The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  While Meissonier traveled south in the summer of 1868, Édouard Manet, like so many other Parisians, headed north for his vacation, returning with his family to Boulogne-sur-Mer. Having taken his sketchbook with him, as well as his palette and easel, he wandered about the town in search of likely subjects, executing rapid pencil (and sometimes watercolor) studies of steamboats, lighthouses, donkeys, women under parasols, men lounging on jetties and bathing machines lumbering out of the waves.11 These sketches then became oil canvases such as Jetty at Boulogne and Beach at Boulogne, seascapes with boats in murky silhouette against horizontal bands of pale blue and gunmetal gray strikingly different from what Meissonier had depicted in Antibes.

  Besides his plein-air seascapes, Manet also painted an interior scene on a five-foot-wide canvas. Called The Luncheon, it was posed in the dining room of their rented house, that of a retired sailor, and featured a portrait of Léon Koella standing in the foreground. Wearing a straw boater, a dark blazer and the same vacant expression familiar from so many of Manet's portraits, the young man stands before a table littered with the remains of a meal of oysters. Seated at the table behind him, smoking a cigar and enjoying both a coffee and an amber-colored digestif, is the painter Auguste Rousselin, a regular visitor to Boulogne and one of Manet's friends from their days together in the studio of Thomas Couture. In the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, looking very out of place in this domestic scene, is a medieval helmet and a pair of swords.

  Manet may have been inspired to paint these bits of armor in part by the example of a friend, Antoine Vollon, who had just scored a success at the 1868 Salon with Curiositis, a still life of helmets and swords that had been commissioned by Nieuwerkerke. Yet Manet's painting was quite different from Vollon's crisp delineation of Nieuwerkerke's pieces of armor. In many respects it was, like Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe and Olympia, a defiant reworking of artistic tradition. Helmets such as the one depicted in the corner of his canvas were a staple of nineteenth-century French art. Many masterpieces of French Neoclassicism, such as those by David and Ingres, featured heroic male figures nude but for their helmets and the occasional strategic fold of toga. Through the first half of the nineteenth century the numerous students and imitators of David and Ingres proceeded to paint so many helmet-clad heroes from ancient Greece and Rome that a new term, pompier, was born to describe them. Pompier literally meant "fireman"—derived from pomper, "to pump"—and the term made reference, supposedly, to how the antique helmets of these Neoclassical heroes resembled the headgear worn by the French fireman of the period.12 The term quickly became a derogatory one and, by dint of its similarity to the word pompeux ("pompous"), soon connoted the pretentious and the overblown. Nonetheless, in 1868 the pompier spirit was still alive and well at the École des Beaux-Arts, where the most recent topic for the Prix de Rome had been The Death of Astyanax. However, the style was one with which Manet, who favored top hats over plumed helmets, had scant sympathy.

  The Luncheon (Édouard Manet)

  Manet placed the helmet and swords on the retired sailor's armchair, where they form a kind of historical and sartorial counterpoint to Léon's straw boater and Auguste Rousselin's pearl-gray top hat. Also on the chair, directly in front of the helmet, Manet painted a black cat—a sly allusion to the most famous and controversial black cat in the history of art. Rather than arching its back as in Olympia, though, the cat in The Luncheon turns its back on the heroic-looking helmet and goes about the business of industriously licking its privates. It is a whimsical touch in a painting otherwise filled with suggestions of boredom and claustrophobia. Manet also took a poke at the conventions of pompier art. Just as the plumed helmet and shield from the engraving of Raphael's Judgment of Paris became, in Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, a wickerwork picnic basket and a jumble of discarded clothing, so in The Luncheon the signatures of masculine bravery celebrated in pompier art became cast-off props in a provincial dining room, sharing the same dignity and distinction—no more, no less—as the potted plants, corked bottles and coffee urn.

