The Judgment of Paris (61 page)

Courbet had managed to paint numerous canvases during his confinement. He finished at least fifty works in Sainte-Pélagie, many of them still lifes of the fruit and flowers brought to him by his sisters. At Neuilly, in the month of January alone, he completed eighteen more. As his prison term ended, he submitted two of his recent efforts to the 1872 Salon, one a female nude, the other a still life of apples, at the bottom of which he had inscribed, in bright vermilion, "Sainte-Pélagie"—even though this particular work had actually been painted in Neuilly.

The effrontery of this Communard and convicted
déboulonneur
proposing to show work at the Salon—and work that apparently advertised and even glorified his status as a prisoner—was simply too much for the jurors, and particularly for Meissonier, to countenance. Courbet's apples were all the more provocative since the canvas arrived in the Palais des Champs-Élysées against the grim backdrop of a series of trials and executions. In February, five men were condemned to death for the murder of the Dominican monks; a week later three men found guilty of killing Lecomte and Clement-Thomas were shot by firing squad; and in April a Communard named Fimbert was convicted of "incendiarism"—a lesser charge than the one faced by Courbet—and condemned to death. Henri Rochefort, meanwhile, was sentenced to deportation to a penal colony in New Caledonia.

By comparison with these sentences, the toppler of the Vendôme Column seemed to have escaped rather lightly. Meissonier, still seething over the episode, therefore took the lead in proposing that Courbet should be excluded from the Salon, not on aesthetic grounds but because of his political activities. The deliberations of the jury were reported in
Le Figaro,
whose correspondent described how Meissonier, "whose canvases are better than his judgments," declared that he would never agree to serve on a jury for which "questions of honor" did not take precedence over all else. "We must reject Monsieur Courbet with all our hearts," Meissonier was reported as telling his fellow jurors. "He must be dead for us."
¹¹

When a vote was taken, the show of hands went overwhelmingly against Courbet, with only two of the twenty jurors—Robert-Fleury and Fromentin—protesting against his exclusion. Robert-Fleury made a spirited defense, scolding his colleagues for "banishing one of their own, the first among them in talent and perhaps in character."
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The seventy-five-year-old Robert-Fleury commanded enormous authority, not just as President of the jury but also as the Director of both the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de France in Rome. Yet his words had little effect in the face of Meissonier's angry determination, and the other jurors, including even Antoine Vollon, voted to banish Courbet. A second vote produced exactly the same result. Courbet's apples therefore became the forbidden fruit of the 1872 Salon, or the "apples of discord," as one newspaper promptly dubbed them
¹³
—a witty allusion to the golden apple thrown by Eris, the Goddess of Strife, that led to the Judgment of Paris and ultimately started the Trojan War.

Courbet himself, the cause of the strife, was strangely unconcerned by this development, in part because he had a much greater worry in the spring of 1872: 200,000 francs' worth of his paintings and other possessions had been stolen from his lodgings during his spell in Sainte-Pélagie, prior to which his parents' house had been ransacked by the Prussians. Against these misfortunes, his status as a
refuse
from the Salon seemed of little consequence. Indeed, Courbet reveled in the publicity. "The attention I get is tremendous," he wrote before treating himself to a new vehicle, an eight-seat brig for which he paid 1,300 francs.
¹⁴

In the end, Meissonier, rather than Courbet, came to suffer from the latter's exclusion. There was very little support among the newspapers for the banishment, still less from the artistic community. A Catholic journal,
L 'Univers,
supported the exclusion, as did, writing in
Le Figaro,
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, a flamboyant dandy and the founder of the right-wing
Revue du monde catholique.
Barbey d'Aurevilly claimed to see a direct link between the "brutality" of Courbet's canvases and the atrocities of the Commune, as if naked bathers and thick layers of paint had led inexorably to the assassination of the Archbishop of Paris.
¹⁵
On the whole, though, even conservative journals such as
Le Pays
supported Courbet's right to show his work even as they deplored his actions as a Communard.
¹⁶

