by Ross King
In fact, the Académie had one last insult in store. Elected soon afterward to Delacroix's chair in the Institut was, not a Romantic or a Realist, but Nicolas-Auguste Hesse, the former winner of the Prix de Rome whom Meissonier had narrowly defeated two years earlier. An artist more different than Delacroix would have been difficult to imagine.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Young France
EUGÈNE DELACROIX WAS buried in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise on August 17, 1863, two days after the birthday of Napoléon Bonaparte was celebrated in Paris with gamboling clowns and great bursts of fireworks. The funeral service took place in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, a short distance from Delacroix's house and studio. Among the pallbearers were Nieuwerkerke and the painter Hippolyte Flandrin, whose frescoes adorned the ancient church, festooned for the occasion in black. Funeral orations were delivered by the sculptor François Jouffroy, president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and by Paul Huet, a landscapist who declared in his speech that Delacroix had been "one of a small number of artists who characterize an epoch."1
Delacroix's funeral signaled, in many ways, the end of this epoch. The ceremony marked both the waning of an artistic movement, Romanticism, and the passing of the fabled "Generation of 1830."2 The representatives of this generation of Romantics—Gautier, Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine—had come of age against the backdrop of the Revolution of 1830, when the ultraconservative King Charles X was deposed, following three days of fighting in the streets of Paris, in favor of the more liberal monarchy of King Louis-Philippe, a distant relative.* These events had been immortalized by Delacroix in Liberty Leading the People (plate IB), first shown at the Salon of 1831. Slight and genteel, Delacroix had been too alarmed by the sight of the rough-looking rabble to do battle on the barricades himself, but he did not hesitate to portray himself in the work as a stalwart citizen wearing a top hat, clutching a rifle in his hands, and standing shoulder to shoulder with the bare-breasted figure of Liberty.
By the time of Delacroix's death, many of the other poets and prophets of 1830 had begun vanishing into the shades. Still, he had no shortage of mourners, and the reporter for Le Temps spoke of a "considerable attendance" in the church.3 Ernest Meissonier was naturally present, wearing the green tailcoat of the Institut as he followed the hearse toward the cemetery. Besides being a close friend of Delacroix, he had been profoundly affected by both the events of 1830 and the works of the painters, poets and playwrights of Delacroix's generation. He had been fifteen years old, boarding at a school in Thiais, ten miles south of Paris, when the fighting erupted on the barricades. The sound of the fusillades in the distance pitched him into such "an extraordinary state of effervescence," he later remembered, that he and three friends tried to escape from the school and make their way to Paris to join the fray.4 Collared by the headmaster, the young Meissonier earned for his political zeal a box on the ear and a stint in solitary confinement. For the rest of his schooldays he indulged his revolutionary instincts by reading in secret the works of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny, as well as the writings of two men who would later become close friends, Gautier and Lamartine—all members of the Generation of 1830, or what Gautier called "Young France."5
Eugène Delacroix (Nadar)
Gautier, too, was present at Père-Lachaise for the funeral of his old friend, as was Delacroix's fellow boules player, Adolphe Thiers. Also at the graveside was Charles Baudelaire, who cut a ghastly appearance. Though only forty-two, he was in dire straits both financially and physically—dunned by creditors, addicted to opium, and so wasted by syphilis that vanity compelled him to rouge his cheeks. Fresher faces, though, were in the crowd, representatives of a small group that might have been called the "Generation of 1863." Arriving in the company of Baudelaire was the painter Henri Fantin-Latour, whose studio was around the corner from where Baudelaire lived near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Also in Baudelaire's company was Édouard Manet, the widely acknowledged leader of this new generation who had come to mourn the man who, had he lived, seems certain to have become his most powerful champion.
Soon after the funeral, Fantin-Latour would begin his next painting, Homage to Delacroix. It would feature portraits of a select group of the painter's self-proclaimed admirers—including Manet, Baudelaire, Whistler and Fantin-Latour himself—grouped around a gold-framed painting of their master. The torch of 1830 was being passed into the hands, Fantin-Latour implied, of a new generation of rebels and romantics.
