The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  Manet's disappointments at the 1874 Salon led him to a kind of show of solidarity with his fellow outcasts, the Impressionists, and in particular with Claude Monet. Manet and Monet had come a long way since 1865, when the former had angrily refused to make the acquaintance of the latter. They got to know one another sometime in the late 1860s, when Manet invited the younger painter to the Café Guerbois, "at which point," Monet later recalled, "we immediately became firm friends." Monet was to look back on these evenings in Manet's company at the Café Guerbois as vital to his artistic development. "Nothing could have been more interesting than our discussions," he claimed, "with their constant clashes of opinion. They kept our wits sharpened, encouraged us to press forward with our own experiments, and gave us the enthusiasm to work for weeks on end."24 Manet had provided material as well as intellectual support, since in 1871 he had found Monet a house in Argenteuil when the latter returned from England.

  Though he still had a studio in Paris, by 1874 Monet was firmly established at Argenteuil. He failed to sell any of the works exhibited in Nadar's studio—where Impression: Sunrise languished on the wall despite a modest price tag of 1,000 francs—but his paintings continued to find enough favor in the marketplace that he planned to move into a larger house. In the middle of June, he signed the lease on a newly built house, complete with a large garden, next door to the one where he had lived for the previous eighteen months. The rent was a not inconsiderable 1,200 francs per month, but Monet was determined to enjoy the fruits of his labors. He hired a maid and a gardener, and he took to drinking fine wines from Bordeaux instead of the local vintage. Finally, he allowed himself one more luxury, a small rowboat in which he began plying the arms of the Seine in the wide stretch of the Argenteuil basin. Following the example of Daubigny, he took his canvas and paintbox on board for expeditions, dropping anchor at likely vantage points and painting scenes of regattas and riverbanks. This suburban idyll suited him so well that he was more productive than ever in the summer of 1874, completing forty canvases in the space of a few short months.25

  Monet's happiness that summer was further boosted by the regular presence of a visitor from Paris. Manet had decided to forgo his traditional trip to the seaside in favor of remaining in the environs of Paris. Choosing to stay for a few weeks in the family home at Gennevilliers, he found himself back in the environment—in the vibrantly modern world of bathers, boaters and casual pleasure-seekers—that a dozen years earlier had inspired Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe. On this occasion, though, his style of painting had changed. He may not have esteemed the efforts of Cézanne and Renoir, but Monet was a different matter. Seven years earlier Manet had disdained The Garden of the Princess, one of Monet's plein-air cityscapes, when he saw it in a dealer's window. At that time he believed paintings of la vie moderne were best realized in a studio, not under the open skies. Slowly, however, he had come to accept—largely on the evidence of Monet's canvases—that the fashionable and fugitive world of what Baudelaire called "modernity" could be captured in situ. He had painted en plein air on previous occasions, most notably during his seaside vacations. But he seems to have come to the Argenteuil basin in the summer of 1874 with the express aim of abandoning what he would call the "false shadows" of the studio in favor of joining Monet in the "true light" of the outdoors. 26

  For the first time in his career, Manet tried to catch the effects of natural light. He carried his canvases to the same riverbank that Monet had been painting so prolifically and, following Monet's lead, replaced the somber colors and sharp contrasts of so many of his earlier canvases with a lighter palette of blues, yellows and ochers, which he added to his canvas in strokes of pure, unmixed color. He even painted, as a kind of tribute, Claude Monet and his Wife on his Floating Studio, a portrait of his friend at work, his easel propped on the gunwale and Camille inside the boat's makeshift cabin.

  Nautical pursuits along this reach of the Seine had become fashionable in the previous two decades, and anyone hoping to witness the picturesque amusements of modern Parisians could do no better than to visit—as Manet made sure to do that summer—the Cercle de la Voile, or Sailing Club, at Argenteuil.27 Besides the portrait of Monet in the boat, he painted four further scenes of sailors and boaters at Argenteuil. In one of these canvases, simply entitled Boating, Manet posed his brother-in-law Rudolphe Leenhoff, then thirty-one, in the stern of a skiff, a young woman in a blue dress beside him. Another canvas, Argenteuil, showed Rudolphe and another young woman seated on a bench beside the marina, the luminous blues of the river fractured by the white of the sails in the middle distance. The stiff postures and blank expressions of these two figures, as well as the whiff of moral delinquency, recalled numerous of Manet's earlier paintings, but they also indicated the enduring appeal for him, even outdoors, of the human form. This fascination would make his work distinct from that of Monet, whose only real pictorial concern was the incidental effect on a landscape of the weather, the hour or the season. The lighter tones and saturated colors of both Boating and Argenteuil show how Manet had left the studio and stepped resolutely into the sunshine.