Most vehement in Courbet's defense was his friend Castagnary. He launched a blistering attack on Meissonier in the pages of
Le Siècle,
implicating him in what he regarded as the decadence, corruption and general tastelessness of the Second Empire. Meissonier, he claimed, had spent his entire career catering to the whimsies of "bankers and prostitutes" with tiny pictures adapted to "the proportions of contemporary apartments." Courbet, on the other hand, was a far more unique and inventive artist; he had never imagined, according to a sarcastic Castagnary, "that to make figures interesting it would suffice to dress them in Louis XV costume." He concluded that the two painters occupied—as Duret later claimed of Manet and Meissonier—the two opposite poles of art: "Obviously these two artists cannot live together. They are polar opposites."
¹⁷

Ironically, Meissonier had suddenly become identified, like his old foes Picot, Signol and Ingres, with the forces of reaction. Though Meissonier's overriding concern had undoubtedly been to punish Courbet for destroying the Vendôme Column, his vendetta may also have been motivated, on some level, by a distaste for Realism. Courbet's rustic figures and his thick application of pigment with a palette knife—not to mention, as well, his often crude and sensual subject matter—had nothing in common with Meissonier's dainty figures and his fastidious applications of paint. Meissonier's fellow juror, Jules Breton, described this difference in style by observing that Meissonier was "in contrast with Courbet" because of his "absolute conscientiousness and marvelous clearness of vision."
¹⁸
These qualities may have pleased jurors like Breton, but by 1872 many younger artists and critics had little truck with such optical subtleties or dexterous sleights-of-brush. Meissonier's intransigence over Courbet would provide further ammunition to critics such as Zola and Astruc who felt his technical facility could not disguise the fact that he was destimte of the original creative impulses that motivated painters such as Courbet and Manet.

The exclusion of Gustave Courbet was not to be the only controversy at the 1872 Salon as widespread rejections by the Selection Committee caused a clamor for a Salon des Refusés. A petition did the rounds accusing the jurors of "a favoritism and prejudice that are without precedent" and requesting space for an alternative exhibition.
¹⁹
But Charles Blanc showed himself as impervious as Nieuwerkerke to all such demands.

A number of artists had declined to submit work to the 1872 Salon. Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro had both come back from London, Monet bringing with him canvases of Hyde Park and the River Thames, Pissarro views of the south London suburbs of Norwood and Sydenham. But no longer did they possess the desire to precipitate themselves into the unforgiving artistic fray that was the Salon. Monet and Paul Cézanne—who was back from the south of France with Hortense Fiquet—had good reason to be disillusioned with the process, since in the last years of the Second Empire their works had constantly been rejected. Edgar Degas had likewise decided to turn his back on a system that looked no more encouraging under the Third Republic than it had when Napoléon III was in power. Renoir, however, broke ranks with the Batignolles painters to submit a pair of canvases,
Parisiennes in Algerian Costume
and
The Riders in the Bois de Boulogne.
The actions of his friends no doubt seemed justified when both were returned unceremoniously stamped with a red R.

Another painter who broke rank, albeit with more success, was Édouard Manet. The last few months had been remarkable ones for Manet. In the decade before the Siege and the Commune he had managed to sell only a couple of his paintings. These had gone to close friends, one of whom, Théodore Duret, paid for his portrait in 1868 by giving Manet a case of cognac. This lack of commercial success had become more acutely dismaying to Manet as his fortieth birthday approached: one of the reasons for his depressive illness in the summer of 1871 seems to have been the precarious state of his finances. In August, shortly before his doctor sent him to Boulogne, he had found himself obliged to ask Duret for a loan of 700 francs. "You can imagine how dire my need has been," he wrote to his friend.
²⁰

