The Judgment of Paris (48 page)

France had more than 11,000 miles of railway track in 1869.
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In the previous three decades the railway had transformed the nation more than any other single invention. It had stimulated the economy, created new social relations, and transfigured the urban environment as metropolitan life began to revolve around the train station more than—as previously—the church or the town hall.
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The railway had likewise influenced artists, in particular landscapists, by bringing the Forest of Fontainebleau and more remote destinations such as the coast of Normandy within easy reach of their Paris studios. It had also, like photography, caused a shift in visual perception by altering the relationship between the viewer and the physical landscape, across which one could suddenly travel at speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour. It could be argued that the hasty-looking landscapes of Monet and Pissarro owed something to the brief vistas glimpsed as they loomed and then dissolved in the window of a train carriage. One critic of the Batignolles painters complained, at any rate, that Monet "paints as if from an express train."
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Even so, the most eccentric contribution of railway technology to the history of art was surely Meissonier's miniature railway at Poissy.

Meissonier had a team of workmen lay a set of iron rails in grounds that had formerly featured only the bucolic delights of cherry trees and grazing livestock. He next installed on this track a small carriage, or what one witness called a "wagonette" and another "a rolling sofa."
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Parallel to this length of track he fashioned a bridle path along which a horse could gallop. With these two lengths of course complete, he climbed into the wagonette, whose motive power was not steam or even horses but a pair of men. These two unfortunates were ordered to push the painter as quickly as possible along the rails in his wagonette as a horseman galloped full-pelt down the bridle path beside them. This bizarre feat was performed time and again as Meissonier, whisked along the track with pencil and paper in hand, "jotted down the action, the strain of the muscles, every detail of the motion and the different transitions."
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Entire albums were filled with these scribbled observations. One of his friends claimed that Meissonier thereby "succeeded in decomposing and noting 'in a flash' the most rapid and complex actions" of the horse's flying legs.
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Without a high-speed camera, however, Meissonier was like a naked-eye astronomer, a Tycho Brahe staring at the night sky and counting stars before the invention of the telescope. Not for another ten years, when Eadweard Muy-bridge finally managed to use a high-speed camera to capture a horse's motion photographically, would these "rapid and complex actions" truly be understood.
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Nevertheless, that a man so bewitched by the past, a man who claimed to detest the sight of railway stations, should have spent so much time and effort hurling himself down a railway track in a quest for the latest scientific knowledge, provides a delicious irony.

Meissonier's researches into the articulation of a horse's leg as it cantered or galloped were nineteenth-century equivalents of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of bats and birds or Michelangelo's dissections of the human body. In each case, scientific observation was pressed into the service of art, and art into the service of science, with Michelangelo, for instance, in his quest to depict physical perfection, mapping the anatomical structure of the human body more accurately and explicitly than anyone before him.
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Meissonier was no less committed to his own task. He became the first painter in history, according to one of his friends, to bring a "scientific knowledge of anatomy" to bear on the artistic treatment of the horse.
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The 1869 Salon took place, like the one in 1863, against the background of elections for the Legislative Assembly. The political climate in France had altered dramatically in the intervening six years. Not only had the Emperor's reputation been damaged by his ill-judged foreign policy initiative in Mexico, but the economy had begun to contract after years of growth. The silk industry was suffering from an epidemic of
pébrine,
the wine industry from
phylloxera,
and the banking industry from a
greve du milliard,
the "strike of the billions" whereby nervous financiers ceased to invest their wealth, causing the collapse of banks such as the Crédit Mobilier, the value of whose shares had tumbled, in 1867, from 1,982 francs to 140.
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Even worse for the Emperor was the fact that the relaxation of the press laws in 1868 meant the republican opposition—always a powerful force in Paris—had at last been unmuzzled.
La Lanterne,
an inflammatory antigovernment journal edited by Henri Rochefort, had become so provocative (and so successful) that the government took action after only a few issues and—liberal laws notwithstanding—closed it down. But dozens of other journalists also began whipping themselves into a vituperating frenzy. The result, in Paris at least, was that almost every night for weeks on end witnessed packed electoral meetings, followed by demonstrations, riots and the forceable scattering of the angry protesters with batons and cavalry charges.
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French artists, however, were more sedate in 1869, thanks largely to the fact that a wide majority had work accepted for the Salon. Many of the painters from the Salon of Newcomers returned in 1869. Camille Pissarro had two views of Pontoise accepted; Renoir a portrait of his mistress Lise Tréhot; and Degas that of a former ballerina, Josephine Gaujelin. But Degas also had one of his canvases rejected; Berthe Morisot submitted nothing; while Cézanne and Alfred Sisley each had both of their works turned down.

The 1869 Salon had another notable absentee. Claude Monet had reached a low ebb following Nieuwerkerke's insistent rejection of one of his two paintings in 1868. He had moved that summer to Bonniéres-sur-Seine, twenty-five miles north of Paris, where an unpaid bill resulted in his eviction from an inn and a halfhearted suicide attempt as he threw himself into the river. "Fortunately no harm was done," he wrote a day later to Bazille.
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His fortunes then briefly waxed after he managed to show some of his canvases at an exhibition of maritime art in Le Havre and sell his portrait of Camille, shown at the 1866 Salon, to Arséne Houssaye, editor of
L 'Artiste,
for 800 francs. However, the authorities in Le Havre seized four of his paintings from the walls of the exhibition and auctioned them to pay his numerous creditors. These canvases were knocked down to a buyer for 80 francs each—an astonishing bargain considering that a new, unpainted canvas cost a little less than half that.

