The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  The Balcony was inspired both by a group of figures glimpsed by Manet on a balcony in Boulogne and by—as usual—an Old Master painting: Goya's Majas on a Balcony, which Manet had seen years earlier in the Galerie Espagnole in the Louvre.8 But the real impulse for the canvas, one suspects, was the chance to paint the beguiling figure of the doe-eyed Morisot with her dark ringlets. The end result, however, was not especially flattering. Though friends described Morisot as having "powerfully dark" eyes that possessed "a deep magnetic force,"9 Manet nonetheless gave her the same dully absent gaze as everyone else who had ever ventured before his easel. He portrayed her seated on an upholstered chair, wearing a voluminous white gown with bell-shaped sleeves—a gown of truly majestic dimensions—and staring vacantly beyond the frame of the canvas. Morisot herself did not quite know what to make of the work. "I am more strange than ugly," she later remarked.10

  Berthe Morisot (self-portrait)

  Manet eventually spent most of the autumn of 1868 toiling over his canvas. Posing in his studio was no easy business. If professional models like Jacob Leuson and Victorine Meurent could hold their poses for long periods at a stretch, other sitters found the demands of portraiture excruciating. For Zola, the task of sitting for Manet had been exhausting both physically and mentally. His limbs, he claimed, went numb from long hours of forced inactivity; his eyes wearied from staring straight ahead; and he struggled to stay awake. He found the interminable sessions so tedious that he begged Théodore Dureit to visit the studio and relieve the boredom with interesting conversation. Apparently Manet was not given to small talk as he worked, since he remained "engrossed in his work," wrote Zola, "with a concentration and artistic integrity that I have seen nowhere else."11 Morisot, though, seems to have been a more compliant sitter. For reasons of propriety, her mother, Marie-Cornelie, was present for at least some of the sessions in which her daughter was involved, once more revealing her liberal inclinations, since not every mother in Paris would have allowed her unmarried daughter to pose for a man with a grisly reputation earned from a pair of shocking nudes. Still, Marie-Cornelie was not unduly taken with the painter. "Manet looks like a madman," she confided to Edma.12

  Morisot, for her part, was much taken with Manet; but whether or not the relationship between the painter and his model developed into a more intimate one remains something of a mystery, not least because Berthe and Edma faithfully burned a number of the letters they wrote to one another, presumably in order to conceal incriminating sentiments. The few letters that survived these bonfires reveal that Edma—who confessed to a toquade, or crush, on Manet—was, despite her forthcoming marriage, no less intrigued by the dandyish painter than was her younger sister.13 However, The Balcony appears to represent the impediments placed in the way of a deeper intimacy between the artist and his model, since Morisot is placed behind a barrier—the balcony's iron railing—and accompanied by a pair of chaperones.14 Whatever the case, Manet clearly regarded Morisot as someone through whom he might revive his artistic fortunes. For no sooner was The Balcony completed than he began making plans to send it to the Salon.

  Manet also had another work ready for the 1869 Salon. After three aborted attempts he had finally completed to his satisfaction a ten-foot-wide canvas showing Emperor Maximilian meeting his doom. Evidently undaunted by the fate of Alphonse Liébert, the print dealer imprisoned for two months and fined 200 francs for possessing photographs of the execution, he decided to send his enormous canvas to the Palais des Champs-Élysées, still showing the executioners in French uniforms as well as the soldier who looked like the Emperor Napoléon delivering the coup de grace.

  Early in 1869 Manet also began preparing a lithograph based on The Execution of Maximilian. He had done a few lithographs in his career, including one of The Races at Longchamp, though none had yet been published. Lithography literally means "drawing from stone." Invented in Munich by Alois Senefelder in about 1798, it consisted of making a drawing or design with a greasy crayon on a slab of polished stone; the stone was moistened first with a roller charged with water and then with another roller charged with either ink or an oil-based paint. Since grease and water do not mix, the ink or paint was repelled by the wet stone, adhering only to the marks left by the crayon. Impressions of these inky lines could then be taken on paper with a hand press. Lithography was highly efficient for the mechanical reproduction of works of art, since several hundred clear pulls could be made without any loss of definition. What Manet proposed, therefore, was to create dozens if not hundreds of lithographs of The Execution of Maximilian and then sell them through a publisher such as Adolphe Goupil.

