The Judgment of Paris (12 page)
The painting jury for the 1863 Salon faced a daunting prospect as its deliberations began. The annual equestrian exhibition due to be held at the Palais des Champs-Élysées during the latter half of April gave the jurors a mere ten days to evaluate all of the submissions. At least five hundred works therefore needed to be appraised every day, and given that the judges spent six-hour days in the Palais des Champs-Élysées, more than eighty pieces passed before their eyes each hour—with the result that most works received less than a minute of attention. Painting on which artists had spent months or even years were declined, in other words, on the basis of an assessment, made by a team of dazed and exhausted jurors, that lasted no more than a few seconds.
3
The
règlement
did provide a slim chance for reprieve: at the end of the judging a special session called the
repêchage,
or "fishing again," was convened, when the jury took a second look at the
refusés
in order to reconsider their verdicts. As well, each of the jurors had the right of a "charity" pick—a work that, no matter how unworthy in the eyes of his colleagues, would be accepted without quibble. Still, an artist enjoyed only a fifty—fifty-chance of having his work accepted.
The odds against the artists appeared to become even more unfavorable when, as judging for the Salon of 1863 commenced, Nieuwerkerke urged the jury to treat the submissions severely.
4
Given the composition of the jury, most of whose members shared Nieuwerkerke's elevated objectives, this imperative was hardly necessary. Those eligible to serve on the jury included six former winners of the Prix de Rome as well as one runner-up for the prize, Victor Schnetz, a seventy-six-year-old who, in a long and distinguished career, had served as Director of both the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de France in Rome, the two main training grounds for French artists.
5
However, the physical rigors involved in judging so many works, together with the advanced age of many members of the Académie, prevented a number of those eligible for service, including Schnetz, from appearing at the Palais des Champs-Élysées on April 2. All told, Ingres, Delacroix, Cogniet, Schnetz and Hippolyte Flandrin—a friend and former pupil of Ingres—declined to accept their places, while another member of the Académie, the battle painter Horace Vernet, had died in January at the age of seventy-three. To Manet, anxiously awaiting news of the deliberations, the absence of a strong supporter like Delacroix was a cause for serious concern. He even went so far as to exhort Delacroix to attend the voting sessions, but the older artist was simply too ill to participate.
6
The jury was therefore reduced to eight members, with the votaries of Raphael and Rome well-represented among them.
*
Indeed, one of their number, seventy-seven-year-old Jean Alaux, even went by the nickname "The Roman." François Heim, another septuagenarian veteran of the controversial 1859 jury, epitomized the majority. A renowned history painter, he had won the Prix de Rome fifty-six years earlier, in 1807, for
Theseus and the Minotaur.
After five years of studies in Rome he had returned to Paris to teach at the École des Beaux-Arts and to paint ceiling murals for the Louvre. Manet could not have expected him to provide a friendly reception for a work such as
Le Bain.
Nor could he count on encouragement from Émile Signol, a famously intolerant conservative who could be outraged by the sight in a painting of "a certain red."
7
Another juror, a seventy-seven-year-old named François Picot, was bound to be equally intransigent. A sensation thirty years earlier at the Salon of 1833 with allegorical paintings such as
Cybele Protects the Towns of Stabiae, Herculaneum, Pompeii and Resina from Vesuvius,
he had distinguished himself by repeatedly voting against the inclusion in the Salon of Gustave Courbet and other proponents of Realism.
Ernest Meissonier was the one member of the jury from whom Manet may have hoped for some support. They had been allies in the fight against Nieuwerkerke's new regulations, and Meissonier enjoyed a close friendship with Manet's strongest advocate, Delacroix. Moreover, on the 1863 jury he found himself among a group of
académiciens
who, on two separate occasions within the previous three years, had voted against exalting him to their ranks.
"I flatter myself that I can be of use there," Delacroix had written in 1857 regarding his own presence on the Salon jury, "because I shall be nearly alone in my opinion."
8
On his own first stint on the jury, Meissonier must likewise have resigned himself to holding the minority opinion. Most interested observers could reasonably have concluded that he was the ideal candidate to assume the mantle of the ailing Delacroix and vote for the artists who dwelt beyond the charmed circle of the École des Beaux-Arts.
Meissonier's presence notwithstanding, the results of the jury's deliberations were, perhaps, only too predictable. On April 5, three days into the judging, rumors about widespread rejections made the rounds of the cafés and studios of Paris. When the results were announced a week later, stories of a massacre in the Palais des Champs-Élysées were brutally confirmed: only 2,217 works were accepted out of the more than 5,000 submitted, a failure rate of almost sixty percent. Of the 3,000 artists who had submitted work, only 988 heard good news.
Among the more than 2,000
refusés
were a number of well-known painters. Foremost among them were the landscapists Antoine Chintreuil, an exhibitor since 1847, and Johan Barthold Jongkind, a forty-four-year-old Dutch painter whose work had been awarded a gold medal in 1852. In another surprise, more than forty students and former students of Léon Cogniet—Meissonier's old teacher and a fellow member of the Académie—were also given the thumbs-down. Among their number was one of the rising stars of French art, Amand Gautier, a thirty-seven-year-old painter and engraver who had won great plaudits at the Salon of 1857 for
The Madwomen of La Salpetriere
—a study of lunatics in a Paris asylum—and again in 1861 for a portrait of his friend and former roommate, Paul Gachet, a doctor specializing in psychiatry and homeopathy.
9
As for Manet, he received the same bad news as the more than 2,000 other
refuse's.
