The Judgment of Paris (11 page)

More was to come as Paul Bins, the Comte de Saint-Victor, reviewed the exhibition for
La Presse,
a mass-market daily newspaper with a circulation of some 30,000. Though this paper, edited by a dandyish impresario named Ar-séne Houssaye, was generally liberal in outlook, the thirty-six-year-old Saint-Victor was a venomous reactionary, with even his friends accusing him of "boorish intolerance" in matters of art.
⁷
True to form, he dismissed Manet in a few words: "Goya gone native in the depths of the Mexican pampas."
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Worse still, however, was the response of the public. One of Manet's friends would later write that all "original" works of art were fated to suffer the gibes and taunts of "bourgeois imbeciles."
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Many Parisians were as hostile and intolerant in matters of artistic taste as the disdainful Saint-Victor, and paintings not meeting with their approval sometimes risked being shown the business end of a riding-crop or walking-stick (as Courbet had discovered in 1853). Occasionally even the artists themselves came in for rough treatment. At the Salon of 1828, Delacroix's
Death of Sardanapalus
aroused such widespread revulsion with its brilliant colors and wild sensuality that one visitor threatened to put a stop to the painter's controversial career by amputating his hands.
¹⁰

For several weeks in March, the Galerie Martinet witnessed similarly unruly scenes as indignant visitors threatened violence to Manet's canvases. Most offensive to their sensibilities was
Music in the Tuileries,
a chaotic-looking blaze of figures painted with a smeary lack of fine detail. Inauspiciously enough, it shared many of the same hallmarks as
Le Bain,
such as an off-white undercoat, impasted shadows and a lack of chiaroscuro—all of which made it drastically dissimilar in style to most of the works put on show in the Palais des Champs-Élysées.

The viewing public was accustomed to standing close to paintings, studying them minutely and marveling over the delicacy of the handiwork. The work of a master like Meissonier even repaid, as John Ruskin would discover, the scrutiny of a magnifying glass. But Manet's apparently clumsy brushstrokes and lack of clarity in
Music in the Tuileries
did not lend themselves to this sort of appreciation. The work looked lackadaisical and incomplete because in places the undercoat of white primer and the weave of the canvas could clearly be seen. Elsewhere the marks of the paintbrush were visible. Most other painters used thin glazes and fine brushes made from sable to cover their traces, in effect brushing themselves—their labors and their personalities—out of their works. Manet, however, exploited the properties of his paints to reveal the nature of his workmanship. The vast majority of pigments sold in France were no longer mixed with linseed oil, which yellowed with age, but rather with poppy oil, whose use resulted in more buttery, textured pigments than the smooth ones produced by mixtures of linseed oil. Painters using pigments bound in poppy oil therefore needed to work harder to eliminate the bristle-marks from their canvases, though a number of them, notably Delacroix and Couture, had begun leaving behind the visible sign of the brush as a kind of signature of their individuality and workmanship.
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They were following in the tradition of painters of the Italian Renaissance such as Leonardo and Titian, some of whose works show how they even smeared paint with their fingertips. But by the nineteenth century this seemingly spontaneous approach—and the hand of the individual artist—had largely disappeared because of an insistence on a more burnished appearance.

Study for
Music in the Tuileries
(Édouard Manet)

From close range, therefore,
Music in the Tuileries
simply looked absurd to spectators in the Galerie Martinet, a half-completed sketch masquerading as a finished product. The subject matter of
Music in the Tuileries
seems to have been equally repellent. It did not shock in the same way as, for instance,
The Death of Sardanapalus,
a scene of orgy and murder inspired by one of Lord Byron's plays. But Parisians accustomed to paintings featuring models in historical dress—the Roman togas and plumed helmets of David and Ingres, the Louis XV costumes of Meissonier—found themselves confronted, to their surprise, by a canvas showing a cast of characters dressed much like themselves.

Top hats and frock coats were by 1863 a distinctly modern costume. The top hat had been invented in 1797 by the London haberdasher John Hetherington, who caused a riot when he stepped outside with one perched on his head: children screamed, women fainted, the arm of an errand boy was broken, and Hetherington was hauled before the courts to explain the meaning of his alarming new invention. Sixty years on, these fears had been conquered and the top hat was omnipresent on the heads of both the bourgeois and the aristocrat, worn, like the equally ubiquitous frock coat, for both business and pleasure. While the dress of men in previous centuries had been designed to indicate ranks or professions, by the middle of the nineteenth century—especially after the reign of King Louis-Philippe, the "Citizen King" who wore a bowler hat and carried a rolled-up umbrella—almost all men in Paris dressed identically in sober black clothes as a kind of sartorial recognition of their equality.
¹²
As early as 1846 Baudelaire had been interested in the black frock coat as a worthy subject for artists, urging them to abandon the exotic fripperies of historical paintings and to concentrate instead on this modern-day uniform of the bourgeois age (this despite the fact that he himself was a famous dandy who favored resplendent dress and spent two hours each day making his toilet).
¹³
The same argument was made by the novelist and art critic Jules Champfleury. This "supreme pontiff of Realism," as he was known, ordered artists to discard the costumes of Greece and the Renaissance and consider a "serious representation of present-day personalities, the derbies, the black dress-coats, the polished shoes or the peasants' clogs."
¹⁴