In the weeks following the Salon des Refusés, Manet had been tending to various aspects of family business. Chief among his concerns was part of his late father's legacy, the 200 acres of land near Asnières and Gennevilliers. Fifteen acres of this patrimony were sold in August, fetching 60,000 francs, of which Manet's share was to be 10,000 francs, or what amounted to a comfortable income for one year.6 This would be the only money that he received in 1863 since, notwithstanding his reputation among the cognoscenti, he had yet to sell a single painting. Despite its clutch of good notices, Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe had been returned unsold to his studio.
By the time of Delacroix's funeral, Manet had started work on a number of new paintings. His two Spanish canvases, overshadowed by Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, had failed to attract much notice at the Salon des Refusés. Even so, in looking for a new subject he had reached once again into his trunk of Andalusian costumes and begun another scene redolent of Spain. Incident in a Bull Ring would include a bull and several toreros doing battle in the background, while the foreground would feature the "incident" referred to in the title—a dead matador lying prone on his back and oozing a small pool of blood.
Work on Incident in a Bull Ring did not progress smoothly. Manet made a number of changes to his composition before setting it aside and starting work on quite a different canvas. His inspiration came, as was so often the case, from a previous painting. Visiting Florence on a tour through Italy in 1853, he had been entranced in the Uffizi by Titian's Venus of Urhino, a painting later described by Mark Twain as "the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses."7 Painted for the Duke of Urbino in 1538, the Venus of Urhino depicts a nude woman reclining horizontally on a divan as she fixes the beholder with an inviting gaze and places her left hand lightly across her pubic region in a gesture suggesting either modesty or—so Twain pretended to believe—masturbation.
Paintings of Venus concealing her privates with either a hand or another obstacle to sight (such as the conveniently placed tresses of golden hair in Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus) were a genre known during the Middle Ages and Renaissance as Venus Pudica, "shameful" or "shamefaced" Venus. The genre may have had precedents in illustrations of the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden that showed the naked Eve covering her breasts and genitals out of shame (which is precisely how Michelangelo, obedient to this tradition, portrayed her on the vault of the Sistine Chapel). The link between female genitalia and shame has actually been inscribed in language, since the word pudenda comes from the Latin/Were, to be ashamed. However, Titian appears to have subverted the genre of Venus Pudica, since his Venus with her bold gaze and seductive manner is anything but shamefaced.
Manet, then twenty-one years old, clearly relished Titian's clever sabotage of artistic tradition. The entire painting, as he undoubtedly recognized, was wonderfully ambiguous. Was the woman truly a goddess, as the title suggested? Was she a loyal and loving wife, as indicated by her sleeping lapdog (a symbol of fidelity) and the servant and child rummaging through the marriage chests in the background? Or was she, as her enchanting gaze and the inscrutable gesture with her hand seemed to imply, a Venetian courtesan?
Ever the diligent student, Manet had made a color sketch of the painting, which he unearthed a decade later as he began his own version of the scene. However, Titian's Venus of Urhino was not the only inspiration for his new work. Recumbent female nudes were commonplace in French art, with Ingres and Cabanel probably the most famous practitioners by 1863. But Manet may have been moved to p
aint his own version by the example of one painter in particular. Throughout his career, Delacroix had painted numerous naked odalisques draped enticingly across unmade divans, as in Woman with a Parrot in 1827 and Odalisque Reclining on a Divan from a year later. Delacroix had been very much on Manet's mind during the spring and summer months of 1863, and this new work, comparable in subject matter to the odalisque paintings, came to serve as his own "homage to Delacroix."
Manet needed a model for his new painting, so Victorine Meurent once again found herself making the journey across Paris to remove her clothing in Manet's studio. She must have known of the controversy and ridicule aroused by Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe; perhaps she even visited the Salon des Refusés and witnessed for herself the convulsions of hilarity and abuse. If so, she was evidently undaunted by both the laughter of the Salon-goers and the barbs of the critic who had mocked her as the "ideal of ugliness." Whatever the case, she agreed to a pose considerably more sexually provocative than the one she had struck for Manet almost a year earlier.
