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

PREFACE

Erratum.—Page 23, line 18 from top, for “February 4th” read “February 14th.”

THE ETCHINGS OF CHARLES MERYON

INTRODUCTION.

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

But when we come to Le Petit Pont (plate 7), etched in the same year as these copies after Zeeman, and exhibited in the Salon of 1850, we are aware of quite a different vision, a different order of intellect, as well as greater perfection of technical skill. It is becoming difficult for us after the lapse of seventy years, in which so many other etchers have been working on Meryon’s lines, to realise how new, how epoch-making in the strict sense of the word, was such an etching as Le Petit Pont in 1850. There had been fine engravers and etchers of architecture before Meryon; there had been Hollar, there had been Canale, Piranesi and Rossini. But they in their different degrees were facile and fluent, rhetorical, diffuse, commercial, in comparison with the severe, tense, concentrated style of Meryon. In his “Eaux-Fortes sur Paris,” which extend in date from 1850 to 1854, he achieved a body of work which led the way in what is called the modern revival of etching and in its own special style has never been surpassed, though other etchers have triumphed in other styles of etching which were entirely outside Meryon’s limited compass. Not only was he in advance of all the other notable etchers of his generation, but he had finished this series of masterpieces before the others had begun to produce anything of importance. Millet began to etch in 1855; Whistler’s Paris set dates from 1858; Haden, though he had etched in the forties, did little that really counts till about 1858. Jacque and Daubigny were working before Meryon, but they are hardly in the same class. It was consonant with Meryon’s brooding, introspective temperament that he took the work of etching very seriously. He acquired a profound knowledge of the technique of the art and applied it, in the case of all his important etchings, with conscientious thoroughness. Disdaining anything like a sketchy treatment of his subject, he built up the whole design laboriously, painfully, with tireless perseverance, after making the most conscientious studies of detail. He was, in fact, by habit and temperament more an engraver than an etcher, though he used the etching process instead of attacking the copper with a burin.

But nothing that I have yet said explains what there is in Meryon that makes us regard him as a great artist. Any etcher might have taken all these pains and yet remained to the end nothing but an industrious plodder. It was the combination, in Meryon, of this high degree of mechanical skill with a fine instinct for design and the poet’s vision which was still more specially his prerogative, that places him in a different category from a Lalanne, a Martial-Potémont or an Edwin Edwards. The old streets of Paris were not, for him, merely storehouses of picturesque motives, structures composed of walls and porticoes, gables and spires, on which the sun arranged at different times of day different patterns of light and shade; they were that, certainly, and his etcher’s eye, trained to observe niceties of gradation between black and white rather than varieties of actual colour, took full advantage of their hitherto unexplored wealth of suggestion. Leaving all metaphor out of court, his actual eyesight was astonishingly keen; he saw details of architecture with the naked eye which would be revealed to average persons only by a telescope. But to him the streets of Paris were haunted places, peopled with ghosts and wet with tears. Their atmosphere was infected by old crimes and miseries and sins. The lonely meditations of a brain already morbid, affected even when he was a boy by the discovery that he was a bastard, suspicious in later life and shrinking from human intercourse, were reflected in the melancholy which seems, to sympathetic observers, to brood over the dark narrow streets, survivors of a mediæval Paris, much of which was doomed to destruction in the great demolitions and reconstructions of the Second Empire. But Meryon did not trust entirely to sympathetic observation to discern his meaning. He expressed himself directly in verses, which were meant to be published, and in some cases actually were published, along with the architectural etchings, to explain what reflections the subjects aroused in the etcher’s mind. Sometimes these verses were etched at the foot of the subject itself, as in the fourth state of Le Stryge; more often they were etched on separate plates, in cursive writing, with little ornaments and rather elaborate capitals, the stanzas carefully spaced in a decorative arrangement. They may be seen reproduced, so far as they were actually etched, in M. Loys Delteil’s catalogue, but the whole of Meryon’s verses, including some that he did not etch, are collected and presented in a more legible form, being printed with type, in Aglaüs Bouvenne’s “Notes et Souvenirs sur Charles Meryon.” They are jerky, queer and amateurish verses, but they throw so much light on Meryon’s mentality that they must not be neglected by any student of his art.

It is time that we returned to the Paris etchings themselves, of which only one, Le Petit Pont (plate 7), has hitherto been mentioned in our survey of the progress of Meryon’s work. The complete series as he published them himself, in three parts, between 1852 and 1854, consists of twenty-two etchings,[2] preceded by a portrait of Meryon etched by Bracquemond; not the half-length portrait, seated, with the hand resting on the back of a chair (plate 1),[3] which was etched in 1853 (Beraldi 77), but the head in profile to the left (Beraldi 78), in imitation of an antique sculpture in relief, with the legend, composed and etched by Meryon himself, in 1854:

Of the “cahiers” which were issued of the Paris set, containing this portrait, probably not one remains to-day intact. The twenty-two etchings by Meryon himself consisted of an etched title (plate 2) printed on grey, brown, blue or green paper (in which, it should be noticed, as well as in the address etched at the foot of each plate, the etcher calls himself Meryon, not Méryon), four small preliminary etchings, twelve important subjects, which bear numbers in the final state, which was not printed till 1861 and then in an edition of thirty only, and five more plates which were never numbered, and which, as regards size at least, must be counted as “minor” works, though they include La Rue des Mauvais Garçons (plate 10), a plate to which posterity attaches a high value, if Meryon did not do so himself. Some of the minor etchings are so extremely rare that they must have been printed in small numbers and not generally included in the “cahier.” Several rather important etchings of Paris were done at a later date, and did not form part of the “Eaux-Fortes sur Paris” set.

The dedication to Zeeman, “peintre des matelots” (plate 3), is in verses which express in simple language Meryon’s love and admiration for the master who had inspired his early efforts, concluding with the words:—