The Judgment of Paris (22 page)
T
HE HANDCARTS AND wheelbarrows laden with offerings for the 1864 Salon began rolling up before the Palais des Champs-Élysées on March 21. Besides having their submissions measured, catalogued and receipted, certain artists were allowed to cast their votes for the Selection Committee. The ballot boxes closed on April 2, the deadline for submitting works of art. Of the twelve seats available on the jury for painting, nine were to be elected by the group of artists who had either received medals at previous Salons or been privileged with induction into the Legion of Honor or the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
Given this constituency, the results showed a bias in favor of members of the Académie, a total of five of whom were elected. The painter polling the most votes was the seemingly unstoppable Cabanel, followed by Robert-Fleury and Ernest Meissonier. Other members elected included Léon Cogniet and Hip-polyte Flandrin (both of whom had chosen not to serve in 1863), while nonmembers picked by their peers included Gérôme and Camille Corot. The election of the sixty-eight-year-old Corot must have encouraged the landscapists, the group most harshly treated by the 1863 Selection Committee. He was a mentor to both Antoine Chintreuil and another much less well-known participant in the Salon des Refusés, Camille Pissarro.
The election produced other results that looked favorable for the
refusés
of 1863. Émile Signol, the man blamed by many for the harshness of the previous painting jury's decisions, failed to get himself elected, as did three other well-known conservatives from the Académie: François Picot, François Heim and Auguste Couder. All four were apparently being punished for their deeds of a year earlier. The backlash against the more intransigent
académiciens,
begun in many of the newspapers, seemed even to have spread into the ranks of this relatively conservative electorate of painters. Meissonier's tally of votes proved, on the other hand, that he was not held responsible for their sins.
Nieuwerkerke had been careful to reserve for himself the right to appoint a quarter of the Selection Committee. For the painting jury he selected one conservative, Paul de Saint-Victor,
*
whose narrow-mindedness was offset by the more benevolent Théophile Gautier, as well as by a third appointee, Auguste de Morny. The Due de Morny (his title had been conferred two years earlier) was an inspired choice on the part of Nieuwerkerke—and an acknowledgment of just how determined he was to avoid the debacle of the 1863 Salon.
After the Emperor, the fifty-three-year-old Morny was the most powerful man in France. He was in fact the illegitimate half-brother of Louis-Napoléon, the product of an affair between Hortense de Beauharnais and one of Napoléon's generals, the Comte de Flahaut. An adept and charismatic politician, he had been one of the architects of Louis-Napoléon's coup d'etat and, since 1854, President of the Legislative Assembly. He was also a great patron of the arts, having amassed a large collection of paintings thanks to the fortune of his former mistress. Eclectic and venturesome in his aesthetic tastes, Morny had been among the first to purchase paintings by the landscapist Théodore Rousseau—whose work until then had regularly been rebuffed by Salon juries—and even Gustave Courbet. He also, naturally, collected Meissonier, six of whose finest works looked down from the walls of his splendid mansion beside the Champs-Élysées. But Morny's tastes for Meissonier's paintings showed his political as well as his aesthetic instincts.
Morny's appearance on the painting jury was nominally due to the fact that he knew his way around the auction rooms and art galleries of Paris. But he had almost certainly been put forward by Nieuwerkerke because of his brilliant political instincts. A master at blunting opposition to Louis-Napoléon in the Legislative Assembly, he was equally skilled at subtly shaping the careers—political as well as aesthetic—of the artists whom he collected. His purchase in 1852 of Courbet's
Young Ladies of the Village Giving Alms to a Cow Girl
was a clever attempt to co-opt the radical impulses of Courbet, then at the height of his notoriety.
1
The effort proved unsuccessful, but Morny obtained better results with another painter whose uncompromising realism had been seen, in the early 1850s, as a plausible threat to Louis-Napoléon's regime.
Meissonier may have missed the Revolution of 1830, but he had managed a more active part in the turbulent events of 1848, when the Second Republic was declared after famine and riots forced the abdication of King Louis-Philippe. Meissonier's friend, the poet Lamartine, became Minister of Foreign Affairs and a member of the Executive Committee. At his insistence the thirty-three-year-old Meissonier—whom Lamartine recommended to the voters of Poissy as "a man of heart, an artist of genius, and a devoted patriot"
2
—ran for a seat in the Constituent Assembly. Though he lost the election, Meissonier served in the National Guard during the June Days, after which he painted his "terrible impression" of political violence,
Remembrance of Civil War.
His scene of corpses beneath a broken barricade was in many ways a companion piece to Delacroix's
Liberty Leading the People,
a painting deemed so subversive that for many years it was banned from public view. The authorities recognized that Meissonier's work likewise had the potential to inflame political passions. Sent to the Salon of 1850, it was removed from view before the exhibition closed, though not before a good deal of attention came its way from critics across the political spectrum, most of whom praised Meissonier's "omelette of men" (as one called it) for depicting the horrors of warfare with "the pitiless fidelity of the daguerrotype."
3
The man responsible for dozens of easygoing musketeers appeared to have been transformed into a painter whose shocking tableau delivered an uncustomary political and emotional charge.
Paintings with such sharp political edges had a grim resonance after Louis-Napoléon came to power. After his violent coup d'etat in 1851 saw more than a hundred people shot dead in the streets of Paris, supporters of the new Emperor had reason to fear that Meissonier, a republican sympathizer, might create another such "omelette" with his brushes, conjuring vividly to life the men and women caught in the crossfire of Bonapartist guns. But Morny was careful to forestall any such work by assiduously courting Meissonier's favor, paying visits to his studio and purchasing from him works such as
Bravoes,
exhibited at the Salon of 1852.
4
He also commissioned Meissonier to paint a portrait of his mistress wearing a blue dress and holding a book.