Manet began work by making a number of sketches of Victorine reclining naked on a daybed. One was painted with a brush in black ink; another in a sepia wash heightened with color; two more were done in red chalk, the medium favored by Renaissance artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo. Victorine's pose for this new painting was more comfortable than the one she had been required to hold for Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe. For the sketches in red chalk, probably Manet's first studies, she reposed on a large pillow, her right hand touching her breastbone and her right leg bent slightly to hide her genitals. Manet changed her pose for the other sketches, placing her in a revealing position more akin to that demonstrated in the Venus of Urhino: legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles, eyes fixed on the beholder, left hand covering the "shameful" privates.
Manet may also have made other images of Victorine. Painters had been supplementing their drawings with photographs ever since Louis Daguerre, twenty-five years earlier, had created the first workable camera. A writer in an 1856 issue of La Lumière, a journal dedicated to photography, noted the "intimate association of photography with art."8 By the 1860s more than three hundred professional photographers were working in Paris, and a great many of their clients were painters for whom they did nude studies. Indeed, as many as forty percent of all photographs registered at the Dépôt Légal were asserted to be academies done for painters—photographs of nude (usually female) models posing on chaises longues amid paraphernalia such as lyres, shields, plumed helmets, and antique vases and busts.9
Study of Victorine Meurent for Olympia (Édouard Manet)
Even the most renowned painters of the day availed themselves of this new technology. In the 1850s Delacroix had collaborated with the photographer Eugène Durieu, who took pictures of nude models that Delacroix proceeded to turn into his paintings of odalisques. Other painters, such as Gerome, had female models shot for them by Nadar, the most renowned photographer of the day. Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, Nadar was a printer and caricaturist (his pseudonym came from the expression tourne a dard, meaning "bitter sting") who had also published a novel and spent time in a debtors' prison. At the age of thirty-three, in 1853, he had turned his considerable energies to photography, taking portraits of many artists and writers and then, in 1861, a series of eerie-looking pictures of Paris's new sewer system and water mains. An intimate of Baudelaire, by the early 1860s he was also friends with Manet, whom he photographed on several occasions. No photographs of Victorine, by Nadar or anyone else, have come to light, but she may well have appeared before his camera, either in Manet's studio or in Nadar's own workshop in the Boulevard des Capucines.10
Victorine was not the only woman to pose for Manet's new painting. He planned to include in the work, as a counterpart to the servant in the background of the Venus of Urhino, a black maid. Since it was commonly believed, as Flaubert wryly observed, that black women were "more amorous than white women,"11 negresses were often included in scenes of bathers or brothels in order to heighten the eroticism. Manet planned to portray a black maid, fully dressed, presenting her supine mistress with a large bouquet of flowers. For his model he chose a twenty-four-year-old named Laure, whom he described as "a very beautiful negress."12 Manet painted a sketch of Laure on a small canvas less than two feet square, depicting her in a madras, or headscarf, and wearing pearl earrings as well as a necklace of precious stones and a pale dress that set off her dark complexion. As a warm-up for the oil painting, he next completed a watercolor sketch of the entire scene, showing Victorine, pale and slender, wearing nothing but a pair of gold slippers and a keepsake bracelet as Laure approaches her with an armful of flowers in a paper wrapping.
