Part 3

The Paris set had almost entirely absorbed his energies during the years of its production, but he made one or two other good etchings during the same period. Two of the Bourges etchings belong to this time, the third being much later. The only etching of 1851 was _Porte d’un ancien Couvent, Bourges_ (plate 39), a lightly etched plate, parts of which were only drawn in outline. Meryon printed very few copies of it, and intended to complete it later, but it is a very beautiful piece of work in its present condition. Meryon projected the publication of a Bourges set, but it always remained in abeyance. Two draughts exist in his handwriting, dated 1852, for the lettering of a title page to such a set, and M. Delteil prints a letter addressed by him in 1854 to the Ministry of the Interior, in which he sends a proof of the first plate etched of the proposed Bourges set (meaning, no doubt, _Rue des Toiles, Bourges_) and begs for a subscription for fifty copies of a set of ten etchings at fifteen francs a set. The set was to consist of four etchings of the same dimensions as the specimen submitted and six etchings of details of buildings. The etchings were to represent private houses, which were in more danger of demolition than public monuments. He sent _Porte d’un ancien Couvent_ (plate 39) as a specimen of the less important etchings that he projected. In the same letter he recalls that the Ministry had subscribed for fifty copies of the Paris set, which had been originally intended to consist of ten etchings (he counts only the important subjects which ultimately received numbers); he had now decided to add two more (_La Morgue_ and _L’Abside_) and begged the Minister to subscribe for fifty copies of these additional plates at two francs each, adding that such help as he would get from the Ministry was almost his only assistance in view of the indifference of the public. _Rue des Toiles à Bourges_ (plate 40) is a very fine etching, comparable to some of the rather similar subjects in the Paris set, notably _Tourelle, Rue de la Tixéranderie_. The early impressions of it are very beautifully printed. The British Museum has recently acquired a probably unique first state, earlier than any described by M. Delteil, printed before the plate had been reduced to its ultimate dimensions. The third Bourges etching, _Ancienne habitation à Bourges_ (plate 41) was added much later, in 1860, and is in the style of some of the late Paris etchings, but not so good. The only other etchings that date from the period of the “Eaux-Fortes sur Paris” are the _Verses to Eugène Bléry_ (two different plates with the same contents, D. 88, 89) and the fine _Entrée du Couvent des Capucins à Athènes_ (plate 42), both etched in 1854. Though Meryon had drawn in early youth the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates which was then partly embedded in the buildings of the French Capuchins at Athens, though it was afterwards detached from the wall, his etching is copied from one of the plates by J. P. Le Bas in J. D. Le Roy’s “Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce,” Paris, 1758.

It was about this time that Meryon began to etch plates of antiquarian interest from old drawings or prints. Though they were commissioned for illustrations, it is evident, among other things from a letter of Baudelaire’s written in 1860, that Meryon himself developed a rather tiresome habit of research, both pedantic and eccentric in its methods. One of the best of these derivative etchings, the _Salle des Pas-Perdus_ (plate 35), after Ducerceau, dates from 1855, and _Le Pont-Neuf et la Samaritaine_ (plate 33) and _Le Pont-au-Change vers 1784_ (plate 34) were also etched in the same year. They are fine etchings, but do not arouse the same interest as Meryon’s first-hand impressions of the Paris of his own day. _Le Château de Chenonceau_, also after Ducerceau, and etched in a very dry manner, is a plate of 1856, and in the same year he etched, from photographs, the large panoramic view of _San Francisco_. More typical Meryons are the two queer etchings of 1855 and 1856 called _La Loi Solaire_ and _La Loi Lunaire_, in which he propounded very crazy views on morality, one of them being that an upright posture is the proper attitude for sleep, a theory which he himself carried into practice in later years, by passing the night between two upright boards with his arms supported by loops of rope to keep him from falling. _Le Pilote de Tonga_, a prose poem in a frame, etched in 1856, is the first of what grew, in the sixties, into a long series of etchings founded on his sketches and reminiscences of his early voyage to the South Seas. These filled an even larger place in his thoughts in his last years, but it is to be feared that the etchings of these subjects, of which a few specimens are here reproduced (plates 43-46), leave posterity rather cold.

