The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  Claude Monet also faced disappointment. One of his offerings, a seascape called Boats Leaving the Port of Le Havre, was admitted by the jury only after impassioned insistence from Daubigny; but not even Daubigny's pleas could save his second entry, The Jetty at Le Havre. Nieuwerkerke, who served as president of the jury, and who was no admirer of landscapes, was at loggerheads with Daubigny not only over Monet's work but also over the submissions of many other young painters. The Superintendent regarded Daubigny as a "liberal" and a "freethinker" who wished indiscriminately to open the doors (in line with the Courbet manifesto) to all painters regardless of taste and talent. Nieuwerkerke therefore took a firm stand over The Jetty at Le Havre. "We have enough of that kind of painting," he informed Daubigny.6

  The rejection of any of his paintings was inopportune in view of Monet's precarious domestic situation. Camille Doncieux had given birth to their child, a son named Jean, the previous August. "Despite everything, I feel that I love him," Monet wrote to Bazille, adding: "It pains me to think of his mother having nothing to eat."7 Monet had not been present for the birth of his son. Summoned back to Normandy earlier in the summer, he had been living with his aunt, in a kind of enforced exile, at her seafront home in Sainte-Adresse. He was able to make only the occasional swift trip into Paris to visit Camille, who suffered through the winter of 1867—68 with barely enough money for coal. These excursions were not without a certain risk: Monet had to be careful neither to arouse the suspicions of his father nor excite the attentions of his various creditors.

  Still, despite the demurrals from Nieuwerkerke and more conservative jurors such as Baudry and Breton, almost 2,000 more paintings would be shown at the 1868 Salon than a year earlier. So many artists appeared for the first time, in fact, that Castagnary quickly dubbed it "the Salon of Newcomers."8

  The liberalization of the jury's selection process in 1868 was mirrored by another progressive measure taken by the government. The Salon of 1868 coincided with a relaxation in censorship laws as, on May 11, less than a fortnight after the Salon opened, the Emperor repealed many of the draconian restrictions under which newspapers had operated for most of the previous two decades.

  "Liberty has never helped to found a lasting political edifice," Louis-Napoléon once wrote in defense of his policies. "Liberty crowns the edifice when time has consolidated it."9 Louis-Napoléon's own political edifice, the Second Empire, had been consolidated through a military coup and the Law of Général Security, as well as various censors, bans, imprisonments and deportations—the whole raft of measures that The Athenaeum, across the Channel, had claimed amounted to "political slavery."10 The Emperor believed that these tyrannical methods had been necessary in order to forge the thriving, modern nation that France had finally become. He was so proud of his various accomplishments that he had even taken notes for a novel that he planned to write about a grocer named Benoit who returns to France after many years in America to discover the jaw-dropping wonders and Utopian delights of the Second Empire. Expecting to find misery and poverty, Benoit is thrilled and impressed by France's universal suffrage, by its cheap consumer products, its telegraph and railway systems, its well-paid soldiers, convalescent homes, pensions for disabled priests, and by any number of other enlightened social policies overseen by the Emperor."11

  With all of these improvements in place by 1868, the time was ripe, the Emperor believed, to unchain the press. Accordingly, stamp taxes were lowered and licenses for journals abolished, which meant journals and newspapers could be founded and published without authorization from the government. As well, governmental officials lost their powers of warning and then suspending or suppressing journals (such as L 'Événement) that they deemed subversive. The result of the press law of 1868 was that scores of new journals were immediately founded, both in Paris and the provinces—virtually all of them hostile to the Emperor. In the months following the promulgation of the new law, more than a hundred journals sprang up in Paris alone. "They are cramped for space in kiosks," one journalist claimed, "and newspaper dealers, positively overwhelmed, do not know where to tuck the latest arrivals."12

  Most of these journals arrived in the kiosks too late to cover the 1868 Salon, and so Manet and other members of the so-called École des Batignolles faced the same familiar adversaries in the columns of the same familiar newspapers. Their cause was also thwarted by the Marquis de Chennevières, who, anxious as ever to impede the advance of the democrats, had ensured that their works were skyed. Pissarro's paintings of Pontoise, for example, had been hung near the ceiling on orders from the Hanging Committee, though Castagnary noted that even this lofty altitude failed "to prevent art lovers from observing the solid qualities that distinguish them."13 Nor was it enough to put off the critics, many of whom singled out his work for special praise.14 At the age of thirty-eight, Pissarro was finally beginning to win himself a reputation as a landscapist worthy of his two mentors, Corot and Daubigny.

