The Judgment of Paris (41 page)

Study of horses in motion (Ernest Meissonier)

Besides demonstrating their attack formations and the secrets of hand-to-hand combat, the cuirassiers had another task to perform for Meissonier: he requested that they and their horses trample a field of wheat. Just as
The Campaign of France
had required him to rake across the grounds of the Grande Maison vast quantities of flour to double as snow, his work on
Friedland
demanded a battered crop of ripening wheat—the landscape on which the incident depicted had taken place. Yriarte claims Meissonier purchased an entire field over which he hired horsemen from a cavalry company to tromp.
⁵
Another of Meissonier's friends, Albert Wolff, likewise a writer for
Le Figaro,
maintained that the painter actually planted the crop in his park at Poissy, then hired the horsemen to flatten it once June, the month of the battle, had arrived.
⁶
Whatever the exact circumstances, Meissonier had assembled his easel in the middle of the field and made
plein-air
sketches of the ears of wheat scattered across the ground.

These studies seem to have been completed in 1867 or the first half of 1868. Meissonier included one of them in a portrait he began early in 1868, that of Gaston Delahante, owner of
The Campaign of France.
The banker posed for the portrait not at his own mansion but, in what amounted to a kind of advertisement for Meissonier's taste in interior decoration, in one of Meissonier's antique Louis XIII chairs, with a carved trunk beside him and a tapestry on the wall behind. Also in the background was an easel with a sketch of
Friedland
clearly visible, while a piece of paper lying casually on the floor proclaimed: "Gaston Delahante. E. Meissonier, 1868." The cost to Delahante was 25,000 francs, one of the highest prices ever paid by a sitter for his portrait.
⁷

Delahante naturally could not fail to notice how Meissonier's latest masterpiece was proceeding. But when he expressed an interest in acquiring
Friedland
he learned how the painting was already spoken for. The buyer was not Henry Probasco, who had returned to Cincinnati with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of books and other treasures but without, however, getting his hands on
Friedland.
His offer of 150,000 francs had been topped by a bid from Lord Hertford that seems to have been in excess of a stratospheric 200,000 francs.
⁸
At this price,
Friedland cost
more than double the amount ever paid for a painting by a living artist. To put this sum into perspective, twenty years earlier, Alexandre Dumas
père
had spent 200,000 francs constructing his Château de Monte Cristo, a lavish Renaissance-style castle featuring a moated studio, statues by James Pradier, and a Moorish salon carved by a team of craftsmen specially imported from Tunisia; while
Le Moniteur
once reported that 200,000 francs could support a brigade of soldiers—some 2,000 men—for as long as six months.
⁹
The price tag of 200,000 francs was therefore an extravagance even for the man who owned Bagatelle, the beautiful Château built for Marie-Antoinette in the Bois de Boulogne.

The Universal Exposition of 1867 and the months following its closure at the end of October comprised for Meissonier a kind of
annus mirabilis
in what had already been a miraculously successful career. If he entertained any worries about his finances (and his passion for aggrandizing his property at Poissy certainly gave him a few anxious moments over the years), then the 200,000 francs would happily lay these to rest. And if he retained any worries about his critical reputation, he could rejoice in the assurances of the many critics who claimed he possessed, in the words of Charles Blanc, "no equal . . . either in France or anywhere else."
¹⁰
His career had reached a magnificent peak by the time he celebrated his fifty-third birthday in February. He also relished other domestic delights, since he would mark his thirtieth wedding anniversary later in the year, a few weeks before his son Charles—who had succeeded in winning the hand of Jeanne Gros—was due to marry. Charles himself seemed poised to become a great success as a painter, a worthy heir to his father. Not only had
While Taking Tea
been awarded a medal at the 1866 Salon, but Charles was celebrated by the reviewer for the
Revue du XIX
^e
Siècle
as an artist whose talent "seizes you with its lively charm, which harbors sharp and rigorous drawing, and which bursts with the right color—youthful, stimulating, harmonious, virile and truthful."
¹¹
Buoyed by so many accomplishments, Meissonier was unprepared for the rebuke he was about to receive as the Salon of 1868 approached.

The
règlement
for the 1868 Salon was published in
Le Moniteur universel
a little more than a week after the Universal Exposition closed at the end of October. The numerous protests over the previous two Salons—the chanting in the streets, the petitions, the violent threats—had convinced Nieuwerkerke that he could no longer avoid making alterations to how the jury was chosen. Four years earlier, the furores of 1863 had persuaded him to allow certain artists to elect three quarters of the jurors, effectively marginalizing the most reactionary painters. But the artists casting their ballots had constituted an elite group who had either won medals at the Salon or been decorated with the Legion of Honor. The controversies surrounding the Salons of 1866 and 1867 indicated that a noisy rump of artists had yet to be appeased by what they regarded as half-measures and token gestures.

The time had therefore come for Nieuwerkerke to surrender to the democrats: his new
règlement
announced that two thirds of the jury for the 1868 Salon would be elected by artists who had ever exhibited as much as a single work at the Salon, regardless of whether or not the work had been awarded a medal of any description. Hundreds of artists were thereby enfranchised. Perennially unsuccessful painters such as Paul Cézanne would still be excluded from the ballot box; but Manet, Fantin-Latour, Whistler, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Degas were suddenly eligible to vote for the first time. Cabanel, for one, was displeased with this new democracy: "It's just like in politics," he lamented, "it makes a fine mess of things."
¹²

