Part 1

THE ETCHINGS OF CHARLES MERYON

THE ETCHINGS OF CHARLES MERYON

BY CAMPBELL DODGSON, M.A., C.B.E. KEEPER OF THE PRINTS AND DRAWINGS AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

EDITED BY GEOFFREY HOLME PUBLISHED BY “THE STUDIO,” LTD., LONDON MCMXXI

_Printed by Herbert Reiach, Ltd., 9 King Street, Covent Garden, London. Photogravure plates engraved and printed by A. Alexander & Sons, Ltd., 15 Westmoreland Place, City Road, London._

CONTENTS

ARTICLES Page

Introduction 1

Early Life 3

The Early Etchings 6

The Etchings of Paris 8

Other Etchings of the ’Fifties 20

The Late Etchings 22

List of Meryon’s Etchings 24

LIST OF ETCHINGS REPRODUCED.[1] Plate

Charles Meryon. By Félix Bracquemond 9 × 5-7/8 in. 1

Titre des Eaux-fortes sur Paris (D.17), 6-1/2 × 4-15/16 in. 2

Dédicace à Reynier Nooms, dit Zeeman (D.18), 6-15/16 × 2-3/4 in. 3

Ancienne Porte du Palais de Justice (D.19), third state 3-7/16 × 3-3/8 in. 4

Armes Symboliques de la Ville de Paris (D.21), third state, 5-3/8 × 4-3/8 in. 5

Le Stryge (D.23), eighth state, 6-3/4 × 5-1/8 in. 6

Le Petit Pont (D.24), fifth state, 10-1/4 × 7-1/2 in. 7

L’Arche du Pont Notre-Dame (D.25), third state 6 × 7-3/4 in. 8

La Galerie Notre-Dame (D.26), third state, 11-1/8 × 6-15/16 in. 9

La Rue des Mauvais Garçons (D.27), third state, 5 × 3-7/8 in. 10

La Tour de L’Horloge (D.28), third state, 10-5/16 × 7-1/4 in. 11

Tourelle de la Rue de la Tixéranderie (D.29), second state, 9-3/4 × 5-3/16 in. 12

Saint-Etienne-du-Mont (D.30), fifth state 9-3/4 × 5-1/8 in. 13

La Pompe Notre-Dame (D.31), ninth state, 6-3/4 × 9-7/8 in. 14

La Petite Pompe (D.32), second state, 4-1/4 × 3-1/8 in. 15

Le Pont-Neuf (D.33), eighth state, 7-3/16 × 7-1/4 in. 16

Le Pont-au-Change (D.34), second state, 6-1/8 × 13-1/16 in. 17

Le Pont-au-Change (D.34), ninth state, 6-1/8 × 13-1/16 in. 18

L’Espérance (D.35), (Vers destinés à accompagner Le Pont-au-Change), 2-1/2 × 5 in. 19

La Morgue (D.36), third state, 9-1/8 × 8-1/8 in. 20

L’Hôtellerie de la Mort (D.37), two plates each 4-3/4 × 1-3/8 in. 21

L’Abside de Notre-Dame de Paris (D.38), fourth state, 6-1/2 × 11-3/4 in. 22

Tombeau de Molière (D.40), second state, 2-5/8 × 2-3/4 in. 23

Charles Meryon, 1858. By Léopold Flameng, 8-3/4 × 10-3/4 in. 24

Tourelle de la Rue de L’Ecole.-de-Médecine (D.41), sixth state, 8-3/8 × 5-3/16 in. 25

Tourelle de la Rue de L’Ecole.-de-Médecine (D.41), ninth state, 8-3/8 × 5-3/16 in. 26

Rue des Chantres (D.42), first state, 11-3/4 × 5-7/8 in. 27

Rue des Chantres (D.42), fourth state, 11-3/4 × 5-7/8 in. 28

Collège Henri IV. (D. 43), sixth state, 11-5/8 × 18-7/8 in. 29

Bain-froid Chevrier (D.44), fourth state, 5-1/8 × 5-5/8 in. 30

Le Ministère de la Marine (D.45), first state, 6-5/8 × 5-3/4 in. 31

Le Ministère de la Marine (D.45), fifth state, 6-5/8 × 5-3/4 in. 32

Le Pont-Neuf et la Samaritaine (D.46), third state, 5-11/16 × 8 in. 33

Le Pont-au-Change vers 1784, d’après Nicolle (D. 47), third state, 5-5/16 × 9-3/8 in. 34