A letter on notepaper headed "Ministry of State," and signed with a flourish by Nieuwerkerke, tersely explained how the Directeur regretted that his three works "were not admitted by the jury." There was no explanation for the rejection: the artist was simply told that he had to reclaim his work from the Palais des Champs-Élysées "without delay."
10
The jury's wholesale rejections spurred into action groups of artists who had already been mobilized several months earlier by the campaign against Nieuwerkerke. They did not on this occasion muster on the steps of the Institut de France, as they had done four years earlier, or protest noisily beneath Nieuwerkerke's windows in the Louvre. Instead, in the days that followed many of them gathered to drown their sorrows and discuss strategy in the Café de Bade, close to the Galerie Martinet in the Boulevard des Italiens. A number of the 12,000 cafés in Paris had become important forums for artistic life. cafés offered to painters and writers a bohemian atmosphere of pipesmoke,
bonhomie,
and drinks that tasted, in the words of one habitué, like a mixture of cheap mouthwash and soot.
11
Manet had been a regular at the Café de Bade for the previous eight or nine years, spending each evening there before making his way home to Suzanne, Léon and what passed for his domestic obligations. The café offered a slightly raffish clientele of men-about-town, prostitutes and devotees of
le whist,
a card game recently imported from England. It had become the preferred hangout of a group of young artists who abandoned their former haunt on the Left Bank, the Café Moliere, to enjoy its hospitality. Included among them were Fantin-Latour and his close friend, the painter and engraver Alphonse Legros; a young art critic named Zacharie As-true; and, whenever he was in Paris, a twenty-nine-year-old expatriate American named James McNeill Whistler.
Manet and "Jemmie" Whistler had met in March, following an introduction by Fantin-Latour. With his monocle, sarcastic wit and rebellious streak, not to mention an inheritance stingily doled out by a widowed mother, Whistler resembled a transatlantic version of Manet—though his
bon mots
and "amazing power of anecdote" (as one admiring witness reported) exceeded even Manet's sparkling repartee.
12
The son of an engineer who built a 420-mile railway from Moscow to Saint Petersburg for Czar Nicholas I, Whistler was a former West Point cadet who had been expelled by the academy's commandant, a despairing Robert E. Lee, for incompetence and insubordination. He had fetched up in Paris in 1855, at the age of twenty-one, determined to make a living as a painter. Like Manet, he saw his offering for the Salon of 1859,
-At the Piano,
rejected by that year's painting jury, but since then a limited amount of success had come his way in London. He had sent to the 1863 Salon, however, a painting already rejected by the Royal Academy in London. That Whistler was still alive to show the painting was something of a minor miracle in itself. Called
The White Girl,
the seven-foot-high canvas had been responsible for giving him a dose of lead poisoning after he used copious amounts of lead white, a toxic pigment, in its creation.
*
He had subsequently spent time recuperating from the illness in Biarritz, on the southwest coast of France. There he had nearly been drowned when a fifteen-foot-high wave swept him out to sea as he studied the breakers for his latest work,
The Blue Wave: Biarritz
James McNeill Whistler (Nadar)
Both Whistler and Fantin-Latour found themselves excluded from the 1863 Salon along with Manet, Whistler's
The White Girl
adding to its catalogue of misfortunes the inglorious red stamp of the Salon jury. Though Whistler left for Amsterdam in April to make a study of Dutch painting, many other rejectees gathered in the Café de Bade, in the days after the jury's decisions were announced, to plot their response. Among their number, it seems, was Louis Martinet, who, undaunted by the poor reception given Manet's works a month earlier, offered to show some of the refused works in his gallery. The
Courrier artistique
reported the project on April 15, three days after the jury's decisions were made public. Martinet immediately received a letter from Whistler (who was being kept abreast of developments by the faithful Fantin-Latour) authorizing him to fetch
The White Girl
from the Palais des Champs-Élysées.
13
Manet, too, undoubtedly began preparations for another showing of his work, including
Le Bain,
at the Galerie Martinet—a small compensation for his exclusion from the Salon.
These plans were suddenly and dramatically altered, however, when word of rampant discontent among the artists reached the ears of someone far more powerful than Louis Martinet. Exactly a week after the controversial decisions were announced, Emperor Napoléon III, worried about the level of the complaints, decided to investigate. On April 22, therefore, he made his way to the Palais des Champs-Élysées to inspect the rejected paintings for himself.
Charles-Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte had been born in Paris on April 20,1808, in a mansion in the Rue Cerutti (now the Rue Laffitte). His was a dizzying genealogy. His mother was Hortense de Beauharnais, the daughter of the Empress Josephine and the stepdaughter of Napoléon.
*
His father, at least on paper, was Louis Bonaparte, Napoléon's brother and the King of Holland from 1806 until his abdication in 1810. However, the marriage between Louis and Hortense was so unhappy ("Never was there so gloomy a ceremony," wrote Louis of his own wedding)
14
that the child's true paternity was the object of much speculation. Candidates ranged from an admiral in charge of the Dutch navy, to various equerries and chamberlains, and even to Napoléon himself, who was rumored to have nourished a soft spot for his stepdaughter.
15
The child, known as Louis-Napoléon, was so feeble at birth that he was bathed in wine and then wrapped in cotton wool. For several years thereafter, disappointed at having given birth to a boy, Hortense dressed him as a girl, an inauspicious start in life for someone whose horoscope proclaimed that he would wear the imperial crown of France. Still, greatness was impressed upon the child from an early age. An imperial decree gave him, at the age of two, the title of "Prince Louis-Napoléon," and he received regular visits from his uncle the Emperor. One of his most vivid early memories, indeed, was of Napoléon picking him up by his head.
16
