by Ross King
Meissonier was further upstaged at the Salon when the Grand Medal of Honor was awarded to Alexandre Cabanel—whose career was truly going from strength to strength—for his portrait of Napoléon III. If Meissonier resented this rare experience of being overshadowed, he at least had the consolation of knowing his paintings could still command the highest prices of any living artist in France. His worth in the sale room was proven several weeks after the 1865 Salon opened, at one of the greatest auctions seen in Paris for a decade.
Paris had been abuzz with gossip since the death of the Due de Morny in March. As insatiable in the boudoir as his half-brother the Emperor, Morny had taken as mistress the most famous courtesan in Paris, a dyed-blonde Englishwoman who went by the name Cora Pearl and lived in a mansion near the Champs-Élysées with a stable of sixty horses. He also enjoyed legions of other lovers, all of whom he was said to have photographed in the nude, with bouquets of flowers tastefully shielding their modesty. These mementoes were preserved on his bedside table in a casket that mysteriously vanished from sight after his death, supposedly into the clutches of an unscrupulous valet intent upon blackmailing the ladies involved. The casket with its pulse-quickening treasures—elegant académies which the pornographers of Paris could only dream of possessing—had yet to surface by the end of May. But other of Morny's treasures had come onto the market as his art collection went to auction.
Art auctions were a common occurrence in Paris in the 1860s, with as many as three taking place on any given day.23 Attended by bankers, industrialists and aristocrats, who bought and sold paintings as investments, they were usually held at the Hôtel Drouot, the official auction house in Paris. Morny's auction was no ordinary enterprise, however. Held at his home in the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, it attracted a throng of the wealthy and the fashionable who gathered to bid for his treasures or simply to gape at the implausible opulence of his residence. Among the guests invited to the event were numerous well-heeled collectors as well as art critics like Paul Mantz and Théophile Thoré. Meissonier was also among the privileged invitees, and after witnessing the frantic bidding for his paintings the correspondent for La Presse promptly dubbed him "king of the sale."24
Of the six Meissonier paintings on the auction block, three were knocked down to Lord Hertford, the wealthy English aristocrat. At the age of sixty-five, Richard Seymour-Conway, the fourth Marquess of Hertford, had made himself proprietor of the finest private art collection in Europe. With an annual income of six million francs, mostly from his vast estates in Ireland, he had filled his Paris residences—an hotel in the Rue Laffitte and a magnificent country house in the Bois de Boulogne—with a glorious hoard of French and Dutch art. Art was an obsession almost to the point of fetishism for Lord Hertford, a notorious miser whom an acquaintance called "a complete, absolute, unashamed monster."25 He once proudly declared that "when I die I shall at least have the consolation of knowing that I have never rendered anyone a service."26
Lord Hertford already owned a number of paintings by Meissonier, one of a very select group of artists whose names graced his address book.27 Among his collection was Meissonier's Polichinelle, which Madame Sabatier had cannily trimmed from the door of her apartment and sold in a time of financial need. At the Morny auction he added to his collection both Halt at an Inn and Bravoes, as well as An Artist Showing His Work, which had been painted in 1854 on a commission from Morny. Of the three, Halt at an Inn, at 36,000 francs, fetched the highest price, topping those paid at the auction for works by Gérôme (21,300 francs), Ingres (20,000 francs) and even by the eighteenth-century painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, whose Rococo masterpiece The Swing went to Lord Hertford for 30,200 francs.28 Still able to raise furious bidding and gasps of astonishment in the auction room, Meissonier's stock apparently remained as buoyant as ever. Indeed, the future in 1865 looked as bright for Meissonier as it looked bleak for Manet.
*"Cham" was the pseudonym of Charles-Henri Amédée, the Comte de Noe, who had published his caricatures in Le Charivari since 1843; and "Bertall" was Charles-Albert Arnaux.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Maître Velázquez
THE EXCITEMENT CAUSED by the auction of the Due de Morny's art collection was eclipsed, a few days later, by the third running of the Grand Prix de Paris. As in 1864, more than 100,000 people poured through the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois de Boulogne on their way to the Hippodrome de Longchamp. And, as in 1864, the winner of the Epsom Derby was again the favorite—only this time the Derby champion was a French horse named Gladiateur. Known as "The Avenger of Waterloo" for his stunning victory on English soil—where he also won the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket—Gladiateur had returned to France covered in glory. At Longchamp he did not disappoint the wildly cheering crowds, outpacing his nearest competitor by three lengths. A few days later he was given a victory parade along the Champs-Élysées and his owner, Comte Frédéric de Lagrange, received a standing ovation in the Legislative Assembly.