  With this project in mind, Manet prepared his slab of stone with a waxy crayon and then sent it to the foremost printer of lithographs in Paris, Rémond-Jules Lemercier, whose studios were in the Latin Quarter.15 There the printer etched Manet's design into the stone by means of a chemical reaction precipitated with nitric acid. Brushed over the surface of the stone, the acid reacted with the grease to create oleomagnate of lime, in effect making the image, chemically speaking, part of the rock. The stone was then inked and four proofs were pulled from the press, three of which were sent to Manet for his approval. There was, however, a slight hitch. A law of 1852 stipulated that all prints needed to be submitted to the Dépôt Légal, where they were to be inspected for subversive content before they could be sold to the public. Lemercier duly sent the fourth proof to this government censor for registration. Despite the liberalization of the press laws, censorship was still very much alive in the France of Napoléon III, and within days an official letter informed Manet that he was forbidden either to print or to publish his lithograph. The letter further stated that his canvas of The Execution of Maximilian would not be welcome at the 1869 Salon.

  Manet's immediate reaction was to send the censor's letter to Émile Zola, denouncing "this ludicrously small-minded procedure" and suggesting that his friend "write a few lines" in his defense.16 Zola needed no further encouragement, and the Chronique des arts et de la curiosité was soon carrying an article lamenting the repression of such an "excellent" work.17 But the authorities were unbending, and within a few weeks the saga took a new twist as Lemercier refused to return the lithographic stone, which he was seeking permission to grind down. The infuriated Manet promptly had Lemercier & Co. served with legal papers to prevent the firm from effacing the image. The stone was finally returned, but the victory was a small one since for all intents and purposes neither the lithograph nor the four canvases of The Execution of Maximilian were of any use to him. "What a pity Édouard took all that trouble with it," Suzanne would later dolefully reflect. "What a lot of nice things he could have painted in the time."18 Still, one of the canvases did prove handy: Suzanne's brother Ferdinand cut the third version into strips, which he then used to light the fire.19

  Balked in his plans for the 1869 Salon, Manet decided to enter The Luncheon along with The Balcony. He was particularly worried about the chances of the latter. "He hopes his picture will be a success," Madame Morisot wrote to Edma, "then all of a sudden he is filled with doubts that cast him down."20 He may have been reassured by the composition of the jury. Once again the règlement provided for elections by means of a wide suffrage; and once again the ballots yielded a familiar crop of names. The only newcomer elected to the painting jury was Léon Bonnat, a thirty-six-year-old so squeamishly elegant (he was rumored to paint with his gloves on) that he made even Manet look unkempt. Nieuwerkerke then named as one of his appointees Albert Lezay-Marnésia, the man who six years earlier had given the Emperor the idea for the Salon des Refusés.

  The three stalwarts of the École des Beaux-Arts, Cabanel, Gérôme and Robert-Fleury, all were elected to the 1869 jury, but another familiar face was missing. For the second year in a row, Ernest Meissonier had failed to appeal to the expanded electorate. Nor did Meissonier have any plans to show his work in 1869, not even any of the beautiful views of Antibes painted the previous summer. He had recently so
ld one of them, Promenade at Antibes, for 25,000 francs; but such simple, sun-drenched landscapes lacked the gravitas, he seems to have felt, for a painter with his eminent reputation. Friedland took precedence over all else. And by 1869 his studies for this masterpiece had reached a critical new stage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Flying Gallops

