The Judgment of Paris (25 page)
The most contentious passages in
The Life of Jesus
came near the end, in a chapter entitled "Jesus in the Tomb," where Renan speculated that the Resurrection had not actually taken place. "Had Christ's body been taken away," he asked his readers, "or did enthusiasm, always credulous, create afterwards the group of narratives by which it was sought to establish faith in the Resurrection?" Renan inclined toward the latter, concluding that "the strong imagination of Mary Magdalen played an important part in this circumstance. Divine power of love! Sacred moments in which the passion of one possessed gave to the world a resuscitated God!"
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The Resurrection was, in this view, a fabrication founded on the wishful thinking of an ex-prostitute unhinged by grief.
Manet's inclusion of the biblical verse recounting how Mary Magdalen had arrived at the tomb to see that Christ's body was missing could be taken as another approving nod at Renan's demolition of the Resurrection.
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Still, a true attempt to quash all supernatural aspects of the Bible would surely not have included the brace of winged angels that feature so conspicuously in Manet's painting. Renan put no stock, naturally, in stories about angels materializing in Christ's tomb, since for him they were simply the figments of Mary Magdalen's overheated imagination. For Manet the "two angels in white" described in the Gospel of Saint John may have mutated into the blue-winged creatures in orange and black robes—but they are angels nonetheless. Their presence suggests that, whatever some of the critics believed, his work was actually influenced more by the canvases of Tintoretto than the pages of Renan.
Manet's reputation may have dipped somewhat with these two unpopular canvases. But Gautier, for one, suspected that more would be heard from Manet, who possessed, he allowed, "the true qualities of a painter." He also recognized that, whatever his poor reputation among most critics, Manet had his share of "fanatical" admirers: "Already some satellites are circling around this new star and describing orbits of which he is the center."
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As he wrote these lines, Gautier may have been thinking of another painting in the Salon, Fantin-Latour's eight-foot-wide
Homage to Delacroix,
in which a ginger-bearded Manet, surrounded by friends and allies such as Baudelaire and Whistler, cut a conspicuous figure to the right of the framed portrait of Delacroix. The work was, besides a tribute to Delacroix, a celebration on canvas of prominent artists from the "Generation of 1863"—Manet, Whistler, Legros, the engraver Félix Bracquemond, and Fantin-Latour himself, all veterans of the Salon des Refusés. One by one through the early months of 1864 these artists and writers had come to Fantin-Latour's small studio in the Rue Saint-Lazare, in front of the train station, to pose for the group portrait. Yet despite the appearance of solidarity and earnest purposefulness that Fantin-Latour conveyed, those of the Generation of 1863 shown in the painting had largely left Paris by the time it was shown. Having missed the deadline for the Salon, Whistler was a no-show in Paris in 1864; instead, he submitted two works to the Royal Academy in London, receiving favorable reviews from both
The Athenaeum
and
The Times.
He had in any case more or less permanently relocated to London, to a house in Lindsey Row, Chelsea, which was crammed with his collection of blue-and-white porcelain and Japanese fans. Another painter, Alphonse Legros, had also moved to London, sharing accommodation with Whistler for a few months before marrying an Englishwoman in 1864. Baudelaire, of course, had left for Brussels and, despite his complaints about living among "the stupidest race on earth,"
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showed no sign of returning to Paris.
Manet and Fantin-Latour, then, were left to hoist the standard in 1864. If Manet's Salon had been underwhelming, Fantin-Latour was beginning to enjoy some remarkable success.
Homage to Delacroix
proved so popular with Salon-goers that it was bought for the very reputable sum of 2,000 francs by a printseller named Ernest Gambart, who planned to have the image engraved and then sold in his shop. His second painting,
Scene from Tannhäuser,
also sold for 2,000 francs, this time to Alexander Ionides, a London-based shipping merchant and art collector. Nor were these sales the last of his triumphs. Fantin-Latour also exhibited two of his flower paintings at the Royal Academy in London; these, too, were purchased by Ionides.