When, in the late summer of 1863, Manet was ready to paint the work in oil, he chose a canvas six feet wide by some four feet high—smaller than the showstopping grandeur of Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe but still large enough to command attention in the Salon. Difficulties soon arose, chief among them Victorine's face, which Manet was forced to scrape down and repaint several times.13 He also experimented with Laure's figure, providing her with, on second thought, more generous curves, repainting her dress at least once and omitting the jeweled necklace. Finally, at the end of his labors he added, almost as an afterthought, a touch absent from his earlier sketches: in place of the lapdog curled at the feet of Titian's Venus he substituted a black cat with an arched back and erect tail. Like the frog in Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, the animal might have been intended as a visual pun, for les chattes was a slang term for both female genitalia and prostitutes.14
Manet scarcely needed to add the black cat in order to suggest exactly what was happening in his scene. Victorine was clearly cast in the role of a prostitute receiving a gift of flowers from an admiring customer. She was not, however, a prostitute like the lower-class "unruly woman" hinted at in Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, but rather what was known legally as a fille de maison. A prostitute of somewhat higher standing, the file de maison worked in a brothel, entertained a better class of client, and often adopted for herself an exotic name such as Arthémise, Octavie or Olympe. Manet even called his painting Olympe ("Olympia"), thereby leaving little doubt about how the reclining young woman earned her living. The name may have been a direct allusion to the courtesan Olympe in Alexander Dumas fils's novel La Dame aux Camélias, first published in 1848 and turned into a popular stage play four years later. Another courtesan with the alias Olympe had appeared in 1855 in Émile Augier's Le Mariage d'Olympe.15
Depicting a courtesan in so unmistakable a fashion was a bold and provocative move on Manet's part considering how Alexandre Cabanel, only a few months earlier, had taken such a battering from the critics who accused his Venus of looking like a prostitute from the Rue Bréda. Prostitution may have been legal in the streets and brothels of Paris, but it was still very far from being acceptable on the walls of the Salon. And while Cabanel had at least executed his work with an unimpeachable technique, Manet applied his paint to the canvas with the same supposed lack of control and finish that had put one critic in mind of a floor mop. As in Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, he painted Victoria's face, torso and limbs with none of the sculptural three-dimensionality and careful modulations of color to which Salon-goers were accustomed. Instead, using sharp contrasts of color, he created her body through a series of flat planes, producing a two-dimensional image that almost served to make the canvas seem a parody of Titian's curvilinear Venus of Urhino.
Part of Manet's inspiration for this technique probably came from photography. Painters had almost always required a muted light in which to work. The ideal studio was lit by a large north-facing window that diffused the sunlight and allowed the painter to see—and to capture in pigment—the softest and subtlest tones. Photographers, however, worked under quite different conditions. Anyone hoping to produce a photograph in the middle of the nineteenth century needed bright illumination since the first chemical emulsions were stubbornly insensitive to light. In the days before the invent
ion of flash powder (a mixture of potassium chloride and powdered magnesium first successfully employed in the 1880s), photographers were forced to turn on their sitters various forms of artificial light. Most of their pyrotechnic devices, such as "limelight," a sheet of lime heated with a hydrogen-oxygen torch, had provided a harsh, brilliant illumination that resulted in photographs with pronounced tonal contrasts.* Photographs therefore displayed far fewer varieties of tone than was found on canvases. If Victorine had indeed been photographed by Nadar (who sometimes used battery-powered arc lamps to cast light on his subjects), the result would not have been dissimilar to the stark image Manet produced on his canvas, whose lack of detail, moreover, resembled the hazy images produced by photographers as a result of the long exposures required by paper-negative prints.16
Manet's peculiar rendering of Victorine reclining on her pillows probably had another source as well. Besides photography, his work owed a debt to Japanese woodcuts. In the years since the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa ended Japan's two centuries of isolation and opened her ports to foreign trade, Oriental woodblock prints and other handcrafted artifacts such as painted fans and folding screens had begun making their way to Europe. Manet was not as devout a collector of such bric-a-brac as Whistler, who had been stockpiling Japanese artifacts since the early 1860s. Even so, he was a regular visitor at La Jonque Chinoise, a purveyor of Japanese art in the Rue de Rivoli, and one of his proudest possessions was a print of a sumo wrestler done by Kuniaki II. The disregard for linear perspective found in the woodblock prints of Japanese artists such as Hokusai, as well as their lack of subtle shadings of color, clearly appealed to Manet, offering him a precedent for his own stylized representations.17