  Manet completed several other oil paintings during his two-month stay in Boulogne. One of them, entitled Moonlight, Boulogne—a view of the harbor with the blackened silhouettes of masts and rigging visible under a full moon—he considered one of his finest works. He also painted the Folkestone steam packet that ferried passengers back and forth across the English Channel. The Folkestone boat, which he had painted in 1864, seems to have had a certain attraction for Manet; and in the last week of July, before returning to Paris, he became a passenger on it. He had decided to make his first trip to London.

  Victorian London was the largest city on earth. The journalist Henry Mayhew, ascending over it in a hot-air balloon, had been unable to tell where the "monster city" began or ended. The American Henry James, writing home to his sister in Boston, claimed he felt "crushed under a sense of the sheer magnitude of London—its inconceivable immensity."13 Its population, at more than three million, was almost double that of Paris. Over the previous few decades hundreds of thousands of immigrants had arrived, many of them refugees from all across Europe and beyond. The city was "a reservoir," claimed the journalist George Augustus Sala, "a giant vat, into which flow countless streams of Continental immigration."14 More Irish lived in London than in Dublin and more Catholics than in Rome.15 There were exiled Polish nationalists, Italian followers of Garibaldi, Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia, as well as German radical philosophers, such as Karl Marx, escaping the attentions of the Prussian authorities. Also among these multitudes were as many as 20,000 Frenchmen, many of them in the area around Leicester Square.16 Édouard Manet traveled to London to visit one of them in particular: his old friend, the painter and engraver Alphonse Legros.

  Having left his family in Boulogne, Manet arrived in London following a two-hour journey from Folkestone on board the South-Eastern Railway only to find the city in the midst of a heat wave of unprecedented intensity and duration. Throughout the month of July the mercury had rarely dipped below the mid-8os Fahrenheit, and on July 21 a temperature of 101 degrees was recorded.17 The country endured deaths from sunstroke, fires on the moorlands, dried-up springs, parched meadows and, on everyone's part, extreme physical enervation. "We are not used to being roasted, melted, exhaled," wrote the editor of The Illustrated London News at the beginning of August, "and most of us find a dash of unpleasantness in the process."18 The newspapers urged men to keep cool by drinking their tea cold and by wearing wet cabbage leaves inside their top hats.19 Women meanwhile adopted French fashions: straw hats topped off dresses made of light materials such as muslin and "gauze de Chambéry," all in pale fawns and grays rather than the dark colors more familiar in London's streets and parks.20

  Even with the theaters and opera houses closed for the season, London offered much for a painter of modern life to appreciate. Attractions included Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea, with its open-air dance floor, and the Zoological Gardens on the north side of Regent's Park. The famous Crystal Palace, moved by the Brighton Railway Company to its new home in the suburb of Sydenham, played host, in 1868, to an exhibition of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain at which an inventor named John Stringfellow unveiled a triplane with a one-horsepower steam engine and two twenty-one-inch propellers. Most spectacular of all, perhaps, was the Metropolitan Railway, opened in 1863, which ran underground for four miles between Paddington Station and King's Cross. Passengers sat in open carriages as steam trains conducted them through brick-lined tunnels at speeds of twenty miles per hour. These were precisely the kind of inventions, the sooty and thronging emblems of modern life, that Thomas Couture had urged his students to take as the subjects for their paintings.

  A good deal of art was also on offer in London, albeit few Spanish paintings. The most famous Velázquez in England, The Toilet of Venus, showing the nude goddess studying her reflection in a mirror held by Cupid, was at Rokeby Hall in Yorkshire. But at the National Gallery, founded in 1824, Manet could have seen two works by th
is "greatest artist of all," a portrait of King Philip IV and La Tela Real, a depiction of a boar hunt. Meanwhile the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) displayed some of England's greatest art treasures, including the seven Raphael Cartoons for the tapestries in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In the summer of 1868 the museum was also hosting an exhibition of portraits, featuring work by Holbein, Vandyke, Hogarth, Gainsborough and Romney, as well as a self-portrait by Turner.