THE LATE ETCHINGS

The only etchings of any importance that Meryon produced after his release from confinement are some of the last views of Paris, done at the time when he was retouching his old plates of Paris and making the, not very judicious, alterations which distinguish their latest states. The new ones are: _Rue Pirouette_ (1860, plate 36), _Tourelle de la rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine_ (1861), which shows the house in which Marat was assassinated (plates 25, 26), _Rue des Chantres_ (1862, plates 27, 28), _Collège Henri IV_ (1864, plate 29), _Bain-froid Chevrier_ (1864, plate 30), _Le Ministère de la Marine_ (1866, plates 31, 32) and _L’ancien Louvre, vers 1650_ (1866, plate 38), in which, fulfilling a commission from the Chalcographie du Louvre, he returned to the study of his old love, Renier Zeeman. The _Rue des Chantres_ is incomparably the finest of these, but it can only be seen to real advantage in the very rare early states, one of which the British Museum possesses (plate 27), in which the spire, a recent addition to Notre-Dame designed by Viollet-le-Duc, soars into an empty sky, which was afterwards disfigured by the incongruous insertion of two bells and a device with the initials J. B. (plate 28). The streets of all the etchings of the sixties are filled with excited crowds or little groups of tall, unnatural looking people, and all kinds of curious monsters and allegorical figures hover in the sky or swoop in rapid flight across it. The _Collège Henri IV_ (plate 29) in some of its states, has for background a sea with sails and whales and sea-gods, and the figures in the foreground are the most extraordinary that Meryon ever drew.

It is of no use to dwell at length on these symptoms of mental decline. The lonely artist, subject to hallucinations, thinking that Jesuits were watching him in every street, quarrelling with his best friends, who found it impossible to help him, almost starving because he thought it wrong to eat when others were in need, was no longer capable of the concentrated effort that had produced the masterpieces of the first half of the fifties. On October 12th, 1866, he was shut up again at Charenton, where he died on February 4th, 1868, and where a friend of his sailor days, De Salicis, pronounced an oration over his grave. Bracquemond etched, with a few symbolical ornaments, a copper plate to be laid on the slab of black Breton stone, resting on cubes on white stone, which covered his tomb.

His life had been a failure; he was himself only too ready to proclaim it. He regarded art as something so mysterious, so sacred, as to be quite out of reach. “L’art pour lui n’existait qu’ à l’état de fétiche, d’idéal,” wrote Dr. Gachet to Bouvenne, “on ne devait pas y toucher--il n’y avait pas d’artistes.” To praise him as an artist was to make of him an enemy. To such a temperament fame was denied while he lived. It remained for posterity to do homage that could meet with no rebuff. The sincerest flattery, that of imitation, has been offered to Meryon without stint by a generation of etchers that was being born while he was relaxing by degrees his imperfect grasp of life.