Édouard Manet was not so depressed by his reception at the Salon that he begrudged himself a trip to Longchamp to cheer Gladiateur on to victory. As in 1864, he began a work, Women at the Races, based on his studies of the crowds at Longchamp. Once again, he did not concern himself with the racehorses—Gladiateur does not even feature in the work—so much as with the spectators. He depicted a pair of women in bonnets and crinolines holding parasols over their heads as they stood beside an elegant carriage. Devastated by the reaction to Olympia and Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers, he had turned once more to the fashionable Parisian society of which he had become an observer.
Manet at this time decided on another palliative for his artistic ills: he was planning a trip to Spain. "I cannot wait to see all those wonderful things," he wrote to Zacharie Astruc, "and go to Maître Velázquez for advice."1 He was hoping to travel with two friends, Jules Champfleury (the "supreme pontiff of Realism" whom he had portrayed in Music in the Tuileries) and the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, "but they keep putting me off. . . Anyway, they're a bloody bore," he wrote in the middle of August to Astruc, a Hispanophile who would happily have accompanied him were his wife not expecting a baby.2 Manet therefore decided to make the journey on his own, armed with a detailed twenty-page guide to Spain very helpfully prepared by Astruc, who advised his friend to take his own supply of tobacco, to travel second-class on the trains, to drink copious amounts of water to stave off the effects of the extreme heat, to sample Manzanilla (a dry sherry), and to avail himself of the pastries and coffee in the Café Suisse in Madrid. "Your itinerary seems excellent," Manet wrote gratefully to Astruc. "I'll follow it precisely."3
This pilgrimage to Spain was long overdue for someone so transfixed by Spanish art, particularly the work of Diego Velázquez. Manet had seen the nineteen alleged Velázquez paintings in the Louvre's Galerie Espagnole before it closed in 1849, and as a student of Couture he had copied other paintings in the Louvre attributed to Velázquez, such as The Gathering of Gentlemen and Portrait of a Monk. In 1862 he had done an engraving of Philip IV as a Hunter, and in the same year he made a copy of The Infanta Margarita, likewise in the Louvre. Yet most of these paintings were not actually by Velázquez. The Gathering of Gentlemen had been done by his son-in-law; Portrait of a Monk by an artist or artists unknown; and The Infanta Margarita by various of Velázquez's assistants. Almost none of the so-called Velázquez paintings in the Galerie Espagnole—the collection of Spanish art purchased by King Louis-Philippe—had in fact come from the brush of the master. Suspicions about the true authorship of these paintings—which seemed, to experts like Gautier, pale imitations of those in Madrid—had led to the truism that one needed to cross the Pyrenees in order fully to appreciate Velázquez.
Leaving behind Suzanne and the rest of his family, Manet departed from the Gare Montparnasse on August 25 for what was meant to be a month-long stay in Spain. The train took him via Bordeaux and Bayonne on a seventeen-hour journey to Irún, from where exactly one year earlier a new 300-mile railway lin
e to Madrid had been inaugurated amid much fanfare. On the way he disembarked briefly at Burgos to see an El Greco in the cathedral, then at Valladolid (the city where Christopher Columbus had died), before arriving in Madrid amid "fatigue and problems"4 and taking a room at the Grand Hôtel de Paris. Seeking out his idol Velázquez, he went each day to the Prado (then known as the Real Museo de Pintura y Escultura), where he signed his name in the museum's visitors' book, emphatically recording his occupation as artiste.
