The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  "Pardon me, Monsieur le Comte," Zola thundered in L'Événement a few days after the newspaper printed Nieuwerkerke's article praising the "men of talent" on the jury. On April 30, the day before the Salon opened, he launched his first blistering tirade, naming and shaming the twenty-four jurors for their hostilities toward and prejudices against what he called "the new movement." Making what he described as "a somewhat daring comparison," Zola described the Salon as a "giant artistic ragout" into which each painter poured his ingredients. But since the French public supposedly had a sensitive stomach, a team of cooks was deemed necessary to sample this eclectic stew in order to prevent "digestive disturbances" when it was dished up to the hungry public. Zola therefore proceeded to examine the qualifications and prejudices of these guardians of the public palate. "Nowadays a Salon is not the work of the artists," he claimed in the first installment, "it is the work of a jury. I am therefore concerned first of all with the jurors."16

  Émile Zola (Nadar)

  Zola blamed the malign interference of the jury's chairman, Robert-Fleury, a "relic of romanticism" who was both the Director of the École des Beaux-Arts and, since 1865, the Director of the Académie de France in Rome. But he also denounced the newer and younger jurors, such as Jules Breton, "a young and militant painter" who had supposedly said of Manet's canvases, "If we accept works like these, we are lost." Another first-time juror, a forty-six-year-old portraitist named Édouard Dubufe, had also recoiled in horror when faced with Manet's work: "As long as I am part of a jury," Zola quoted him as saying, "I will not accept such canvases." As for another new juror, Louvrier de Lajolais, his experience of rejection in 1863 failed to make him a sympathetic judge: he supposedly boasted that only 300 of the more than 3,000 works accepted for the exhibition had received his personal seal of approval.

  In the context of this tirade, Ernest Meissonier got off rather lightly. Zola claimed that the "painter of Lilliput"—an old nickname for Meissonier first coined by Gautier—skipped most of his jury duties due to his unremitting labors on his own work. "Nothing takes as long to make, it seems, as the bonshommes," wrote Zola, "since the painter of Lilliput, the homeopathic artist with his infinitesimally small doses, missed all the meetings. I was told, however, that Meissonier attended the judging of the artists whose surnames start with an M." The implication was that Meissonier had attended meetings only to guarantee the acceptance of his son Charles (While Taking Tea did indeed find favor with the jury) as well as to cast his vote against Manet.

  Meissonier undoubtedly wished to see his son's painting accepted by the jury, but he was surely less appalled than Breton or Baudry by Manet's efforts. He was more likely to have taken the side of his old friend Daubigny, the one juror exempted by Zola from any blame for the debacle. "He behaved as an artist and a man of heart," Zola proclaimed in L'Événement. "He alone fought against certain of his colleagues, in the name of truth and justice." Whatever his opinion of the "new movement," Meissonier would presumably have supported Daubigny against painters like Barrias, Baudry and Breton—men who shared the same artistic education as conservative académiciens such as Picot and Signol who had been shunted aside by the voters after the debacle of 1863. But the fact that Zola made no attempt to exonerate him, or to put him on the side of "truth and justice," indicated that, in a few minds at least, Meissonier was coming to be identified with the forces of reaction. The association would eventually return to haunt him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Monet or Manet?

  CHARLES-FRANCOIS DAUBIGNY had come a long way since the days when he shared a cramped apartment in the Marais district of Paris with four other struggling artists and, in concert with Ernest Meissonier, painted canvases for export to America for a wage of five francs per square meter. By 1866, at the age of forty-nine, Daubigny had won a handful of Salon medals, received a government commission to decorate an office in the Louvre, and been made a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor. He had traveled in Switzerland with his friend Camille Corot and, since 1861, occupied an idyllic house at Auvers-sur-Oise whose interior walls he decorated with scenes from the fables of La Fontaine and the Brothers Grimm. Nonetheless, he still liked to demonstrate his youthful, rebellious spirit by singing the Marseillaise as he painted.