LIST OF MERYON’S ETCHINGS

Besides the earliest full catalogue of Meryon’s etchings, that by P. Burty, translated into English by M. B. Huish (1879), which derives its value from Burty’s Memoir of Meryon and his notes on certain of the etchings, there are two catalogues of Meryon in general use, that written by the late Sir F. Wedmore (“Méryon and Méryon’s Paris,” 2nd ed., London, 1892) and the much more thorough catalogue by M. Loys Delteil (1907) which forms Tome II. of the series, “Le Peintre-Graveur illustré.” The British Museum collection is still arranged in Wedmore’s order, which has one practical advantage: it gives precedence to the important works, the etchings of Paris, and describes the other etchings as minor works after these. Thus the visitor, not an expert, who asks for Meryon’s etchings and receives the first volume, finds in it at once a number of the masterpieces. He can persevere, if he will, and see the minor works also; but, if he is more easily tired, he will at least have seen the Paris set while his eye is fresh, and will have spent none of his energy on the early experiments. On the other hand, Delteil is not pedantically chronological; he also places the Paris etchings early, by themselves, and groups the remainder, unlike Wedmore, by a subject arrangement, in various classes. By his more scientific description of states Delteil has superseded Wedmore, and is now invariably quoted in sale catalogues. How far even his catalogue is from being exhaustive is proved by the numerous additional states, chiefly based on the examination of the British Museum and Macgeorge collections, which Mr. H. J. L. Wright has described in the July number (1921) of the _Print Collector’s Quarterly_. It is understood that a new edition of Delteil is projected, containing a definitive numeration of the states, in which these and other corrections will be incorporated. The present list attempts no description of states. The titles are given in M. Delteil’s order, Wedmore’s numbers following in brackets, with the date of each etching and a summary indication of the number of states at present known to exist, quoted from Delteil except where the reference “_see_ Wright” is given.

I. EARLY EXPERIMENTS.

1 (78)--La Sainte Face, after P. de Champaigne. 1849. 2 (63)--La vache et l’ ânon, after P. J. de Loutherbourg. (2 states).[4] 3 (67)--Soldat de profil, after Salvator Rosa. 1849 (2 states). 4 (67a)--Soldat de face, after Salvator Rosa. 1849. 5 (64)--Le mouton et les mouches, after K. du Jardin. 1849 (2 states). 6 (65)--Les trois cochons couchés devant l’étable, after K. du Jardin. 1850 (2 states). 7 (66)--Les deux chevaux, after K. du Jardin. 1850. 8 (62)--La brebis et les deux agneaux, after A. van de Velde. 1850? (2 states). 9 (68)--Le Pavillon de Mademoiselle et une partie du Louvre, after R. Zeeman. 1849 (3 states). 10 (69)--Entrée du Faubourg Saint-Marceau, à Paris, after R. Zeeman. 1850 (2 states). 11 (70)--Un moulin à eau près de Saint Denis, after R. Zeeman. 1850 (2 states). 12 (71)--La rivière de Seine et l’angle du Mail, à Paris, after R. Zeeman. 1850 (2 states). 13 (72)--Galiot de Jean de Vyl de Rotterdam, after R. Zeeman. 1850 (3 states). 14 (73)--Bateaux de Harlem à Amsterdam, after R. Zeeman. 1850 (4 states). 15 (75)--Pêcheurs de la Mer du Sud, after R. Zeeman. 1850 (2 states). 16 (74)--Passagers de Calais à Flessingue, after R. Zeeman. 1850 (2 states).

