The Judgment of Paris (45 page)

The people of Antibes could have been forgiven their surprise, therefore, when the most famous painter in France suddenly appeared in their midst. Ernest Meissonier arrived in Antibes, complete with canvas and easel, in June 1868. He took with him his wife, son and daughter, as well as two of his horses, Bachelier and Lady Coningham. Meissonier may have been drawn to the region for its historical associations. After the fall of Robespierre in 1794, Napoléon had been imprisoned in Fort Carré, and on his return from exile on Elba in 1815 he had come ashore a few miles away at Golfe-Jouan. A little out to sea, meanwhile, loomed the island of Sainte-Marguerite, in whose citadel the Man in the Iron Mask was imprisoned between 1686 and 1698. As he stared out to sea, Meissonier was also reminded of Homer. "Looking at that shining sea," he wrote, "as beautiful and as inimitable in color as the sky itself, one dreams one sees the ships of Ulysses floating on it."
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In the end, though, landscape and light, rather than history, were what captivated Meissonier in Antibes. "It is delightful to sun oneself in the brilliant light of the South," he wrote, "instead of wandering about like gnomes in the fog. The view at Antibes is one of the fairest sights in nature."
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He seems to have come to the Midi mainly to indulge his passion for landscapes, devoting himself to watercolors and oils of scenes such as Fort Carré perched on its promontory overlooking the water. Never in his life had he been so prolific with his brush. The man who had been laboring for five years on
Friedland
suddenly churned out, in the space of a few weeks, canvas after canvas, most of them painted
en plein air
and beautifully refulgent with Mediterranean light. "It is a delight to work in the open air," he wrote following his stay, "and the peaceful landscape painters are a happy race. They do not suffer from nerves like the rest of us."
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Meissonier wandered about the village and along the coast with his easel, raising it at various points to capture the locals playing
boules
or the view along the Route de la Salice. These outdoor scenes, spontaneously executed and awash in light and color, come as a surprise from a man known to the public only as a laboriously accurate painter of military scenes and quaint
bonshommes.
Although Meissonier had already painted numerous landscapes in and around Poissy, his new passion for
plein air
probably had something to do with his response to the recent work of painters such as Monet and Pissarro.
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For a painter struggling with
Friedland,
in which almost every brushstroke was infinitely rehearsed, the brisk and impulsive approaches of
plein-air
landscapists seem to have prompted Meissonier to abandon his traditional obsession with historical authenticity in favor of creating eye-catching visual effects by means of a few salient touches of the brush. If these Antibes landscapes never matched the casual brushstrokes and colorful dissolutions of natural form found in the work of Pissarro, they nonetheless revealed Meissonier as a painter of remarkable versatility whose ambitions were not entirely at odds with those of the École des Batignolles. In danger of attack from writers like Zola and Astruc, Meissonier may have used his Antibes sojourn to revamp his style in order to meet the challenges of the "new movement" in painting.
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With his great wealth and awesome self-regard, Meissonier was hardly a man of the people. Still, several of the Antibes paintings suggest that he was happy to mix with the locals. "We should take an interest in the poor people," he once wrote, "we should talk about their affairs with them. We should love them, and be beloved by them."
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In keeping with this philosophy, Meissonier often performed small acts of charity to relieve the miseries of the poor. One day in Poissy, for example, he came across an old blacksmith whose goods had been seized and were to be sold to cover his debts. He promptly bought all of the tools, reinstated the blacksmith in his business, and paid his rent for a year.
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He also performed a similar sort of charity at Antibes. One of his paintings,
Mère Lucrèce,
featured an old peasant woman sitting on her doorstep with a grandchild perched on her knee. Since Madame Lucrèce lived in great poverty, Meissonier arranged to pay her a pension for the rest of her life.
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This pension may have amounted to a paltry sum for a man no doubt aware of how he could easily sell
Mère Lucrèce
for as much as 20,000 francs; but the episode shows that Meissonier, for some a monster of ambition and pride, possessed a softer side. Meissonier returned to Poissy with more than a dozen paintings in hand. Fresh from executing these
plein-air
landscapes, he turned once again to the formidable labors of
Friedland.
He was still dissatisfied with his representation of horses in the work. The models sculpted in beeswax, the cavalry charges organized by Colonel Dupressoir, the endless studies that left his own horses on the verge of collapse—none of these measures had allowed him to portray equine movement in quite the way he desired. He therefore decided to take even more drastic measures: he began building a railway track in the grounds of the Grande Maison.

While Meissonier traveled south in the summer of 1868, Édouard Manet, like so many other Parisians, headed north for his vacation, returning with his family to Boulogne-sur-Mer. Having taken his sketchbook with him, as well as his palette and easel, he wandered about the town in search of likely subjects, executing rapid pencil (and sometimes watercolor) studies of steamboats, lighthouses, donkeys, women under parasols, men lounging on jetties and bathing machines lumbering out of the waves.
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These sketches then became oil canvases such
as Jetty at Boulogne
and
Beach at Boulogne,
seascapes with boats in murky silhouette against horizontal bands of pale blue and gunmetal gray strikingly different from what Meissonier had depicted in Antibes.

