The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  38 History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoléon, 20 vols. (London, 1845-62), vol. 17, p. 470.

  39 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 243.

  40 History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoléon, vol. 17, p. 445.

  Chapter Two: Modern Life

  1 Quoted in The Westminster Review, April 1,1873.

  2 Émile Zola, La Bête Humaine, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 45.

  3 Armand Silvestre, Au Pays des souvenirs (Paris, 1892), p. 161.

  4 Quoted in Beth Archer Brombert, Édouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 42.

  5 Quoted in Francoise Cachin, Manet, trans. Emily Read (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), p. 18.

  6 Eric Darragon, Manet (Paris: Fayard, 1989), p. 12.

  7 Quoted in Brombert, Édouard Manet, p. 15.

  8 For the Daumier reference, see ibid., p. 46. Thomas Couture frequently receives bad press from Manet's hagiographers, most notably Antonin Proust. For an absurd distortion of the facts, see the entry on Manet in volume 8 of Andre Michel's Histoire de l'Art depuis les premiers temps chretiensjusqu'd nosjours (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1926). Michel attempts, ludicrously, to make of the young Manet a determined plein-air painter who, against the tenets of Couture, eschews the "false shadows" of the studio for the "true light" of the great outdoors (pp. 581-2). For more balanced accounts of Couture and his atelier, see Albert Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 441—56; and idem., The Academy and French Painting (London: Phaidon, 1971), pp. 65—78. Boime argues that the reported conflicts between Manet and Couture "reflect the attempts of apologists to create historical cleavage between master and pupil in the interests of establishing the latter's unbridled originality" {Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision, p. 446).

  9 For Manet's journeys to Italy as well as his studies there, see Peter Meller, "Manet in Italy: some newly identified sources for his early sketchbooks," Burlington Magazine (February 2002), pp. 68—84.

  10 The father's name was listed on the birth certificate as "Koella" and his occupation as" artiste." The mysterious Koella has never been identified, and speculation about Léon's paternity has settled on Édouard, not unreasonably, perhaps, in view of the fact that he and Suzanne eventually became lovers and set up home together. But speculation has also turned to Auguste Manet, Édouard's father. In 1981 Mina Curtis gave readers of Apollo the tantalizing piece of gossip that a "highly distinguished and reliable writer, a relation by marriage of the Manet family, confided in recent years to a close friend that Manet père was actually Léon's father." "Letters of Édouard Manet to his Wife during the Siege of Paris: 1870-71," Apollo 113 (June 1981), p. 379. This theory has recently been championed by Nancy Locke, who points out that Édouard, later in life, never legitimized Léon, even though the Napoleonic Code made provisions for the legitimation of a child whose parents married after their birth. See Manet and the Family Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.47 and 115. Manet's biographer, Brombert, refutes these assertions, claiming that Édouard was in fact the father: see Édouard Manet, p. 98. It may be relevant that both Locke's and Brombert's intriguing psychoanalytic readings of Manet's paintings depend, at least in part, on whether he was Léon's half-brother or biological father.

  11 L'Artiste, September 6, 1857.

  12 Quoted in Cachin, Manet, p. 26.

  13 Poems of Baudelaire, trans. Roy Campbell (New York: Panthéon Books, 1952).

  14 Gazette des Beaux-Arts, July 1, 1861. The critic was Léon Lagrange.

  15 Albert de la Fizeliére, in L'Union des arts, May 21, 1864.

  16 Le Moniteur universe!, July 3, 1861.

  17 Fernand Desnoyers, Le Salon des Refusés (Paris, 1863), p. 41.

  18 The fact that Auguste Manet received treatment, following his stroke, from Dr. Jacques Maisonneuve, a renowned expert on venereal diseases, suggests that his debilitating medical condition may in fact have been tertiary syphilis, presumably contracted from either a prostitute or a mistress. Locke, for example, speculates that the "cerebral congestion" suffered by Auguste Manet could have been "a euphemism for what we would now call tertiary syphilis": see Manet and the Family Romance, p. 48.

