The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  There seemed to be no limit to Meissonier's tinkering with his house. A set of iron tie-bars were sealed in the masonry three times before he was satisfied; the brickwork on the front of the house was removed and laid a second time when the alternating bands of pink and white failed to impress; and no sooner was the roof completed than Meissonier ordered its demolition because it did not, in his view, present the desired profile.19 Even the most minor details were important to Meissonier, for his house was as essential as his paintings to what Gautier called his "resurrection of the life of bygone days." Wanting the Grande Maison to look from the outside like a steep-roofed Flemish house in an engraving by the seventeenth-century artist David Teniers the Younger, he went so far as to show the engraving to his perplexed workmen, ordering them to copy it.20 Things were scarcely any easier on the inside. Balustrades for the staircase were carved and then recarved, and Meissonier finished decorating his salon in sixteenth-century style—carved wood, a large fireplace—only to dismantle the entire room to create the illusion of a different century. "Each day, a new change," sighed Meissonier's friend Edmond de Goncourt.21

  Ernest Meissonier and family in front of the Grande Maison. Seated in front: Charles Meissonier and Jeanne Gros. Seated in second row: Emma Meissonier (second from left) and Lucien Gros (third from left); standing: Thirésè Meissonier (third from left) and Ernest Meissonier (far right).

  Not surprisingly, Meissonier's wife found these endless refurbishments no less exasperating than the builders did. "His poor wife," murmured Goncourt sympathetically in his journal. "He sends her to visit friends whenever he wants to make a change."22 Since about 1860, Emma Meissonier had suffered bouts of poor health, in particular rheumatism and bronchitis, which at times kept her confined for long spells to her bedroom. These conditions may have been exacerbated—or even brought on—by the stress of her husband's incessant architectural experimentation. The situation was not helped by the fact that Meissonier was anything but a doting husband. "My art before all and above all!" he once pompously declared, adding: "In spite of my yearnings for deep affection, I am one of those who could have walked alone in the liberty of work and of creation. I could have forgone marriage."23 He claimed, in fact, that the true artist should never marry. "Painting is his mistress, and all others must inevitably flee before her."24 Small wonder that as the years passed Emma became an invalid and a recluse.

  In 1862 Meissonier had purchased another building in the abbey enclosure that he planned to turn into a residence for his son Charles, then age eighteen. Formerly the house of the abbey's prioress, the building was dubbed "La Nouvelle Maison" even though it was actually older than many of the other buildings in the enclosure, including the Grande Maison itself. Meissonier once again hired an architect and set about remodeling and extending the structure such that its rows of dormer windows and alternating bands of pink and white brickwork would nicely complement his own residence.

  Meissonier also designed, for the rear of the Nouvelle Maison, a glass-walled studio in which his son could paint. Charles was training to become an artist like his father. Meissonier did not run a studio or take students under his tutelage like Thomas Couture, whose pupils numbered in the dozens. But he did instruct a few handpicked students. His son Charles was one pupil, along with Charles's best friend (and a Poissy neighbour) Lucien Gros, who in 1864 was nineteen years old. Charles was working at this time on a painting whose virtuoso brushwork and keen eye for detail proved that he had inherited his father's amazing precocity. Called The Studio, it showed the burly, bearded Meissonier toiling intently over a sketch in his workshop. This kind of tableau—an artist at his craft—was one much favoured by Meissonier himself.25 Charles faithfully followed his father's style, even down to the inclusion of a painting-within-a-painting. He portrayed Meissonier standing at a table and jotting something on a piece of paper while wearing a pair of riding boots (evidently having dashed into the studio after a gallop through the countryside). The work gave a captivating glimpse inside the master's richly appointed studio, with its oak-beamed floor and Renaissance-style refectory table; most fascinating of all, though, he showed the unfinished Friedland perched on Meissonier's easel, awaiting further attentions. One can just make out on the right of the canvas the blurry mass of the charging cuirassiers. Charles included in the foreground a discarded envelope addressed to (lest there be doubts as to the subject's identity) "Monsieur Ernest Meissonier/ membre de l'Institut/Poissy."

