The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  Meissonier nonetheless had a difficult time settling in the Grande Maison after its occupation by the Prussians. He had developed an almost pathological hatred of all Germans. In the weeks following the siege, polite and ingratiating Prussian officers hoping to engage the master in idle conversation were treated to rude replies and slamming doors.7 Meissonier became a recluse in his studio, and even when the Prussians finally departed the memory of their presence was so obnoxious to him that he began contemplating a move from Poissy. To that end, therefore, he acquired a plot of land in the Boulevard Malesherbes, in the heart of the Batignolles.

  The Batignolles may have seemed an unlikely spot for France's wealthiest painter to build himself a house. The district was home, of course, to members of the so-called École des Batignolles. It was also home to a large population of working-class Parisians, many of whom had been, like their neighbors in Montmartre, staunch supporters of the Commune. The women of the Batignolles had been especially active, forming a Women's Union for the Defense of Paris and raising barricades from the tops of which they flew the Red Flag. Still, the area was beginning to change. Meissonier had bought the land for his house from the brothers Émile and Isaac Pereire, wealthy railway developers and financiers who were hoping to transform this working-class neighborhood into one of the most fashionable in Paris. He quickly set about planning a Renaissance-style Château whose grandeur and opulence—it was to include a loggia, a courtyard and a spiraling staircase—would put even the Grande Maison to shame.8

  Besides his new home, Meissonier was also busy with an old project, namely the seemingly interminable Friedland. By the spring of 1872, he had not touched the painting for more than eighteen months. He had temporarily abandoned it during the siege of Paris, after which, with a house full of conquering Prussians, he had not had the heart to work on what he called "this picture of Victory."9 The man who had arranged to buy the work, Lord Hertford, had died of bladder cancer in August 1870. The work therefore had no owner until, more than a year later, Sir Richard Wallace agreed to buy it. Supposedly Lord Hertford's illegitimate son, but more probably his illegitimate half-brother, Wallace inherited the marquess's houses in London and Paris, his sprawling Irish estates, and his extraordinary art collection, which included among its treasures more than a dozen Meissonier paintings. If Lord Hertford went to his grave with the consolation of knowing he had never rendered anyone a service, Wallace was determined to use his wealth more generously. Opportunities immediately presented themselves during the siege, and "Monsieur Richard," as he was known to Parisians, rose heroically to the challenge. He funded two hospitals for the sick and wounded, provided food and coal for the poor, and in the end spent an estimated 2.5 million francs assisting the besieged and starving Parisians in one way or another.

  Wallace quickly demonstrated that he would be no less enthusiastic a Meissonier collector than Lord Hertford. Early in 1872 he bought A Visit to the Burgomaster—Meissonier's first-ever Salon painting—and soon afterward agreed to purchase Friedland for 200,000 francs. This extravagant price matched the going rate for a work by the artist revered above all others in nineteenth-century France, since only a year later the French government would spend 207,500 francs buying for the Louvre a fresco that Raphael had executed for La Magliana, the papal villa outside Rome.10

  After paying Meissonier an advance of 100,000 francs, Wallace shipped all fourteen of his Meissonier paintings across the Channel, together with most of the rest of his art collection, for an exhibition at the Bethnal Green Museum in London.* This exhibition drew the usual complimentary reviews. One of the most enthusiastic came from the studiously elegant pen of a twenty-nine-year-old American named Henry James, whose first novel, Watch and Ward, had made its appearance a year earlier. The young novelist had picked his way through what he called an "endless labyrinth of ever murkier and dingier alleys and slums" in order to describe the show for readers of The Atlantic Monthly. Among the paintings by Watteau, Rembrandt, Gainsborough and Vernet, he singled out Meissonier for special praise. Meissonier's "diminutive masterpieces," he wrote, "form a brilliant group. They have, as usual, infinite finish, taste, and research, and that inexorable certainty of hand and eye which probably has never been surpassed."11

  That inexorable certainty would soon test the reaction of critics everywhere. Meissonier estimated that Friedland had been some six months from completion when the Franco-Prussian War erupted. Resuming work in the summer of 1872, he found his optimism had been well founded. He would therefore be ready to unveil the painting in 1873, a full ten years after he had first started work.