  19 I have calculated the worth of land based on the fact that in 1863 sixteen acres were sold for 60,000 francs. For this sale, see Brombert, Édouard Manet, p. 135.

  20 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Salomon (1867), quoted in Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 199. For Herbert's excellent description of the delights of Asnières, see pp. 198-200.

  21 Kenneth Clark writes that by the nineteenth century the predominance of the female nude over the male "was absolute": The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (London: John Murray, 1956), p. 343-22 The term has since entered popular culture, since today the French will describe a woman with a comely shape as une belle académie.

  23 The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans. Walter Pach (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1980), p. 293.

  24 Le Concert champêtre, painted about 1508, was thought in Manet's time to be by Giorgione. It is now believed to have been the work of Titian.

  25 Antonin Proust, Édouard Manet: souvenirs (Paris: H. Laurens, 1913), p. 43.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Stendhal was writing about the 1824 Salon in a series of articles in the Journal de Paris. A translation can be found in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., From the Classicists to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 40-51.

  28 Thomas Couture, Méthode et entretiens d'atelier (Paris, 1867), pp. 251—2. Though this work was not published until 1867, there is no reason to believe it does not represent Couture's views in the 1850s, when Manet was under his tutelage.

  29 Les Chantes modernes (Paris, 1858), p. 5.

  30 The critic was Walter Benjamin in "Das Passagen-Werk," his massive but unfinished study of architecture, politics and capitalism in nineteenth-century Paris, researched from 1927 until his death in 1940. The work has recently been translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin as The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). For studies of Haussmann's transformation of Paris, see J. M. and Brian Chapman, The Life and Times of Baron Haussmann: Paris in the Second Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957); David H. Pinkney, Napoléon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958); Howard Saalman, Haussmann: Paris Transformed (New York: George Braziller, 1971); and David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

  31 Baudelaire originally wrote The Painter of Modern Life, a study of the artist and illustrator Constantin Guys, at the end of 1859. He published it four years later, in November and December 1863, in three installments in Le Figaro. For a modern translation, see Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet (New York: Viking, J972), pp. 395-422.

  Chapter Three: The Lure of Perfection

  1 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 82.

  2 Ibid., p. 254.

  3 Ibid. The references to "Penelope's webs" and the palimpsesting are found on p. 83.

  4 Ibid., pp. 70-1.

  5 Ibid., p. 69. Accounts of Meissonier's studies for 1814: The Campaign of France may be found in Verestchagín, "Reminiscences of Meissonier," p. 662; Ambrose Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, trans. Violet M. MacDonald (New York: Little, Brown, 1936), pp. 159—61; and Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," pp. 832—4.

  6 This expanse of snow, coupled with a grim-looking Napoléon, led a number of earlier commentators to call the painting "The Retreat from Russia," identifying the painting, mistakenly, with the French retreat from Moscow. See, for example, Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, p. 161, and Mollett, Meissonier, p. 6.

  7 Quoted in Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, p. 161.
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br />   8 Quoted in ibid.

  9 These details come from an account by the writer Edmond Duranty, who was—it should be noted—both writing long after the fact and relying on hearsay: see Le Pays des artistes (Paris, 1881), p. 141. Duranty ascribes these efforts to the painting of Friedland, but given that there is no snow in this latter work, the most likely candidate is obviously The Campaign of France.

  10 Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," p. 832.

  11 Philippe Burty, "Meissonier," Croquis d'après nature (Paris, 1892), p. 18.

  12 This account, that of Meissonier's son Charles, is given in Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," p. 834.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid.

  15 For the "extreme artificiality" of the conditions under which Géricault painted, see Lorenz Eitner, Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa" (London: Phaidon, 1973), pp. 32-3.

  16 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 105. For Meissonier's work as a landscapist, see Dominique Brach-lianoff," Heureux les paysagistes!" in Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective, pp. 148—9.

