The Judgment of Paris (65 page)

The greatest interest, though, was reserved for Meissonier, who had dispatched nine of his own paintings into this artistic combat, none of which, except for
End of a Gambling Quarrel,
had ever been seen in public. In addition to a couple of musketeer scenes, he chose three of his Antibes landscapes, one a watercolor, providing visitors to the Fine Arts Gallery with a glimpse of a possibly unexpected versatility in dealing with color and light. They were predictably well received, with the critic for
The Times
exclaiming over the beauties of these light-saturated landscapes.
³
But watercolors and musketeers nonetheless made odd choices for a man obsessed with artistic grandeur as well as with the moral and patriotic regeneration of France. In 1871 Meissonier had claimed the aftermath of the war against Prussia was no time to paint "little figures"—and yet, try as he might to drive his repertoire into Olympian realms, he could never quite abandon his musketeers.

Absent from the Fine Arts Gallery were Meissonier's two patriotic allegories from 1871,
The Siege of Paris
and
The Ruins of the Tuileries.
He likely left these two works back in Poissy to avoid stirring up memories of the shameful and tragic episodes in the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. The failure of painters at the 1872 Salon to pull artistic victories from the jaws of military defeats no doubt convinced him to dwell, instead, on an incontestable triumph; and for that reason his hopes in Vienna rode on another work. This, of course, was the masterpiece calculated to explode amid "the mediocrity of arts in Europe" with all the devastating force of a battlefield victory. On May 15, 1873, following a short speech by Emperor Franz Josef, the world therefore got its first glimpse of
Friedland.

Few works in the history of art have consumed as much labor, generated as much rumor and anticipation, been showered with as much money, or simply taken as long to complete, as Meissonier's
Friedland.
The canvas had been the product of exhaustive studies and researches, bizarre experiments, real-life cavalry charges, and as many as a hundred separate studies of everything from the crook of a soldier's arm to the joint of a horse's foreshortened leg. It had survived a skewering from a fencing sword, bombardment by the Prussians, and the flames of Bloody Week. In the ten years he had spent on this work, Meissonier had metamorphosed from a painter whose election to the Institut de France had been celebrated by progressive newspapers as a victory for youth over the "old Académie," to a painter reviled by those same progressive newspapers as an appalling reactionary. He had turned from an artist known for exquisite little paintings of musketeers and other
bonshommes
into a man possessed by Michelangelesque visions of covering the Panthéon with sprawling murals—of appealing to posterity from hundred-foot walls. And his opponents, finally, had changed from the diehards found in the Académie des Beaux-Arts to the younger generation of artists who gathered at the Café Guerbois.

Despite his incredible hauteur and colossal self-regard, even Meissonier must have wondered how long he could possibly keep his grasp on the vertiginous summit to which he had climbed. For the previous two decades he had been celebrated as the "incontestable master" who would be venerated, according to Delacroix, long after his contemporaries disappeared into the shades. Yet he knew from his historical studies, as well as from witnessing the collapse of the Second Empire, that power, fame and glory were the most transient of properties. One of his favorite stories concerned a comment made by Napoléon while at the height of his powers. The Emperor had gathered with several close friends at the Château de Malmaison when talk turned to the blazing glory of his reign. "Yes," Napoléon had soberly told his listeners, "but some day I shall see the abyss open before me, and I shall not be able to stop myself. I shall climb so high that I shall turn giddy."
⁴

The year 1873 was not perhaps the best time to unveil a work such as
Friedland.
The historic victory on Prussian soil commemorated by the painting was made to look somewhat hollow by the Germans' gleaming display, only a few yards from the Fine Arts Gallery, of the giant Krupp cannons that had shredded the modern-day French cuirassiers with such brutal efficiency. Equally inauspicious was the work's celebration of Napoléon. Ten years earlier, as Meissonier set to work on his masterpiece, Adolphe Thiers wrote that Napoléon was "the man who has inspired France with the strongest emotions she has ever felt."
⁵
But by 1873 these emotions were not so strong. The cult of Napoléon, so lustrous and potent throughout the 1860s, had been damaged with the fall of Napoléon III and the transition of France from an imperial power to a republic constituted in the ignominy of military defeat and civil war. Indeed, the Bonapartes were derided in one republican newspaper, following the death of Louis-Napoléon, as "that sinister and cursed race."
⁶
Rather than trumpeting the glories of France, Meissonier appeared to have created an elegy for a lost empire and a testimonial to fugitive and meretricious grandeur.