  Manet's two works received a more uneven press. As soon as the Salon opened, Zola dashed off an article for L'Événement illustré in which he declared that the "success of Manet is complete. I dared not believe it would be so rapid and deserving. . . . The necessary and inevitable reaction which I prophesied in 1866 is slowly taking place. The public is becoming acclimatized; the critics are growing calmer and consenting to open their eyes; success is on the way."15 Castagnary likewise praised Portrait of Émile Zola as "one of the best portraits in the Salon,"16 but on the whole Manet's paintings attracted chiding reviews. One critic claimed that the canvases showed his "coarse and ugly eccentricities, the fruit of vanity and impotence"; another, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, that he was stirring up controversy "quite voluntarily and uselessly." A reviewer in La Presse lamented that Realists such as Manet were "capable of anything!" In L 'Artiste, the journal in which Thirésè Raquin had been serialized the previous year, Manet was taken to task for his lack of control, muffled hues and poor modeling; and in a provincial journal, Le Gironde, the young painter Odilon Redon, who had praised Pissarro, claimed that Manet's portrait of Zola, due to its lack of animation, was more like a still life than a portrait.17

  Nonetheless, the hilarity and hostility that had accompanied the exhibitions of his work in 1863 and 1865 was not repeated; and most critics recognized that his was a name to conjure with, if only because so many young painters had rallied around him. "The leader, the hero of Realism, is now Manet," wrote Théophile Gautier. "His partisans are frenzied and his detractors timid." Manet's work seemed to make Gautier—once the floppy-haired, hashish-smoking champion of "Young France," but now fifty-seven years old and nursing both gout and a heart ailment—feel his age and sense the final passing of the fabled Generation of 1830. "It would seem," he wrote with a wistful resignation in Le Moniteur universel, "that, if one refusés to accept Manet, one must fear being taken for a philistine, a bourgeois, a Joseph Prudhomme,* an idiot who cares for nothing but miniatures and painted porcelain. . . . One examines oneself with a sort of horror . . . to discover whether one has become obese or bald, incapable of understanding the audacities of youth." And Gautier frankly admitted that he was indeed incapable of understanding the audacities of this new generation. The paintings of Courbet, Manet and Monet held beauties, he claimed, "apparent to young people in short jackets and top hats"—the sort of conformist dress that Gautier despised—"but which escape the rest of us old Romantic greybeards."18

  As the ailing Gautier recognized, the Salon of Newcomers marked an important juncture in French art. The occasion was marked by the prescient Zola. His weekly reviews in L 'Événement illustré ignored the traditional heroes of the Salon in favor of singling out for evaluation and praise a new group of painters, members of the École des Batignolles, whose names he introduced to the public. To the thousands of Salon-goers who had never before heard the name Camille Pissarro, much less noticed his landscapes, Zola presented this "intense and austere personality" as "one of the three or four painters of our time"
and ventured that public opinion would soon pronounce itself in his favor.19 He also gave, week after week, well-versed introductions to, and shrewd appraisals of, Monet, Bazille, Renoir and Degas, as well as Manet and Courbet, calling them naturalistes and actualistes, and identifying them as a distinct group at the head of a new artistic movement. They were painters, he argued, who ignored traditional bourgeois tastes in favor of a courageous pursuit of the modern, the original, and the true.20

  The medals at the 1868 Salon were collected not by any of these actualistes, however. Works catering to what Zola called bourgeois tastes collected the majority of the prizes, with the roll call of winners featuring painters such as Jules Worms, Henri Klagmann, Victor Giraud, Pierre de Coninck, Alphonse Muraton and a forty-one-year-old named Pierre-Honoré Hugrel, who was rewarded for a Cabanelesque nude scene entitled Nymph Playing with Cupid. The Grand Medal of Honor, meanwhile, went to Gustave Brion, a member of the jury. Probably most famous for having done 200 illustrations for a popular 1863 edition of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Brion specialized in rural scenes featuring peasants whose quaint customs and antique costumes recalled the idyllic charm of many of Meissonier's lace-and-buckle period pieces. His prize-winning canvas in 1868, Bible Reading: Protestant Interior in Alsace, was typical of his work—and typical of the sort of sentimentalized scene that Zola claimed so delighted the bourgeoisie.