Manet could only dream of such commercial success, and his two paintings suffered a more forlorn fate. Reclaiming the pair of them from the Palais des Champs-Élysées in June, he proceeded to take a knife to his much-derided
Incident in a Bull Ring,
cutting it into several pieces. He kept two fragments—the dead toreador and the three bullfighters in the background—but destroyed the remainder, including most of the "microscopic bull."
Dead Christ with Angels
joined the several dozen other unsold canvases, including
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe,
that cluttered his studio in the Rue Guyot. Manet then vacated this studio for a few weeks in the summer of 1864. The notorious painter was taking his family to the seaside.
B
OULOGNE-SUR-MER WAS ON the English Channel, 135 miles north of Paris. A walled city of some 35,000 people, it featured a harbor bristling with masts, a wooden pier jutting into the waves, a cliff with Roman ruins, and the newly restored church of Notre-Dame, to which a miraculous image of the Virgin had brought pilgrims since the Middle Ages. The city was also famous as the site where Napoléon had made his preparations to invade Britain in 1804. On an eminence above the town a 170-foot-high pillar, the Colonne de la Grande Armée, was still topped by a statue of Napoléon. More recently, an invasion by a Bonaparte had come the other way: Louis-Napoléon had launched himself on France from this spot in his ill-fated expedition aboard the
Edinburgh Castle
in 1840.
Édouard Manet arrived in Boulogne in the second week of July. With him were his wife Suzanne, his godson Léon, his younger brother Gustave, a lawyer, as well as both his mother and his new mother-in-law. The extended family rented a small house in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comedie, a short walk from the harbor, and partook of the delights of Boulogne by purchasing a one-month subscription to the Établissement des Bains. This was a grand new set of assembly rooms, opened a year earlier, that treated its guests to heated baths, an English garden, terraces overlooking the sea, billiard tables, a lawn for croquet (a game newly imported from England) and, in the evening, musical entertainment. It was, according to one enthusiastic newspaper report, "on a more splendid scale than any establishment of the same nature."
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Seaside resorts had become popular in France over the previous dozen years.
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After the railway, which came to Boulogne in 1848, linked Paris with what had then been a series of fishing villages on the coasts of Normandy and Picardy, middle-class Parisians found themselves able to spend a week or two each summer either under parasols on the beach or submerged in the waves. The beneficial effects of the seaside had been explained in 1861 by the historian Jules Michelet in
La Mer,
a book that claimed seabathing, in particular the infusion of salt through the skin, was excellent for the constitution; and a journal called
La Gaiette des eaux,
published fortnightly, extolled the benefits of immersing oneself in water. The point was not to exercise oneself in the waves but to absorb (and even to drink) the brine. Some resorts, like the Établissement des Bains, offered indoor bathing facilities, complete with heated salt water, but more adventurous holidaymakers could brave the bathing machines. Drawn by horses and looking like privies on wheels, these contraptions conducted bathers chest-deep into the chilly waves, preserving their modesty, shielding them from the wind, and then transporting them safely back to shore.
The seaside was popular with painters as well as Parisian holidaymakers. Inspired by the example of English artists like J. M. W Turner, a painter of Normandy seascapes by the early 1830s, many artists had arrived with their canvases and easels a good decade before the railway. In Honfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, a group of artists had begun congregating at the Auberge Saint-Simeon, an old farmhouse whose interior walls were scrawled with chalk-drawn caricatures by visiting painters; among those who came there to work were landscapists such as Daubigny and Corot. Twenty miles up the coast, at Étretat in Normandy, a hotel known as the Rendez-Vous des Artistes had attracted the custom of Delacroix and numerous other painters. "Parisian painters came to ask the beautiful cliffs of Étretat for inspiration," a writer named Morlent had observed in 1853, noting how their canvases never failed to find buyers, further spreading the fame of both artists and resorts alike.