  One gallery that Manet almost certainly would have visited was that of Gustave Doré, the man with whom he had delivered the petition to the Comte de Walewski in the spring of 1863. Since then, Doré had enjoyed phenomenal success, mainly as a book illustrator. An exhibition of his engravings had proved a huge success in London in 1867, prompting him to move there in 1868. He had immediately opened a gallery in Mayfair and signed a contract to engrave some 200 scenes of London for a book to be called London: A Pilgrimage. The contract, due to run for five years, was worth the enormous sum of 10,000 pounds per year—the equivalent of almost 250,000 francs. Doré, who was exactly the same age as Manet, had entered the ranks of the Meissoniers and the Cabanels.

  The gulf between Doré's fabulous success in London and Manet's disastrous failure in Paris was as vast as it must have been rankling for the visiting actualiste. Two of Manet's other friends, Whistler and Fantin-Latour, had likewise enjoyed bursts of good fortune in London, as had Alphonse Legros. After only moderate success in Paris, Legros had relocated to London in 1863, married an Englishwoman, then begun exhibiting regularly, and winning medals, at both the Salon and the Royal Academy. He was furthermore a teacher at the National Art Training-Schools of South Kensington, an art college with an enrollment of more than a thousand students.

  Quite understandably, Manet was determined to see if he could make a similar impact across the Channel. "I think we should explore the terrain over there," he had written to Edgar Degas from Boulogne a few weeks before making his trip, "since it could provide an outlet for our products."21 Manet seems to have recognized that England's extraordinary prosperity had created a new breed of art collector—men who had come from humble origins, enriched themselves through trade, then devoted themselves to covering the walls of their mansions with paintings by living artists. Despite their unpopularity with both the British art establishment and many of the critics, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites had been able to find patrons in men like James Leathart, a lead merchant from Newcastle, and Frederick Richards Leyland, a thirty-six-year-old Liverpool shipowner known because of his generous patronage of the arts as the "Liverpool Medici."

  Little wonder that Manet, struggling to sell any of his canvases in Paris, had cast a covetous eye across the Channel, or that he returned to Boulogne filled with a rare optimism. "I believe there is something to be done over there," he wrote confidently to Fantin-Latour. "The feel of the place, the atmosphere, I liked it all and I'm going to try to show my work there next year."22

  *Cézanne would of course paint many landscapes around Aix-en-Provence, including some sixty views of Mont Sainte-Victoire; but his interest in making these studies of the Provence landscape did not develop until the 1870s.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Mademoiselle Berthe

  PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR once wrote that while he regarded female writers as "monstrosities," female painters were "simply ridiculous."1 Nonetheless, a good many female painters could be found in Paris in the 186os. Some fifty women had exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, or thirteen percent of the total number of participating painters, while more than a hundred showed work at the official Salon during any given year.2 Few of them won medals or were household names, and of the 162 paintings bought by the government from the 1868 Salon, only four were by women.3

  Over the previous decades, however, a number of women had managed to forge successful artistic careers for themselves, the most renowned being Rosa Bonheur. Daughter of a little-known landscapist, Bonheur had first shown her work at the Salon in 1841, at the age of nineteen, after which she went on to enjoy success with her animal paintings. By the 1860s she had won several Salon medals, received government commissions, been awarded the Legion of Honor (the first woman to receive it), and earned the admiration of numerous collectors and connoisseurs. She was especially popular in England, where in 1855 her most famous work, The Horse Fair, was sold for 40,000 francs. One of her greatest enthusiasts was Queen Victoria, who ordered a private viewing of The Horse Fair at Windsor Castle when the painting triumphantly toured the country.

  Showing a horse market held in the Boulevard de l'Hôpital in Paris, The Horse Fair, at more than sixteen feet wide, was a massive canvas, and one that had obliged Bonheur to visit the fair dressed as a man in order to avoid unwelcome attention as she made her sketches. Most female painters restricted themselves to smaller and more unassuming works such as still lifes and portraits, and they were circumscribed in their choice of subject matter for the simple reason that they were circumscribed in their daily lives. They were not allowed to study at the École des Beaux-Arts or to paint nudes, and they did not have the liberty, like their male counterparts, of roaming the boulevards or the bridle paths at will. Nonetheless, by the 1860s a few women did enjoy enough freedom of movement to work as landscapists; and one of those represented most consistently at the Salon, a specialist in light-suffused riverscapes and sun-dappled woodlands, was Berthe Morisot.

