Brussels and, despite his complaints about living among "the stupidest race on earth,"28 showed no sign of returning to Paris.
Manet and Fantin-Latour, then, were left to hoist the standard in 1864. If Manet's Salon had been underwhelming, Fantin-Latour was beginning to enjoy some remarkable success. Homage to Delacroix proved so popular with Salon-goers that it was bought for the very reputable sum of 2,000 francs by a printseller named Ernest Gambart, who planned to have the image engraved and then sold in his shop. His second painting, Scene from Tannhäuser, also sold for 2,000 francs, this time to Alexander Ionides, a London-based shipping merchant and art collector. Nor were these sales the last of his triumphs. Fantin-Latour also exhibited two of his flower paintings at the Royal Academy in London; these, too, were purchased by Ionides.
Manet could only dream of such commercial success, and his two paintings suffered a more forlorn fate. Reclaiming the pair of them from the Palais des Champs-Élysées in June, he proceeded to take a knife to his much-derided Incident in a Bull Ring, cutting it into several pieces. He kept two fragments—the dead toreador and the three bullfighters in the background—but destroyed the remainder, including most of the "microscopic bull." Dead Christ with Angels joined the several dozen other unsold canvases, including Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, that cluttered his studio in the Rue Guyot. Manet then vacated this studio for a few weeks in the summer of 1864. The notorious painter was taking his family to the seaside.
*There seems to have been no truth in the rumor, often repeated at the time, that Maximilian was actually the illegitimate son of the Due de Reichstadt—the so-called Napoléon II—and therefore the grandson of Napoléon Bonaparte and a cousin of Napoléon III. Charlotte, for her part, did have French blood: she was the granddaughter of King Louis-Philippe.
*This arch was duly finished, but it was demolished after 1870 and the Place du Trône was renamed the Place de la Nation.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pie in Air
BOULOGNE-SUR-MER WAS ON the English Channel, 135 miles north of Paris. A walled city of some 35,000 people, it featured a harbor bristling with masts, a wooden pier jutting into the waves, a cliff with Roman ruins, and the newly restored church of Notre-Dame, to which a miraculous image of the Virgin had brought pilgrims since the Middle Ages. The city was also famous as the site where Napoléon had made his preparations to invade Britain in 1804. On an eminence above the town a 170-foot-high pillar, the Colonne de la Grande Armée, was still topped by a statue of Napoléon. More recently, an invasion by a Bonaparte had come the other way: Louis-Napoléon had launched himself on France from this spot in his ill-fated expedition aboard the Edinburgh Castle in 1840.
Édouard Manet arrived in Boulogne in the second week of July. With him were his wife Suzanne, his godson Léon, his younger brother Gustave, a lawyer, as well as both his mother and his new mother-in-law. The extended family rented a small house in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comedie, a short walk from the harbor, and partook of the del
ights of Boulogne by purchasing a one-month subscription to the Établissement des Bains. This was a grand new set of assembly rooms, opened a year earlier, that treated its guests to heated baths, an English garden, terraces overlooking the sea, billiard tables, a lawn for croquet (a game newly imported from England) and, in the evening, musical entertainment. It was, according to one enthusiastic newspaper report, "on a more splendid scale than any establishment of the same nature."1
Seaside resorts had become popular in France over the previous dozen years.2 After the railway, which came to Boulogne in 1848, linked Paris with what had then been a series of fishing villages on the coasts of Normandy and Picardy, middle-class Parisians found themselves able to spend a week or two each summer either under parasols on the beach or submerged in the waves. The beneficial effects of the seaside had been explained in 1861 by the historian Jules Michelet in La Mer, a book that claimed seabathing, in particular the infusion of salt through the skin, was excellent for the constitution; and a journal called La Gaiette des eaux, published fortnightly, extolled the benefits of immersing oneself in water. The point was not to exercise oneself in the waves but to absorb (and even to drink) the brine. Some resorts, like the Établissement des Bains, offered indoor bathing facilities, complete with heated salt water, but more adventurous holidaymakers could brave the bathing machines. Drawn by horses and looking like privies on wheels, these contraptions conducted bathers chest-deep into the chilly waves, preserving their modesty, shielding them from the wind, and then transporting them safely back to shore.