  17 On plein-air landscape in France, see the discussion in Lorenz Eitner, An Outline of 19th-century European Painting: From David through Cézanne (New York: Harper &Row, 1987), pp. 212—13; Anna Ottani Cavina et al., Paysages d'ltalie: Les peintres du plein air (1J80-1830) (Milan: Electa, 2001); and the exhibition catalogue Impressions of Light: The French Landscape from Corot to Manet, ed. George T. M. Shackleford and Fronia Wissman (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2002).

  18 For the way in which such inventions made plein-air painting possible, see James Ayres, The Artist's Craft: A History of Tools, Techniques and Materials (London: Guild Publishing, 1985), pp. no—11. Ayres writes that metal tubes were not patented before 1841, when an American named John Goffe Rand received a patent in London for collapsible metal mbes for oil paints. However, such mbes were in use before then, since in 1824 an Englishman was awarded a prize of twenty-four guineas from the Royal Society of Arts in London for inventing tin tubes for the preservation of colors.

  19 Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," p. 834.

  20 Gréard, Meissonier, pp. 13 and 15.

  21 Ernest and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, ed. and trans. Robert Baldick (London: The Folio Society, 1980), p. 101. Where possible I quote from this work rather than the three-volume French edition published by Robert Laffont.

  22 On Nieuwerkerke's life and career, see Suzanne Gaynor, "Count de Nieuwerkerke: A Prominent Official of the Second Empire and His Collection," Apollo 122 (1985), pp. 372—9; Fernande Goldschmidt, Nieuwerkerke, le bel Émilien: Prestigieux directeur du Louvre sous Napoléon III (Paris: Art International Publishers, 1997); and Goldschmidt et al., Le Comte de Nieuwerkerke: Art et pouvoir sous Napoléon III (Paris: Réunion des Musees nationaux, 2000), the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Musée national du Château de Compiegne. Regarding Nieuwerkerke's links to the House of Bourbon, his mother seems to have been the illegitimate granddaughter of Louis-Philippe I de Bourbon, Due d'Orleans (1725—1785), who was the father of Philippe Egalite and the grandfather of King Louis-Philippe. Nieuwerkerke's father, who once served as King Charles X's Gentleman of the Bedchamber, was a descendant of William the Silent, the sixteenth-century founder of Dutch independence.

  23 This statement, possibly apocryphal, is quoted in Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 184.

  24 For Nieuwerkerke's 1863 règlement and the artists' response to it, see Albert Boime, "An Unpublished Petition Exemplifying the Oneness of the Community of Nineteenth-Century French Artists," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970), pp. 345—53.

  25 Quoted in Boime, "An Unpublished Petition," p. 353.

  26 Quoted in ibid.

  27 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 62.

  Chapter Four: Mademoiselle V.

  1 According to Henri Perruchot, Manet had painted eighteen canvases in 1862 alone. See Manet, trans. Humphrey Hare (London: Perpema, 1962), p. 102.

  2 Manet later painted out the satyr and renamed the work The Surprised Nymph. For the evidence for this change, see Beatrice Farwell, "Manet's Nymphe Surprise," Burlington Magazine 97 (April 1975), pp. 224-9.

  3 Albert Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision, p. 465.

  4 Much light has been shed on the formerly shadowy Victorine. See Margaret Siebert, "A Biography of Victorine-Louise Meurent and Her Role in the Art of Édouard Manet," Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1986. See also Eunice Lipton's entertaining account of her scholarly sleuthing, Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model and her Own Desire (New York: Penguin, 1992).

  5 Jacques Lethève, Daily Life of French Artists in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Hilary E. Paddon (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), p. 77.

  6 Susan Waller, "Professional Poseurs: The Male Model in the École des Beaux-Arts and the Popular Imagination," Oxford Art Journal 25 (2002), p. 56.