La Salle des Pas-perdus à l’ancien Palais-de-Justice (D.48), fourth state, 10-5/8 × 17-1/8 in. 35

Rue Pirouette aux Halles (D.49), third state, 6-1/8 × 4-9/16 in. 36

Partie de la Cité vers la Fin du XVIIᵉ Siècle (D.51), seventh state, 6 × 12-5/8 in. 37

L’Ancien Louvre, d’après une peinture de Zeeman (D.53), fifth state, 6-3/8 × 10-1/2 in. 38

Porte d’un ancien Couvent à Bourges (D.54), second state, 6-5/8 × 4-3/8 in. 39

Rue des Toiles à Bourges (D.55), fifth state, 8-1/2 × 4-3/4 in. 40

Ancienne Habitation à Bourges (D.56), fourth state, 9-5/8 × 5-7/16 in. 41

Entrée du Couvent des Capucins à Athènes (D.61), third state, 7-5/8 × 5 in. 42

Nouvelle-Calédonie. Grande case indigène sur le Chemin de Ballade à Poepo (D.67), fourth state, 5-5/8 × 9-3/4 in. 43

Océanie, Pêche aux Palmes (D.68), fourth state, 6-1/4 × 13-1/4 in. 44

La Chaumière du Colon (D.72), third state, 3-1/8 × 3 in. 45

Prô-volant des Iles Mulgrave (D.74), fifth state, 5-3/4 × 3-1/8 in. 46

L. J.-Marie Bizeul (D.83), fourth state, 6-1/2 × 4-5/8 in. 47

PREFACE

No modern author could write on Meryon without acknowledging in the amplest terms, as I do, his indebtedness to M. Loys Delteil’s monograph on this great etcher in his _Peintre-Graveur Illustré_ (1907). The biography which precedes it, and the quotations which it gives from Baudelaire and Burty, and from Meryon’s own comments on what Burty wrote about Meryon, make M. Delteil’s volume much more than a catalogue. The other books that I have chiefly consulted are Burty’s Catalogue of Meryon, translated by M. B. Huish (1879), and Aglaüs Bouvenne’s “Notes et Souvenirs sur Charles Meryon” (1883.) I have had no access to original documents, except the chief documents of all, the etchings themselves, or to books not generally known; but there may be readers, perhaps, who will welcome a brief account in English of Meryon’s career, an estimate of his rank as an etcher, and comments on all of his etchings that they have any need to know and admire. The originals of all the etchings reproduced in the plates, except the portrait by Bracquemond, are in the British Museum.

C. D.

5 September, 1921.

ERRATUM.--_Page 23, line 18 from top, for “February 4th” read “February 14th.”_

THE ETCHINGS OF CHARLES MERYON

INTRODUCTION.