Yet one day in the middle of January 1872, less than two weeks before observing his fortieth birthday, Manet was visited in his studio by Paul Durand-Ruel, a picture dealer who owned a gallery in the Rue Laffitte. Durand-Ruel promptly purchased two of his canvases, paying Manet 1,600 francs. He then returned the following day and, to Manet's astonished pleasure, took away twenty-three more canvases for which he arranged to pay 35,000 francs. "On the spot," Durand-Ruel later recalled, "I bought everything he had."
²¹
He thereby became the proprietor of, among others,
The Absinthe Drinker, The Street Singer, The Spanish Singer, Young Man in the Costume of a Majo, Mile V . . . in the Costume of an Espada, The Dead Toreador, The Dead Christ with Angels, The Fifer, The Tragic Actor
and
The Repose.
Several days later, Durand-Ruel returned once more to the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg and paid Manet 16,000 francs for yet another cartload of canvases; included among this third batch was
Music in the Tuileries.

Durand-Ruel was in many ways an unlikely champion for the rebel angel of French painting.
²²
He was an extreme political conservative who feared and detested both democracy and republicanism. A friend and supporter of the Comte de Chambord, he believed that only the restoration of a hereditary monarchy could save France. Yet he was, above all, a practical businessman. He had taken control of the family firm at the age of thirty-four, following the death of his father in 1865, and then begun vigorously to expand. He had specialized in landscapists, acquiring a virtual monopoly on Théodore Rousseau when, in 1866, he purchased seventy paintings directly from Rousseau's studio. When his business was threatened by the Franco-Prussian War, he escaped with his collection of canvases to London and opened a gallery in New Bond Street. There he staged exhibitions that introduced the English public to the work of Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Rousseau and Millet, as well as to two members of the new generation of French landscapists whose acquaintance he made in London: Monet and Pissarro. He also opened a gallery in Brussels, where in the aptly named Place des Martyrs he began impressing Belgian connoisseurs with works that had been on the receiving end of so many critical brickbats in Paris. He had then returned to France at the end of 1871 to reopen his gallery in the Rue Laffitte and acquire more works by the new generation of painters.

Delighted with his sales to Durand-Ruel, Manet had sauntered into the Café Guerbois and mischievously inquired: "Can you name an artist who can't flog fifty thousand francs' worth of paintings in a year?" To which a chorus of his comrades replied, predictably: "You!" Manet then happily disabused them of their misapprehension.
²³
These sales did not seem to have inspired him to go back to work, however, and so when the March 23 deadline arrived he had no new Salon painting to offer. He had obviously decided that his canvases of Léon riding a
vilocipede
and playing croquet were too frivolous in a year when the Salon was meant to showcase the greatness of France. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, though, he was still determined to exhibit work. He therefore arranged to enter
The Battle of the U.S.S. "Kearsarge" and the C.S.S. "Alabama,"
for which Durand-Ruel had paid 3,000 francs. Painted in 1864, the work had received a good press, notably from Philippe Burty, when it had appeared in the window of Alfred Cadart's shop.

Manet may have chosen the painting for another reason as well. Its subject matter was topical because, though the famous naval battle was eight years old, the United States had begun seeking reparations from Great Britain for the damage inflicted on its shipping by the
Alabama,
which had been built at the shipyard of John Laird & Sons in Liverpool despite the fact that Britain was supposedly neutral during the American Civil War. In 1871 the U.S. Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, had signed the Treaty of Washington, which provided for arbitration between Britain and America over what became known as the "Alabama Claims." As Manet submitted his work to the 1872 jury, a panel that included the Emperor of Brazil was convening in Geneva to discuss the reparations. It would eventually find in favor of the United States, which was awarded reparations of more than $15 million in gold. The Salon jury, in the meantime, found in favor of Manet, whose battle scene was accepted for the exhibition.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

A Ring of Gold

T
HE SKY STAYS a funereal gray. Between two dirty clouds a yellow sun sometimes risks an arrow of gold; but the rain blunts the flaming dart and sudden downpours sweep the roadways and the pavements, rolling in torrents of water along the Champs-Élysées. The chestnut trees drip on your head, and you must leap across the wide puddles that turn the asphalt into maps of seas and continents."
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