Monet had moved in the autumn to a rented house in Étretat, on the Normandy coast not far from Le Havre. There, buoyed by a visit from Gustave Courbet, his spirits quickly improved. "I'm very happy, very delighted," he wrote to Bazille. "I'm surrounded here by all that I love."
²⁵
Despite being refused credit at the paint shop (his reputation had obviously preceded him) he managed a winter scene,
The Magpie,
which he painted out of doors on a day so cold that he was forced to bundle himself into three overcoats, light a brazier beside his easel, and wield his paintbrushes in gloved hands. A few months later, having moved back to Paris, he submitted
The Magpie
to the Palais des Champs-Élysées along with
Fishing Boats at Sea,
another product of his Étretat sojourn. This time both paintings were rejected. Monet was furious. "That fatal rejection has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth," he fumed in a letter. The dealers had all turned their backs on him, he noted bitterly, notwithstanding his extremely modest prices.
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Édouard Manet enjoyed more favor from the 1869 jury. Both
The Balcony
and
The Luncheon
were accepted, but he was anxious about their possible reception following so many discouraging experiences. On the first day of the Salon, Berthe Morisot discovered him loitering nervously in Room M, "with his hat on in bright sunlight, looking dazed."
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Morisot, who had come to the Palais des Champs-Élysées with her mother, was not showing work in 1869. Though 130 women were exhibiting at this Salon, Morisot had been unable to join them since she was suffering from an eye infection that prevented her from completing her work on time. This infection made it difficult for her to see the paintings on the wall, but Manet begged her to gauge their effect, "as he did not dare move a step. I have never seen such an expressive face as his," she later wrote to her sister Edma. "He was laughing, then had a worried look, assuring everybody that his picture was very bad, and adding in the same breath that it would be a great success."
²⁸

Morisot made her way to where
The Balcony
was suspended on the wall. "It seems that the epithet
femme fatale
has been circulating among the curious," she reported to Edma about her own appearance in the work.
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Manet, "in high spirits," then gallantly escorted her through the other rooms in the Palais des Champs-Élysées. The party soon became separated in the press of the crowd, at which point Morisot became sensible that it was not proper for a woman such as herself "to walk around all alone. When I found Manet again, I reproached him for his behavior. He answered that I could count on all his devotion, but nevertheless he would never risk playing the part of a child's nurse."
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With her sessions for
The Balcony
complete, Morisot's relations with the man she quickly came to regard as a mentor had become slightly fraught. "I think he has a decidedly charming temperament," she wrote to her sister following this particular encounter, "I like it very much."
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But in many ways the gentle, insecure Morisot was ill-equipped to deal with a character such as Manet. Though he may have looked the part of the gentleman, with his lemon-yellow gloves and ubiquitous cane, Manet could sometimes be guilty of unpleasantly boorish behavior. He dominated the Café Guerbois and his various other haunts with a kind of tyrannical wit. He was "naturally sarcastic in his conversation and frequently cruel," wrote one friend. "He had an inclination for punches, cutting and slashing with a single blow. . . . He was the strangest sight in the world, his elbows on the table, throwing about his jeers with a voice dominated by the accent of Montmartre, close to that of Belleville."
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Clever insults delivered in an affected working-class accent may have gone down well in male company, but Morisot, more accustomed to tutelage from the genial, pipe-smoking "Papa" Corot, found them extremely hurtful. Manet, she once admitted to Edma, "has said many unpleasant things to me."
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By the time of the 1869 Salon, moreover, the uneasiness between Manet and Morisot was exacerbated by the presence of another young female painter, a twenty-year-old named Éva Gonzales who had become Manet's first and only student after entering his studio in February. The daughter of a Spanish-born novelist, Éva possessed beauty, elegance, breeding, intelligence—and even some talent as a painter. She swiftly became Morisot's rival for Manet's affections and attentions.

As it transpired, Manet had good reason to be nervous about the reception of his paintings. The attacks on the painter each spring in the French newspapers were becoming a regular event, an annual ritual like the Poisson d'Avril or the Grand Prix de Paris. The 1869 Salon brought yet another volley of abuse. Though Théophile Gautier wrote that the two works "are relatively sensible and will create no scandal," other reviewers found plenty of reasons to inveigh against them. A writer in the
Gaiette de France
rather cruelly picked out the figure of Léon in
The Luncheon:
"The painter of Olympia and her cat seems to have laboriously plumbed the depths of human ugliness to extract the distressing figure which he shows us in the foreground of his
Luncheon."
Most severe of all was a thirty-four-year-old German playwright and journalist named Albert Wolff, recently appointed chief art critic of
Le Figaro.
"Manet thinks he is producing paintings, but in fact he does nothing but sketches," wrote Wolff, voicing the familiar complaint against painters of the Generation of 1863. "He lacks imagination," Wolff added. "He will never accomplish anything else, you can count on it." Even Castagnary, one of the country's more progressive reviewers, found both paintings "meager" and "sterile." His review in
Le Siècle,
a left-leaning paper with 40,000 readers, went so far as to suggest that Manet required more training in order to improve his technique.
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Having endured the humiliation of this latest batch of lacerating reviews, Manet lapsed into the usual depression. "Poor Manet, he is sad," Berthe Morisot wrote to her sister. "His exhibition, as usual, does not appeal to the public, which is for him always a source of wonder."
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Such failure caused Manet embarrassment as well as wonder. Morisot's mother noted how he met in the street "people who avoid him in order not to have to talk about his painting, and as a result he no longer has the courage to ask anyone to pose for him."
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Still, Manet did summon the courage to ask to ask one person. Before the summer was out, he had begun, much to the annoyance of both Morisot and her mother, a portrait of Éva Gonzales.