  *The image refers to how each year on Ascension Day the Doge of Venice would symbolically marry the sea by tossing a gold ring into the Adriatic from his galley, the Bucentaur, while saying: "We espouse thee, O sea, as a token of our perpetual dominion over thee."

  *Wallace deposited his paintings in the Bethnal Green Museum in 1872 while waiting for his London home, Hertford House in Manchester Square, to be made ready to receive them. This stock of paintings, together with Nieuwerkerke's pieces of armor, today forms the core of the Wallace Collection in Hertford House.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Pure Haarlem Beer

  DESPITE His GRAND studio and newfound success, in the autumn of 1872 Édouard Manet could still be found warming a bench every evening in the artists' corner of the Café Guerbois. By the early 1870s the Café Guerbois was crowded with, besides the regular group of painters, a motley band of dandies and bohemians. Included among them, until he absconded to Brussels with the seventeen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud, was Paul Verlaine, the absinthe-addicted poet and former Communard; an eccentric musician named Ernest Cabaner, who collected old boots to use as flower pots and lived on nothing but bread and milk; and the Comte de Villiers de l'lsle-Adam, a penniless and dissolute poet and dramatist. But Manet was particularly taken with another of these fellow drinkers, a red-faced, beer-drinking, pipe-smoking engraver named Émile Bellot. "I must do your portrait sometime," Manet had often told Bellot; and in the autumn of 1872 the engraver finally agreed to visit the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg.1

  Manet's inspiration for this portrait was almost certainly a visit he and Suzanne had made to Holland the previous June, immediately before he took possession of his new studio. It was Manet's first visit to Holland since his marriage in 1863; and while he may have had little desire to visit his in-laws, his enthusiasm for Dutch museums made the journey worthwhile. Accompanied by his brother-in-law Ferdinand Leenhoff, he had made a visit to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, a town of canals and gabled houses that was famous for growing flower bulbs and brewing beer. Opened ten years earlier in a former home for indigents where the painter had died in 1666, the museum held more than a dozen of Hals's portraits of worthy Haarlem burghers dressed in millstone collars and dark suits. Yet besides these respectable Dutch merchants, Hals had also painted more lighthearted portraits of bosomy wenches and cheery, round-faced cavaliers. One of the best of these, The Merry Drinker, was in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which Manet likewise visited. Painted in the 1620s, the work showed a rosy-cheeked gentleman in a ruff collar and wide-brimmed hat gesticulating amiably with his right hand and raising a glass of Haarlem's finest with his left.2

  This convivial bonhomme seems to have put Manet in mind of his friend Bellot, and within a few weeks of returning to Paris he began work on a Hals-like painting called Le Bon Bock ("The Good Pint," plate 8A). The honor of posing for Manet was, as ever, greater than the pleasure, and Bellot was obliged to visit the studio on at least eighty occasions. In keeping with the lordly style of his new studio, Manet instructed the concierge to admit Bellot—humiliatingly for the engraver—through the tradesmen's entrance.3 At least the pose was by no means a demanding one. Bellot was merely required to don an otter-skin cap and sit at a table holding a glass of beer while puffing happily on his long-stemmed pipe. His twinkly-eyed contentment is wonderfully captured—a rare example of Manet depicting animation and
emotion in a subject. Manet himself was evidently pleased with the work, which he decided to send to the 1873 Salon.