5
The tactic succeeded. No more scenes of military gore came forth from Meissonier's easel; work resumed on the
bonshommes
and musketeers; and by 1859 Meissonier was celebrating in paint the Emperor's victory at Solferino. Such sly coercion on the part of Morny suggests that the members of the Académie would not have heaped up their funeral pyre in so blundering a fashion, as they did in 1863, had he been in their midst.
Besides appointing the Due de Morny to the painting jury, Nieuwerkerke took further precautions to make certain that the scandals of 1863 would not repeat themselves. The jurors were specifically instructed to take a more tolerant view of the works submitted. Any works not admitted to the Salon would simply be deemed "too weak to participate in the competition for rewards"
6
and go on show in another Salon des Refusés. This year, however, the administration of the Salon des Refusés was not to be entrusted to a band of private individuals, such as Chintreuil and his friends; it would be organized instead by Nieuwerkerke and Chennevières themselves.
One note of discord did manage to creep into Nieuwerkerke's harmonious arrangement when Meissonier—showing that he had not been entirely tamed—abruptly declined to serve on the jury. The reasons for his refusal are not known for certain, but a number of factors may have played their part in his decision. He may simply have balked at the physical and mental labors involved in judging at a time when he was preparing numerous studies for
Friedland.
"Besides taking up much precious time," he once wrote of his work on the Selection Committee, "it generally results in regret, reproaches, and very great fatigue."
7
Nieuwerkerke's dismissive response to the petition presented to the Comte de Walewski a year earlier may still have irked him, while his galling experience on the previous Salon jury and his failure to be awarded a professorship at the École des Beaux-Arts—a position which he coveted—could likewise have made him reluctant.
Meissonier was not one to forgive and forget a slight. According to a friend at the Institut de France, he enjoyed a well-deserved reputation among friends and enemies alike as "a very savage fellow" whose impulsive temper often "betrayed him into violent outbursts and an offensive show of contempt."
8
Another friend, Edmond de Goncourt, likewise noted Meissonier's flammable disposition, calling him a "maniac" who could be "as brutal as anything" if the moment moved him: "One never knows, coming to his house, if the door will be slammed in your face or if you will be crowned with roses."
9
Though he refused jury duty, Meissonier's anger and churlishness were not extreme enough for him to continue his boycott of the Salon. He therefore agreed to send
The Campaign of France
and
The Battle of Solferino
to the Salon of 1864. His grand new style, after the delay of a year, would at long last make its debut in public.
* * *
After the Selection Committee began its deliberations in April, the Marquis de Chennevières received a letter from an old acquaintance. Charles Baudelaire had reached a low ebb. In February 1864 he had published in
Le Figaro
a series of melancholy and ill-tempered prose poems entitled
The Spleen of Paris,
in one of which he declared himself "dissatisfied with everything."
10
In April he had departed on a train for Brussels, officially to deliver a series of lectures on Delacroix, Hugo, Gautier and Edgar Allan Poe, but also to find a publisher for his work and, even more pressing, to give the slip to his many creditors in Paris. Ill and penniless apart from money he had borrowed from Édouard Manet, he installed himself in the Hôtel du Grand Miroir, where his sole companion was a live bat. Here he spent his days composing his lectures, drinking Belgian beer (which he blamed for his constant diarrhea) and making frequent excursions to the local pawnshop.
Yet Baudelaire was not thinking of his own sorry plight when he wrote to Chennevières. He was concerned that his friends Manet and Fantin-Latour should both receive a fair hearing from the painting jury and then advantageous positions for their paintings in the Salon. "You will see what marvelous talent is revealed in these paintings," he informed Chennevières before urging him to "do your best to place them well."
11
The entreaties of a figure as notorious as Baudelaire may have seemed unlikely to cut much ice with Chennevières, a staunch conservative; but many years earlier the pair had gone to school together at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, from which, however, Baudelaire had been expelled, though not before distinguishing himself among his fellow pupils for his standoffishness and, as one of them later remembered, "the most brazenly immoral opinions, which went beyond what was tolerable."
12
Even so, Baudelaire thought it worthwhile writing to Chennevières (who a year earlier had sent him a copy of his latest volume of short stories) in order to try pulling a few strings for his younger friends.
Manet had sent two works to the Salon of 1864. Although
Olympia
had been completed as many as six months earlier, this latest painting of Victorine Meurent was not among them. The public ridicule to which
Music in the Tuileries
and
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
had been treated made him reluctant to open himself to further obloquy with what he must have realized was a daring work. Not knowing the composition of the Selection Committee at the time of the deadline for submissions meant, moreover, that he had cause to fear rejection from the main Salon and exile to the Salon des Refusés—a state of affairs he was unwilling to suffer for a second year in a row.
Olympia
therefore stayed in his studio while two other works were shipped to the Palais des Champs-Élysées.
The first of Manet's submissions was
Incident in a Bull Ring,
which he had managed to complete in spite of difficulties with the scene's perspective. The second, begun the previous November and painted on a canvas almost six feet high by five feet wide, was a biblical episode entitled
The Dead Christ with Angels.
Manet had painted a few religious scenes in his career, though these were done not out of any special feelings of piety or devotion so much as from a love of the works of Italian Renaissance artists like Titian and Tintoretto. Manet had a particular affection for Tintoretto, a sixteenth-century Venetian, sometimes known as II Furioso, who was renowned for his
fa presto
("work quickly") style of painting in which he applied his pigments with brush-popping vehemence. Tintoretto's
Self-Portrait,
which featured the mournful face of the gray-bearded, baggy-eyed artist hovering against a pitch-dark background, was one of Manet's favorite paintings. He made a copy of the work in the Louvre and thereafter, as if paying court to a wise old sage, never failed to seek out the original on his visits to the museum.