A century has passed since the birth of Meryon, a circumstance which excuses, if it does not actually demand, a survey in retrospect of the great etcher’s work and the growth of his renown. There is no indication, it must be said at once, that the lapse of time has weakened in any degree the sure fabric of his fame. About no other modern etcher, save Whistler, is there an equal consensus of opinion among those whose opinion counts, that he ranks among the great masters of his art. Whistler himself was a dissentient; he spoke one day to Mr. Wedmore of “Meryon, whom you have taken out of his comfortable place.” Without insinuating that he was jealous of a _confrère_ with whom he was forced to share the honour of a Wedmore catalogue, it may be remarked that the utterances of such a lover of paradox as Whistler need not be taken too seriously. Nor is an artist always the best judge of a fellow artist who pursues very different aims from his own. Meryon’s reputation, though it is ungrudgingly admitted and admired by most etchers of to-day and yesterday, was established by the critics and collectors of a generation now extinct. Philippe Burty, who published the first critical article on Meryon and the first catalogue of his etchings in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ of 1863, was the first to discern clearly and to proclaim to the world his peculiar genius. Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier added their words of praise and the _Galerie Notre-Dame_ evoked the enthusiasm of Victor Hugo. Bracquemond, by twelve years his junior in age but his contemporary in the practice and mastery of etching, gave him all the support of his appreciation, and there was a small enlightened circle of collectors, including Wasset of the War Office, Niel of the Ministry of the Interior, Meryon’s former shipmate De Salicis, the English etcher Seymour Haden, and a few others who saw the great merit of his work from the first. But on the whole his reception in France was cool and discouraging; academic opinion at the time was unfavourable to original etching. The editor of the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ grudged admission to Burty’s essay and asked, if two articles were to be devoted to a modern etcher, how many would be needed for Raphael. His _Galerie Notre-Dame_ was refused by the Salon in 1853, and though many of his Paris etchings were exhibited there, they gained no prize. The public collections did not acquire his works and it was not till 1866 that Burty induced the Chalcographie Impériale at the Louvre to commission and publish one of his plates, _L’Ancien Louvre_, after Zeeman (plate 38). The stories told of the pitiful sums that he used to accept for proofs of his finest etchings, a franc and a half or two francs, sometimes, seem almost incredible now, when such proofs sell for hundreds of pounds. In a pathetic letter which he addressed in 1854 to the Minister of the Interior, appealing to him for the support which he could not obtain from the public, he announced his intention of producing a set of ten etchings of Bourges, and charging fifteen francs for the set. He actually sold the whole series of his masterpieces, “Eaux-fortes sur Paris,” as a set, for twenty-five or thirty francs. They sold very slowly indeed. A receipt is extant from him for twenty-five francs paid by Baron Pichon in 1866, twelve years after the publication of the set, for “une suite de vues anciennes de Paris, gravées par moi à l’eau-forte, intitulées Eaux-fortes sur Paris.”

It was not till 1910 that the first collective exhibition of Meryon’s etched work was held in Paris, at the Galerie Devambez. In England, where his fame was spread by Seymour Haden, Philip Gilbert Hamerton and Wedmore, Meryon’s reputation grew more rapidly, at least after his death. The great French private collections of his etchings crossed the Channel, Burty’s being sold in 1876, and the year 1879, eleven years after Meryon’s death, witnessed the publication of two different English catalogues of his etchings and the holding of a fine exhibition of his etchings and drawings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, to which the Rev. J. J. Heywood was the largest contributor. Much later, in 1902, an important exhibition was held by Messrs. Obach & Co., while Messrs. P. and D. Colnaghi & Co., arranged another very fine Meryon exhibition in 1919. The British Museum, fortunately, owes to the foresight of a former Keeper of Prints the early formation of a magnificent, though not complete, collection of Meryon, to which additions are still occasionally made, though they must needs be few now that a further stage in the migration of fine proofs is in progress and not the Channel only, but the Atlantic, parts them from their _pays d’origine_. The National Gallery of Scotland is fortunate in having obtained, by the gift of Mrs. G. R. Halkett, a small selection of very fine proofs of Meryon etchings, but Edinburgh’s gain is far less than was Glasgow’s loss by the sale, in 1916, of the collection of Mr. B. B. Macgeorge, which was undoubtedly the most complete work of Meryon ever brought together, containing, as it did, not merely almost every etching by the master in almost every state, but also a large number of his original drawings for the etchings of Paris. The year 1916 was an unfavourable time for acquiring such a valuable _œuvre_ for any national or municipal museum, and the Macgeorge collection went to America and was dispersed, only a small number of proofs remaining in, or returning to, this country, where, I suppose, no one collection of importance still remains except that of the British Museum. A Meryon exhibition is being held at the Museum this autumn to celebrate the centenary of the artist’s birth.