Founded by King Ferdinand VII in 1819 in order to house the royal collection (and in order, Ferdinand's detractors had sneered, that the walls of his palaces could be wallpapered), the Prado held the world's finest and most comprehensive collection of paintings by Velázquez, by far the most celebrated painter in Spain. Manet was able to see, by his own count, as many as forty of his canvases, including masterpieces such as Las Meninas (which he found "an extraordinary picture") and The Fable of Arachne, as well as portraits of various dwarfs and jesters at the Spanish royal court. He was intoxicated. "How I miss you here," he wrote to Fantin-Latour, "and how happy it would have made you to see Velázquez, who all by himself makes the journey worthwhile . . . He is the supreme artist. He didn't surprise me, he enchanted me." To Baudelaire he wrote: "I've really come to know Velázquez, and I tell you he's the greatest artist there has ever been," while a letter to Zacharie Astruc heartily declared: "He's the greatest artist of all. . . . I discovered in his work the fulfillment of my own ideals in painting, and the sight of those masterpieces gave me enormous hope and courage."5
Manet did not specify his "ideals in painting": presumably Astruc knew them only too well from their debates at the Café de Bade. But he was undoubtedly inspired by the Spaniard's application of paint in the thick impasto that a connoisseur, Edmond de Goncourt, once called Velázquez's "soft muddiness."6 This slathering on the canvas of "muddy" paint, so radically different from the thin, smooth layerings of pigment advocated by teachers at the École des Beaux-Arts such as Gérôme and Cabanel, seemed to give Manet sanction for the sort of loose brushwork knocked, in the case of Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe, for looking like it was done with a floor mop. Manet was also no doubt impressed by how Velázquez was willing to sacrifice fine detail in his paintings for an overall effect—a style an admirer once claimed resulted in "distant blobs" that achieved "truth rather than likeness."7 If, as Théophile Thoré claimed after the Salon des Refusés, a battle raged in Paris between the "sketchers" and the "finishers," Velázquez was surely the patron saint of the former.
Besides visiting the Prado, Manet also found time to attend a bullfight—an overdue experience, once again, given the fact that he had already painted and exhibited several bullfight scenes. As a painter of crowds, he was very much in his element among the throngs at the bull ring in Madrid. He was, if anything, even more impressed by the sight of this gory spectacle with its colorful matadors and passionately exultant aficionados than he was by anything Velázquez had painted. "The outstanding sight is the bullfight," he enthused in a letter to Astruc. "I saw a magnificent one, and when I get back to Paris I plan to put a quick impression on canvas: the colorful crowd, the dramatic aspect as well, the picador and horse overturned, with the bull's horns plunging into them."8 It was a courageous plan given that the critical jeering of Incident in a Bull Ring must still have been ringing in his ears.
Despite his love of Velázquez and the bull ring, Manet remained in Madrid for only a week. His reason for abbreviating his visit was quite simple: the food in Spain was not to his liking. "When you sit down at the table," he explained in a letter to Baudelaire, "you want to vomit rather than eat."9 Not even the cuisine prepared in the Hôtel de Paris met his lofty standards. A young French visitor named Théodore Duret, having arrived in Madrid after a forty-hour journey by stagecoach, witnessed unpleasant scenes in the hotel's dining room as Manet, adopting the role of the rude Gallic snob, imperiously dismissed dish after dish ferried from the kitchen. When Duret, famished from his travels, eagerly tucked into everything placed before him, Manet took offense and stormed across the dining room to rebuke him: "So, is it to mock me, to make me look a fool, that you insist on eating this revolting food?"10 Duret eventually managed to persuade the irate stranger that his only motive in eating his dinner was hunger, not ridicule or revenge. At this point they introduced themselves, and Duret found himself sharing his table with the painter, who explained by way of an apology that he had feared the mockery he was experiencing in the streets of Paris had pursued him to Madrid.
The twenty-seven-year-old Duret came from a wealthy family of cognac merchants based near Bordeaux. Nursing political ambitions, he had run against the official candidate in the elections of 1863, then after his inevitable defeat entered the family business and toured the world selling cognac. He had developed a keen interest in art, amassing on his travels a large collection of Oriental objets d'art and befriending Gustave Courbet during the Realist's legendary wine- and cognac-fueled sojourn at Rochemont in 1862. In comparison with Courbet's antics, Manet's odd behavior must have struck Duret as positively benign. The two men swiftly became friends, visiting the Prado together and making a three-hour excursion by train to Toledo, where once more Manet made a fuss about the local cuisine.