Friedland
(plate 6B) was prominently displayed in the central hall of the Fine Arts Gallery. It was an arresting sight, a full-pelt cavalry charge magically frozen in time, every bunched muscle and flying hoof—and every stalk of ripening wheat—captured with a precision that no photographer, and no other painter, could hope to replicate. Not even
The Campaign of France,
Meissonier's master-class in heaving human and equine bodies into motion, could have prepared viewers for the thundering gallop across the canvas of the triumphant cuirassiers.

The composition was a thrilling one, plunging spectators headlong into the scene. Here, for the first time on a broad canvas, were all the extraordinary virtuosities with which Meissonier had made his name—the trademark dexterities of brush, the microscopically precise details, the rigorously anatomical and exquisitely choreographed movements of horses and riders. The painting repaid the closest inspection, yielding up such infinitesimal details as the bulging veins on the legs of Napoléon's white charger and the poppies—a few dashes of red—crushed beneath the hooves of the stampeding cuirassiers. For anyone who knew to look for it, there was also evidence of Charles Meissonier's mishap with the fencing sword, since the flank of the sorrel horse in the middle foreground betrayed both an ever-so-slight wrinkling of the canvas and a thick and apparently clumsy application of paint altogether unlike Meissonier's usual elegant brushwork.

Most viewers were enthralled by the astonishing level of detail, with critics exclaiming over Meissonier's "scrupulous exactitude," his "conscientiousness," and the unparalleled means by which he gave a vivid impression of "nature seized from life."
⁷
The critic for
The Times
wrote that "the composition is remarkably bold and the execution at once vigorous and minute."
⁸
A Viennese paper, the
Tageblatt,
proclaimed him "the ace of spades" in French art and called his paintings "a constellation of stars in the Fine Arts Gallery."
⁹
Meanwhile a French critic writing in the
Journal officiel
noted with satisfaction that his glory was still "without eclipse."
¹⁰

And yet not everyone was convinced by the painting. A few years later Meissonier would complain about the "many (among the thousands of viewers) who have done it injustice with a certain malevolent appreciation."
¹¹
He was exaggerating, though a minority of critics did take the view that the whole of
Friedland
was something less than the sum of its parts. One of the most trenchant was Arséne Houssaye's son Henry, a masterful young art critic and classical historian who reviewed the painting for the
Revue des deux mondes.
His argument was one Meissonier must have found damaging for the simple reason that it was undeniably—and embarrassingly—accurate. Meissonier believed the painter's task was to come to the aid of history; he had once claimed, in fact, that had he not become a painter he would have been a historian like Adolphe Thiers. He purported to be a student of Thiers in matters Napoleonic, keeping beside his bed volumes of
The History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoléon
and on occasion inviting Thiers to Poissy to discuss the finer points of French military history. With
Friedland,
Meissonier had hoped to achieve a perfect historical reconstruction by translating onto canvas what Thiers had put onto the page.

Houssaye, however, uncovered a troublesome lapse in Meissonier's historical appreciation, one suggesting that
Friedland
was actually a fiction. A keen scholar of Napoléon, Houssaye would later publish a two-volume history of the First Empire that ran through forty-six editions. He knew whereof he spoke, therefore, when he pointed out that the episode portrayed—Napoléon reviewing his charging cuirassiers—had never actually occurred: the 3,500
Gros Frères
had made their dramatic assault against the enemy columns long before Napoléon made his appearance on the battlefield at Friedland. Houssaye then went on to explicate the farcical nature of the composition by pointing out how the particular trajectory of the charge—which sent the cuirassiers looping around to the Emperor's right—invited spectators logically to conclude that either Napoléon had turned his back on the enemy or the cuirassiers were in the process of fleeing from battle. Meissonier was thereby exposed as someone defective in both historical knowledge and military tactics—devastating assaults on a man who prided himself on his absolute fidelity to history.

