The Judgment of Paris (62 page)
Such were the inauspicious conditions under which, according to Émile Zola, the Salon of 1872 opened its doors. Worse still, the Salon opened ten days later than usual, on May 11, because of delays in getting the Palais des Champs-Élysées cleaned and decorated following the equestrian exhibition, itself held for the first time in two years. But worst of all, the two thousand paintings on show were, in the opinion of most critics, decidedly substandard. An English newspaper reported that the Salon "has no picture of exceeding merit to boast of; besides which, the general run of works exhibited is unquestionably below the average." Most French critics found themselves regretfully obliged to agree. One reviewer, bemoaning the meager contributions, asked a question guaranteed to send chills down the spine of every Frenchman: "Have we lost supremacy on the field of fine arts, as we have lost it on the field of battle? Are our artists, like our generals, the victims of a treacherous illusion in believing themselves invincible?" It was a hideous question to contemplate in a year when the French hoped, as
L 'Opinion nationale
had declared, "to show jealous Europe all that the genius of France could produce in the aftermath of its defeat."
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On the evidence of the 1872 Salon, genius seemed in as short supply among French painters as it had been among French commanders.
The dearth of notable works at the Salon meant that Manet's naval battle, with its sinking ship and billows of black smoke, turned out to be an unexpected crowd-pleaser. Manet was in any case the talk of the Salon thanks to the much-publicized purchase of his paintings by Durand-Ruel a few months earlier. The Salon's critical pariah soon found himself on the receiving end of several column inches of generous praise.
The Battle of the U.S.S. "Kearsarge" and the C.S.S. "Alabama"
was singled out by a critic in
La Rappelas
"a strong, beautiful seascape," while Armand Silvestre, in
L 'Opinion nationale,
extolled it as "one of the most interesting things in the Salon." The loudest applause came from Barbey d'Aurevilly, the reactionary Catholic and erstwhile friend of Baudelaire who, several months earlier, had defended Courbet's exclusion. "Édouard Manet, according to his critics, possesses no talent," he wrote
in Le Gaulois.
"He is said to be a persistent and headstrong dauber, and in recent years he has been pitilessly ridiculed. But that does not imply he is ridiculous—no, far from it." He went on to cite Baudelaire's approval of Manet before celebrating the "very simple and very powerful" battle scene with a poetic conceit that implied the artist's mastery of seascape. "Monsieur Manet," he wrote, "has made like the Doge of Venice: he cast a ring, which I swear was a ring of gold, into the sea."
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Barbey d'Aurevilly was an old friend of Manet, as for that matter was Armand Silvestre; but these enthusiastic reviews were no less gratifying for a man who had indeed been pitilessly ridiculed by the critics. Even his old nemesis, Albert Wolff, declined to savage the work. Wolff concentrated more on Manet's appearance, reassuring readers of
Le Figaro
that although his canvases may sometimes have conjured images of a long-haired, beret-wearing, pipe-smoking bohemian, in fact Manet was "a man of the world, with a refined and ironic smile."
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Here was an artist, Wolff seemed to be saying, who was safe for bourgeois consumption.
All in all, Manet could scarcely have hoped for a better result. He also had other reasons for celebrations that summer. A sportsman and art collector named Barret commissioned him to paint a view of the horse races at the Hippodrome de Longchamp for the enticing sum of 3,000 francs.
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Then, two days before Barbey d'Aurevilly's review, he moved into a new studio. With his old atelier in the Rue Guyot badly damaged, he had spent the previous year working in rented accommodation not far from the apartment he shared with Suzanne and his mother. But on the first of July, fresh from his Salon triumph, he signed a nine-year lease on an imposing studio down the street at 4 Rue de Saint-Petersbourg. Formerly used as a fencing school, the premises consisted of four rooms, including a kitchen and toilet facilities. The vast main room featured high ceilings, oak-paneled walls, a balcony, and an impressive fireplace whose looming overmantel was decorated with Corinthian pilasters. Parting with more of Durand-Ruel's cash, he furnished the room such that it began to look more like a fashionable salon than the studio of a painter known for his shocking canvases. Up the stairs and into the oversize room came a piano, a cheval-glass, a Louis XV console table, a tapestry, some porcelain vases, crimson curtains, a crimson sofa covered with cushions, and a ceramic statue of a cat. More than simply an expression of Manet's own personal taste, this elegant decor was intended to impress prospective clients with his status and sophistication—to prove to wealthy men such as Barret that he was indeed safe for bourgeois consumption.
At least one visitor, an art critic, was utterly charmed by Manet's impeccable refinement, effusing over the studio as "a truly agreeable environment: very beautiful, charming, luxurious even. . . . With a little imagination, we might believe ourselves to be in a room at the Louvre."
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Or, indeed, one might almost have believed oneself inside Meissonier's baronial halls in the Grande Maison. In fact, to some of Manet's friends from the Café Guerbois, this stately and self-important studio smacked of a creeping conservatism, of a commitment more to the artistic ideals and ambitions of
the pompiers
than the
actualistes.
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In any case, it certainly did not look like the workplace of a man about to devote himself to painting
en plein air.
Nonetheless, the studio did include among its elegant
objects
two jarringly dissident souvenirs of the painter's old days as a critical abomination. Hanging proudly on the walls were both
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
and
Olympia,
two works that not even Durand-Ruel had mustered the courage to purchase.
In many ways, Ernest Meissonier had been lucky during the Franco-Prussian War. Thanks to his Europe-wide reputation, his studio in the Grande Maison was treated with far more deference than those of numerous other painters. Camille Pissarro had returned to Louveciennes to discover how the enemy soldiers were using his house as a butcher shop and his canvases as aprons on which to wipe their hands after they slit the throats of rabbits and chickens; his studio was heaped with dung, and only forty of his 1,500 paintings remained intact. Thomas Couture had lost more than a hundred paintings and drawings after his house at Villiers-le-Bel, twelves miles north of Paris, was expropriated by the invaders. Meissonier, on the other hand, may have lost a number of his cows and horses, but his unwelcome guests had neither damaged nor looted his paintings. The fact that none of his works vanished under mysterious circumstances during the occupation indicated a certain level of discipline on the part of the Prussian soldiers in view of the fact that many of Meissonier's tiny masterpieces could easily have fit inside a kitbag or overcoat.
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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
D
ESPITE 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.
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