At issue for all of the petitioners, however, was the right of artists to exhibit their works to the public. And Meissonier ardently believed in this right—or, at any rate, he believed in his right to exhibit his own work in the Palais des Champs-Élysées in whatever quantities he desired. He had shown five paintings in 1861, while the Salons of 1855 and 1857 had each featured nine of his works. Under Nieuwerkerke's new
règlement,
he would be allowed to show only three of his works every two years. For an artist possessing Meissonier's large and enthusiastic following, this new regulation would make for a disappointingly slender offering to his public. He therefore dedicated the full weight and authority of his name to overturning Nieuwerkerke's new rule. Given the prominent position of his signature, he may well have assisted with the argument and wording of the letter itself.
Whatever his involvement in the composition of the appeal to the Comte de Walewski, Meissonier soon took a much more drastic step than simply signing the petition. He let it be known that should Nieuwerkerke's new reform not be struck down, he would personally lead a boycott of the 1863 Salon.
A
MONG THE 182 artists who signed the petition to the Minister of State was Édouard Manet. His name appeared three quarters of the way down the first page, the eighteenth signature on the list. It was included together with those of several friends, including a shy and diminutive painter called Henri Fantin-Latour, a Belgian named Alfred Stevens, and Félix Bracquemond, an engraver. Like many of the others on the petition, Manet's name was not one that the Comte de Nieuwerkerke would necessarily have recognized, beyond, perhaps, his vague awareness that Manet's style of painting—at least, in a work of Realism such as
The Absinthe Drinker
—veered dangerously toward the kind of art that the Directeur-Général was hoping to exclude from future Salons.
Unlike Ernest Meissonier, Manet had no plans to boycott the 1863 Salon should the petition fail. Still at the beginning of his career, he could ill afford to pass on the opportunity to show the best of his work to the public. Therefore, at the same time that he added his signature to the list he was preparing for submission to the jury, whose deadline was the first of April, the three paintings allowed to him by the new regulations. He had completed more than twenty works since the previous Salon in 1861 but seems to have known exactly which three pieces he would send to the jury.
1
Two of them would be Spanish-themed canvases along the lines of his previous success,
The Spanish Singer.
The third would be
Le Bain,
the nude scene inspired by his trip to Asnières with Antonin Proust.
Manet had decided that his new canvas should be a tableau of young people bathing and picnicking beside the water. He would feature two men dressed in modern costumes as well as a young woman—his nude figure—reposing on the ground. On the few occasions when he required a nude model, Manet had turned to his mistress, Suzanne Leenhoff. In about 1860 she had posed for a work called
Nymph and Satyr,
which featured her sitting beside a woodland stream, her hair unfastened and her clothing discarded beside her.
2
For
Le Bain
(plate 5B), however, Manet decided to use a different model, a nineteen-year-old redhead named Victorine Meurent. The daughter of an engraver, Victorine came from a working-class district in the east end of Paris, where she was baptized, in February 1844, in the church of Saint-Elisabeth. By 1863 she was living in an apartment in the Latin Quarter, near the Sorbonne, some two miles from Manet's studio in the Batignolles. Manet probably met her through his former teacher, since she had begun modeling in Couture's studio in 1861 for a wage of twenty-five francs per month.
3
She would have been what was known as a
modèle-occasionnel,
someone who posed for whomever she could, either on short contracts or for a few francs a sitting, at the same time that she supplemented this slender income with other low-paid work.
4
Little seemed to distinguish Victorine, her looks included, from the scores of other young women who hovered on the margins of Parisian artistic life. Nicknamed
La Crevette
("The Shrimp") because of her short stature, she was nothing like the exotically beautiful women favored by members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Her face was round and expressionless, her eyes hooded, her nose blunt above a small mouth, her limbs short, her trunk fleshy. Manet nonetheless seems to have been captivated by her appearance, or at least by the visual possibilities of dressing her in exotic costumes and placing her in beguiling poses. He first used her, in the spring or summer of 1862, for a painting called
The Street Singer,
in which, holding a guitar and a bunch of cherries, she fixes the viewer with her gaze as—in a gesture both challenging and suggestive—she raises two cherries to her lips. Next he hired her for
Young Woman Reclining in a Spanish Costume,
a work of mild eroticism that saw her stretched out on an upholstered divan in a black bolero. Finally, she had posed as a female matador for a third canvas, a strange bullfight scene called
Mile V . . . in the Costume of an Espada
that Manet was planning to send to the 1863 Salon.
These paintings had all seen Victorine fixing the viewer with an arrestingly direct gaze and—in the latter two at least—cross-dressing in a manner evoking the morally dubious world of gaslit boulevards and women of easy virtue that an 1855 play by Alexandre Dumas
fls
had christened
le demi-monde.
If, however, these three paintings seemed risque,
Le Bain,
in which Victorine posed for Manet for the first time in the nude, would be all the more so.
For a period of at least several weeks during the autumn of 1862, Victorine had regularly found herself making the two-mile journey to Manet's studio, possibly traveling on one of the horse-drawn omnibuses, nicknamed
Batignol-laises,
that linked the Batignolles with the center of Paris. Many of these omnibuses were driven, oddly enough, by male models who had retired from the business, which meant that Parisians of Manet's day were transported around the city by men who had once posed as valiant biblical heroes or the vindictive deities of classical mythology.