  Not only did Manet and his fellow members of the École des Batignolles fail to receive either prizes or praise from the administration; further indignities befell them. Midway through the Salon, following the announcement of the medals, Nieuwerkerke and Chennevières always rearranged the paintings in the Palais des Champs-Élysées to highlight both the prize-winners and the dozens of works purchased by the government. In 1868 they took advantage of this reshuffle to remove paintings by many of the actualistes from the alphabetized rooms and place them in a room at the very back of the building known by the artists as the dépotoir ("rubbish dump")—an out-of-the-way room into which few Salon-goers ventured. Though Manet's paintings did not suffer this relegation, the contributions of Renoir, Bazille and Monet spent the last few weeks of the Salon in this humiliating obscurity, with Renoir's Lise and Bazille's Family Gathering skyed even in the dépotoir. For Castagnary, a critic sympathetic to the actualistes, this shabby treatment was a sure sign that the work of the newcomers praised by Zola had delighted the public as much as they had displeased Nieuwerkerke and Chennevières.21

  *Joseph Prudhomme, created by the caricaturist Henri Monnier (a contributor to Le Charivari), was a personification of the vulgar, well-heeled and self-satisfied bourgeoisie who grew up under the July Monarchy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Au Bord de la Mer

  ANTIBES, IN THE south of France, was a sleepy fishing village fortified by ramparts and surrounded by pine forests and stretches of sandy beach. Olive trees shaded its winding roads and the star-shaped Fort Carré loomed over the turquoise waters of the cove. In 1868 Antibes was home to a perfume factory, a sardine fishery, and little else apart from a botanic garden founded a decade earlier by Gustave-Adolphe Thuret, the biologist who had elucidated the sexual reproduction of seaweeds. The railway from Paris had arrived at Cagnes-sur-Mer, six miles from Antibes, in 1863, causing luxury hotels and an esplanade to sprout in Cannes; and for several generations English aristocrats had spent their winters close by at Nice, where each day, on orders of Sir Thomas Coventry, a cannon was fired at twelve o'clock to remind them to eat their lunch. But tourists had not yet arrived in Antibes, nor had the seaside resort of Juan-les-Pins been founded. This stretch of the Midi, 400 miles from the capital, was still terra incognita to most Parisians. Between 1814 and 1860 it had belonged not to France but to the Kingdom of Sardinia. The people spoke Provençal, a dialect that successive educational campaigns had failed to eradicate; and they were believed by northerners to be indolent, superstitious, passionate and (in the words of one writer) "voluptuous to the point of delirium."1 Prosper Mérimée, when he arrived in the south of France, felt he had entered a foreign land.

  Its remoteness from Paris meant that painters were still a fairly uncommon sight in the Midi. The landscapist Félix Ziem had opened a studio in Martigues, near Marseilles, in the late 1830s, and Paul Huet visited for the good of his health on regular occasions between 1833 and 1845, taking the opportunity to capture slices of the south of France on canvas. "I am completely dazzled by this light," Huet wrote, "so keen and so brilliant."2 But French landscapists overwhelmingly preferred to exercise their talents in the more muted light of the north, so the charms of Provence and what was soon to become known as the Côte d'Azur had for the most part remained unexplored. Even painters born in the Midi showed little interest in its landscape. Frédéric Bazille, a native of Montpellier, confined his landscapes to the environs of Paris, while Paul Cézanne was too preoccupied with images of violent eroticism to worry about the sunlight or mountains around his hometown of Aix-en-Provence.*

