The Judgment of Paris (38 page)
Manet did at least have one celebrated visitor to his pavilion. Gustave Courbet took time out from superintending his "personal Louvre" in order to inspect the work of his fellow Realist. Alas, Manet could not count on a kind word even from Courbet. "What Spaniards!" was the older painter's only comment as he stalked from the pavilion.
25
Courbet naturally entertained a higher opinion of his own efforts. "I have staggered the art world," he declared to a friend soon after his own pavilion opened, likewise at the end of May
26
This was a gross hyperbole, since Courbet was scarcely any more successful with his exhibition than Manet. Visitors stayed away in droves, the press paid him little attention, and even friends and admirers such as Monet were distinctly unimpressed by many of the 130 works on show: "God, what horrors Courbet came up with," he confided to Bazille.
27
Though celebrated works such as
A Funeral at Ornans
and
The Stone-breakers
were part of the exhibition, Courbet had crammed the walls of his pavilion with lesser works, including many of the seascapes hurriedly knocked off during his boozily gregarious interludes at Trouville and Deauville. "Ugliness and more ugliness," sniffed Edmond and Jules de Goncourt after their visit.
28
Such a tepid reception was a letdown for a man who had been hatching grandiose plans of expanding his exhibition space into a gallery 220 yards in length and earning a million francs through the sales of his paintings.
But at least Courbet was able to sell a few of his works. A wealthy collector bought two of his paintings, including
The Stonebreakers,
while the widow of the Due de Morny showed interest in another. Manet, on the other hand, failed to tempt a single buyer with any of his fifty-three canvases. Yet both of their travails were soon overshadowed by the rumors emanating from the Champ-de-Mars: a wealthy American collector named Henry Probasco, visiting from Cincinnati, Ohio, had offered to buy a French painting for the unheard-of sum of 150,000 francs. The work in question was
Friedland.
As in 1855, Ernest Meissonier had once again become the talk of the Universal Exposition.
Visitors wishing to view the International Exhibition of Fine Arts needed a good deal of patience and persistence. On display at the center of the vast exhibition hall, next to the Museum of the History of Work, this exhibition dedicated to paintings and sculptures from around the world could be seen only after one passed, among other attractions in the open air on the Champ-de-Mars, a Tunisian palace, an aquarium, two lighthouses, a prefabricated American schoolhouse, and a full-scale model of a Gothic cathedral in which religious artifacts had been placed on display. Nonetheless, more than a million people managed to thread their way through the cast-iron labyrinth to where hundreds of the most remarkable modern masterpieces were on show. The British section included paintings by Sir Edwin Landseer (who at the time was designing the enormous lions for the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square) and two cofounders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The biggest star among the British was Millais. A former child prodigy, he was known for attacking his canvases with all of the industrious preparation and finicky application to detail of a Meissonier or a Gérôme. For one of his works,
Ophelia,
painted fifteen years earlier, he had dressed his model, Lizzie Siddal, in an expensive gown, placed her in a full bath of water, and toiled so long over his canvas that she caught a chill and required medical attention. For many years Millais had suffered at the hands of the critics what he called "such abuse as was never equaled in the annals of criticism"; but by 1867, at the age of thirty-eight, he had survived this invective to become the most commercially successful painter in England, with earnings of 35,000 pounds per year. Equivalent to 175,000 francs, this huge sum made him, he boasted, "almost like Meissonier."
29
The American section in the International Exhibition of Fine Arts occupied a much smaller set of galleries between those dedicated to Mexico and Tunisia. The stellar attraction was the four paintings by Whistler, including
The White Girl.
Having survived his South American odyssey, Whistler had gone to Paris in March with a canvas from Valparaiso called
Twilight at Sea
*
and a destructively violent spirit that saw him quarrel with the American delegation over the hanging of his paintings, pummel a plasterer in the street, push his brother-in-law through the window of a café, and (in an incident that may explain the others) acrimoniously part company with Jo Hiffernan. Then, back in London in April, in an episode whose details were never properly explained—Whistler called it "the simple chastisement of a gross insult"
30
—he had thrashed his erstwhile friend Alphonse Legros so severely that the Frenchman had needed the services of a doctor. But if Whistler was becoming seriously unhinged, at least his paintings appeared to be finding favor. A French critic pronounced him "the only American worthy of attention," while, surprisingly, the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, who owned several of his etchings, made no secret of his admiration of Whistler, the only member of the Generation of 1863 for whom he had any taste.