  In spite of his successes, Daubigny had always received a mixed reception from the critics. Their most common complaint was that his landscapes looked like sketches or preparations for future works rather than paintings in their own right. As one of them put it, though undoubtedly a great talent, he stubbornly insisted on hanging "rough sketches" on the walls of the Salon instead of more polished works.1 Daubigny's taste for sketchiness meant he could appreciate the offerings of a number of the young painters rejected from the 1866 Salon, no matter how unorthodox their approaches. He preferred "paintings full of daring," he claimed, "to the nonentities welcome into each Salon."2

  One of these "daring" painters unsuccessfully supported by Daubigny was the thirty-five-year-old landscapist Camille Pissarro. The son of a prosperous Jewish merchant who had emigrated to the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, Pissarro had been living in the insalubrious Bréda district since 1855. He had so far enjoyed little renown as a painter, though he did manage to exhibit landscapes at the Salon in 1859, 1864 and 1865, and three of his paintings had appeared at the 1863 Salon des Refusés. Like Daubigny, he specialized in river views. In 1866, however, The Banks of the Marne in Winter was refused by the jury despite pleas from Daubigny as well as from Corot, Pissarro's mentor and prime inspiration. Showing the atmospheric effects of gray clouds scudding above a dun-colored winter terrain and an indistinct huddle of houses, this landscape, which looked to have been painted in a single afternoon, typified the breezy abandon of the "new movement" in painting.

  Another painter backed to no avail by Daubigny was a twenty-five-year-old named Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The son of a tailor from Limoges, Renoir had shown talent in a number of fields. As a choirboy he possessed such an angelic voice that the composer Charles Gounod had urged him to turn professional. However, young Renoir's habit of scribbling with charcoal on the walls of the family home convinced his parents of the suitability of an artistic career, and he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1862 and began studying under Émile Signol. Like Daubigny, who as an adolescent had painted clock faces and jewelry boxes, young Renoir earned money by decorating coffee cups, ladies' fans and the awnings of butcher shops. But after finishing his studies at the École and entering the studio of Charles Gleyre he twice showed work at the Salon, including La Esmeralda (based on Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris) in 1864 and a landscape called Summer Evening a year later. To the Salon of 1866 he sent a pair of landscapes. When Daubigny was unable to sway the jury in his favor—six jurors voted for his works, the remainder against—he urged the young painter to demand another Salon des Refusés.3

  Coincidentally, an appeal for a new Salon des Refusés had already landed on Nieuwerkerke's desk in the spring of 1866. It was composed by Paul Cézanne, a strange and obscure painter whose name was known, if at all, only because Émile Zola, his boyhood friend, had dedicated his scandalous Confession of Claude to him. A year older than Zola, Cézanne had yet to meet with anything remotely like success. He was the son of a haberdasher of hats in Aix-en-Provence whose tightfistedness helped him to become so rich that in 1848 he bought a bank, amassed an even greater fortune, and became even more tightfisted. Young Cézanne did not, however, either look or act like the son of a wealthy banker. He wore a bandito mustache, dressed sloppily, bathed infrequently and swore incessantly, while his studio near the Place de la Bastille was inches deep in dust, ashes and carelessly strewn piles of his meager possessions. Having followed Zola to Paris in 1861, he stayed only long enough to fail his entrance examination for the École des Beaux-Arts and become the butt of jokes at the Académie Suisse, where his fellow students found his efforts clumsy and incompetent. He reappeared in Paris a year later, at which point one of the more kindly painters work
ing at the Académie Suisse, Camille Pissarro, took this "strange Provençal" (as Pissarro called him) under his wing.4

  Cezanne had made several stabs at the Salon, all of them glacially rebuffed by the jurors. In 1866, in a spirit of vengeance, he submitted two works that he boasted would "make the Institut de France blush with rage and despair."5 One of them, Portrait of Antony Valahregue, showed the brusque, hasty style in which, in imitation of Courbet, he smeared paint onto his canvas with a palette knife instead of a brush. Even the sitter, a friend from Aix, had reservations about the work: "Paul is a horrible painter as regards the poses he gives people in the midst of his riots of color," wrote Valabregue. "Every time he paints one of his friends it seems as though he were revenging himself on him for some hidden injury."6 The jurors did indeed recoil at the sight of the painting. One of them quipped that "it was not only painted with a knife but with a pistol as well."7