  7 Waller, "Professional Poseurs," p. 56.

  8 Ibid., pp. 41 and 56. Female models would be admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts at the end of 1863.

  9 Quoted in ibid., p. 59.

  10 Quoted in Pierre Courthion and Pierre Cailler, eds., Portrait of Manet by Himself and His Contemporaries, trans. Michael Ross (London: Cassell, 1960), p. 10.

  11 Ibid., p. 54.

  12 Juliet Wilson-Bareau, "Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe," in Juliet Wilson-Bareau, ed., The Hidden Face of Manet: An Investigation of the Artist's Working Processes (London: Burlington Magazine, 1986), p. 37.

  13 Eugène Manet is sometimes identified as the brother who posed for the work. For this debate, see Paul Hayes Tucker, "Making Sense of Édouard Manet's 'Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe,' " in Paul Hayes Tucker, ed., Manet's "Le Déjeuner sur I'Herbe" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 35, note 37.

  14 For the copies of Raphael's work in the École des Beaux-Arts, see Paul Duro, " 'Un Livre Ouvert a 1'Instruction': Study Museums in Paris in the Nineteenth Century," Oxford Art Journal 10 (1987), p. 48.

  15 Quoted in Gary Tinterow, "Raphael Replaced: The Triumph of Spanish Painting in France," in Gary Tinterow et al., eds., Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 14.

  Chapter Five: Dreams of Genius

  1 Quoted in Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation, p. 21. For the prestige of fresco in nineteenth-century France, see ibid., pp. 19-21.

  2 Henri Delaborde, Ingres: Sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine (Paris, 1870), p. 373.

  3 Quoted in Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation, p. 21.

  4 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 162.

  5 Ibid., pp. 103-4.

  6 Ibid., p. 238. For a good discussion of Remembrance of Civil War, see Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, pp. 52—63. See also the comments of Robert Rosenblum and H. W. Janson, Art of the Nineteenth Century: Painting and Sculpture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), p. 219. Their passage is worth quoting: "Even the precedent of Goya's Disasters of War or Daumier's Rue Transnonain offers inadequate preparation for the close-up scrutiny of the facts of modern military death that Meissonier insists on here. . . . The ignoble truths of violated flesh and blood, of grotesque foreshortenings, and ripped clothing are presented with the chilling veracity of a modern news photo that might document anything from the corpses of the Crimean War to those of a Nazi concentration camp" (p. 219). Rosenblum and Janson, together with Hungerford, provide a welcome correction to the view expressed by T. J. Clark that Meissonier's "deliberate deadpan in the face of horror" implied "a sober warning to the rebels of the future": see his discussion in The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848—1851 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), pp. 24-9, which is based on a nonlinear reading of Meissonier's politics that unfairly presses him into service as a conservative straw man. For a good discussion of the June Days, which points out that the battle was not a simplistic or straightforward one between workers and their masters, see Théodore Zeldin, Politics a
nd Anger: France 1848—1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 125—6, as well as the classic study by Rémi Gossez, Les Ouvriers de Paris: L'Organisation, 1848—1851 (Paris: Société d'histoire de la revolution de 1848, 1968).

  7 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 238.

  8 The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, p. 689.

  9 On this matter, see Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective, p. 34. See also the excellent discussion of Meissonier's election in Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, pp. 92-4.

  10 The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, p. 689. For celebrations of Meissonier's victory over the" old Académie," see Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective, p. 34, and Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, p. 94.

  11 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 297.

  12 Quoted in Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, p. 92.

  13 Ingres's decision to sign the petition may have been motivated in part by his vendetta against Nieuwerkerke. In the early 1860s Ingres had criticized Nieuwerkerke's conservation of a number of paintings in the Louvre, including ones by Raphael, denouncing the Directeur an "assassin." Nieuwerkerke responded with the unworthy gesture of removing some of Ingres's paintings from their prominent positions in the Luxembourg Gallery. On these matters, see the discussion in Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire, pp. 123—4.