The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  The seaside was popular with painters as well as Parisian holidaymakers. Inspired by the example of English artists like J. M. W Turner, a painter of Normandy seascapes by the early 1830s, many artists had arrived with their canvases and easels a good decade before the railway. In Honfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, a group of artists had begun congregating at the Auberge Saint-Simeon, an old farmhouse whose interior walls were scrawled with chalk-drawn caricatures by visiting painters; among those who came there to work were landscapists such as Daubigny and Corot. Twenty miles up the coast, at Étretat in Normandy, a hotel known as the Rendez-Vous des Artistes had attracted the custom of Delacroix and numerous other painters. "Parisian painters came to ask the beautiful cliffs of Étretat for inspiration," a writer named Morlent had observed in 1853, noting how their canvases never failed to find buyers, further spreading the fame of both artists and resorts alike.3

  Like so many painters before him, Manet had traveled to Normandy for something more than dips in the ocean or games of croquet. He had gone to the seaside armed with an easel as early as 1853, when Thomas Couture arranged a walking and painting tour of the Normandy coast for his students. Eleven years later, he raised his easel beside the harbor and, though he had rarely worked en plein air, proceeded to paint a number of canvases during the spell of fine, dry weather. After the failure of his works at the Salon, he was determined to take inspiration not from Old Masters in the Louvre so much as from—as both Baudelaire and Couture had been exhorting—the everyday life that surrounded him.

  To that end, even before the Salon of 1864 closed its doors Manet had started a painting based on a number of plein air sketches of "modern life." On June 5, a Sunday, he had joined the more than 100,000 Parisians who made their way to the Hippodrome de Longchamp for the second running of the Grand Prix de Paris. "All Paris went out to see it and made a splendid show," the correspondent for The Times reported breathlessly at the sight of so many Parisians in resplendent attire streaming through the Bois de Boulogne in their stylish carriages. "Surely in no out-of-door spectacle in the world could such a show present itself."4 Huge excitement had accompanied the race because Blair Athol, winner of the 1864 Epsom Derby in a record time, had come to challenge the local favorite, Vermouth, a bay with three white legs. Despite arriving in Paris only the evening before, Blair Athol was the favorite with the bookmakers, who chalked the latest odds—2 to 1 at post time—on blackboards set up around the Hippodrome. But Vermouth led from the start and never relinquished his lead, defeating the English champion by two full lengths. "The roar of huzzas rent the air," wrote the correspondent for The Times, who noted how Emperor Napoléon—never one to miss a grand occasion such as this—acknowledged the glorious victory with a bow from his private box. After endless cries of "C'est magnifique!" and "Vive I'EmpereurF' as well as endless bottles of champagne, the ecstatic crowd wobbled home, clogging the Champs-Élysées with six lanes of fashionable broughams, barouches, spiders and tandems.

  Manet had made pencil sketches of the scene at Longchamp that he then turned into a watercolor and, sometime over the next few weeks, an oil painting called The Races at Longchamp (plate 6A).5 Engravings of horse races featured in the pages of journals such as La Chronique du turf and Le Sportsman, but Manet added a new and striking aspect to the popular genre by showing the horses galloping straight at the viewer. As an action scene with a dramatic perspective, it was a bold composition for someone who had just failed so visibly with Incident in a Bull Ring. But the atmospheric perspective through which the background of hills and trees was devised, as well as the vanishing point created by the racetrack's guardrail, both provided the visual depth so notably lacking in the bullfight scene.

  The composition was bold for another reason as well. If The Races at Longchamp was accepted for the next Salon, it would hang in the same room as whatever Meissonier chose to display. Meissonier's reputation as a painter of horses was, of course, without parallel. The Battle of Solferino may not have endeared itself to many critics, but no one could fault Meissonier's depiction of equine anatomy. As Théophile Gautier wrote, with this one work all previous painters of horses—Cuyp, Wouwermans, Horace Vernet—were "overcome in a single blow."6The Campaign of France had simply aggrandized this reputation.

