The Judgment of Paris (34 page)

Courbet had soon been enchanted by the presence in Trouville of James McNeill Whistler and, even more agreeable to him, Whistler's copper-haired Irish mistress and model, Joanna Hiffernan. The daughter of an Irish immigrant to London, the beautiful Jo had met Whistler in 1860, when she was about seventeen, and had posed for various of his paintings and engravings. Her most famous appearance was in
The White Girl,
the seven-foot-high canvas that gave Whistler both public notoriety and a case of lead poisoning. She, Whistler and Courbet made a happy threesome in Trouville that October, eating shrimp salad, visiting the casino, and frolicking in the breakers. "This is a charming place," sighed Whistler in a letter to a friend in London.
¹⁶
He and Courbet assembled their easels along the beach, and Whistler finished at least five canvases; one of them,
Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville,
pictured the stocky, bearded Courbet in the foreground. Whistler had long admired Courbet's work, while Courbet quickly came to appreciate the charms of Whistler's "superb red-headed girl."
¹⁷
Smitten with Jo's Celtic beauty, he painted her in a portrait,
La Belle Irlandaise,
in which her abundant red-gold tresses were prominently featured.

Courbet's interest in Jo had not confined itself to aesthetics, and the two of them seem to have begun an affair, either in Trouville or a few months later, early in 1866, when Jo traveled on her own to Paris while Whistler, in a strange and baffling bit of derring-do, took himself off to South America with a boatload of torpedoes. Whistler claimed that he had decided "to go out to help the Chileans, and, I cannot say why, the Peruvians too."
¹⁸
Chile and Peru were at war with Spain at the time, but Whistler's motives may have had as much to do with escaping his creditors in London as with sinking the Spanish Pacific fleet. In any case, he had set sail for Valparaiso early in February, soon after which Jo began posing in Courbet's Paris studio for a work much more risquè than
La Belle Irlandaise.

The commission for this work had come from a wealthy art collector and
bon viveur
named Khalil Bey, a thirty-five-year-old former Turkish ambassador to Greece and Russia who had moved to Paris and begun depleting his immense fortune on cards, canvases and courtesans.
¹⁹
Having heard about the deliriously indecent
Venus and Psyche,
he commissioned Courbet to paint a similarly erotic scene to adorn his apartment, which ostentatiously included a number of Meissoniers. The result was
Le Sommeil
("Sleep"), depicting a pair of intertwined female nudes asleep on a disordered bed; one of them, her hips rolled and posterior flaunted
a la
Cabanel, was the flame-haired Jo. Courbet, wisely, had not bothered to submit this work to the 1866 Salon. He sent instead a less explicit and more conventional nude showing a woman lolling on a bed with a parrot perched on her outstretched hand. This canvas,
Woman with a Parrot,
might have come from the studio of Cabanel; and, like one of Cabanel's works, it proved hugely popular with Salon-goers.

"I am the uncontested great success of the Salon," Courbet reported to a friend, and for once he was not exaggerating.
²⁰
Cabanel personally complimented the preening Courbet on the work, as did another juror who knew something about the languorously draped female form, Paul Baudry. Courbet was less than gracious in accepting their regards: "I told you a long time ago," he wrote to a friend, "that I would find a way to give them a fist right in the face. That bunch of scoundrels . . . !"
²¹
The work was even popular with officialdom, for it was displayed prominently on direct orders from Nieuwerkerke, who had expressed an interest in purchasing it the previous summer after seeing it on the easel while visiting Courbet's studio. Nieuwerkerke also attempted to buy Courbet's second offering at the 1866 Salon,
Covert of Roe Deer,
only to discover that he had been pipped by another interested party, none other than Empress Eugénie.

In the space of three years, Courbet had gone from artistic pariah to darling of the Salon, with so many commissions that his drawers were, as a friend reported, "bulging with bank notes."
²²
Such a turnabout in fortune must have been, to
refusès
from the Salon such as Édouard Manet, an enviable but inspiring sight. Perhaps not coincidentally, in 1866 Manet acquired an African gray parrot and, one year after the scandal of
Olympia,
invited Victorine Meurent back into his studio.