5
Models lived a hard life in Paris. During the eighteenth century, posing for artists had been, at least for male models, a quite respectable occupation. Those who worked for members of the prestigious Académie Royale de la Peinture et de la Sculpture had worn royal livery, carried swords, lived in the Louvre and, when they retired, received generous pensions.
6
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, models enjoyed a much less exalted status. Even the most successful earned well under 1,000 francs per year, or only a half to a third of the average factory worker's annual salary. Their earnings were little better than those of Paris's lowest-paid workers, such as ragpickers, cobblers, washerwomen and milliners.
Female models were paid even less than men. Couture, for instance, offered his male models nineteen francs per week,
7
compared to the twenty-five that Victorine, when she posed for his students, received per month. Moral squeamishness about women removing their clothes meant they were barred from posing at the École des Beaux-Arts, where wages for models were higher than in private studios.
8
Indeed, such shame and ill repute attached itself to the profession of
modèle-femme
that many women were reluctant to admit their vocation. "She follows it on the sly," one writer claimed of the typical female model. "She does laundry, she embroiders, she works in a boutique, but she is never a model!"
9
Female bodies may have been celebrated in paintings as incarnations of ideal beauty, but their flesh-and-blood prototypes, at two francs per sitting, were treated with considerably less esteem.
The behavior of models was a common source of worry and complaint for artists. "When I start something," Manet once told a friend, "I always tremble to think that models will let me down, or that I won't see them as often as I would like, or that the next time will be under conditions I don't like."
10
However, he seems to have had no trouble with Victorine, who proved herself exemplary—patient, obedient, uncomplaining and not given to idle chitchat.
11
Arriving at the studio, she would have been carefully positioned into the prescribed stance—that of a young woman reclining on the grass after having taken her bath in the river. Seated on the floor with her right leg retracted and her right elbow bent and supported by one knee, she would cup her chin with her right hand and turn her head to the right to gaze at Manet as he stood behind his easel. This pose was not especially uncomfortable in an age when many artists were obliged to suspend from the ceilings of their workshops systems of rings and pulleys for the models to use in maintaining their balance or supporting their limbs as they struck the required heroic postures. Even so, she would have held the position for long periods at a stretch, suffering the strains—and the tedium—that were the occupational hazards of the model.
Though
Le Bain
was an outdoor scene, Victorine was not obliged to pose anywhere other than in Manet's studio. Manet was not given to erecting his easel on riverbanks or mountains, like Meissonier, and painting
enplein air.
His works were the products, on the contrary, of visits to museums and print shops rather than of any kind of face-to-face communion with nature: the external world was always mediated, for Manet, by other works of art. Moreover, unlike Meissonier, he did not concern himself with realistically transcribing nature or ensuring that the flesh tones of his subjects correctly matched their outdoor setting. He may have made a few preliminary on-the-spot sketches of trees on the îie Saint-Ouen, the location on the Seine, near Asnières, sometimes identified as the setting for
Le Bain.
However, the stream and saplings of his river-scape were inspired more by another work of art—
Titian's Jupiter and Antiope,
which he had copied in the Louvre—than by any actual foliage in Asnières or Saint-Ouen.
12
Manet used two further models for
Le Bain.
The pose for one of the young men seated beside Victorine was struck by his brother Gustave, while that for the other by Suzanne Leenhoff's twenty-one-year-old brother Ferdinand, an aspiring sculptor and engraver who had followed his sister to Paris in order to study art.
13
In the background, Manet included a fourth figure, a young woman in a white negligee wading in the shallows of the river, a much less detailed figure for whom Victorine may also have posed.
Manet's earlier bathing scene,
Nymph and Satyr,
had featured Suzanne Leen-hoff preserving her modesty through the strategic disposition of her limbs while turning her gaze unflinchingly to the viewer. The picture resembled works known to Manet from his studies in the Louvre and elsewhere, especially
Susannah and the Elders
by Rubens, an engraving of which was in the Louvre's Print Room. For
Nymph and Satyr
he transcribed the pose of Rubens's Susannah virtually line for line, albeit reversing the image, a trick frequently used by artists to disguise their borrowings.
This entire formula—a woodland stream, a seated nude, a bold gaze, an echo of an Old Master painting—was rehearsed again as Manet painted
Le Bain.
He did not select the positions of his models at random. The pose of Gustave, placed to Victorine's right, was particularly interesting. Manet instructed him to recline as if on a sloping patch of ground, bending his right leg slightly, supporting the weight of his body on his left elbow, and extending his right arm toward Victorine. This posture was an exact copy—albeit in reverse—of one of the most famous images in the history of art: that of Adam in Michelangelo's
Creation of Adam
on the vault of the Sistine Chapel. Though Manet was familiar with this fresco from his visit to Rome, Gustave's recumbent pose in
Le Bain
was not actually borrowed directly from Michelangelo, but rather from Michelangelo's young admirer and rival, Raphael, who had reversed the famous image and placed it in one of his own works,
The Judgment of Paris.
Dating from about 1518,
The Judgment of Paris
was a drawing specially executed by Raphael for engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi—an engraving that Manet knew from his foraging in the Print Room of the Louvre. Besides the central scene showing Paris choosing which of the three goddesses, Juno, Minerva or Venus, was the most beautiful,
*
the engraving included a small vignette of three nude figures—two bearded river gods and a water nymph—seated on the reedy ground beside a stream. For the pose of one of these river gods, Raphael carefully reversed the image of Michelangelo's Adam.