First Impressionists

DID you know that Napoleon III suffered from such acute hemorrhoids that towels had to be stuffed into his breeches when he rode his horse at the Battle of Sedan? That the plein-air painting style dear to many Impressionists was made possible by substituting metal tubes for the unwieldy cows’ bladders that had traditionally contained artists’ pigments? That the economic boom enjoyed by France in the mid-1870s is in part traceable to Pasteur’s discovery that bringing wine to a boiling point (or “pasteurizing” it) made it exportable? There are numerous equally colorful details in Ross King’s riveting study of the sociopolitical background of Impressionism, which the author calls “the greatest aesthetic revolution since the Italian Renaissance.”

The years documented in “The Judgment of Paris” are the 1860s and 1870s, the decades in which such masters as Degas, Monet, Renoir and Manet began their heroic struggle for recognition. Given the entrenched power of “official” taste in Second Empire France, which favored the depiction of lofty historical or classical themes in a slickly finished academic style, seldom has an aesthetic movement caused such controversy and incited more vitriolic attacks.

King, the author of “Brunelleschi’s Dome” and “Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling,” epitomizes this conflict between tradition and innovation by focusing on two enormously dissimilar 19th century artists, the academic stalwart Ernest Meissonier and the revolutionary upstart Edouard Manet. One might well see them as the Salieri and Mozart of 19th century French art. It is mind-boggling to read that in 1860, Meissonier, a haughty, irascible, luxury-loving little man “dripping with medals and bristling with ribbons,” was the wealthiest artist in Europe and, along with Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and William Bouguereau, among its most famous. The painter of small, meticulous canvases that capitalized on the general cult of the past and, above all, of Napoleon I, Meissonier was particularly famed for his battle scenes, especially those of Solferino and Friedland. So beloved was his work, in fact, that Napoleon III could think of no better way of flattering his ally in the Crimean War, Queen Victoria, than to offer her a picture of the artist’s for which he had paid 25,000 francs -- a higher price than any of Meissonier’s contemporaries had ever fetched.

On the opposite side of the aesthetic barricades stood Manet, handsome, kind and as convivial a fellow as Meissonier was surly and aloof. The son of a wealthy Parisian magistrate, originally destined by his father for the law, Manet spent considerable time at the Louvre and the Uffizi copying classics of the Western tradition, particularly Velazquez, who would have a pivotal influence on his work. He started submitting pictures in 1859 to the Salon: Since 1673, this government-sponsored, juried institution, held every year or two in May, had offered painters their best venue for recognition and sales. It had also provided Parisians with a cherished ritual (the Salons could attract close to a million visitors during their six-week runs). But for the next decade, those of Manet’s works displayed at the Salons would be relentlessly criticized for surrendering traditional chiaroscuro effects in favor of abrupt tonal contrasts and irreverent use of undignified subjects.

Manet began to be a scourge of bourgeois respectability in 1863 when he showed his vast canvas “Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe” (initially named “Le Bain”), which shows a naked woman enjoying a riverside picnic with two fully clothed men, at what would be called the “Salon des Refuses.” This alternative venue was founded, ironically, by Napoleon III himself to pacify thousands of artists enraged by the rejections they suffered from conservative Salon jurors. When Manet’s “Olympia,” the depiction of a coquettishly reclining woman (obviously a fairly classy prostitute) was shown at the official 1865 Salon, public indignation grew so inflamed that guards had to be deployed to protect the painting. By this time, Manet was being referred to by one French critic as “the apostle of ugliness,” and Great Britain’s most famous painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, called him “a French idiot” whose pictures were “for the most part merely scrawls.”

King uses, as his narrative spine, the succession of salons that were confronted by a bold young group of painters who called themselves Impressionists. The term had been coined (at first derisively, by hostile critics) when Claude Monet, Manet’s closest friend, exhibited a painting titled “Impression: Sunrise.” Manet, though not technically an Impressionist, was the movement’s icon and inspiration, and King devotes a chapter to each Salon through the prism of that artist’s struggling career, describing the always-contentious nature of each jury’s composition and the lists of painters who were refused, accepted and honored (in many cases Meissonier).