Another painter who managed to clear the hurdle of the 1866 jury and impress Salon-goers and critics was Claude Monet, whose seascapes had been such a draw one year earlier. Unformnately, Monet had been unable to complete
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
(plate 5A). He had spent the summer of 1865 toiling away at the ambitious painting in the Forest of Fontainebleau, making sketches of his mistress Camille Doncieux and friend Frédéric Bazille enjoying a picnic lunch in fashionable dress. Work was interrupted, though, when he injured his leg in an incident involving a group of English painters, a bronze ball from the signboard of the Léon d'Or, and a game of football. Luckily Bazille, who had trained as a doctor, took matters in hand, conducting Monet to his bed and treating the wound.

Monet's damaged leg was not the only reason
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
failed to appear at the 1866 Salon. The colossal size of the canvas meant he was unable to work on it exclusively out of doors, as he had hoped, especially when the weather turned at the end of summer. By mid-October, therefore, he had left Fontainebleau and, despite the cholera epidemic, returned to the studio he shared with Bazille in Paris. Over the next few months a number of visitors came to the Rue Furstemberg to inspect his progress on the work. His old friend and mentor from Le Havre, Eugène Boudin, arrived in December, reporting back to a mutual friend that Monet was "finishing his elephantine painting, which is costing him an arm and a leg."
²³
Courbet, fresh from his invigorating spell at Trouville, commended the younger painter on the work, and Monet responded by painting Courbet into one of his studies for the scene. He placed him in exactly the same pose as that held by Ferdinand Leenhoff in Manet's
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe,
insinuating that his own enormous canvas, with its showstopping size and uncompromisingly modern vision, would pay tribute to both Courbet and Manet.

As Boudin had noted, the enterprise was proving a costly one. Monet and Bazille, running short of funds, were evicted from their studio at the beginning of February, a situation made worse a short time later when Monet's aunt—who thus far had been bankrolling his artistic endeavors—decided to stop his allowance. "I'm utterly shaken," Monet wrote to a friend, Amand Gautier.
²⁴
He also informed Gautier that he was "putting aside for the moment all the large things I have under way, which are only eating up my money and causing me great difficulties."
²⁵
Despite having wrestled with the canvas in his studio for almost six months, he would be unable to finish it, he realized, on time for the Salon's March deadline.
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
was therefore, for the time being at least, rolled up and placed in storage.

Fortunately, Monet had been able to send two other works to the 1866 Salon: a landscape painted at Chailly-en-Bière and a portrait of Camille in a green-and-black striped dress. Both were accepted by the jury and reviewed favorably by the critics. Among the choristers of praise was Émile Zola: "Here is a man among eunuchs," he had managed to proclaim before getting the sack from
L 'Événement.
²⁶
Monet made certain that cuttings of these reviews were dispatched forthwith to his aunt in Le Havre. "My aunt appears to be delighted," he was soon able to report to Amand Gautier. "She is congratulated at every turn."
²⁷
Even more encouraging, the collectors began covetously eyeing his works; one of them, an art dealer, promptly commissioned further work from him. On the strength of his showing at the Salon, Monet even managed to sell a number of his other paintings, pocketing a grand total of 800 francs in the bargain—a paltry amount by the standards of Meissonier or Gérôme, but a welcome relief for a man being dunned by creditors in both Paris and Fontainebleau.
²⁸

Édouard Manet no doubt took special interest in Monet, the man with a similar name who, on the evidence of
Camille (Woman in a Green Dress),
shared something of his style of painting as well. "Monet or Manet?" the caricaturist Gill asked of the painting in
La Lune,
before concluding: "It is to Manet that we owe this Monet. Bravo, Monet! Thank you, Manet!"
²⁹
Monet did indeed seem to owe a debt to Manet, since he had set Camille against a dark, blank background reminiscent of numerous of Manet's full-length portraits. He also arrayed Camille in modern costume—a fur-trimmed black coat over a long, billowing dress—similar to those represented by Manet in
Music in the Tuileries
and
The Races at Longchamp.
But where Manet's works had attracted public outrage and critical derision, Monet's efforts earned many plaudits. Camille was hailed in
L 'Artiste
—the paper in whose columns Castagnary and Hector de Callias had both twitted Manet's work—as "the Queen of Paris."
³⁰