  Charles was clearly talented, but Meissonier, as both father and teacher, proved a stern and domineering taskmaster, forcing his son from his bed for jaunts on horseback at six o'clock in the morning and presiding over what Charles called "hair-pulling" lessons in the studio.26 The young man confided in his journal that sometimes he felt like nothing more than the "second skin" of his father, whom he called Le Patron ("The Boss").27 Charles nonetheless idolized Meissonier, seeking his approval not only through his art but by means of simple gestures such as bringing mushrooms back from his walks in the woods near Poissy. Meissonier loved mushrooms, even trying to propagate them in a special cellar, and so whenever Charles took a walk in the woods he kept an eye peeled for appetizing fungi. "If I could please him with these," he wrote in his journal, "then he would at least see that while walking I thought of him."28

  The Studio (Charles Meissonier)

  By the end of 1864, Charles possessed an even better opportunity to impress Le Patron. Having completed The Studio, he planned to send it to the Salon of 1865. At the age of twenty, he hoped to make his debut in the same room as his father.

  *But not for all time: in 1984 the French Navy discovered the wreck of the Alabama six nautical miles off the coast of Cherbourg, at a depth of 185 feet.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A Beastly Slop

  IN NOVEMBER 1864, a thirty-six-year-old English painter named Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a friend of Whistler and Fantin-Latour, arrived in Paris for a short stay. Accompanied by his redheaded mistress and model, Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti rented a room in a hotel in the Rue Laffitte and then visited an exhibition of Delacroix's paintings and did the rounds of the china shops. He also visited one of Delacroix's favorite haunts, the Jardin des Plantes, a zoological garden on the Left Bank. Its collection of beasts was only slightly more impressive than Rossetti's own, since the painter's house in Chelsea was home to a kangaroo, a raccoon, several peacocks, a wallaby, a chameleon, a gazelle, a woodcock, various monkeys and parakeets, a raven, an armadillo and (until it died after eating Rossetti's cigars) a wombat.

  Rossetti was the most notorious painter in England. He had been a founding member, in 1848, of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a clutch of ambitious young artists who had challenged the stodgily conservative Royal Academy in London—the arbiter of taste in British art—with a misty-eyed medievalism and a supposed emulation of fourteenth-century Italian frescoists, such as Andrea Orcagna, who preceded the much-worshiped Raphael (hence "Pre-Raphaelite"). Appalled by the industrial age in which he lived, with its clouds of smoke and steam, Rossetti had fashioned in his paintings an enchanted world of languid angels and swooning, full-lipped maidens. Such works earned lacerating reviews, with his detractors castigating them as "revolting" and "disgusting," and filled with a "morbid infatuation."1 These complaints about a seemingly decayed morality seemed to the critics to have been justified when Rossetti's wife and student, Lizzie Siddal, overdosed on laudanum, probably a suicide, in 1862.

  The work of Édouard Manet, however, was too much even for Rossetti. Taken by his friend Fantin-Latour to Manet's studio in the Rue Guyot, the English painter found himself appalled. "The new French school is simple putrescence and decomposition," he wrote home in disgust to his mother. "There is a man named Manet. . . whose pictures are for the most part mere scrawls, and who seems to be one of the lights of the school."2 He was even more disobliging in a letter to a friend, Jane Morris, describing to her "a French idiot named Manet, who certainly must be the greatest and most conce
ited ass who ever lived."3 Manet's canvases were fit for nothing, he told her, but the decoration of a lunatic asylum. To another friend, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, he concluded witheringly: "The whole of French art at present is a beastly slop and really makes one sick."4 How very relieved he must have been that a busy schedule a year earlier had prevented him from traveling to Paris, as planned, to pose for Fantin-Latour's Homage to Delacroix, a canvas in which he would have been compelled to share space with the obnoxious Manet.