Such material could have been tedious in less nimble literary hands. But so thorough is King’s grasp of the Second Empire’s cultural politics, so ironic his wit and choice of detail, that his text remains a page-turner throughout. Conveying the pivotal importance of Salons, and the humiliation suffered by the artists whose works were spurned, he describes how two 19th century painters, the esteemed Baron Gros and the more obscure Jules Holtzapffel, committed suicide upon hearing that their works had been turned down. And he vividly depicts the appalling slipshod nature of the Salon jurors’ process: Faced with 5,000 submissions but only 10 days to make their selections, working six-hour days, they judged 80 works an hour, giving less than a minute of their “weary and dazed” scrutiny to each work.

Despite such adverse circumstances, Manet persevered for many years, with prodigiously stoic tolerance to hostile reviews, to win acceptance to the yearly Salons. “Every year there’s a Manet problem,” one juror quipped during those decades, “the way there’s an Alsace-Lorraine problem.”

King’s book is also enriched by the presence of the colorful eminences grises who were Manet’s earliest supporters: Charles Baudelaire, the first great apostle of modernity, whose pivotal essay “The Painter of Modern Life” urged painters to scorn “the dress of the past” and depict the “transitory, the fugitive, the accidental” details of everyday life; Eugene Delacroix, whose own “Liberty Leading the People” was considered so subversive that it was banned for years from public view; and above all Emile Zola, who from 1866 on unstintingly supported Manet in his weekly newspaper columns while brazenly attacking the barren creations of Meissonier, Gerome, Cabanel and other stars of the waning establishment.

King includes a telling vignette that shows Baudelaire in his last days, stumbling about the garden of a Paris clinic, constantly visited by his many painter friends but crying out “Manet! Manet!” It was that artist’s energy and irreverence, his fierce courage and determination, his miraculous imperturbability to attack, that had made him the leader of the Modernist movement, and it was only his company that the first apostle of modernity wanted in his last hours.

Readers will feel somewhat the same: Throughout King’s pages, we crave the company of Manet, rather than Meissonier’s, and we feel an almost sadistic glee upon reading of the reversal of fortune undergone by the two painters. After France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the fall of the empire, the establishment of the Third Republic and the perturbations of the 1871 Paris Commune (events that the author describes with superb photographic immediacy), a new generation of progressive art critics and dealers began to criticize Meissonier for catering to “bankers and prostitutes.” And in 1872, Manet, who had sold fewer than a dozen paintings in the previous decade, received a visit from the astute young art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who bought 25 of his canvases on the spot for more than 35,000 francs. Manet went on to have eight successive shows with Durand-Ruel, who soon spread Manet’s growing fame abroad.

The artist died the year after he had exhibited one of his most renowned pictures, “Un Bar aux Folies-Bergere,” at the Salon of 1882. Only 51, he was felled by a syphilitic infection contracted decades earlier. Shortly after his death, the exhibition of his works mounted at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts received rave reviews, and by 1907 both “Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe” and “Olympia,” the painting that art historian T.J. Clark referred to as the “founding monument of modern art,” had entered the Louvre’s collection. Picasso, who would see “Dejeuner” a few months after arriving from Spain, often commented that it had inspired him more than any other painting, and he produced some 200 versions of it. Flash forward to 2003: The exhibition “Manet/Velazquez” mounted at New York’s Metropolitan Museum drew more than half a million viewers, a record surpassed in recent years only by blockbusters devoted to the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and King Tut.

You may well ask about Ernest Meissonier. Ernest who? He lived far longer than Manet, dying in 1891 at the age of 74, but was spared the full experience of decline. By the 1940s, Lionello Venturi’s magisterial two-volume study of 19th century French painting made no mention of him. Here’s the final blow: In 1964, esteem for Meissonier had fallen so low that a bronze statue of him was removed from the Louvre upon the orders of De Gaulle’s minister of culture, Andre Malraux; it was then dumped in a tiny public square in the village near Paris where Meissonier had once lived in a grand chateau, attended by a fleet of coaches that bore his family crest. The destinies of the smug, reactionary academic hack and the heroic iconoclast that are the pith of King’s marvelous book had finally swung full circle. Sic transit gloria mundi. *