  Paul Cézanne (right) and Camille Pissarro

  Finding himself rejected from the Salon yet again, Cézanne boldy penned a letter to Nieuwerkerke demanding the reinstatement of the Salon des Refusés, at which he had shown work in 1863. When Nieuwerkerke did not trouble himself with a reply—numerous such requests crossed his desk each year—Cézanne dashed off another letter. "Seeing that you have not answered me," he wrote impatiently, "I think I must emphasize the motives that made me appeal to you." He explained that he could not accept the "illegitimate judgment of colleagues whom I myself have not commissioned to appraise me," and that he wished to be judged by the public instead. "I ardently wish the public to know at least that I do not wish to be confused with the gentlemen of the jury," he loftily concluded, "any more than they seem to wish to be confused with me."8

  This second letter still failed to produce the desired effect. Nieuwerkerke simply scrawled on Cézanne's letter: "What he asks is impossible. It has been recognized how little suitable the exhibition of the rejected was for the dignity of art, and it will not be reestablished."9

  One of Cézanne's few consolations was that he came to the attention, around this time, of his fellow refusé Édouard Manet, to whom he was introduced by Zola. He and Zola had admired Manet's paintings at the 1863 Salon des Refusés, and Zola himself was finally introduced to Manet, in February 1866, by Antoine Guillemet, a talented and amiable young landscape painter from Chantilly. Guillemet took the young writer, then reveling in his newfound infamy, to meet the equally infamous Manet at the Café Guerbois. Though the pair seem not to have crossed paths in the ensuing months, Zola leapt to his new friend's defense when the Salon of 1866 finally opened. Fresh from his attack on the jury, he devoted a laudatory article to the excluded Manet in L'Événement: "I feel it is my duty to devote as much space as possible to a man whose works have been willfully rejected," he wrote, "and have not been thought worthy to appear among the fifteen hundred or two thousand ineffectual canvases which have been welcomed in with open arms."10

  Zola's gallant defense of Manet was more than most readers of L'Événement could bear. Subscriptions were canceled and copies of the newspaper were shredded by angry readers in front of baffled newsagents. The publisher, Hippolyte de Villemessant, may have been a scandalmonger and sensation seeker, but these virulent diatribes were too much even for him. Before the month was out, Zola was clearing his desk.

  Manet was delighted with the piece, however. "Dear Monsieur Zola," he wrote to its author, "I don't know where to find you to shake your hand and tell you how proud and happy I am to be championed by a man of your talent. What a splendid article. A thousand thanks!"11 He proposed meeting at the Café de Bade. Zola agreed and, at some point, brought along Cézanne, some of whose still-life paintings Manet had already seen in Guillemet's apartment. Manet was complimentary about Cézanne's work to both Guillemet and Zola, but privately he wondered how anyone could bear to look at "such foul painting."12 Cézanne's unrestrained brushstrokes and heavy-handed work with the palette knife, not to mention his rather grotesque visions, did not appeal. Manet later confessed that he found the younger artist uncouth and his work as sophisticated as something produced with a "bricklayer's trowel."13

  Though the Salon of 1866 opened without any work from Manet on show, it did include paintings by the other bane of the artistic establishment, Gustave Courbet. In fact, the 1866 Salon was a rare triumph for Courbet following several troublesome years. After Return from the Conference was banned from both the Salon and the Salon des Refusés in 1863, Courbet had found himself exiled from the Palais des Champs-Élysées one year later when Venus and Psyche—a nude scene freighted with lesbian innuendo—offended the Empress Eugénie, who urged an obliging Chennevières to remove the canvas from view. He had made a return in 1865 with a landscape and a portrait of his late friend, the socialist firebrand Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but both canvases were poorly received by the critics, even by those generally sympathetic to Courbet. One of his friends wrote witheringly that the two works "do not rise above the standard of a village stonemason who might, one fine day, take it into his head to be an amateur painter," while Théophile Thoré, writing about the portrait of Proudhon, claimed he had "never seen such a bad painting."14

  Courbet had consoled himself over the failure of the paintings by departing in September for the seaside resort of Trouville and reinventing himself as a portrait painter to the idle rich. He executed portraits of the Countess Károlyi, wife of an Hungarian diplomat, and various other of the aristocrats and industrialists who flocked to the villas and casinos of Trouville. "I am gaining a matchless reputation as a portrait painter," he boasted in a letter, in his usual self-aggrandizing style. "I have doubled my reputation and have made the acquaintance of everyone who can be useful."15 In between sessions in his studio—where more than one sitter was amazed at how he could talk, drink and paint at the same time—he bathed in the ocean and painted seascapes along the beach.