  Manet also painted one other canvas that summer at Argenteuil. Visiting Monet's house in the Boulevard Saint-Denis one afternoon, he began painting The Monet Family in their Garden at Argenteuil. The work portrayed Camille and Jean, then seven years old, seated on the grass amid the sprawl of her white dress; nearby a blue-smocked Monet stooped over one of the borders in his beloved garden, a watering can at his feet. Monet ceased gardening at some point that afternoon and then he, too, started painting. Turning his attention to his guest, he began working on Manet Painting in Monet's Garden, showing Manet seated before his easel in a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. Hardly had he begun painting than Renoir arrived at the house and, finding the two men so engaged, borrowed paints and a canvas from Monet and started his own work, Madame Monet and her Son, with Camille and Jean reclining on the lawn as in Manet's canvas. The day ended with Manet and Renoir making gifts of their paintings to Monet.

  The pioneers of the painting of the future: three men working outdoors in a suburban garden, their canvases catching reflections from one another like rays of the sun.

  The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (Édouard Manet)

  Manet Painting in Monet's Garden (Claude Monet

  Epilogue: Finishing Touches

  THE SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME cooperative a capital variable des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et lithographes was dissolved in December 1874, after its members failed to sell many paintings from their exhibition or make much in the way of profit from their enterprise. However, in 1876 many of the same painters regrouped for a second show, this time at Durand-Ruel's Paris gallery, under the prosaic banner "Exhibition Made by a Group of Artists." Fewer visitors attended than in 1874 and the reviews—particularly one by Albert Wolff that denounced the painters as "a group of unfortunate creatures stricken with the mania of ambition"1—were even worse. Nonetheless, the art critic for The New York Tribune, Henry James, wrote that this exhibition by the "Irreconcilables" (as he christened them) was "decidedly interesting."2

  The following year, in April, a third show was held in a vacant apartment on the third floor of a building in the Rue Le Peletier. On this occasion a dwindling number of participants—only eighteen braved the exhibition—finally took ownership of Louis Leroy's term of abuse, calling themselves Impressionists and even publishing a short-lived journal called L 'Impressioniste to defend their efforts against their critics. The results were much the same as on the two previous occasions.

  Five more such exhibitions would follow. By the time of the eighth and last Paris show, in 1886, Durand-Ruel had mounted successful retrospectives of paintings by "the Impressionists of Paris" in both London (in 1882 and 1883) and New York (1886). The exhibition in New York was staged at the American Art Galleries and continued due to popular demand at the National Academy of Design. Organized under the auspices of the American Art Association, it fe
atured 289 works of art and proved particularly gratifying in terms of both sales and reviews. According to The New York Tribune, American collectors of Meissonier, Cabanel and Gérôme, hoping to protect the value of their investments, had tried to queer the pitch for the Impressionists by denouncing them in the press as "utterly and absolutely worthless."3 The tactic ultimately failed as the American public remained unmoved by the prevailing tastes and longstanding prejudices in France. "Do not believe the Americans are savages," Durand-Ruel wrote to Fantin-Latour in 1886. "On the contrary, they are less ignorant, less bound by routine than our French collectors."4 Unencumbered by the dogma of conservative Institutions such as the École des Beaux-Arts, the Americans happily embraced what the French had been reviling for two decades as scandalous profanations of art. Paintings of modern life—ballet dancers, Parisian street scenes, and the sunlit, willow-draped riverbanks at Pontoise or Argenteuil—endeared themselves to a new generation of American collectors and museum-goers much more than did moralistic interpretations of Greek myths, Roman history, or indeed Napoleonic battle scenes.

  In the decade following Durand-Ruel's New York exhibition, increasingly more American money was invested in Impressionist paintings. One of the primary American collectors was Louisine Havemeyer, a friend of the American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt and the wife of Henry O. Havemeyer, owner of the American Sugar-Refining Company. By the 1890s she had begun buying works by Monet, Pissarro, Degas and Cézanne, ultimately putting together an unsurpassed collection of more than a hundred Impressionist paintings to adorn her Tiffany-encrusted, Romanesque-style mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East Sixty-sixth Street in Manhattan. American painters had also taken note of the work of the Impressionists. Numerous American artists had trained in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in 1887 a journal reported that an "American colony" had gathered at Giverny, the village on the Seine to which Claude Monet had moved in 1883: their pictures, noted the correspondent, revealed "that they have got the blue-green color of Monet's Impressionism and 'got it bad.' "5 One of these painters, Théodore Earl Butler, married Monet's stepdaughter Suzanne at Giverny in 1892—an event charmingly commemorated by one of the great examples of American Impressionism, Théodore Robinson's The Wedding March. By the first years of the twentieth century the style had taken such a firm root in American soil that many local varieties—Connecticut Impressionism, California Impressionism, Pennsylvania Impressionism—had been produced. As Germain Bazin, Chief Conservator of the Louvre during the 1950s, was later to write, exaggerating only slightly: "The Impressionists entered America without resistance."6

