The Judgment of Paris (73 page)

6
This expanse of snow, coupled with a grim-looking Napoléon, led a number of earlier commentators to call the painting "The Retreat from Russia," identifying the painting, mistakenly, with the French retreat from Moscow. See, for example, Vollard,
Recollections of a Picture Dealer,
p. 161, and Mollett,
Meissonier,
p. 6.

7
Quoted in Vollard,
Recollections of a Picture Dealer,
p. 161.

8
Quoted in ibid.

9
These details come from an account by the writer Edmond Duranty, who was—it should be noted—both writing long after the fact and relying on hearsay: see
Le Pays des artistes
(Paris, 1881), p. 141. Duranty ascribes these efforts to the painting of
Friedland,
but given that there is no snow in this latter work, the most likely candidate is obviously
The Campaign of France.

10
Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," p. 832.

11
Philippe Burty, "Meissonier,"
Croquis d'après nature
(Paris, 1892), p. 18.

12
This account, that of Meissonier's son Charles, is given in Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," p. 834.

13
Ibid.

14
Ibid.

15
For the "extreme artificiality" of the conditions under which Géricault painted, see Lorenz Eitner,
Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa"
(London: Phaidon, 1973), pp. 32-3.

16
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 105. For Meissonier's work as a landscapist, see Dominique Brach-lianoff," Heureux les paysagistes!" in
Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective,
pp. 148—9.

17
On
plein-air
landscape in France, see the discussion in Lorenz Eitner,
An Outline of 19th-century European Painting: From David through Cézanne
(New York: Harper &Row, 1987), pp. 212—13; Anna Ottani Cavina et al.,
Paysages d'ltalie: Les peintres du plein air (1J80-1830)
(Milan: Electa, 2001); and the exhibition catalogue
Impressions of Light: The French Landscape from Corot to Manet,
ed. George T. M. Shackleford and Fronia Wissman (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2002).

18
For the way in which such inventions made
plein-air
painting possible, see James Ayres,
The Artist's Craft: A History of Tools, Techniques and Materials
(London: Guild Publishing, 1985), pp. no—11. Ayres writes that metal tubes were not patented before 1841, when an American named John Goffe Rand received a patent in London for collapsible metal mbes for oil paints. However, such mbes were in use before then, since in 1824 an Englishman was awarded a prize of twenty-four guineas from the Royal Society of Arts in London for inventing tin tubes for the preservation of colors.

19
Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," p. 834.

20
Gréard,
Meissonier,
pp. 13 and 15.

21
Ernest and Jules de Goncourt,
Pages from the Goncourt Journal,
ed. and trans. Robert Baldick (London: The Folio Society, 1980), p. 101. Where possible I quote from this work rather than the three-volume French edition published by Robert Laffont.

22
On Nieuwerkerke's life and career, see Suzanne Gaynor, "Count de Nieuwerkerke: A Prominent Official of the Second Empire and His Collection,"
Apollo
122 (1985), pp. 372—9; Fernande Goldschmidt,
Nieuwerkerke, le bel Émilien: Prestigieux directeur du Louvre sous Napoléon III
(Paris: Art International Publishers, 1997); and Goldschmidt et al.,
Le Comte de Nieuwerkerke: Art et pouvoir sous Napoléon III
(Paris: Réunion des Musees nationaux, 2000), the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Musée national du Château de Compiegne. Regarding Nieuwerkerke's links to the House of Bourbon, his mother seems to have been the illegitimate granddaughter of Louis-Philippe I de Bourbon, Due d'Orleans (1725—1785), who was the father of Philippe Egalite and the grandfather of King Louis-Philippe. Nieuwerkerke's father, who once served as King Charles X's Gentleman of the Bedchamber, was a descendant of William the Silent, the sixteenth-century founder of Dutch independence.

23
This statement, possibly apocryphal, is quoted in Patricia Mainardi,
Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 184.

24
For Nieuwerkerke's 1863
règlement
and the artists' response to it, see Albert Boime, "An Unpublished Petition Exemplifying the Oneness of the Community of Nineteenth-Century French Artists,"
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
33 (1970), pp. 345—53.

25
Quoted in Boime, "An Unpublished Petition," p. 353.

26
Quoted in ibid.

27
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 62.

Chapter Four: Mademoiselle V.

1
According to Henri Perruchot, Manet had painted eighteen canvases in 1862 alone. See
Manet,
trans. Humphrey Hare (London: Perpema, 1962), p. 102.

2
Manet later painted out the satyr and renamed the work
The Surprised Nymph.
For the evidence for this change, see Beatrice Farwell, "Manet's
Nymphe Surprise," Burlington Magazine
97 (April 1975), pp. 224-9.

3
Albert Boime,
Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision,
p. 465.

4
Much light has been shed on the formerly shadowy Victorine. See Margaret Siebert, "A Biography of Victorine-Louise Meurent and Her Role in the Art of Édouard Manet," Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1986. See also Eunice Lipton's entertaining account of her scholarly sleuthing,
Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model and her Own Desire
(New York: Penguin, 1992).

5
Jacques Lethève,
Daily Life of French Artists in the Nineteenth Century,
trans. Hilary E. Paddon (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), p. 77.

6
Susan Waller, "Professional Poseurs: The Male Model in the École des Beaux-Arts and the Popular Imagination,"
Oxford Art Journal
25 (2002), p. 56.