II. VIEWS OF PARIS.

17 (1)--Titre des “Eaux-fortes sur Paris.” 1852. 18 (2)--Dédicace à Reynier Nooms, dit Zeeman. 1854. 19 (3)--Ancienne porte du Palais de Justice. 1854 (3 states). 20 (4)--Qu’âme pure gémisse. 1854 (2 states). 21 (5)--Armes symboliques delà Ville de Paris. 1854 (3 states) 22 (6)--Fluctuat nec mergitur. 1854. 23 (7)--Le Stryge. 1853 (8 states). 24 (8)--Le Petit Pont. 1850 (7 states--_see_ Wright). 25 (9)--L’ Arche du Pont Notre-Dame. 1853 (7 states--_see_ Wright). 26 (10)--La Galerie Notre-Dame. 1853 (5 states). 27 (11)--La rue des Mauvais Garçons. 1854 (3 states). 28 (12)--La Tour de l’ Horloge. 1852 (10 states--_see_ Wright). 29 (13)--Tourelle de la rue de la Tixéranderie. 1852 (4 states--_see_ Wright). 30 (14)--Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. 1852 (8 states). 31 (15)--La Pompe Notre-Dame. 1852 (9 states). 32 (16)--La Petite Pompe. 1854. (2 states). 33 (17)--Le Pont-Neuf. 1853 (10 states--_see_ Wright). 34 (18)--Le Pont-au-Change. 1854 (12 states--_see_ Wright). 35 (19)--L’ Espérance. 1854 (3 states--_see_ Wright). 36 (20)--La Morgue. 1854 (7 states). 37 (21)--L’ Hôtellerie de la Mort. 1854. 38 (22)--L’Abside de Notre-Dame de Paris. 1854 (8 states). 39 (--)--O toi dégustateur. 1854 (2 states). 40 (23)--Tombeau de Molière. 1854 (2 states). 41 (24)--Tourelle de la rue de l’ Ecole-de-Médecine. 1861 (13 states--_see_ Wright). 42 (25)--Rue des Chantres. 1862 (5 states--_see_ Wright). 43 (58)--Collège Henri IV. 1864 (11 states--_see_ Wright). 44 (27)--Bain-froid Chevrier. 1864 (6 states). 45 (26)--Le Ministère de la Marine. 1865 (6 states). 46 (29)--Le Pont-Neuf et la Samaritaine de dessous la 1ʳᵉ arche du Pont-au-Change. 1855 (4 states). 47 (28)--Le Pont-au-Change vers 1784, after Nicolle. 1855 (6 states--_see_ Wright). 48 (76)--La Salle des Pas-perdus 1855 (4 states). 49 (30)--Rue Pirouette aux Halles. 1860 (6 states). 50 (84)--Passerelle du Pont-au-Change après l’ incendie de 1621. 1860 (8 states--_see_ Wright). 51 (31)--Partie de la Cité vers la fin du XVIIᵉ siècle. 1861 (8 states). 52 (85)--Le Grand Châtelet vers 1780. 1861 (3 states). 53 (60)--L’Ancien Louvre, after R. Zeeman. 1866 (6 states).

III. VARIOUS VIEWS.

54 (33)--Porte d’un ancient Couvent, rue Mirebeau, à Bourges. 1851 (3 states--_see_ Wright). 55 (35)--Rue des Toiles à Bourges. 1853 (8 states--_see_ Wright). 56 (34)--Ancienne habitation à Bourges. 1860 (5 states). 57 (77a)--Château de Chenonceau (1st plate). 1856. 58 (77)--Château de Chenonceau (2nd plate). 1856 (3 states). 59 (81)--Ruines du Château de Pierrefonds. 1858 (3 states--_see_ Wright). 60 (83)--Chevet de St.-Martin-sur-Renelle, after P. Langlois. 1860 (3 states). 61 (32)--Entrée du Couvent des Capucins, à Athènes. 1854 (3 states). 62 (79)--Plan du Combat de Sinope. 1853 (2 states). 63 (46)--Couverture du voyage à la Nouvelle-Zélande. 1866 (8 states--_see_ Wright). 64 (36)--Le Pilote de Tonga. 1856 (2 states). 65 (38)--Tête de Chien de la Nouvelle-Hollande. 1850 (2 states) 66 (37)--Le Malingre Cryptogame. 1860 (4 states). 67 (40)--Nouvelle-Calédonie. Grande case indigène. 1863 (5 states). 68 (41)--Océanie, pêche aux palmes. 1863 (4 states). 69 (42)--Presqu’ île de Banks. Pointe des Charbonniers, Akaroa. 1863 (7 states--_see_ Wright). 70 (39)--Greniers indigènes à Akaroa. 1865 (5 states--_see_ Wright). 71 (43)--Etat de la colonie française d’Akaroa. 1865 (5 states) 72 (44)--La Chaumière du Colon. 1866 (3 states). 73 (80)--San Francisco. 1856 (4 states). 74 (45)--Prô-volant des Iles Mulgrave. 1866 (6 states--_see_ Wright).

