Meissonier therefore dreamed of exchanging his easel for a ladder and scaffold. He coveted one commission in particular: the decoration of the Panthéon, the church built on the site of the tomb of Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. As long before as 1848, a friend named Paul Chenavard had been given an immense commission to decorate the interior of the building with sixty-three scenes depicting the evolution of human society. This project was, according to a later commentator, "one of the most ambitious mural plans ever worked out by one man in the entire history of art."
3
Chenavard had gathered together a team of thirty assistants and created at least seventeen large cartoons; but two decades later, distracted by other astoundingly ambitious projects—including one to excavate a canal between Paris and Dieppe in order to turn the capital into a seaport—he had yet to produce more than a few brushstrokes. Meissonier therefore hoped to relieve his friend of the gargantuan task, apparently offering his services at some point in the early 1870s. "This little man," Chenavard later recalled, "burdened with so many troubles, actually wanted to replace me free of charge to finish the Panthéon. . . . Is that not marvelous?"
4
It is marvelous, yet also droll. After making his name by executing works that had won for him the title of "the painter of Lilliput," Meissonier dreamed of painting "with buckets of color on hundred-foot walls"—and of tackling one of the largest decorative projects in the history of art. Charles Yriarte could see the funny side of these vaulting ambitions: "It would indeed have been a curious sight to watch this wonderful little shortsighted man, with his blinking eyes, armed with his enormous brushes, attacking this great wall with those colossal heroes."
5
But the depiction of these colossal heroes on the walls of the Panthéon was what Meissonier believed would secure his reputation for all time.
Meissonier had returned from Italy before the end of March, in time to participate in the jury sessions for the 1870 Salon. Despite the presence of Chennevières and other conservatives, the jury actually proved rather lenient, admitting almost 3,000 canvases. Manet's
Portrait of Éva Gonzales
was accepted along with his second submission,
The Music Lesson,
in which he had posed Zacharie Astruc with a guitar in a kind of rehash of
The Spanish Singer.
Other Batignolles painters fared equally well. Renoir's two canvases passed muster with the jury, as did paintings by Pissarro and Sisley. Berthe's Morisot's
The Harbor at Lorient
and a portrait of her sister Edma were likewise accepted. As for Cézanne, he had been in a bombastic mood when a journalist encountered him carrying his canvases to the Palais des Champs-Élysées in the week before judging started. "Yes, my dear sir," Cézanne airily informed him, "I painted as I see, as I feel—and I have very strong sensations . . . I dare, sir, I dare. I have the courage of my opinions—and he who laughs last laughs best."
6
The jurors responded in their usual fashion: "I have been rejected as in the past," Cézanne, in a less buoyant frame of mind, wrote a few weeks later to a friend in Aix.
7
Also rejected, more controversially, was Claude Monet, marking the second year in a row in which he had been excluded from the Salon. "The worst thing is that I can no longer even work," a furious Monet had written a year earlier, following the jury's wholesale rejection of his work.
8
But he had in fact managed to work in the summer of 1869—and he had produced, at this low point in his life, his most dazzling canvases.
Before the 1869 Salon closed, Monet had taken Camille Doncieux and their son Jean to the hamlet of Saint-Michel, on the Seine eight miles west of Paris. There the family lived with (so Monet claimed) "no bread, no kitchen fire, no light—it's horrible."
9
He was soon joined on his
plein-air
painting excursions by Renoir, who was staying nearby with his parents at Louveciennes. Together the pair of them would visit an island in the Seine at Bougival, the îie de Croissy,
10
where a fashionable entertainment complex known as La Grenouillère ("The Frogpond") had operated for the previous two decades. Situated on the south side of the island, La Grenouillère consisted of a bathing pond and, floating on pontoons, a restaurant fashioned from an old barge. As early as 1854 a book called
Le Sport a Paris
related that La Grenouillère had become popular with "men and women belonging to the artistic life of Paris," including, the author reported, Ernest Meissonier, who helped popularize swimming, fishing and rowing in the area.
11
The restaurant was even frequented by the Emperor and Empress, who stopped for a visit during a steamboat ride along the Seine in the summer of 1869.
Monet and Renoir had positioned themselves side by side on the riverbank at this fashionable pleasure spot. They assembled their easels a few yards away from a small artificial island, some fifteen feet in diameter, that was joined by footbridges to the restaurant and shore, and that was known (after wheels of the famous Normandy cheese) as Le Camembert. Painting sketches of the scene before them—the figures grouped on the miniature island, a corner of the restaurant, the trees on the opposite bank at Bougival—they concentrated most of all on the waters of the Seine sparkling in the foreground, conjuring vivid optical effects by dissolving solid forms into dazzling patches of color.
Monet in particular excelled at the task of capturing the light shimmering on the waves. He worked on the same pale ground favored by Manet but further heighted his luminous tones by painting with vibrant pigments, some of them newly invented, which he added to his canvas in small commas and dashes. Advances in chemistry during the Industrial Revolution meant nineteenth-century painters possessed a much wider range of pigments than artists of earlier centuries. Oddly, however, many painters were reluctant to expand their chromatic horizons, largely due to the prejudice against color enforced, for example, at the École des Beaux-Arts. Rather than exploiting the properties of these radiant new pigments, artists learned to tone down their works by coating them with transparent brownish glazes made from ingredients such as bitumen. As a collector had once informed John Constable: "A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown."
12
Painters who challenged this prejudice against color—most notably Delacroix, who used as many as twenty-three pigments on a single canvas—found themselves reviled by conservative critics.