Houssaye also voiced what was ultimately, perhaps, an even more serious criticism, one that further struck at the root of Meissonier's artistic project. Specifically, he felt Meissonier had gone overboard in his laborious attempts to represent the movement and musculature of his horses. The work's mind-boggling complexity of detail, far from heightening the realism, actually detracted from it. Meissonier's fixation on anatomical exactitude merely resulted in horses that looked like they had been flayed of their skin. "He wanted to go beyond perfection," wrote Houssaye, "to show everything, to not let a single muscle relax, nor hide a single vein beneath the skin." He argued, in effect, that Meissonier failed to see the forest for the trees: though his horses were anatomically correct in every last detail, they were not actually true to life. "A galloping horse," he pointed out, "cannot be painted with the minute meticulousness and patience that one employs for a figure at rest. . . . Such figures must be executed with vigorous touches, otherwise they will be frozen and immobilized in their movement."
¹²

Meissonier's all-engrossing scrutiny of his subject, combined with his almost mesmeric style of delineating the results, ultimately made for a dubious and unrealistic scene. The canvas was zootomically impeccable but, for spectators such as Houssaye, visually unconvincing. What Meissonier saw as he watched anatomical dissections or rode alongside Colonel Dupressoir's galloping cuirassiers did not tally with the blurry and indistinct impressions of equine locomotion gained, for example, by spectators positioned beside the finishing post at Longchamp. Meissonier's attempts to press technological advances into the service of art had produced animals that belonged less in the École des Beaux-Arts than in the École Nationale Vétérinaire.

Someone considerably more important to Meissonier than Henry Houssaye likewise entertained reservations about the painting. Among the hundreds of notable visitors to the International Exhibition in Vienna was Sir Richard Wallace, who made his way to the Fine Arts Gallery in a distinguished company that featured the Prince of Wales and several English politicians. Also in the party were the critic Charles Yriarte and the art dealer Francis Petit, both close friends of Meissonier. Naturally, they made straight for
Friedland.

The Prince of Wales and his companions were suitably awed by the painting. "At first sight," Yriarte remembered, "this admirable work drew a cry of admiration from our whole party." Petit then turned to the Prince of Wales (whose father, Prince Albert, had been such an enthusiast for Meissonier) and informed His Royal Highness that he could congratulate Sir Richard "on being its fortunate owner." But to the surprise of Yriarte and the others, Sir Richard, who only a year earlier had parted with an advance of 100,000 francs, "modestly declined the honour," an announcement that must have shocked Petit, who had personally arranged the sale.
Friedland
was suddenly, and somewhat inexplicably, without an owner, and Meissonier was without the promised second installment of 100,000 francs.
¹³

This unexpected renunciation of ownership had little to do with aesthetic disagreements of the sort advanced by Houssaye and everything to do with a childish misunderstanding. Wallace had advanced Meissonier 100,000 francs for
Friedland
on the understanding "that later the final conditions could be settled according to the work's importance." But these final conditions were never settled. By 1873 virtually all communication had lapsed between patron and painter as Wallace moved more or less permanently to London, having become, among other things, the Member of Parliament for Antrim in Ireland. According to Yriarte, Wallace was "somewhat offended by the artist's protracted silence," while Meissonier, for his part, was miffed that the connoisseur for whose collection the work was destined "should never have displayed any curiosity about it."
¹⁴
This standoff culminated with Wallace disowning
Friedland
in front of the Prince of Wales and Meissonier obliged to return his advance of 100,000 francs.