  Of course, Manet's painting was very different from anything Meissonier would have done. Manet was not interested in recording for posterity the duel between Vermouth and Blair Athol, or even showing what the individual horses looked like. They were mere dabs of paint in the background—a few flying forelegs and a cloud of dust rather than the elegant, lifelike beasts at which Meissonier excelled. Manet was actually more interested in the racegoers than the racehorses, and accordingly he filled the left half of his canvas with members of the beau monde in modern dress—a crowd of Longchamp spectators with their top hats, crinolines and parasols. He even included a pair of coachmen in blue livery seated atop a landau with its hood folded back to reveal its passengers, a pair of ladies enjoying the spectacle from under their blue parasols. The result was a frieze of modern life not unlike Music in the Tuileries.

  Lithograph of The Races at Longchamp (Édouard Manet)

  If The Races at Longchamp was stimulated in part by engravings in journals like Le Sportsman, a second of Manet's paintings from the summer of 1864 owed even more to the popular press. For the past few years a Confederate privateer, the C.S.S. Alabama, had been roaming the seas in search of Union merchant ships. All told, sixty-eight of these vessels had been sent to a watery doom, with a loss of six million dollars in Union trade revenues. By the spring of 1864, the Alabama's deadly hunt had brought it into the waters of the English Channel. Then in June, a short time before Manet departed for Boulogne, the legendary privateer appeared in the French port of Cherbourg.

  Through the spring of 1864, the Civil War had remained a grim battle of attrition. At the beginning of May, the Union Général Ulysses S. Grant started his summer campaign by moving his 120,000-strong Army of the Potomac into central Virginia, where it engaged Robert E. Lee's numerically inferior forces in the Wilderness, a harsh terrain where more than 17,000 Union casualties were sustained. A few days later and ten miles to the southeast, in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Lee again checked the Union advance, inflicting almost 20,000 casualties on the Army of the Potomac.

  Meanwhile the war was being fought on other fronts. Gideon Welles, the U.S. Navy Secretary, had eight warships scouring the oceans for the Alabama, whose remarkable exploits had been splashed across the pages of British, French and American newspapers. On June 11, while patrolling the English Channel, one of these vessels, a sloop of war named the U.S.S. Kearsarge, received reports that a Confederate ship, soon confirmed to be the Alabama, had arrived in Cherbourg for the recoppering of its hull and the repairing of its boilers. Two days later, the Kearsarge, commanded by John Winslow, was sighted several miles off the coast of Cherbourg, where it waited for the Alabama to weigh anchor and enter the Channel. Battle was finally engaged on a Sunday morning, June 19, when the Alabama, though low on ammunition and still barely seaworthy, steamed out of Cherbourg, bravely living up to the motto on her great bronze wheel: Aide-toi et Dieu t'aidera ("God helps those who help themselves"). After a battle lasting ninety minutes—during which time the two warships fought starboard to starboard in increasingly diminishing circles while spectators gathered on high ground along the shore to watch—the Alabama was sunk by the superior firepower of the Kearsarge, which was outfitted with two 15,700-pound Dahlgren smoothbore cannons. Three French pilot boats and a British steam yacht named the Deerhound rescued Raphael Semmes, captain of the Alabama, and fifty of his crew. But the career of the great Confederate privateer was ended as the burning ship sank stern-first into the waves and then disappeared from sight.*

  Even though French sympathies rested largely with the Alabama, the sea battle created as much excitement in France as the victory of Vermouth at Longchamp had two weeks earlier. Before the month of June
was out, engravings of this naval battle had appeared in numerous French newspapers, including L 'Universel and Le Monde illustré. Within a few weeks, another view of the engagement was also offered to the public. In the middle of July, a painting by Manet entitled The Battle of the U.S.S. "Kearsarge" and the C.S.S. "Alabama" went on show in the window of a shop in the Rue de Richelieu owned by the publisher Alfred Cadart. Inspired by the engravings and news reports, Manet had created his own version of the scene, one placing a French pilot boat in the foreground and, beyond it, the Alabama swamped and smoldering in the blue-green waves. Unlike The Races at Longchamp, the painting was not based on either firsthand observation or plein air sketches, but it was animated, like the racing scene, by both popular illustrations and public sentiment. In his search for success and acclaim, Manet had left behind the corridors of the Louvre and turned to the events—albeit quite extraordinary ones—that were occurring in the world around him.