Monet was happy to avail himself of advances in paint technology. The coruscating reflections in his La Grenouillère canvases owed much to his use of pigments such as chromium oxide green and cobalt violet. The former, a yellowish green produced from a chemical reaction involving chromium salts and boric acid, was manufactured as a pigment by a Parisian color merchant only in 1862. Cobalt violet, invented in 1859 by a French chemist named Jean Salvétat, was almost as new. Monet blended it with Prussian blue to create the shimmering water in the foreground. He would eventually come to regard this particular pigment as an essential for capturing the effects of light and shade: "I have finally discovered the color of the atmosphere," he later declared. "It is violet."
13
Though he possessed as profound and instinctual a grasp of colour as anyone who ever held a brush, Monet might never have discovered the true nature of the atmosphere without the help of chemists like Salvétat.
Both Monet and Renoir began hatching plans to turn their sketches into studio paintings. "I really have a daydream," Monet had written to Bazille at the end of September, "a painting of bathing at La Grenouillère, for which I've done a few bad sketches, but it's a daydream. Renoir, who just spent two months here, also wants to do this picture."
14
Monet accordingly began turning his hasty, paint-dappled sketches of Le Camembert into a larger canvas intended for the 1870 Salon (plate 8B). He encountered problems only when he and Renoir ran short of money for pigment, food and wine. "We don't eat every day," Renoir wrote to Bazille, adding pluckily: "Yet I am happy in spite of it, because, as far as painting is concerned, Monet is good company."
15
The only other problem, he claimed, was the dead donkeys that came floating down the river.
Despite his various privations, Monet managed to complete a studio version of his La Grenouillère scene which the following March he submitted to the Palais des Champs-Élysées along with
The Luncheon,
an interior scene (reminiscent of Manet's interior of the same name) painted a year earlier at Étretat. Monet undoubtedly expected a better result than in 1869 since the new jury included Daubigny and Corot. But the votes, when they were tallied, went against both paintings. This rejection led to the immediate resignation of Daubigny, who, as in 1868, pleaded with his colleagues to take a more tolerant view of Monet's canvases. "I wouldn't allow my opinion to be contradicted," Daubigny later claimed. "You might as well say that I don't know my trade."
16
In the minds of most jurors, however, Monet had simply gone too far in his "abominable direction" (as one juror, Jules Breton, had phrased it). With their seemingly slipshod facture, his paintings looked like mere preparatory sketches, not works of art finished to the standard of Salon paintings. Monet, in their opinion, required chastisement; and with five of his last six paintings rejected from the Salon, he had become the newest
Grand Refusé.
The 1870 Salon opened, like its predecessor a year earlier, against the background of a fierce political campaign. In the third week of April the Emperor had called for a plebiscite on the following point: "The people approve the liberal reforms carried out in the Constitution by the Emperor with the assistance of senior institutions of the State." Louis-Napoléon was hoping to strengthen his hand against the political opposition by seeking ratification from the French people for the transformation of his regime into a "Liberal Empire."
In the months before the plebiscite, due to be held on May 8, several events indicated that Louis-Napoléon could expect a rough political ride. At the end of March, Prince Pierre Bonaparte had been acquitted of Victor Noir's murder, leading to outrage in many newspapers and riots in the streets of the working-class districts of Paris. A month later an assassination plot against the Emperor was uncovered as a twenty-three-year-old army deserter named Camille Beaury was arrested in the Rue des Moulins carrying a loaded pistol with which he claimed he was intending to shoot Louis-Napoléon. The plot was supposedly the work of the AIT, the French section of the International Association of Working Men, founded in London in 1864 by Karl Marx. Ollivier immediately took the convenient precaution of arresting hundreds of Socialists and closing down left-wing newspapers.
17
The Palais des Champs-Élysées must almost have seemed an oasis of calm in the midst of this turbulence. For Manet, however, the experience was as unpleasant as ever, with his paintings attracting the usual enmity and ridicule. If he expected his portrait of Éva Gonzales to be spared derision because of the sitter's father, he was disabused of the notion as soon as he opened the pages of
Le Figaro.
Its chief reviewer, Albert Wolff, the man who predicted that Manet would never accomplish anything, scorned the portrait as a "flat and abominable caricature in oils" and claimed Manet was producing "coarse images for the sole purpose of attracting attention." Coverage in
La Presse
was no better, with an article entitled "Manet's Horrors" describing the two canvases as exceeding "the most ridiculous things you could imagine," while
L'Illustration
asserted that Manet's work "provokes only laughter or pity." If Manet was hoping to please Théophile Gautier with
The Music Lesson,
a work that recalled
The Spanish Singer
—which Gautier had praised in 1861—he was sorely disappointed. Gautier wrote in
Le Journal officiel
that Manet was painting "in defiance of art, the public and the critics," adding: "None of the early promises has been fulfilled."
Once again even Castagnary, a progressive critic, could find nothing good to say. Believing the sole aim of art to be the reproduction of nature in all its "maximum power and intensity," for the past decade Castagnary (like Baudelaire) had been urging artists to offer dynamic images of modern life—both the "uncouth force" of the countryside and the "beautiful triumphs" of city life.
18
He believed that Manet's two canvases, which he saw as a pair of sterile and undistinguished portraits, revealed nothing of this energy. Castagnary could appreciate neither Manet's allusive subjects that owed as much to the galleries of the Louvre as the boulevards outside, nor the novel style that led him to experiment with, for instance, planar compositions and impasted shadows. Blind to the painter's unique vision of modern life, he simply charged Manet with failing in his mission to reflect "the society in which we live." In his particularly wounding review in
Le Siècle, he
argued that the two canvases gave "proof neither of extensive intellectual preoccupations nor of powerful faculties of observation." The only flattering words, in the end, came from Manet's antagonist on the field of honor, Edmond Duranty, who made up for his harsh words in February by heralding Manet, in the same journal, as "one of the first painters of the age."
19