  Twenty-seven years old in 1868, Morisot had an impeccable artistic pedigree, since the Morisot family was said to be distantly related to the eighteenth-century Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.4 Berthe's father had studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts before going on to a career in the civil service that saw him become, in 1864, the Chief Councillor of the Cour des Comptes, the government's audit office. Still unmarried, Berthe lived with her parents, sister and brother in the affluent Paris suburb of Passy, directly across the Seine from the Champ-de-Mars. She had begun her artistic career at the age of seventeen, when she and her elder sister Edma took painting lessons from a neighbor, Joseph-Benoit Guichard, a former student of Ingres. Guichard had taken his young charges to the Louvre and instructed them to copy Old Masters, but he became alarmed as what had begun as a pleasing pastime (Berthe's mother simply wished her daughters to take painting lessons so they could present a birthday gift to their father) quickly became an obsession. "Your daughters have such inclination," Guichard warned Madame Morisot. "They will become painters. Are you fully aware of what that means? It would be revolutionary—I might almost say catastrophic—in your bourgeois society."5

  Guichard was exaggerating, since women from distinguished families had become professional painters without causing either revolutions or catastrophes. There had even been a female painter in the Bonaparte family, Princesse Charlotte, Napoléon's niece, who trained under Jacques-Louis David and then worked as a landscapist. But Guichard may have been thinking of the tragic and scandalous fate of another female artist from a respectable family, Constance Mayer-Lamartinière. The daughter of a high-ranking bureaucrat, she had studied under Jean-Baptiste Greuze and then gone on to become the mistress of the Neoclassical painter Pierre-Paul Prud'hon before committing suicide, in 1821, by slashing her throat with a razor. Or Guichard may have been alluding to Rosa Bonheur's decidedly unconventional personal life. Besides dressing as a man to visit horse fairs and slaughterhouses, she smoked cigarettes in public, cut her hair short, maintained a sheep on the sixth-floor balcony of her Paris apartment, and had a female companion instead of a husband.

  To her credit, Madame Morisot ignored Guichard's warnings, and soon afterward Berthe and Edma had become pupils of Camille Corot, a more benevolent and enlightened teacher. Berthe made her debut at the 1864 Salon with two plein-air landscapes, after which she managed to exhibit her work at the next four consecutive Salons, even escaping the wrath of the Jury of Assassins to show a pair of landscapes in 1866. Her successes were not unqualified, since
her paintings tended to be hung high on the walls, and in 1865 Paul Mantz dismissed her still life with the patronizing observation that women could succeed at "domestic painting" since "it is not necessary to have spent a long time drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts in order to paint a copper pot, a candlestick and a bunch of radishes."6 Yet by 1868, when she showed The Pont-Aven River at Roz-Bras, Morisot's reputation as a landscapist was lofty enough for Émile Zola to introduce her to readers of L'Événement illustré as one of the actualistes courageously pursuing truth and originality.

  Édouard Manet was introduced to the Morisot sisters by Fantin-Latour in the spring or early summer of 1868. The bashful Fantin-Latour was secretly in love with Edma, who was engaged to a naval officer. But the younger sister, a slender, dark-eyed brunette, fascinated Manet. "I agree with you," he wrote jauntily to Fantin-Latour from Boulogne a few weeks after making the acquaintance, "the young Morisot girls are charming."7 Manet was as impressed with Berthe's beauty and beguiled by her company at least as much as he was taken with her talents as a painter. He wasted no time in seeking her out after his return to Paris. By early autumn he had convinced her to model for a painting entitled The Balcony, an exterior view of two women and a man idling on a balcony with a boy in the background behind them. Morisot was therefore obliged to make regular visits to his studio. With Victorine Meurent apparently having vanished—Manet had neither seen nor heard from her since finishing Young Lady in 1866 almost three years earlier—Morisot was about to become his favorite female model.