  Manet arrived in Boulogne a day or two after the work went on show in Cadart's shop and, setting up his easel in the harbor, began his seascapes. One of these, Departure of the Folkestone Boat, featured a more modest vessel than the Alabama, a steam packet that plied the Channel between England and France. This work was probably not painted entirely out of doors, since Manet placed the captain, in what would have been a flagrant breach of the rules, on the boat's bridge, a detail indicating that he did not paint exactly what he saw but rather cobbled the painting together from various of his sketches and memories. Another of his paintings, Seascape at Boulogne, featured a school of porpoises in the foreground and a variety of ships and scudding sailboats in the distance.

  Still, the charms of working en plein air were not inexhaustible. And while Boulogne had various attractions besides its harbor, its ships and the Établissement des Bains, Manet seems to have found its cultural allurements less than stimulating. Within a few days of arriving in Boulogne he wrote to a friend in Paris, the engraver Félix Bracquemond: "Although I'm enjoying my seaside holiday, I miss our discussions on Art with a capital A, and besides there's no Café de Bade here."7 Desperate for news of friends such as Baudelaire, he appealed to Bracquemond for the latest gossip.

  Fortunately for Manet, his interest was piqued by the arrival in Boulogne of the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which dropped anchor a short distance offshore and began playing host to numerous tourists. "The ship is pretty well crowded with a fine lot of people," wrote one crewman, Marine Corporal Austin Quinby, in his journal, "many of them from the country and have on their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes and are very nice looking."8 Another observer, one of the Kearsarge's coal-heavers, was less impressed with the visitors, recording that "they go up and down the decks chattering like so many monkeys, and they go through as many antics as I ever see a Clown go through in a circus."9

  Manet was one of these visitors. Ferried out to the Kearsarge by a pilot boat, he went on board a day or two after arriving in Boulogne. He made sketches of the scene and then painted two impressions of the sloop as she lay at anchor: one an ink-and-watercolor, the other an oil painting entitled The "Kearsarge "at Boulogne. The latter included a sailboat navigating a foreground of choppy, aquamarine-tinted sea and, on the horizon line, several pilot boats nearing the Kearsarge, which was little more, in this view, than a menacing black silhouette. The painting also included a curious anomaly. The flags and streamers on the prow and masts of the Kearsarge blow in one direction while the sails on the boats billow the opposite way, offering more evidence that Manet was not painting exactly what he saw—and perhaps explaining why the young Édouard had proved such an abysmal recruit for the naval academy.

  Manet's efforts by the seaside received encouragement when he learned that The Battle of the U.S.S. "Kearsarge" and the C.S.S. "Alabama "had received a good review from Philippe Burty in La Presse, the daily newspaper in whose pages Paul de Saint-Victor usually dripped his venom. The thirty-four-year-old Burty was a progressive art critic whose articles had appeared in, among other journals, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.10 During the late 1850s he had championed the art of etching, but more recently his attentions had turned to Oriental art: he would later coin the word japonisme to describe the craze for all things Japanese. Manet was well aware that Burty's words carried much weight. He went so far as to write Burty from Boulogne to thank him, expressing the hope that more such reviews would come his way. "I'm grateful to you," he wrote, "and hope the proverb 'one swallow doesn't make a summer' will not apply to us!"11

  After several weeks in Boulogne, Manet finally returned with his family to Paris, bringing back with him on the train a collection of plein-air sketches and several completed canvases. He also returned with an apparent determination to steer his new course in art, painting popular, topical scenes without any of the learned and ironic allusions to the art of past centuries that undergirded works such as Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe and Olympia. In fact, one of his first paintings upon returning to Paris was of a bowl of fruit—pears from the orchard in Gennevilliers of his cousin, Jules De Jouy.