  Manet was also working on several other paintings in between his relentless sessions with Bellot. One of them, quite different in flavor from Le Bon Bock, was entitled The Railway (plate 7B)—a portrait of a mother and child that included in the background the tracks and platforms of the Gare Saint-Lazare as seen from the back garden of a house in the Rue de Rome. The garden, which belonged to an artist friend named Hirsch, looked east across the tracks toward Manet's new studio, one of whose balustraded windows makes a sly cameo in the top left-hand corner of the painting.4 The work satisfied Couture's old demands for paintings of la vie moderne, since it featured huge clouds of locomotive steam rising above the railway cutting and the Pont de l'Europe, a star-shaped bridge with iron latticework that had been completed only in 1868. Manet seated the fashionably attired young mother on a concrete ledge, holding in her lap a clasped fan, an open book and a sleeping puppy; the child stands beside her, back turned as she clutches the iron railing at the foot of Hirsch's garden and looks down into the vaporous void of the railway station.

  The little girl was posed by his friend's daughter, and the young woman—surprisingly, perhaps, for such an image of bourgeois motherhood—by none other than Victorine Meurent. Victorine had only recently returned to Paris after six or seven years in America, to which she had emigrated to pursue a love affair. She may have been surprised at the pose she was ordered to adopt in Hirsch's garden, since this most notorious femme fatale of the 1860s Salons suddenly found herself playing a maternal role. Even so, the painting would have been unsettling for anyone expecting an intelligible narrative or an unambiguous moral imperative. Victorine's nonchalant expression; the child turning her back; the prison-like bars of the railing; the smoking chasm of the railway tracks; the inexplicable bunch of grapes in the right foreground—as so often whenever Manet and Victorine came together, numerous enigmatic touches seemed deliberately to frustrate any clear reading of the work.5

  Louis-Napoléon's exile in England had been a reasonably pleasant one. Camden Place, his rented mansion in Chislehurst, was staffed by fifty servants and host to numerous visitors. Both the Prince of Wales and Queen Victoria had come to pay their respects. The former then invited Louis-Napoléon to his club in London, the latter by private train to Windsor Castle. The deposed Emperor gratefully accepted both offers. He also made excursions to the Brighton Aquarium, and in the summer of 1871 he had holidayed on the Isle of Wight, where he went yachting with a party that included a young American, Jennie Jerome, who three years later would become the mother of Sir Winston Churchill. He even began working on a new invention, a cylindrical stove that would provide, he hoped, a cheap source of central heating for the poor.

  In addition to these recreations, Louis-Napoléon had been—despite his protestations to the contrary—plotting his return to France. In a repeat of his exploits of three decades earlier, he planned to cross into France from Switzerland; he would then mobilize loyal elements in the army and march triumphantly on Versailles to overthrow Adolphe Thiers. His scheme was compromised, however, by the fact that he was too debilitated to ride a horse. Jennie Jerome had found him "old, ill and sad,"6 and indeed he was still suffering from both rheumatism and his bladder stone. Throughout the autumn of 1872 the pain from the stone became so excruciating that his physician, Sir Henry Thompson, decided to risk an operation. A thorough examination was conducted on Christmas Eve, followed by a crushing operation soon afterward. Over the next week, two further operations were performed to break up the remains of what turned out to be the largest bladder stone Sir Henry had ever seen. A fourth procedure was scheduled, but Louis-Napoléon's condition had begun rapidly to deteriorate. He died on the morning of January 9, 1873, three months short of his sixty-fifth birthday.

  The Emperor's body lay in state—ironically for a man who had little appreciation for art—in the picture gallery on the ground floor in Camden Place, with the funeral taking place at Saint Mary's Catholic Church in Chislehurst. The tiny building had seating for fewer than 200 people, but some 30,000 more gathered in the grounds outside, the majority of them French. Hundreds of immortelles were sold, and mourners clipped sprigs from the yew and holly trees for souvenirs. There was "weeping and sobbing from men as well as women," reported The Illustrated London News, which declared: "The late Emperor was a great man, and a great ruler of men."7 In France, the newspapers expressed far less sympathetic opinions. Though Bonapartist organs such as L 'Ordre announced the death on front pages bordered in black, the left-wing journals were jubilant. "Requiescat in pace in the oblivion of history," sneered one, while another suggested that 200,000 Frenchmen would be alive and five billion francs saved if only Louis-Napoléon had died a few years earlier. Meanwhile the official government newspaper, Le Journal officiel, did not bother to report the death until two days later, and then it deemed the Emperor worthy of only a single line: "Napoléon III died on January 9 at Chislehurst."8