IV. PORTRAITS.

74a (--)--Meryon assis devant son chevalet. 1849? (no proof exists). 75 (--)--Eugène Bléry. 1849? (no proof known to exist). 76 (--)--Edmond de Courtives. 1849? 77 (86)--Casimir Le Conte. 1856(2 states). 78 (87)--Evariste Boulay-Paty, after David d’Angers. 1861 (3 states). 79 (88)--François Viète. 1861 (11 states--_see_ Wright). 80 (92)--René de Burdigale, after C. de Passe. 1861 (5 states--_see_ Wright). 81 (89)--Pierre Nivelle, after M. Lasne. 1861 (6 states). 82 (91)--Jean Besly, after Jaspar Isac. 1861 (4 states). 83 (93)--L. J.-Marie Bizeul. 1861 (5 states). 84 (90)--Th. Agrippa d’ Aubigné, after J. Hébert. 1862 (4 states). 85 (94)--Benjamin Fillon. 1862 (5 states). 86 (95)--Armand Guéraud. 1862 (3 states--_see_ Wright).

V. FRONTISPIECES, ADDRESSES, REBUSES, MISCELLANEOUS SUBJECTS.

87 (47)--Adresse de Rochoux. 1856? (5 states--_see_ Wright). 88 (48a)--Vers à Eugène Bléry (small plate). 1854. 89 (48)--Vers à Eugène Bléry (large plate). 1854 (2 states--_see_ Wright). 90 (--)--L’Attelage. 91 (49)--La loi lunaire, 1st plate. 1856 (3 states--_see_ Wright). 92 (50)--La loi lunaire, 2nd plate. 1866 (6 states--_see_ Wright). 93 (51)--La loi solaire. 1855. 94 (82)--Présentation du Valère Maxime au roi Louis XI. 1860 (6 states--_see_ Wright). 95 (54)--Projet d’encadrement pour le portrait d’Armand Guéraud. 1862 (10 states--_see_ Wright; there is another, following Delteil’s 6th, still undescribed) 96 (61)--Frontispice pour le catalogue de Th. de Leu. 1866. 97, 98 (52, 53)--Projets de billets d’action (2 states--_see_ Wright). 99 (59)--Petit Prince Dito. 1864 (3 states--_see_ Wright). 100 (55)--Rébus: La Vendetta. 1863 (2 states). 101 (57)--Rébus: Béranger. 1863 (4 states--_see_ Wright). 102 (56)--Rébus: Morny. 1866 (3 states).

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In each case the dimensions given are those of the original plate, and not of the subject or engraved surface.

[2] A list of the contents of the set, “Eaux-Fortes sur Paris,” may be found useful; it is as follows:--

A. Meryon’s portrait by Bracquemond.

1. The title. 2. Dedication to R. Zeeman. 3. Porte du Palais de Justice (frontispiece). 4. Verses, “Qu’âme pure gémisse.” 5. Arms of the City of Paris. 6. Le Stryge (numbered 1). 7. Le Petit Pont (numbered 2). 8. L’Arche du Pont Notre-Dame (numbered 3). 9. La Galerie Notre-Dame (numbered 4). 10. La Rue des Mauvais Garçons. 11. La Tour de l’Horloge (numbered 5). 12. Tourelle de la rue de la Tixéranderie (numbered 6). 13. St. Etienne-du-Mont (numbered 7). 14. La Pompe Notre-Dame (numbered 8). 15. La Petite Pompe. 16. Le Pont-Neuf (numbered 9). 17. Le Pont-au-Change (numbered 10). 18. Verses, “L’Espérance.” 19. La Morgue (numbered 11). 20. Verses, “L’Hôtellerie de la Mort.” 21. L’Abside de Notre-Dame (numbered 12). 22. Tombeau de Molière.

[3] This portrait is extremely rare, as only ten impressions were taken; it has been reproduced by heliogravure. The impression reproduced in this book is in the collection of the author.

[4] When states are not mentioned it is to be understood that there is only one state.