By the time the Salon opened, Monet and his "queen" had left Paris and were keeping a low profile in Sèvres, not far from where Corot lived at Ville-d'Avray. He had not quite learned his lesson, though, and by early summer he was at work on another massive
plein-air
scene with a similar modern-life subject. Entitled
Women in the Garden,
this new canvas, at eight feet high by six feet wide, was so large that Monet, according to legend, excavated a trench in his garden into which he lowered the canvas by means of a system of pulleys.
³¹
Once again his model for several of the figures was Camille Doncieux; and once again he outfitted her in the latest Second Empire fashions—expansive dresses, beribboned hats, a fawn-colored parasol—as she posed under the boughs and among the shrubs and flower beds of his suburban garden. This time, more confident than ever of his abilities, Monet was determined not to fail to complete his canvas on time for the next Salon.

CHAPTER TWENTY

A Flash of Swords

A
FEW DAYS AFTER the Salon des Refusés shut its doors in June 1863, Emperor Napoléon III had decreed that in four years Paris would host a Universal Exposition, a festival of arts and industry intended to attract visitors and exhibitors from all over the world. Such festivals had become popular ever since London hosted the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851. More than six million people had visited the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park to view sights such as a steam hammer, a model of Niagara Falls, a twenty-five-ton lump of coal, and the Koh-I-Noor Diamond, newly arrived from India. Four years later, Napoléon III had hosted the Universal Exposition in Paris. Held in the Palais de l'Industrie (which was soon afterward given its more dignified name, the Palais des Champs-Élysées), it included more than 20,000 exhibits, the most famous of which, after Prince Albert showed his enthusiastic appreciation for it, was Ernest Meissonier's
The Brawl.

A number of other such fairs had followed: the Great London Exposition in South Kensington in 1862 (at which an inventor named Alexander Parkes unveiled "Parkesine," the world's first plastic); the International Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures in Dublin three years later; and the Exposição Internacional in Oporto, Pormgal, in 1866. Louis-Napoléon hoped to outdo all of them with his second Universal Exposition, which was scheduled to open on the first of April in 1867. With four times the space of the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace and double the number of displays as the Universal Exposition of 1855, it was destined to be the greatest spectacle the world had ever seen.

An engineer named Jean-Baptiste-Sebastien Kranz was appointed to design a special venue for the exhibition, the Palais du Champ-de-Mars. Assisted by another engineer who specialized in designing ironwork for railway bridges and viaducts, a talented thirty-four-year-old named Gustave Eiffel, Kranz produced an iron-framed oval structure with a domed roof that stretched 500 yards along the Champ-de-Mars and dwarfed the nearby Hôtel des Invalides. The hive of activity on the Left Bank of the Seine was witnessed in the months preceding the event by throngs of curious sightseers; every day as many as 5,000 people paid a franc each to watch the exotic structures—an American log cabin, a Chinese teahouse, an Inca palace, an English lighthouse—rise alongside Kranz's iron-and-glass cathedral.

The fine arts were to play an important part in this grand spectacle. A retrospective of the arts since 1855, the International Exhibition of Fine Arts, would go on display in the Palais du Champ-de-Mars, showcasing modern masterpieces. To this end, French artists hoping to exhibit were invited to submit lists of their proposed works by December 15, 1866, while a Selection Committee was formed to choose among them. The Comte de Nieuwerkerke, as always, reserved the right to appoint a proportion of the jury himself, but provision was made for the artists themselves to elect sixteen of their peers. In the end, 147 artists gathered in the Louvre in the middle of November to cast their votes, which served as a sort of referendum on the Jury of Assassins. In the end, most of the names emerging from the ballot boxes had a familiar ring to them, though five members of the painting jury for the 1866 Salon were not elected.