31
The largest and, to many visitors, the most impressive section in the International Exhibition of Fine Arts was dedicated to French painting. Cabanel and Gérôme both displayed thirteen of their finest works, the former thrilling viewers with his famous
Birth of Venus
and the latter with works such as
The Prisoner
and
Dance of the Almeh.
But most of the attention, along with most of the critical laurels, went to Ernest Meissonier, whose legions of admirers swarmed into the Palais du Champ-de-Mars. One English visitor to the International Exhibition of Fine Arts claimed the picture galleries were "rendered well-nigh impassable by curious sightseers expatiating over a Meissonier."
32
Émile Zola, for one, was irritated by the contrast between the frantic squash of people in front of Meissonier's paintings and the dearth of visitors to Manet's pavilion across the river. Mocking the popularity of Meissonier in an article published in a journal called
La Situation,
he bitterly condemned "the enthusiastic crowd that pressed around as though to crush me, exclaiming to each other and enumerating in lowered voices, with a religious astonishment, the fabulous prices of these bits of canvas."
33
A total of fourteen Meissonier paintings were on view, including
The Battle of Solferino
and
The Campaign of France.
The catalogue for the International Exhibition of Fine Arts listed
Friedland
among their number, but Meissonier had not managed to finish the work. Though successfully repaired after its mishap the previous December, the canvas was still in Meissonier's Poissy studio. Meissonier seems to have been dissatisfied with his depiction of the horses; in any case, he had begun planning further studies into equine locomotion in order to make his cavalry horses as realistic as possible.
Meissonier's disappointment at not completing
Friedland
on time was offset by the rapturous reception given his fourteen other paintings. The Universal Exposition of 1867 witnessed his coronation as France's—and indeed the world's—greatest living artist. Praise for him was unanimous and almost boundlessly extravagant. Scarcely a day passed in the spring and summer of 1867 without one critic or another declaring Meissonier's unsurpassed greatness. The respected art historian Charles Blanc, founder of the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
wrote that the painter "had no equal . . . either in France or anywhere else." "All things considered, there is only Meissonier in Europe, and he is ours," declared Paul Mantz, who proclaimed him "the hero of the French display." Even Théophile Thoré, a champion of "modern" art as well as the rediscoverer of Jan Vermeer, had no doubt that Meissonier was one of the few painters alive in France who would be "definitively consecrated" by future generations. "Let us prostrate ourselves with Europe," Léon Legrange simply urged his fellows, "at the feet of one of the glories of French art."
34
These statements of Meissonier's preeminence, along with his fourteen paintings, caught the attention of Henry Probasco, a hugely wealthy forty-seven-year-old former hardware merchant. Probasco had just sold the company he had owned with his late brother-in-law and retired to spend his fortune covering the walls and stacking the shelves of his mansion outside Cincinnati with one of the world's finest collections of paintings and books. He had just commissioned from the Royal Bavarian Foundry in Munich, at a cost of 100,000 dollars, a forty-five-foot-high bronze fountain that he planned to ship back to America and unveil in downtown Cincinnati in honor of his brother-in-law.
35
He had also purchased a Shakespeare First Folio as well as various Bibles and rare manuscripts. But he wanted something more to show for his trawl through the auction rooms of Europe in 1867—namely, the greatest prize in modern art. The 150,000 francs he was rumored to be offering for Meissonier's
Friedland was
unprecedented for a work by a living artist, eclipsing even the 99,000 francs paid to Horace Vernet by Czar Nicholas I of Russia in 1849.
36
Soon, however, someone with even deeper pockets than Probasco let it be known that he, too, was interested in laying his hands on
Friedland.