Besides his
plein-air
seascapes, Manet also painted an interior scene on a five-foot-wide canvas. Called
The Luncheon,
it was posed in the dining room of their rented house, that of a retired sailor, and featured a portrait of Léon Koella standing in the foreground. Wearing a straw boater, a dark blazer and the same vacant expression familiar from so many of Manet's portraits, the young man stands before a table littered with the remains of a meal of oysters. Seated at the table behind him, smoking a cigar and enjoying both a coffee and an amber-colored
digestif,
is the painter Auguste Rousselin, a regular visitor to Boulogne and one of Manet's friends from their days together in the studio of Thomas Couture. In the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, looking very out of place in this domestic scene, is a medieval helmet and a pair of swords.

Manet may have been inspired to paint these bits of armor in part by the example of a friend, Antoine Vollon, who had just scored a success at the 1868 Salon with
Curiositis,
a still life of helmets and swords that had been commissioned by Nieuwerkerke. Yet Manet's painting was quite different from Vollon's crisp delineation of Nieuwerkerke's pieces of armor. In many respects it was, like
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
and
Olympia,
a defiant reworking of artistic tradition. Helmets such as the one depicted in the corner of his canvas were a staple of nineteenth-century French art. Many masterpieces of French Neoclassicism, such as those by David and Ingres, featured heroic male figures nude but for their helmets and the occasional strategic fold of toga. Through the first half of the nineteenth century the numerous students and imitators of David and Ingres proceeded to paint so many helmet-clad heroes from ancient Greece and Rome that a new term,
pompier,
was born to describe them.
Pompier
literally meant "fireman"—derived from
pomper,
"to pump"—and the term made reference, supposedly, to how the antique helmets of these Neoclassical heroes resembled the headgear worn by the French fireman of the period.
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The term quickly became a derogatory one and, by dint of its similarity to the word
pompeux
("pompous"), soon connoted the pretentious and the overblown. Nonetheless, in 1868 the
pompier
spirit was still alive and well at the École des Beaux-Arts, where the most recent topic for the Prix de Rome had been
The Death of Astyanax.
However, the style was one with which Manet, who favored top hats over plumed helmets, had scant sympathy.

The Luncheon
(Édouard Manet)

Manet placed the helmet and swords on the retired sailor's armchair, where they form a kind of historical and sartorial counterpoint to Léon's straw boater and Auguste Rousselin's pearl-gray top hat. Also on the chair, directly in front of the helmet, Manet painted a black cat—a sly allusion to the most famous and controversial black cat in the history of art. Rather than arching its back as in
Olympia,
though, the cat in
The Luncheon
turns its back on the heroic-looking helmet and goes about the business of industriously licking its privates. It is a whimsical touch in a painting otherwise filled with suggestions of boredom and claustrophobia. Manet also took a poke at the conventions of
pompier
art. Just as the plumed helmet and shield from the engraving of Raphael's
Judgment of Paris
became, in
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe,
a wickerwork picnic basket and a jumble of discarded clothing, so in
The Luncheon
the signatures of masculine bravery celebrated in
pompier
art became cast-off props in a provincial dining room, sharing the same dignity and distinction—no more, no less—as the potted plants, corked bottles and coffee urn.

Manet completed several other oil paintings during his two-month stay in Boulogne. One of them, entitled
Moonlight, Boulogne
—a view of the harbor with the blackened silhouettes of masts and rigging visible under a full moon—he considered one of his finest works. He also painted the Folkestone steam packet that ferried passengers back and forth across the English Channel. The Folkestone boat, which he had painted in 1864, seems to have had a certain attraction for Manet; and in the last week of July, before returning to Paris, he became a passenger on it. He had decided to make his first trip to London.

Victorian London was the largest city on earth. The journalist Henry Mayhew, ascending over it in a hot-air balloon, had been unable to tell where the "monster city" began or ended. The American Henry James, writing home to his sister in Boston, claimed he felt "crushed under a sense of the sheer magnitude of London—its inconceivable immensity."
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Its population, at more than three million, was almost double that of Paris. Over the previous few decades hundreds of thousands of immigrants had arrived, many of them refugees from all across Europe and beyond. The city was "a reservoir," claimed the journalist George Augustus Sala, "a giant vat, into which flow countless streams of Continental immigration."
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More Irish lived in London than in Dublin and more Catholics than in Rome.
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There were exiled Polish nationalists, Italian followers of Garibaldi, Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia, as well as German radical philosophers, such as Karl Marx, escaping the attentions of the Prussian authorities. Also among these multitudes were as many as 20,000 Frenchmen, many of them in the area around Leicester Square.
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Édouard Manet traveled to London to visit one of them in particular: his old friend, the painter and engraver Alphonse Legros.

Having left his family in Boulogne, Manet arrived in London following a two-hour journey from Folkestone on board the South-Eastern Railway only to find the city in the midst of a heat wave of unprecedented intensity and duration. Throughout the month of July the mercury had rarely dipped below the mid-8os Fahrenheit, and on July 21 a temperature of 101 degrees was recorded.
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The country endured deaths from sunstroke, fires on the moorlands, dried-up springs, parched meadows and, on everyone's part, extreme physical enervation. "We are not used to being roasted, melted, exhaled," wrote the editor of
The Illustrated London News
at the beginning of August, "and most of us find a dash of unpleasantness in the process."
¹⁸
The newspapers urged men to keep cool by drinking their tea cold and by wearing wet cabbage leaves inside their top hats.
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Women meanwhile adopted French fashions: straw hats topped off dresses made of light materials such as muslin and "gauze de Chambéry," all in pale fawns and grays rather than the dark colors more familiar in London's streets and parks.
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