  IN NOVEMBER 1868 Meissonier's son Charles married Jeanne Gros, and within weeks the new bride was pregnant with Meissonier's first grandchild. Charles and Jeanne took possession of the Nouvelle Maison, whose refurbishment Meissonier was still faithfully—and extravagantly—superintending. The 25,000 francs from Promenade at Antibes, sold a few weeks after the wedding, were a welcome infusion of cash as Meissonier attacked this new architectural enterprise with his customary gusto. Charles soon found himself on the end of relentless inquiries from his father regarding kitchen sinks and whether the house should feature a tower or a gable.1

  Another construction project was also taking shape in the enclosure of the former abbey. Though Meissonier claimed to detest the modern industrial age, with his ever more adventurous studies of equine locomotion he was actually working at the cutting-edge of science. He was regarded by most critics in France as the greatest horse painter in history, having overcome all rivals, as Gautier once proclaimed, "in a single blow."2 His skill in depicting horses had been gained through years of studying the equine form. He had even gone so far as to take courses in anatomy at the École Nationale Vétérinaire in Maisons-Alfort, a few miles southeast of Paris.3 His dedication impressed not only the artistic but also the scientific community. "What efforts, what sketches, what lengths of precious time, what fatigue he incurred, to faithfully translate the living animal!" exclaimed the anthropologist Émile Duhousset.4

  Meissonier regarded himself as something of a scientist in these matters, a hippologist who was attempting to quantify the precise proportions and locomotions of the horse. He believed that the ancient Assyrians had grasped this movement but that their knowledge had been lost until he, Meissonier, revived it through his endless researches.5 Equestrian experts were inclined to agree. In one of his treatises on equine anatomy, Duhousset wrote that Meissonier's motion studies for The Campaign of France had managed to differentiate, for the first time in history, between a walk and a trot. He claimed Meissonier showed how horses walked by moving in unison legs that were diagonally opposed to one another—right front and left back, for example—while flexing their knees only slightly.6

  Meissonier was nevertheless finding the horses in Friedland more difficult to paint than those in The Campaign of France; the reason was that this latest work called for galloping horses. Galloping horses were not usually a problem for painters. Throughout history, the task of the artist had not necessarily been to observe reality and then attempt to match it perfectly in his work. Instead, painters created their images by using various tried-and-trusted conventions—ritualized gestures and symbolic expressions—that satisfied demands for verisimilitude by assimilating the visual representation with the beholder's perceptions.7 Galloping horses were a case in point. Artists habitually showed them performing what was known as a "flying gallop," a hobbyhorse pose in which the forelegs stuck out front and the rear legs behind. People happily accepted this depiction of a gallop because it seemed to match their impressions of what they saw at, for example, the racecourse. Édouard Manet, a painter with no interest in depicting motion, had used precisely this artistic cliché for his horses in The Races at Longchamp.

  Meissonier was not content with this convention, which he suspected did not properly reflect how a horse actually galloped. The man who refused to paint so much as a shoe buckle without first having a correct example before his eyes would not execute something as complex as a charging horse unless he had an image of its gait perfectly in his head. But the problem, he found, was comprehending the exact movement and disposition of the horse's legs as it galloped—what Charles called "the rhythm and successive modifications of the horse's action."8 For instance, did all four hooves leave the ground simultaneously? If so, which was first to land, a foreleg or a hind leg? And were both forelegs ever outstretched from the torso as depicted in the flying gallop?

  Rosa Bonheur had spent eighteen months visiting horse markets and abbatoirs to create The Horse Fair, her masterpiece of equine muscle and movement. Meissonier would ultimately go to even greater lengths in his quest to delineate sequential movement. "Nature," he once wrote, "only gives up her secrets to those who press her closely"9 He had therefore made sketches of Charles racing through the forest and of the 10th Regiment Cuirassiers charging in attack formation across the parade ground at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. But there were limitations to these approaches. "The rapidity of the motions made them difficult to seize," lamented Charles.10 Meissonier found he needed a more effective method of ascertaining how a horse moved its legs as it galloped.