The Marquess of Hertford, who already owned a half-dozen Meissoniers, approached the painter with a view to acquiring the unfinished masterpiece to adorn one of his Paris mansions. The competition for Meissonier's paintings at the Due de Morny's auction in 1865 therefore looked set to pale into insignificance beside the tug-of-war for
Friedland.
Still more honor was to come for Meissonier. The Awards Ceremony for the International Exhibition of Fine Arts, held on the first of July, took place before a crowd of 20,000 people in the Palais des Champs-Élysées, hung for the occasion with banners and bunting. The ceremony was presided over by Emperor Napoléon, with numerous other dignitaries—including the Viceroy of Egypt and the Prince of Wales—in attendance. Having easily received more votes from the awards jury than any other painter, Meissonier was awarded the Grand Medal of Honor. His coronation as the king of painters was complete.
* Whistler later changed the painting's title to
Crepuscule in Flesh Color and Green: Valparaiso.
A
LL HAD NOT been well with Emperor Napoléon as, dressed in his general's uniform and standing beside Abdul Aziz, the Turkish Sultan, he distributed the prizes for the International Exhibition of Fine Arts. The Universal Exposition had certainly been a great triumph, eventually attracting more than seven million paying customers. Yet this success could not allay Louis-Napoléon's various troubles.
During the previous year the Emperor's political fortunes had begun to suffer. One particular exhibit in the Palais du Champ-de-Mars, a fifty-ton Prussian cannon manufactured by Alfred Krupp, capable of firing shells weighing a thousand pounds, would have reminded him (and everyone else who laid eyes on it) of how in the summer of 1866 the Prussians under their Minister-President, Otto von Bismarck, had managed to vanquish the Austrians in a war lasting only seven weeks. The fifty-two-year-old Bismarck, an impressively tall and gluttonously corpulent Prussian
junker
with a walrus mustache and huge ambitions, had more than doubled the size of Prussia's army over the previous few years. He had started using this newfound muscle to hammer together from the various German-speaking dukedoms and princedoms—Mecklenberg, Thuringia, Saxony—a super-state that could rival its French neighbor. He had purchased Louis-Napoléon's neutrality in the war against Austria by promising to cede land along the Rhine to France, but he then proceeded to humiliate the Emperor (whom he mocked as "a sphinx without a secret") by showing no signs of handing over this territory. Meanwhile his own territories continued to grow as the Prussians annexed Hanover, Nassau and Frankfurt. A novel by Alexandre Dumas
père, The Prussian Terror,
serialized in
La Situation
in 1867, was written to warn France of the dangers from the Prussian war machine.
In the summer of 1867 Louis-Napoléon had an even greater worry than Prussian militarization and expansionism. Though he had done his best to conceal these anxieties as he presented the awards for the International Exhibition of Fine Arts on the first of July, several clues indicated that something had gone seriously wrong. Prince Richard von Metternich, the Austrian ambassador, had departed abruptly before the ceremony was finished, while the Count of Flanders, brother of Empress Charlotte of Mexico, was inexplicably absent. Then, before the ceremony had concluded, copies of
L 'Indipéndance beige
hit the newsstands with a dramatic story quoting official dispatches from the Austrian ambassador in Washington.
The news concerned the fate of Emperor Maximilian. It soon became clear that Louis-Napoléon's five-year-long Mexican adventure had gone horrifyingly awry. After 30,000 French troops evacuated Mexico a year earlier at the insistence of the United States, Benito Juárez and his men had promptly set about recapturing the territories they had lost in 1863. In the summer of 1866, as Juárez approached Mexico City, Louis-Napoléon had urged Maximilian to abdicate his throne and flee to Europe. Empress Charlotte had abandoned the hilltop palace of Chapultepec and set sail for friendlier shores, but Maximilian vowed—with an admirable courage—to remain in his adopted country and fight the Juaristas to the death. Though he was supported by an army of 8,000 Mexican loyalists, his fortunes looked bleak. As the 2,000 Guineas was run at the Hippodrome de Longchamp in the summer of 1866, Louis-Napoléon could not have missed an ironic coincidence: the winner was Puebla, a three-year-old colt named for the French victory in 1863.