  Determined that her husband should not rest in the oblivion of history, Eugénie immediately began constructing a memorial for Louis-Napoléon. No sooner was he interred in the sacristy of Saint Mary's than she commissioned a neo-Gothic chapel to enshrine his tomb, the granite for which had been donated by Queen Victoria. The small chapel attached to Saint Mary's would be completed early in 1874, in time for a Requiem Mass on the first anniversary of his death. Above its door was a stained-glass window that featured, among other scenes, a portrait of Saint John the Evangelist holding a poisoned chalice. The image was an apt one for a man whose long reign had been brimful of both splendor and tragedy*

  A few days after the newspapers announced Louis-Napoléon's death, Charles Blanc published the regulations for the 1873 Salon. He demanded such stringent qualifications from voters that only 149 painters were eligible to receive a ballot, compared with more than a thousand in 1870. As a result, the jurors for the 1873 Salon turned out to be virtually identical to those elected the previous year. However, one member of the 1872 jury was conspicuously absent in 1873: the voters emphatically rejected Ernest Meissonier, denying him a place on the jury as chastisement for his persecution of Gustave Courbet. The exclusion of Meissonier itself then caused a rumpus, since several jurors, including Baudry and Breton, promptly resigned in a show of support—though the rest of the artistic community seems to have endorsed the punishment of the belligerent and overbearing Meissonier.

  Meissonier was not especially troubled by his reproof from the voters because in 1873 he was involved in what he regarded as a grander mission. Almost six years had passed since Napoléon III had opened the Universal Exposition in 1867. A number of large industrial exhibitions had been held since then, though nothing on the same scale as the Emperor's spectacular display in Paris. In 1870, however, the Lower Austrian Trade Association had proposed the staging of what became known as a Weltausstellung, or World Exhibition—a showcase, explained the organizers, "that would embrace every field on which human intellect has been at work."9 A huge exhibition hall named the Rotunda, complete with a 440-foot-wide dome, began rising over Prater Park in Vienna, while nearby a 2,000-foot-long Machinery Hall started taking shape. To the east of the Rotunda, beside the Danube, was the Fine Arts Gallery, a 600-foot-long brick-and-stucco construction in which the most recent masterpieces of world art were due to be shown when the Emperor Franz Josef opened the exhibition on May 1, 1873. It was in this building, on the largest stage the world could provide, that Meissonier planned to unveil Friedland.

  Meissonier may have been persona non grata among many of his fellow artists in France, but abroad his name still carried enough weight and prestige that Charles Blanc chose him to head the International Jury for the Fine Arts, in which capacity he would oversee the display of French paintings in Vienna. Meissonier naturally took to this task with relish, seeing a chance to demonstrate to the world—and in a German-speaking nation—that the genius of France
was still alive and well. The critic Edmond About summed up the aspirations of many Frenchmen when he wrote that "a French masterpiece, exploding amid the mediocrity of arts in Europe, would do us as much honor as a victory on the battlefield."10 To that end, Meissonier planned to send to Vienna masterworks of French painting from the Louvre, the Luxembourg and other French museums. Besides the mighty Friedland, Meissonier also planned to dispatch some nine or ten others of his works.

  This artistic expedition soon encountered problems when Adolphe Thiers, citing possible damage en route to Vienna, refused to allow any paintings to be removed from the walls of French museums. Meissonier was furious at his friend's casual attitude to the exhibition, which recalled the ineptness and complacency with which the French generals had prosecuted the war against the Prussians. He sent a telegram to Thiers requesting an audience. "We had a long conversation," Meissonier later reported. "I told him over and over again that he was sending us out to battle with only half our arms, the best of which he was keeping back in the arsenal."11 Thiers eventually relented. The French would go into battle fully equipped with masterpieces.