  The regulations for the 1865 Salon appeared in Le Moniteur universel in early November, around the time of Rossetti's visit. They were composed, as ever, by Nieuwerkerke, who decided the Salon of 1864 had been successful enough that the modifications made to the Selection Committee a year earlier should remain in place. Once again, therefore, the qualifying artists would be allowed to cast their ballots to elect nine of the twelve members of the painting jury. The only change was that the Salon des Refusés would not be repeated in 1865. The moderate stance taken by the Selection Committee in 1864 meant that year's Salon des Refusés, deprived of figures like Édouard Manet, had been a far less controversial affair than the infamous "Salon of the Heretics." Only 286 artists had exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1864, compared to upwards of 500 a year earlier. Their offerings, meanwhile, had attracted far less attention and abuse than had Manet's work in the official Salon. The more liberal regime instituted by Nieuwerkerke had made the Salon des Refusés redundant.

  The elections for the jury were held in March 1865. Predictably, the most notorious conservatives from the 1863 jury—Signol, Picot, Heim—were once again shut out by the electors, while Ingres received a paltry thirty-two votes. But the voting also produced a number of surprising results, since Léon Cogniet and Charles Gleyre both failed to poll enough votes automatically to qualify for service. Both were elected only as alternates, as was Ernest Meissonier. Having come third in the balloting a year earlier, Meissonier, surprisingly, was placed only tenth in 1865, a diminished ranking that may have owed much to his refusal to take up his place on the 1864 jury. It was an unsatisfactory result for Meissonier, who this year was determined to serve, not least because his son Charles was submitting The Studio.

  The clear victor, for a second year in a row, was Cabanel, followed by his fellow professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, Jean-Léon Gérôme; the Director of the École, Robert-Fleury; and Camille Corot. Along with them came four new painters who promised to change the face of the jury even more, among them a former student of Delacroix, Alexandre Bida, who favored Oriental scenes and who, at forty-one, was one of the youngest painters to serve on the jury. The constitution of the painting jury had therefore altered remarkably since the hullabaloo only two years earlier. Gone were the preponderance of painters for whom classical history, ancient mythology and heroic nudity occupied the gleaming apogee of French art. In its place were landscapists, led by Corot, and Orientalists such as the enormously popular Gérôme.

  Absent from the government appointees in 1865 was the Due de Morny, whose shrewd guidance had made the previous Salon a success. Morny died on March 10, at the age of fifty-four, ten days before the paintings and statues were due to arrive at the doors of the Palais des Champs-Élysées. His death was officially blamed on pneumonia, though rumors quickly went around Paris that he had expired from a remedy given to him by his personal physician, an expatriate Irishman named Sir Joseph Olliffe. The son of an Irish merchant, Olliffe had risen in life to become a knight of the realm, a physician at the British Embassy in Paris, and an enormously wealthy speculator who in the early 1860s had helped turn the fishing village of Deauville into a fashionable seaside resort. Unfortunately, he was also a quack, and much of his huge fortune had come from prescribing arsenic pills to improve the complexions of well-to-do patients such as Morny. The pills may well have done wonders for skin tone, but they also produced—as Morny appears to have discovered to his cost—the most disagreeable side effects. Morny's death would be felt deeply not only on the painting jury, but also in the Legislative Assembly, the auction rooms and, perhaps most of all, in the fashionable Paris salons where he had ruled as the Second Empire's greatest social lion.

  The loss of Morny's moderating influence was compensated for, in part, by the government's appointment of Théophile Gautier and then the announcement that Ernest Meissonier would serve on the painting jury after all, when one of the other jurors declined his post. And among the thousands of paintings awaiting their attentions was the portrait of the nude Victorine Meurent posing as a prostimte. Manet had finally decided to send Olympia before the judges.

  To the average Parisian, Manet must have seemed a connoisseur of punishment. When he showed his paintings at Louis Martinet's gallery in 1863, visitors had menaced his canvases with their walking sticks, creating a climate of hostility and mockery that led to even more public ridicule two months later at the Salon des Refusés. Yet after moving into his new lodgings he immediately began preparing for a second one-man show at the Galerie Martinet—an act that must have seemed either an act of vainglorious self-confidence or a foolhardy taunting of fate.