EARLY LIFE

The story of Meryon’s life has often been told, but those who do not know it may welcome a brief recapitulation of it here, and indeed some such narrative is needed for the comprehension of his work, which becomes much more interesting when something is known of the period and circumstances in which it was produced. Meryon was born in Paris on November 23rd, 1821, as the natural son of Dr. Charles Lewis Meryon, an English doctor, formerly physician and secretary to Lady Hester Stanhope, and an opera dancer, Pierre-Narcisse Chaspoux, aged twenty-eight, known as Mme. Gentil, who already had a daughter by an English peer. It was not till August 9th, 1824, that Dr. Meryon made a formal recognition of paternity and left a sum of money, on leaving France, for his son’s education. His mother brought him up with tender care, but he inherited from her apparently the mental disease with which he was afterwards afflicted; she died, out of her mind, in 1837 or 1838. At the age of five, under the name of Charles Gentil, he went to school at Passy, where he received some elementary lessons in drawing. A very childish drawing of houses, trees and a well, in red and black chalk, of which at a later period some one made a woodcut, is in the British Museum; by internal evidence one may judge it to be earlier than the elementary lessons. He went to Marseilles, Hyères, and to Italy, as far as Pisa and Leghorn; then returned to Paris till he made up his mind to go into the Navy, and, in 1837, entered the naval school at Brest. It was then that he adopted his father’s name of Meryon. Leaving the naval school in 1839, he sailed from Toulon in October in the _Alger_ for the Levant, and was transferred at Smyrna, as a first-class cadet, to the _Montebello_. He visited Argos, the tomb of Agamemnon and the lion gate at Mycenae, and at Athens made drawings of the frieze of the Temple of Theseus and of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates which appears in his etching of the _Convent of the French Capuchins at Athens_, 1854 (plate 42). On his return to Toulon he had further lessons in drawing. In 1842 he went to sea again, being gazetted as “enseigne de vaisseau” to the corvette _Le Rhin_, which cruised about New Zealand, New Caledonia, and the islands of the Pacific. The fruits of these years of travel in Oceania may be seen in a number of etchings which he made in later life (Delteil 63-74). A multitude of pencil sketches made on his travels remained in his family’s possession till 1904, when they were given to the British Museum by Mr. Lewis Meryon. They include drawings of his shipmates, of native houses, fetishes and boats, palm trees and other vegetation, studies of skies and sunsets, with notes of colour, sketches of the flight of the albatross, drawings of fish and other fauna of the Pacific, and last, but not least, the original drawings for _Le malingre Cryptogame_ (D. 66) and _Tête de chien de la Nouvelle-Hollande_ (D. 65), the ship’s pet whose queer habits and tragic death by falling overboard before Meryon’s eyes are graphically described in one of his letters quoted at length in Burty’s memoir. Long afterwards, in conversations with Burty, Meryon used to say how his thoughts dwelt on the rocky coast of New Caledonia, where “he had met a race of savages, handsome, heroic, intelligent, where he had breathed an air overladen with balm, where, if he could, he should like one day to return to finish life free and happy.” On the return of _Le Rhin_ in 1846 Meryon received six months’ leave and returned to Paris. He had scruples about his constitution being strong enough for the profession of a sailor; he neglected to ask for an extension of his leave, and in the end his resignation was accepted and he left the Service on September 17th, 1846. He was then in possession of a sum of 20,000 francs left to him by his mother. He took a studio and had lessons from a painter named Philippe. He has recorded his enthusiasm at this time for the pictures of Delacroix, Decamps and Hogarth, whose work he had seen during a short visit to England. After some experiments in allegory, inspired by the proclamation of the republic at the February revolution, he abandoned painting for engraving, and entered the studio of the etcher, Eugène Bléry, in 1848. A circumstance which affected this decision was the discovery that his eyesight suffered from the defect known as Daltonism, a partial colour-blindness.