The deadline for submitting work to the 1868 Salon was March 20, with ballot papers due to be counted two days later. The first weeks of March therefore witnessed, besides the usual scenes in which hopeful masterpieces trundled down the boulevards on the tops of pushcarts, much frantic politicking on the part of the artists as the more savvy and ambitious among them recognized that in order to get themselves elected they needed to campaign as vigorously as any politician. Meetings were therefore convened, committees appointed, parties formed, manifestos composed, and slates of candidates thrust forward. Not surprisingly, Gustave Courbet, a veteran of so many previous battles, proved himself the most energetic politician; he wasted no time putting together a group called "The Committee of Non-Exempt Artists." Consisting of twelve candidates, his impressive roster encompassed two former jurors, Daubigny and Charles Gleyre, and a number of other successful and well-known painters.
*

In the run-up to the election, the Committee of Non-Exempt Artists embarked on a well-organized campaign that left no one in any doubt about their intentions. Their slogan was "Liberty in Art," and their published manifesto—which came with a detachable ballot paper inscribed with the names of the twelve candidates—declared that they would follow "a frankly liberal course" and "open the doors of the Salon to all artistic production, whatever its inclination, which they agree unanimously not to reject."
¹³
They were therefore a team of prospective jurors who planned, should they get elected, to abolish the jury altogether. Nieuwerkerke must have held his breath as, on March 22, the Palais des Champs-Élysées filled with artists clutching their ballot papers.

Manet did not put himself forward as a candidate for the painting jury; but not having made a single sale from his 18,000-franc investment in the Place de l'Alma, he decided to end his boycott of the Palais des Champs-Élysées and send work to the 1868 Salon. He had failed to complete
The Execution of Maximilian
on time to hang it in his pavilion, which had closed on October 10; nor was it ready by the time the deadline for Salon loomed. He had abandoned his second version of the work sometime in the autumn and commenced yet another, this time on an even larger canvas, exactly ten feet wide. But since this latest version of Maximilian's execution was likewise incomplete by the middle of March, he submitted two portraits instead.

The first of these paintings, done some two years earlier, was of Victorine Meurent. Placing before the jurors yet another image of Victorine may have looked like a provocative stunt and a foolish temptation of fate. For this canvas, however, she had worn clothing; or at any rate she had donned a pink peignoir and posed in Manet's studio with an African gray parrot. Begun around the time of the Salon of 1866, the work was entitled
Young Lady in 1866.
Though Victorine struck a modest pose, little doubt could be left in the mind of the spectator about the profession followed by this particular "young lady": Manet had, as usual, cast Victorine as a prostitute. Parrots were well known as a signature attribute of the courtesan, with Marie Duplessis, for instance, one of the most famous courtesans of the century, having kept a parrot with brilliant feathers in a gilded cage in her apartment in the Rue de la Madeleine. The bird, which she had taught to sing, was sold at auction along with the rest of her possessions after she died in 1847 at the age of twenty-three.
*

The subject of Manet's second portrait was, if anything, more notorious than Victorine Meurent. Sometime after closing his pavilion in the Place de l'Alma he had begun a portrait of Émile Zola. Already infamous for his art criticism, by the time the painting was under way Zola had become still more ill-famed as his novel
Thirésè Raquin,
serialized in
L 'Artiste
between August and October, appeared in book form in December. A lurid tale of adultery and murder among working-class Parisians, this work plunged even his scandalous first novel,
The Confession of Claude,
into the shade.

Thirésè Raquin
tells the story of an adulterous affair between the title character, the wife of a lowly clerk in a railway company, and a would-be painter named Laurent whose canvases (rather like those of Zola's friend Cézanne) "defied all critical appreciation."
¹⁴
Zola evoked controversial Realist painters such as Courbet, Manet and Cézanne not merely through his portrayal of Laurent and his violent and ugly canvases layered thickly with paint. The milieu of Manet's
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
was suggested in Chapter Eleven, in the novel's murder scene, where Camille, the cuckolded clerk, goes on a day's outing with his wife and her lover to Saint-Ouen, directly across the Seine from Asnières. Here the three of them encounter among the fairground stalls and raucous cafés the sorts of daytrippers typically found along this stretch of river: office workers and their wives, people in their Sunday best, crews of oarsmen, and "tarts from the Latin Quarter."
¹⁵
They find a shaded spot in the woods where they sit on the grass, the two men in their coattails and Therese—in a kind of homage to Victorine Meurent—provocatively baring a leg. This description of a threesome reclining on the grass beside the river would undoubtedly have put many readers in mind of Manet's
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe.
And the violent outcome of the scene—Camille is strangled and thrown into the Seine—may have confirmed the suspicions of those visitors to the Salon des Refusés who had found something immoral about Manet's ill-assorted grouping of figures.

Zola had confidently predicted to his publisher that
Thirésè Raquin
would enjoy a
"succès d'horreur."
¹⁶
The forecast proved accurate as the novel became both hugely popular—the first edition sold out in less than four months—and highly controversial. The novel was denounced as "putrid literature" by a writer in
Le Figaro.
"In the past several years," the critic exclaimed in outrage, "there has grown up a monstrous school of novelists which pretends to replace carnal eloquence with eloquence of the charnel house, which invokes the strangest medical anomalies, which musters plague victims so that we can admire their blotchy skin . . . and which makes pus squirt out of the conscience."
¹⁷
Zola could hardly have been more pleased with the denunciation. Taking maximum advantage of the opportunities for publicity, he fired off a defense of his so-called "cesspit of blood and filth" in a preface to the second edition.
¹⁸
He claimed his motive was a scientific one and the novel itself merely a kind of experiment in which he scrupulously but dispassionately viewed the results of mixing together a powerful man and an unsatisfied woman. His efforts, he suggested, resembled those of a chemist with his test tubes or an anatomist with his scalpel and his corpse—or, better still, a painter with his paintbrush and a nude model. "I found myself in the same position," Zola wrote, "as those artists who copy the nude body without feeling the least stirrings of desire, and are completely taken aback when a critic declares himself scandalized by the living flesh depicted in their work."
¹⁹