The Etchings of Charles Meryon

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 etchers 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 confrre 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. Meryons 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 Thophile 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, Meryons former shipmate De Salicis, the English etcher Seymour Haden, and a few others who saw the great merit of his work{2} 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 Burtys 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 Impriale at the Louvre to commission and publish one of his plates, LAncien 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, graves par moi leau-forte, intitules Eaux-fortes sur Paris. It was not till 1910 that the first collective exhibition of Meryons 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, Meryons reputation grew more rapidly, at least after his death. The great French private collections of his etchings crossed the Channel, Burtys being sold in 1876, and the year 1879, eleven years after Meryons 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 Burling{3}ton 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 dorigine. 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 Edinburghs gain is far less than was Glasgows 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 uvre 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 artists birth. The story of Meryons 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{4} 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 sons 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, Hyres, 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 fathers 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 re{5}mained in his familys 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 Tte de chien de la Nouvelle-Hollande (D. 65), the ships pet whose queer habits and tragic death by falling overboard before Meryons eyes are graphically described in one of his letters quoted at length in Burtys 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, Eugne Blry, 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.{6} ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 66036
Author: Dodgson, Campbell
Release Date: Aug 11, 2021
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Editor: Holme, C. Geoffrey (Charles Geoffrey), 1887-1954