  Manet made a change to his personal as well as his artistic life in 1864. Soon after returning from the coast, he moved out of the three-room apartment in the Rue de l'Hôtel-de-Ville that for the past four years had been his home. With Suzanne and Léon, as well as Suzanne's grand piano, he took new lodgings in the Boulevard des Batignolles, still within short reach of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and still in the heart of the district. Once installed, he began making plans for an exhibition of his works that would reveal this new artistic direction.

  "The painter's part is to come to the aid of history," Meissonier once wrote. "Thiers speaks of the flash of swords. The painter engraves that flash upon men's minds."12

  Meissonier, in the summer of 1864, was still hard at work turning Adolphe Thiers's words—his description of Napoléon and his triumphant cuirassiers at the Battle of Friedland—into a painting. While Manet was able to illustrate the combat between the Kearsarge and the Alabama in four short weeks, Meissonier, typically, was taking far more time on his own battle scene. He made small oil sketches of everything from the hooves and haunches of the individual horses (the painting, like The Campaign of France, would feature more than a dozen of them) to tiny details such as the hat with which Napoléon salutes his troops.13 He also began sculpting various of the horses in wax. These figurines, which stood some eight or nine inches high, were impressive works of art in themselves. Meissonier twisted wire frameworks into shape, then covered them with pellets of warm beeswax that he proceeded to model with his fingers. The features of the horses—the flared nostrils, the eyes, even the teeth—were next sculpted with minute precision, while small leather bridles were fashioned to fit over their heads. If Manet's horses in The Races at Longchamp were suggested by a few quick splodges of color, the warhorses of the Grande Armée would take shape on Meissonier's easel only after being put through their paces in an endless series of models and prototypes. He was so laboriously precise that he forced one of his horses to hold an awkward position for such a long stretch that he completely exhausted the animal.14

  These intricate preparations meant that Friedland, though keenly awaited by the public and the critics alike, would not be finished on time to appear at the Salon of 1865. However, Meissonier was also creating several other works, including a pair of small panel paintings—Laughing Man and End of a Gambling Quarrel—which marked the return of his musketeer style. The former work simply portrayed a man in seventeenth-century clothing (sword, sash, lace collar, wide-topped boots and wide-brimmed hat), the latter a pair of men in identical costume sprawled on the floor after having exchanged rapier thrusts. This last scene was set in an elegant interior—enormous fireplace, tapestried wall, upholstered chairs—that looked like something out of the seventeenth century but was in fact a room in the Grande Maison. Meissonier's house, with its needlepoint tapestries, heavy antiques and acres of wood paneling, made a fitting backdrop to his musketeer paintings. Its rooms were works of art in themsel
ves. "Some of the rooms are fit to be framed," enthused Gautier (whose own taste in interior decoration inclined toward Turkish sabers, cuckoo clocks and the various exotic curios brought back from his expeditions to Algeria).15

  Meissonier was still crafting his musketeer paintings for the simple reason that he needed the money. He had been paid very large sums for The Battle of Solferino and The Campaign of France—25,000 and 85,000 francs respectively. But together the paintings had used up three or four years of work. With Friedland threatening to take equally long, he clearly needed other work to finance his ostentatious manner of living. Meissonier spent, on average, 60,000 francs per year. Most of these huge sums disappeared due to his passion for, as he put it, "piling stones on top of one another."16 Construction bills for the Grande Maison and its assorted outbuildings had devoured hundreds of thousands of francs since the original structure had been purchased almost twenty years earlier for a modest 18,000 francs.17 Meissonier was as much a perfectionist with his house as he was with his paintings: only the best materials and most exacting craftsmanship would do. And so just as he often scraped paint from a canvas, he forced his builders to knock down and rebuild any additions and alterations that failed to please him—often at great inconvenience and even greater expense. The accounts for the building works at the Grande Maison for the two years between 1854 and 1856—a dense manuscript of 837 pages—include the master mason's constant scribbled refrain, "change made by the owner."18