  Seventeen canvases by Édouard Manet were included in Durand-Ruel's watershed exhibition in New York in 1886. However, Manet cannot properly be called an Impressionist, not only because he refused to take part in any of the Impressionist exhibitions in Paris but also because of his different stylistic preoccupations, such as his fondness for the Old Masters and for rendering the human form rather than (his Argenteuil canvases notwithstanding) the effects of open-air light. Throughout the 1870s he had remained determined to show his work at the Palais des Champs-Élysées rather than in "the shack next door." As in the 1860s, neither the jurors nor many of the critics treated him kindly. Unveiling his sun-drenched new style at the 1875 Salon, he received appalling reviews for Argenteuil, while in the following year—the tenth anniversary of the Jury of Assassins—history repeated itself as both of his canvases were spurned by the jury. Not until the Salon of 1881 did he enjoy any real success, when he was awarded a Salon medal, albeit only a second-class one, for Portrait of Henri Rochefort.*The Grand Medal of Honor was claimed that year by Paul Baudry. At the close of that year, thanks to his friend Antonin Proust, who had become Minister of Fine Arts in a government formed by Léon Gambetta, he received the Legion of Honor. Much to Manet's disgust, a letter of congratulations arrived from Italy, from his old adversary the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, who had retired to a villa near Lucca. "Tell him I appreciate his good wishes," Manet wrote to a mutual friend, Ernest Chesneau, "but that he could have been the one to decorate me. He would have made my fortune and now it's too late to compensate for twenty lost years."7

  In 1882 Manet exhibited the remarkable A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, one of the finest works in his entire oeuvre, but found himself disillusioned, as ever, with the bewildered public reaction. It was to be his final Salon. He was seriously ill by this time, having finished the painting despite suffering pains and problems with his physical coordination caused by a syphilitic infection contracted many years earlier. In April 1883, his gangrenous left leg was amputated below the knee. He died less than a fortnight later, on April 30, at the age of fifty-one, almost twenty years to the day after Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe was first revealed at the Salon des Refusés. He was buried at the Cimetière de Passy, with Émile Zola and Claude Monet among the pallbearers. Edgar Degas, walking behind the coffin, expressed sentiments that much of the rest of France needed some time to appreciate: "He was greater than we thought."8

  Manet was indeed greater than many people thought—greater, in particular, than the critics and the Fine Arts administrators of the 1860s and 1870s had dared to consider. As early as eight months after his death a retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at, of all places, the École des Beaux-Arts—the institution in which, twenty years earlier, Gérôme had tried to ban all mention of his name. This "Exposition Manet" was treated to the sort of favorable reviews that the painter had so often been denied during his lifetime. Then, in February 1884, a large selection of his work, including ninety oil paintings, went to auction. A respectable if unspectacular 116,000 francs was raised. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère was one of the pricier lots, going to a friend, the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, for 5,850 francs. But the most expensive—to the guffawing of many spectators at the auction—proved to be Olympia, which was purchased by Manet's brother-in-law Ferdinand Leenhoff for 10,000 francs.9

  The fortunes of Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe and Olympia served as barometers for Manet's reputation in the decades after his death. The latter canvas, easily the most notorious painting of the nineteenth century, became, surprisingly, the first of his works to enter the Louvre, albeit not without the usual controversy. The painting's museological beatification occurred only thanks to the untiring efforts of Claude Monet. In a feat of almost unexampled selflessness in an artist, Monet spent the entire year 1889 organizing a public subscription to purchase the canvas from Manet's family for installation in the Louvre. Nearly 20,000 francs was raised from subscribers who included Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Fantin-Latour, Antonin Proust and Philippe Burty. However, the work was sent by the government not to the Louvre but to the Musée du Luxembourg—the "Museum of Living Artists." Here it was joined in 1897 by two more of Manet's works, including The Balcony, which had been bequeathed to the nation by the Impressionist painter, patron and collector Gustave Caillebotte. However, two more of Manet's works from Caillebotte's collection, Croquet at Boulogne and a small sketch of racehorses, were refused by the Luxembourg, whose curator, Léonce Bénédite, would later publish a biography of Meissonier. From the same bequest Bénédite turned down some thirty paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas and Sisley.10Olympia was consecrated by the French artistic establishment only in 1907, when it entered the Louvre on orders of Georges Clemenceau, at the time the President of the Council of Ministers as well as a long-standing friend of Monet (and the subject of an 1880 Manet portrait). The work was afforded the honor of hanging on the wall beside Ingres's Grand Odalisque, another work that had once been savaged by the critics.

  Coincidentally, also in 1907 Pablo Picasso, then twenty-six, painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his first Cubist painting, which featured a stunning new approach to representing the nude female form. Two years earlier, a number of other young artists, including Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck, outraged the French public with works whose flat compositions and splodges of vivid, clashing color�
�a shocking style that won them the pejorative nickname les Fauves ("the Wild Beasts")—recalled the Wild Boar of the Batignolles. And Olympia entered the Louvre two years before Filippo Martinetti published his "Futurist Manifesto" in Le Figaro, praising "courage, audacity and revolt," and asserting—in art history's ultimate tribute to modern life—that a speeding motorcar was more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.11

  A generation after his death, Manet had left behind a vibrant cultural legacy, not simply through scandalizing the public—an option that artists of the past century have found all too expedient—but by recasting artistic tradition in his own idiosyncratic vision in order to forge entirely new forms. Within this context, Charles Oulmont, a professor at the Sorbonne, was able to declare, as early as 1912, that Olympia "marks a momentous date in the history of nineteenth-century painting and art generally."12 Or as a more recent art historian, Professor T. J. Clark, has written, Olympia is "the founding monument of modern art."13