Since Baudelaire and Champfleury both appear in
Music in the Tuileries,
the painting might be understood as a kind of artistic manifesto or, at the very least, as Manet's experimental response to the entreaties of these two friends as well as to Couture's demands for scenes of modern life. However, modern-day dress was still a controversial topic for a painting. The subject of one of Manet's other figures in
Music in the Tuileries,
Théophile Gautier, was far more dubious about the value of commemorating top hats and frock coats in paint, or indeed of representing scenes of contemporary life through any means whatsoever.
¹⁵
Often seen sporting bright caftans and a fez, the longhaired Gautier despised bourgeois clothing, regarding it as unworthy of art since the sheer mundaneness of frock coats quashed the possibility of presenting visions of nobility or heroism. And Gautier believed, like many of his contemporaries, that these beautifully idealized visions were the highest and most proper subjects for art. Manet's depiction of humdrum everyday fashion therefore seemed a deliberate and provocative contrast to the signatures of masculine heroism—togas, helmets, swords—so familiar from the canvases and murals sanctioned by the Académie and put on show at each Salon. Nothing heroic or morally uplifting could be seen in
Music in the Tuileries,
merely an ill-defined mob of Parisians loitering and gossiping in a park.

Given the hostile reactions of both the newspapers and the visitors to the Galerie Martinet, Manet cannot have been surprised that his works failed to elicit commercial attention. Yet when Martinet inquired as to the price of one of the works,
Boy with a Sword,
he responded quickly. "I would like one thousand francs for it," he wrote with stern emphasis, before adding: "but I authorize you, if you see fit, to let it go for eight hundred."
¹⁶
Nonetheless, the painting languished on the wall of Martinet's gallery, and Manet would make, in the end, not a single sale from the exhibition.

One of Manet's few consolations at this time was the support from a fellow artist. Though seriously ill with tuberculosis, Delacroix left his home in the Rue de Furstemberg to pay a visit to the Galerie Martinet. He and Manet had met as early as 1857, the year of Delacroix's election to the Académie. Two years later, as a member of the painting jury, he had voted for
The Absinthe Drinker,
an endorsement from which Manet took much consolation. In 1863 Delacroix remained a fierce champion of the younger painter. Appalled by the rude comments and contumelious scenes around the paintings, he loudly proclaimed as he left the Galerie Martinet: "I regret having been unable to defend this man."
¹⁷

Delacroix's spirited advocacy aside, Manet's exhibition had undermined some of the reputation he had built for himself two years earlier with
The Spanish Singer.
This failure obviously did not bode well for the Salon of 1863. His strategy in showing his canvases seemed dismally to have backfired.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Baffling Maze of Canvas

A
LTHOUGH His PAINTINGS were not destined to appear at the Salon of 1863, Ernest Meissonier would at least make his presence felt in another important way. His election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts had given him the privilege of serving on the painting jury. He would therefore be one of the men charged with reviewing several thousand works of art and deciding which among them were worthy of exposure in the Palais des Champs-Élysées.

The deadline for submissions was the first of April, a month before the Salon was due to open. Frenetic scenes always took place in the studios of Paris in the days preceding the deadline as artists worked desperately to put the finishing brushstrokes on their works, many of which arrived at the Palais des Champs-Élysées—the 250-yard-long cast-iron exhibition hall where the judging took place—with the paint still wet to the touch. Transporting a work of art to the hall, especially a piece of sculpture or a large canvas, posed logistical difficulties. The more affluent artists hired porters to convey them, while the rest were forced to do the job themselves, pushing handcarts and wheelbarrows through the streets. Masterpieces of painting and sculpture were thereby exposed to the elements, the perils of cobblestones, and the curious glances of passersby, who occasionally witnessed amusing spectacles, such as the exertions of the Swiss sculptor James Pradier, who often gave his work finishing touches with a hammer and chisel while it was en route. Onlookers in 1855 would have witnessed the arresting sight of Jean-Léon Gérôme's
The Age of Augustus,
a gargantuan painting thirty-three feet long by twenty-three feet high, making its stately progress through the streets.

In the run-up to the 1863 deadline, the Champs-Élysées and surrounding avenues and bridges grew thick with swaying trolleys and wobbling carts as the artists descended on the Palais des Champs-Élysées to have their works registered and measured. Despite Nieuwerkerke's new regulations, some 5,000 works of art—paintings, sculptures, engravings and photographs—were submitted to the Selection Committee, which began its deliberations on the second of April. The process of judging was, as always, an arduous one. The works were ranged around the Palais des Champs-Élysées in alphabetical order according to the artists' surnames, creating what one writer called a "baffling maze of canvas."
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The jurors were obliged to tramp around the hall—and through the warren of upstairs rooms into which the overflow spilled—to view the works one at a time, separated from the canvases they were appraising by a white rope held by two attendants. Votes for and against each work were taken by a show of hands, with a simple majority prevailing. The chairman of the jury was armed with a little bell, which he rang each time the jurors turned their attention to a new work, whose fate was carefully recorded by a secretary. Canvases receiving unanimous favor from the jurors were awarded a "number one" ranking, which gave them the privilege of hanging "on the line" at the Salon, that is, at the ideal viewing height. Those turned down by the jury, on the other hand, were carried away ("like corpses after a battle," as a commentator put it)
²
by white-coated attendants and then—most humiliatingly—stamped on the back with a red R that stood for
refuse:
"rejected." This symbol was the kiss of death to a work, not only ruling it out of the Salon but also hampering any chance of its selling to a private buyer.