  The people of Antibes could have been forgiven their surprise, therefore, when the most famous painter in France suddenly appeared in their midst. Ernest Meissonier arrived in Antibes, complete with canvas and easel, in June 1868. He took with him his wife, son and daughter, as well as two of his horses, Bachelier and Lady Coningham. Meissonier may have been drawn to the region for its historical associations. After the fall of Robespierre in 1794, Napoléon had been imprisoned in Fort Carré, and on his return from exile on Elba in 1815 he had come ashore a few miles away at Golfe-Jouan. A little out to sea, meanwhile, loomed the island of Sainte-Marguerite, in whose citadel the Man in the Iron Mask was imprisoned between 1686 and 1698. As he stared out to sea, Meissonier was also reminded of Homer. "Looking at that shining sea," he wrote, "as beautiful and as inimitable in color as the sky itself, one dreams one sees the ships of Ulysses floating on it."3

  In the end, though, landscape and light, rather than history, were what captivated Meissonier in Antibes. "It is delightful to sun oneself in the brilliant light of the South," he wrote, "instead of wandering about like gnomes in the fog. The view at Antibes is one of the fairest sights in nature."4 He seems to have come to the Midi mainly to indulge his passion for landscapes, devoting himself to watercolors and oils of scenes such as Fort Carré perched on its promontory overlooking the water. Never in his life had he been so prolific with his brush. The man who had been laboring for five years on Friedland suddenly churned out, in the space of a few weeks, canvas after canvas, most of them painted en plein air and beautifully refulgent with Mediterranean light. "It is a delight to work in the open air," he wrote following his stay, "and the peaceful landscape painters are a happy race. They do not suffer from nerves like the rest of us."5

  Meissonier wandered about the village and along the coast with his easel, raising it at various points to capture the locals playing boules or the view along the Route de la Salice. These outdoor scenes, spontaneously executed and awash in light and color, come as a surprise from a man known to the public only as a laboriously accurate painter of military scenes and quaint bonshommes. Although Meissonier had already painted numerous landscapes in and around Poissy, his new passion for plein air probably had something to do with his response to the recent work of painters such as Monet and Pissarro.6 For a painter struggling with Friedland, in which almost every brushstroke was infinitely rehearsed, the brisk and impulsive approaches of plein-air landscapists seem to have prompted Meissonier to abandon his traditional obsession with historical authenticity in favor of creating eye-catching visual effects by means of a few salient touches of the brush. If these Antibes landscapes never matched the casual brushstrokes and colorful dissolutions of natural form found in the work of Pissarro, they nonetheless revealed Meissonier as a painter of remarkable versatility whose ambitions were not entirely at odds with those of the École des Batignolles. In danger of attack from writers like Zola and Astruc, Meissonier may have used his Antibes sojourn to revamp his style in order to meet the challe
nges of the "new movement" in painting.7

  With his great wealth and awesome self-regard, Meissonier was hardly a man of the people. Still, several of the Antibes paintings suggest that he was happy to mix with the locals. "We should take an interest in the poor people," he once wrote, "we should talk about their affairs with them. We should love them, and be beloved by them."8 In keeping with this philosophy, Meissonier often performed small acts of charity to relieve the miseries of the poor. One day in Poissy, for example, he came across an old blacksmith whose goods had been seized and were to be sold to cover his debts. He promptly bought all of the tools, reinstated the blacksmith in his business, and paid his rent for a year.9 He also performed a similar sort of charity at Antibes. One of his paintings, Mère Lucrèce, featured an old peasant woman sitting on her doorstep with a grandchild perched on her knee. Since Madame Lucrèce lived in great poverty, Meissonier arranged to pay her a pension for the rest of her life.10 This pension may have amounted to a paltry sum for a man no doubt aware of how he could easily sell Mère Lucrèce for as much as 20,000 francs; but the episode shows that Meissonier, for some a monster of ambition and pride, possessed a softer side. Meissonier returned to Poissy with more than a dozen paintings in hand. Fresh from executing these plein-air landscapes, he turned once again to the formidable labors of Friedland. He was still dissatisfied with his representation of horses in the work. The models sculpted in beeswax, the cavalry charges organized by Colonel Dupressoir, the endless studies that left his own horses on the verge of collapse—none of these measures had allowed him to portray equine movement in quite the way he desired. He therefore decided to take even more drastic measures: he began building a railway track in the grounds of the Grande Maison.