Within days of their meeting, though, Manet had become too exasperated with Spanish food to remain in the country, and he boarded the train for the French frontier. He made a slight detour on his return, spending a few days near Le Mans, in the small town of Sillé-le-Guillaume, where his mother's family still owned substantial property. By the middle of September he was back in Paris. Despite the ordeals of travel and the supposedly unpalatable food, the expedition had been a success, with Manet carrying back with him, besides his plans to paint bullfight scenes, the "enormous hope and courage" given to him by the canvases of Maître Velázquez. His return to Paris had been ill-timed, however. He arrived in the city as a cholera epidemic was about to strike.
The summer and autumn of 1865 had been extremely hot and dry in Paris. The level of the Seine had dropped, the canals were closed to navigation, and ornamental fountains such as those in the Place de la Concorde stopped gushing on orders from the government. The practices of rinsing the gutters and hosing down the dusty macadam roads were likewise suspended. By the beginning of October the first spring water from the Dhuis Valley came to the rescue along a new eighty-one-mile aqueduct, passing through thirty-two tunnels en route and, to the applause of assembled onlookers, filling a fifteen-foot-deep reservoir at Belleville. But the water arrived too late to relieve the unsanitary conditions created by the water shortage. By the end of September, cattle reaching the Paris abbatoirs showed signs of a "contagious typhus," prompting the Prefect of Police to quarantine all herds and ship the dead animals for disposal at the knacker's yard in the northern suburb of Aubervilliers."11
Parisians themselves were the next to suffer as a cholera epidemic that had begun in the south of France, in Marseilles and Toulon, arrived in the first week of October. By the middle of the month, the disease was claiming more than 200 lives each day, with most deaths occurring in the poorer areas on the north side of Paris, such as Montmartre and the Batignolles.12 Thousands more fell ill with diarrhea, vomiting, palpitations and leg cramps. Caused by a bacterium called Vibria cholerae and spread through contaminated water, cholera was still a deadly disease, killing 19,000 people in Paris in the epidemic of 1832 and returning in 1849 to claim 16,000 more.
As October progressed, the cholera wards and cemeteries both started to fill. On October 20, the Emperor Napoléon took time out from his other duties to pay a visit to victims in the Hôtel-Dieu on the Île-de-la-Cite. Though he was cheered by a large crowd gathered outside Notre-Dame, these were difficult days for the Emperor, who had just suffered a catastrophic setback in his foreign policy. With the end of the American Civil War six months earlier (word of Général Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House had reached Paris one week before the opening of the Salon of 1865
) he had been obliged to agree, under threat from the Americans—who were arming the Juaristas, and who regarded the intervention as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine—to withdraw all French troops from Mexico. This humbling retreat would inevitably expose Maximilian, his puppet emperor, to attacks from the Juaristas and, in a worst case, lead to his abdication.
By the end of the month, deaths from cholera halved to only a hundred per day, and a newspaper reported that the cholera wards were starting to empty as two thirds of the afflicted recovered from the disease.13 Still, the epidemic was bad enough (altogether more than 6,000 people would succumb to the disease) that the cemeteries were thronged on All Souls' Day, when families laid beads, bouquets of flowers and garlands of yellow immortelles on the graves of their dead relations. So many people had tried to pay their respects at Père-Lachaise that guards were stationed at the entrances to keep the way clear and prevent carriages from colliding.14 Manet narrowly avoided becoming one of the cholera victims. He fell ill with the disease in the middle of October, during the height of the epidemic, after contracting the bug from the infected water supply in the cholera-ridden Batignolles. Recovering at the end of the month, he wrote to Baudelaire that after returning from Spain he had "fallen victim to the current epidemic."15 Perhaps in order to keep a lower profile after so much public derision over Olympia, Manet switched his custom from the Café de Bade to another establishment, the Café Guerbois, found in the Grand-Rue des Batignolles,* a street ambling northward from the Batignolles to the glasshouses and candle factories of Clichy. The café was run by a man named Auguste Guerbois and consisted of two large rooms and a small garden planted with shrubs at the back. The front room was furnished with gilded mirrors and marble-topped tables, while the room behind, a crypt-like space lit in the daytime by skylights cut into the roof, featured five billiard tables. Friends of Manet from the Café de Bade such as Astruc and Fantin-Latour quickly followed him to the Café Guerbois. Manet soon found himself presiding over the clacking of billiard balls in what became known to the locals as the Artists' Corner. To the art critics, the group quickly became known as the École des Batignolles.