7
Waller, "Professional Poseurs," p. 56.

8
Ibid., pp. 41 and 56. Female models would be admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts at the end of 1863.

9
Quoted in ibid., p. 59.

10
Quoted in Pierre Courthion and Pierre Cailler, eds.,
Portrait of Manet by Himself and His Contemporaries,
trans. Michael Ross (London: Cassell, 1960), p. 10.

11
Ibid., p. 54.

12
Juliet Wilson-Bareau, "Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe," in Juliet Wilson-Bareau, ed.,
The Hidden Face of Manet: An Investigation of the Artist's Working Processes
(London: Burlington Magazine, 1986), p. 37.

13
Eugène Manet is sometimes identified as the brother who posed for the work. For this debate, see Paul Hayes Tucker, "Making Sense of Édouard Manet's 'Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe,' " in Paul Hayes Tucker, ed.,
Manet's "Le Déjeuner sur I'Herbe"
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 35, note 37.

14
For the copies of Raphael's work in the École des Beaux-Arts, see Paul Duro, " 'Un Livre Ouvert a 1'Instruction': Study Museums in Paris in the Nineteenth Century,"
Oxford Art Journal
10 (1987), p. 48.

15
Quoted in Gary Tinterow, "Raphael Replaced: The Triumph of Spanish Painting in France," in Gary Tinterow et al., eds.,
Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 14.

Chapter Five: Dreams of Genius

1
Quoted in Gotlieb,
The Plight of Emulation,
p. 21. For the prestige of fresco in nineteenth-century France, see ibid., pp. 19-21.

2
Henri Delaborde,
Ingres: Sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine
(Paris, 1870), p. 373.

3
Quoted in Gotlieb,
The Plight of Emulation,
p. 21.

4
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 162.

5
Ibid., pp. 103-4.

6
Ibid., p. 238. For a good discussion of
Remembrance of Civil War,
see Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier,
pp. 52—63. See also the comments of Robert Rosenblum and H. W. Janson,
Art of the Nineteenth Century: Painting and Sculpture
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), p. 219. Their passage is worth quoting: "Even the precedent of Goya's
Disasters of War
or Daumier's
Rue Transnonain
offers inadequate preparation for the close-up scrutiny of the facts of modern military death that Meissonier insists on here. . . . The ignoble truths of violated flesh and blood, of grotesque foreshortenings, and ripped clothing are presented with the chilling veracity of a modern news photo that might document anything from the corpses of the Crimean War to those of a Nazi concentration camp" (p. 219). Rosenblum and Janson, together with Hungerford, provide a welcome correction to the view expressed by T. J. Clark that Meissonier's "deliberate deadpan in the face of horror" implied "a sober warning to the rebels of the future": see his discussion in
The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848—1851
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), pp. 24-9, which is based on a nonlinear reading of Meissonier's politics that unfairly presses him into service as a conservative straw man. For a good discussion of the June Days, which points out that the battle was not a simplistic or straightforward one between workers and their masters, see Théodore Zeldin,
Politics and Anger: France 1848—1945
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 125—6, as well as the classic study by Rémi Gossez,
Les Ouvriers de Paris: L'Organisation, 1848—1851
(Paris: Société d'histoire de la revolution de 1848, 1968).

7
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 238.

8
The Journal of Eugène Delacroix,
p. 689.

9
On this matter, see
Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective,
p. 34. See also the excellent discussion of Meissonier's election in Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier,
pp. 92-4.

10
The Journal of Eugène Delacroix,
p. 689. For celebrations of Meissonier's victory over the" old Académie," see
Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective,
p. 34, and Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier,
p. 94.

11
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 297.

12
Quoted in Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier,
p. 92.

13
Ingres's decision to sign the petition may have been motivated in part by his vendetta against Nieuwerkerke. In the early 1860s Ingres had criticized Nieuwerkerke's conservation of a number of paintings in the Louvre, including ones by Raphael, denouncing the Directeur an "assassin." Nieuwerkerke responded with the unworthy gesture of removing some of Ingres's paintings from their prominent positions in the Luxembourg Gallery. On these matters, see the discussion in Mainardi,
Art and Politics of the Second Empire,
pp. 123—4.

14
Quoted in John Rewald,
The History of Impressionism
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961),p.79.

15
Quoted in Boime, "An Unpublished Petition," p. 347.

16
On this boycott, see Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier,
p. 50.

Chapter Six: Youthful Daring

1
Juliet Wilson-Bareau maintains that the show at Martinet's gallery, which opened a month before the deadline for Salon paintings, was "part of Manet's strategy to gain support for his Salon pictures":
Manet by Himself
(London: Macdonald Illustrated, 1991), p. 16. For a similar argument, see George Heard Hamilton,
Manet and His Critics
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 38.

2
Théodore Zeldin reports that in 1861 there were 104 picture dealers in Paris:
Taste and Corruption: France 1848—1945
(Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 116.

3
Gérôme received 20,000 francs in 1852 for his
Age of Augustus,
first shown in 1855; and he was paid another 20,000 francs for his
Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors,
painted between 1861 and 1863. For his relationship with Adolphe Goupil—whose daughter he married in 1863—see
Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Enterprise,
trans. Isabel Ollivier (New York: Dahesh Museum of Art, 2000).

4
For a discussion of Manet's experimentation with technique, see Anthea Callen,
Techniques of the Impressionists
(London: Tiger Books International, 1993), especially pp. 10-45.