  Courbet had soon been enchanted by the presence in Trouville of James McNeill Whistler and, even more agreeable to him, Whistler's copper-haired Irish mistress and model, Joanna Hiffernan. The daughter of an Irish immigrant to London, the beautiful Jo had met Whistler in 1860, when she was about seventeen, and had posed for various of his paintings and engravings. Her most famous appearance was in The White Girl, the seven-foot-high canvas that gave Whistler both public notoriety and a case of lead poisoning. She, Whistler and Courbet made a happy threesome in Trouville that October, eating shrimp salad, visiting the casino, and frolicking in the breakers. "This is a charming place," sighed Whistler in a letter to a friend in London.16 He and Courbet assembled their easels along the beach, and Whistler finished at least five canvases; one of them, Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville, pictured the stocky, bearded Courbet in the foreground. Whistler had long admired Courbet's work, while Courbet quickly came to appreciate the charms of Whistler's "superb red-headed girl."17 Smitten with Jo's Celtic beauty, he painted her in a portrait, La Belle Irlandaise, in which her abundant red-gold tresses were prominently featured.

  Courbet's interest in Jo had not confined itself to aesthetics, and the two of them seem to have begun an affair, either in Trouville or a few months later, early in 1866, when Jo traveled on her own to Paris while Whistler, in a strange and baffling bit of derring-do, took himself off to South America with a boatload of torpedoes. Whistler claimed that he had decided "to go out to help the Chileans, and, I cannot say why, the Peruvians too."18 Chile and Peru were at war with Spain at the time, but Whistler's motives may have had as much to do with escaping his creditors in London as with sinking the Spanish Pacific fleet. In any case, he had set sail for Valparaiso early in February, soon after which Jo began posing in Courbet's Paris studio for a work much more risquè than La Belle Irlandaise.

  The commission for this work had come from a wealthy art collector and bon viveur named Khalil Bey, a thirty-five-year-old former Turkish ambassador to Greece and Russia who had moved to Paris and begun depleting his immense fortune on cards, canvases and courtesans.19 Having
heard about the deliriously indecent Venus and Psyche, he commissioned Courbet to paint a similarly erotic scene to adorn his apartment, which ostentatiously included a number of Meissoniers. The result was Le Sommeil ("Sleep"), depicting a pair of intertwined female nudes asleep on a disordered bed; one of them, her hips rolled and posterior flaunted a la Cabanel, was the flame-haired Jo. Courbet, wisely, had not bothered to submit this work to the 1866 Salon. He sent instead a less explicit and more conventional nude showing a woman lolling on a bed with a parrot perched on her outstretched hand. This canvas, Woman with a Parrot, might have come from the studio of Cabanel; and, like one of Cabanel's works, it proved hugely popular with Salon-goers.

  "I am the uncontested great success of the Salon," Courbet reported to a friend, and for once he was not exaggerating.20 Cabanel personally complimented the preening Courbet on the work, as did another juror who knew something about the languorously draped female form, Paul Baudry. Courbet was less than gracious in accepting their regards: "I told you a long time ago," he wrote to a friend, "that I would find a way to give them a fist right in the face. That bunch of scoundrels . . . !"21 The work was even popular with officialdom, for it was displayed prominently on direct orders from Nieuwerkerke, who had expressed an interest in purchasing it the previous summer after seeing it on the easel while visiting Courbet's studio. Nieuwerkerke also attempted to buy Courbet's second offering at the 1866 Salon, Covert of Roe Deer, only to discover that he had been pipped by another interested party, none other than Empress Eugénie.