  Manet's exhibition opened in February, the month before judging was due to begin for the 1865 Salon. Among the eight works he sent to the gallery were two of his "modern life" plein-air paintings from the previous summer, The Races at Longchamp and The "Kearsarge " at Boulogne. He also included a fragment, the dead matador, amputated from his unsuccessful Incident in a Bull Ring, together with a number of still lifes of fish and fruit that he had painted in Boulogne. The eight canvases were more cordially received than his show two years earlier. This was due mainly to the fact that his still lifes were perfectly unobjectionable: his paintings of peonies, salmon and bunches of grapes were far less likely to inflame opinion than had most of his previous works. These simple images of fish and fruit spread on white tablecloths showed, Théophile Thoré claimed, "undeniably picturesque qualities."5 Manet's comparative success seemed to be underscored by the fact that during the exhibition he sold an earlier still life, two flowers in a vase, to Chesneau, who had evidently responded favorably to his overtures. "Perhaps it will bring me luck," Manet wrote to Baudelaire of the sale.6

  Manet dared to grow upbeat about his chances for the Salon. However, if his exhibition at the Galerie Martinet showcased his new artistic direction, his submissions to the 1865 Salon reverted to his more typical style. Despite the rough ride given Dead Christ with Angels a year earlier, he decided to offer another portrait of Christ, a canvas enticed Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers, painted early in 1865 with a well-known model named Janvier, a locksmith, posing in the title role. As so often in Manet's case, the work was inspired by a painting in the Louvre, this time Titian's Christ Derided. He portrayed Christ with his hands bound before him and the crown of thorns on his head as three Roman soldiers gathered around to taunt and threaten him. Once again his Christ—large feet, knobby knees, thin chest, plaintive expression—hardly cut a gallant figure. Nor was Manet especially galvanized by the topic: "I think that's the last time I'll be going for that sort of subject," he wrote to Baudelaire after the piece was finished.7

  If Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers seemed almost certain to annoy the critics, the decision to submit Olympia was even more recklessly daring. The fact that Manet had kept the work hidden in his studio for eighteen months indicates his reservations about showing it in public. Why he decided to launch it on the world in 1865 remains something of a mystery, though Léon Koella later claimed Baudelaire had urged Manet to send it to the Salon.8 He may also have been persuaded by Zacharie Astruc, who seems to have given the work its title and then composed an execrable poem in its honor. Whoever was responsible, the strange gamble seemed initially to have paid off. Both paintings were accepted for the Salon—though a newspaper reported, ominously, that the jurors had rejected Olympia at first.9 Still, Manet remained optimistic. "From what I hear, it won't be too bad a year," he wrote to Baudelaire on the eve of the Salon's
opening.10 The next day, his sanguinity at first seemed well founded when a number of people rushed over to congratulate him on his work. They were, he was told, the most superb seascapes.

  Seascapes? Manet was confused. Taking himself to Room M, he soon discovered the source of the confusion: two canvases, The Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur and The Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide, signed by an unknown painter named Monet. Manet was indignant. "Who is this Monet," he demanded, "whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?"11

  Claude Monet, at the age of twenty-four, was exhibiting at the Salon for the first time. He was a cocksure, competitive and rebellious young man of enormous ambition. The son of a grocer, he had earned a precocious fame in Le Havre, his hometown, for his talents as a caricaturist before falling under the influence of the seascapist Eugène Boudin, the son of a ship's captain and Le Havre's most celebrated painter. After Boudin convinced him to give up caricatures for painting landscapes out of doors, Monet moved to Paris in 1859 to study at the Académie Suisse, a private art studio opened on the Île-de-la-Cite in about 1850 by a former artists' model named Suisse. Gustave Courbet, among others, had paid the small fee of ten francs per month required to study at the school, which offered male and female models, studio space and plenty of camaraderie, but no teachers or program of study—a relaxed regime ideally suited to the rebellious temperament of the young Monet.