THE EARLY ETCHINGS

Bléry as an etcher has little interest for us, but he was sufficiently skilled to impart in six months a sound technique to a pupil, whose interest in the art was fostered by the study of old etchings and especially those of the Dutch etcher of architecture and marine subjects, Renier Zeeman (1623-1663), which he used to pick up for a few sous in the boxes outside the printsellers’ shops. Meryon’s first etching of all was a head of Christ, founded on a miniature after Philippe de Champaigne; the only impression known of this etching is in the Howard Mansfield collection at New York. During the years 1849-50 he produced a number of copies after Loutherbourg, Salvator Rosa, Karel du Jardin and others, but Zeeman fascinated him above all in the double capacity of an etcher of marines and of views of old Paris, and it was from his style that he learnt most. While still with Bléry his mind is said to have been slightly unhinged by an unfortunate love affair with the daughter of a restaurant keeper, who would have nothing to say to him. In solitary wanderings about the old streets of Paris and meditations in his garret in the Rue St. Etienne-du-Mont, he formed plans for his series of etchings of old Paris and began to make studies for them. As early as 1850 one of these masterly plates, _Le Petit Pont_ (plate 7), was finished.

In making his studies of old houses and churches, Meryon seldom made a complete drawing on the spot. He would go every day at the same hour and make minutely finished studies of details on small bits of paper, which he either stuck together or made another drawing from them. He used an exceedingly sharp, hard pencil; the astonishing fineness of the line that he produced with it may be well seen in two early drawings of Rouen Cathedral from the Seine in the British Museum, which also possesses some of the drawings of architecture at Bourges, a place which first fascinated him on a visit made about 1848. In drawing architecture Meryon always worked upwards from the bottom of his object, saying that buildings were begun from the foundation and the artist should follow the same method as the builder. In the same way he would draw men from the feet upwards, saying that they must always be planted firmly on their feet before they began to do anything. _Le Petit Pont_ well illustrates another peculiarity of his practice in drawing architecture. He deliberately renounced any competition with the camera of the photographer, and claimed the right to arrange the different parts of what he drew in the manner best calculated to convey a certain impression, while preserving the utmost exactness in the representation of detail in each part. It has been observed, by those who know the spot well, that the towers of Notre-Dame, which dominate the whole composition, are much too high in the etching in regard to their actual dimensions and to the laws of perspective. After taking a drawing from very low down, near the edge of the water, Meryon drew the towers again from the level of the street, as the passer-by would habitually see them, and fitted this drawing with great skill into the former one, constructing by this combination a composition which produced the desired effect of impressive and majestic height, all the details being absolutely accurate, though on reflection it might be discovered that they could not all be seen at once.

_Le Petit Pont_ is the first of his mature works, and marks an astonishing advance upon the exercises in copying other etchers which, with the exception of a few important portraits, are all that had preceded it. “Unimportant,” his own portrait, seated before an easel, could never have been, at least as a document, though it may have been immature, but we cannot judge of its quality, for Meryon destroyed it and preserved no proofs, and we only know of its existence from his own statement recorded by Burty. The only proof of his portrait of Eugène Bléry was destroyed by Bléry’s wife because she did not like it. Thus the only portrait of his quite early time which is actually extant is that of Edmond de Courtives, and of this only one impression, formerly in the Macgeorge collection, can actually be traced. It is a little medallion containing the head, reduced from an etching which according to Meryon’s own account was originally a half length, in which a violin and some chemical apparatus were introduced beside the sitter. It was an original etching, based on a drawing from life by Meryon himself.

All the other portraits are of much later date, one belonging to the year 1856, the rest to 1861 or 1862 (plate 47). None of them are original etchings; they are founded on drawings by others, old prints or photographs, in one case on a medallion by David d’Angers; they are quite insignificant and we shall have no need to mention them again. The other etchings of 1849-50 would have no interest for us if anyone else but Meryon had etched them. It is only the four oblong subjects of Paris and its vicinity after Zeeman that count for something more, because they show very plainly on what Meryon formed his taste, and anticipate, in the proportions and _ordonnance_ of the plate and in the treatment of river boats and of the little figures on the banks of the Seine that we see in _Le Pavillon de Mademoiselle_ and in _La Rivière de Seine et l’angle du Mail_, habits that we shall soon come to regard, when we consider the original etchings of Paris, as specially characteristic of Meryon himself.

THE ETCHINGS OF PARIS