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Like so many painters before him, Manet had traveled to Normandy for something more than dips in the ocean or games of croquet. He had gone to the seaside armed with an easel as early as 1853, when Thomas Couture arranged a walking and painting tour of the Normandy coast for his students. Eleven years later, he raised his easel beside the harbor and, though he had rarely worked
en plein air,
proceeded to paint a number of canvases during the spell of fine, dry weather. After the failure of his works at the Salon, he was determined to take inspiration not from Old Masters in the Louvre so much as from—as both Baudelaire and Couture had been exhorting—the everyday life that surrounded him.
To that end, even before the Salon of 1864 closed its doors Manet had started a painting based on a number of
plein air
sketches of "modern life." On June 5, a Sunday, he had joined the more than 100,000 Parisians who made their way to the Hippodrome de Longchamp for the second running of the Grand Prix de Paris. "All Paris went out to see it and made a splendid show," the correspondent for
The Times
reported breathlessly at the sight of so many Parisians in resplendent attire streaming through the Bois de Boulogne in their stylish carriages. "Surely in no out-of-door spectacle in the world could such a show present itself."
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Huge excitement had accompanied the race because Blair Athol, winner of the 1864 Epsom Derby in a record time, had come to challenge the local favorite, Vermouth, a bay with three white legs. Despite arriving in Paris only the evening before, Blair Athol was the favorite with the bookmakers, who chalked the latest odds—2 to 1 at post time—on blackboards set up around the Hippodrome. But Vermouth led from the start and never relinquished his lead, defeating the English champion by two full lengths. "The roar of huzzas rent the air," wrote the correspondent for
The Times,
who noted how Emperor Napoléon—never one to miss a grand occasion such as this—acknowledged the glorious victory with a bow from his private box. After endless cries of
"C'est magnifique!"
and
"Vive I'EmpereurF'
as well as endless bottles of champagne, the ecstatic crowd wobbled home, clogging the Champs-Élysées with six lanes of fashionable broughams, barouches, spiders and tandems.
Manet had made pencil sketches of the scene at Longchamp that he then turned into a watercolor and, sometime over the next few weeks, an oil painting called
The Races at Longchamp
(plate 6A).
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Engravings of horse races featured in the pages of journals such as
La Chronique du turf
and
Le Sportsman,
but Manet added a new and striking aspect to the popular genre by showing the horses galloping straight at the viewer. As an action scene with a dramatic perspective, it was a bold composition for someone who had just failed so visibly with
Incident in a Bull Ring.
But the atmospheric perspective through which the background of hills and trees was devised, as well as the vanishing point created by the racetrack's guardrail, both provided the visual depth so notably lacking in the bullfight scene.
The composition was bold for another reason as well. If
The Races at Longchamp
was accepted for the next Salon, it would hang in the same room as whatever Meissonier chose to display. Meissonier's reputation as a painter of horses was, of course, without parallel.
The Battle of Solferino
may not have endeared itself to many critics, but no one could fault Meissonier's depiction of equine anatomy. As Théophile Gautier wrote, with this one work all previous painters of horses—Cuyp, Wouwermans, Horace Vernet—were "overcome in a single blow."
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The Campaign of France
had simply aggrandized this reputation.
Of course, Manet's painting was very different from anything Meissonier would have done. Manet was not interested in recording for posterity the duel between Vermouth and Blair Athol, or even showing what the individual horses looked like. They were mere dabs of paint in the background—a few flying forelegs and a cloud of dust rather than the elegant, lifelike beasts at which Meissonier excelled. Manet was actually more interested in the racegoers than the racehorses, and accordingly he filled the left half of his canvas with members of the
beau monde
in modern dress—a crowd of Longchamp spectators with their top hats, crinolines and parasols. He even included a pair of coachmen in blue livery seated atop a landau with its hood folded back to reveal its passengers, a pair of ladies enjoying the spectacle from under their blue parasols. The result was a frieze of modern life not unlike
Music in the Tuileries.