  Unfortunately for Meissonier, the technology required for these motion studies, a multi-exposure camera, was still just out of reach in the late 1860s. A young surgeon and physiologist named Étienne-Jules Marey had recently set up a scientific laboratory in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comedie where he used instruments to measure and then analyze the movements of amphibians, birds and insects.11 He was particularly interested in flight, inventing a special girdle that allowed a bird to fly around in circles as the motions of its wings and torso were recorded. In 1864 he had been visited in his laboratory by the ingenious and inventive Nadar, who a year later began experimenting with moving pictures, taking a "revolving self-portrait" by photographing himself a dozen times as his chair was slowly rotated through 360 degrees. More promisingly, by 1869 an astronomer named Pierre-Jules-Cesar Janssen was at work on what he called a "Revolver Photographique," a multi-exposure camera based on the principle of Samuel Colt's repeating pistol. Janssen envisaged a rotating wheel that could be "fired" at regular intervals in order to admit light into the shutter and allow a photographer to take as many as forty-eight exposures in seventy-two seconds. This sort of stop-action photography would have been absolutely invaluable to Meissonier in his researches into galloping horses. However, Janssen was not expected to have his invention ready before 1874, when he hoped to take it with him to Japan to photograph the transit of Venus. Meissonier was therefore forced to adopt other methods. And so he "turned his garden upside down," according to one visitor, and began building a railway through it.12

  France had more than 11,000 miles of railway track in 1869.13 In the previous three decades the railway had transformed the nation more than any other single invention. It had stimulated the economy, created new social relations, and transfigured the urban environment as metropolitan life began to revolve around the train station more than—as previously—the church or the town hall.14 The railway had likewise influenced artists, in particular landscapists, by bringing the Forest of Fontainebleau and more remote destinations such as the coast of Normandy within easy reach of their Paris studios. It had also, like photography, caused a shift in visual perception by altering the relationship between the viewer and the physical landscape, across which one could suddenly travel at speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour. It could be argued that the hasty-looking landscapes of Monet and Pissarro owed something to the brief vistas glimpsed as they loomed and then dissolved in the window of a train carriage. One critic of the Batignolles painters complained, at any rate, that Monet "paints as if from an express train."15 Even so, the most eccentric contribution of railway technology to the history of art was surely Meissonier's miniature railway at Poissy.

  Meissonier had a team of workmen lay a set of iron rails in grounds that had formerly featured only the bucolic delights of cherry trees and grazing livestock. He next installed on this track a small carriage, or what one witness called a "wagonette" and another "a rolling sofa."16 Parallel to this length of track he fashioned a bridle path along which a horse could gallop. With these two lengths of course complete, he climbed into the wagonette,
whose motive power was not steam or even horses but a pair of men. These two unfortunates were ordered to push the painter as quickly as possible along the rails in his wagonette as a horseman galloped full-pelt down the bridle path beside them. This bizarre feat was performed time and again as Meissonier, whisked along the track with pencil and paper in hand, "jotted down the action, the strain of the muscles, every detail of the motion and the different transitions."17 Entire albums were filled with these scribbled observations. One of his friends claimed that Meissonier thereby "succeeded in decomposing and noting 'in a flash' the most rapid and complex actions" of the horse's flying legs.18 Without a high-speed camera, however, Meissonier was like a naked-eye astronomer, a Tycho Brahe staring at the night sky and counting stars before the invention of the telescope. Not for another ten years, when Eadweard Muy-bridge finally managed to use a high-speed camera to capture a horse's motion photographically, would these "rapid and complex actions" truly be understood.19 Nevertheless, that a man so bewitched by the past, a man who claimed to detest the sight of railway stations, should have spent so much time and effort hurling himself down a railway track in a quest for the latest scientific knowledge, provides a delicious irony.