1. Paris Transformed

Herbert, Robert L.

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1. Paris Transformed

Robert L. Herbert

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

When Henry Tuckerman came to Paris in 1867, one of the thousands of Americans attracted there by the huge international exposition, he was bowled over by the extraordinary changes since his previous visit twenty years before...

Author

Robert L. Herbert

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.1-32

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00067.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15802

Chapter subject tags:Impressionism (Art)--FranceParis (France)--History--1789-1900Grands boulevards (Paris, France)Haussmann, Georges Eugène, baron, 1809-1891Industrialization--Europe--HistoryMonet, Claude, 1840-1926Art and society--France--History--19th centuryRenoir, Auguste, 1841-1919Manet, Édouard, 1832-1883Degas, Edgar, 1834-1917Caillebotte, Gustave, 1848-1894

1. Paris Transformed

Your city, O Paris, is the world!
Your people, humanity.

—H. Derville, Paris nouveau, 1857

City without past, full of minds without memories, of hearts
without tears, of souls without love! City of uprooted multitudes,
mobile heap of human dust, you can grow and become the
capital of the world: you will never have citizens!

—Louis Veuillot, Les Odeurs de Paris, 1867

Elegance shoulders the uncouth to the rear, and with it hustles
into oblivion much of romance.

—Edward King, My Paris, 1868

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Description: Garden of the Princess, Louvre, detail by Monet, Claude

1. Monet, detail of Garden of the Princess (Pl. 14).

When Henry Tuckerman came to Paris in 1867, one of the thousands of Americans attracted there by the huge international exposition, he was bowled over by the extraordinary changes since his previous visit twenty years before. The visitor, he wrote,

finds the noble arcade of the Rue Rivoli indefinitely extended, the new wing of the Louvre, an imposing and solid line of masonry, approaching its junction with the Tuileries…. Another striking change is visible in the fresh tint of nearly every structure along the principal thoroughfares—the effect of whitewash, paint, or the mason’s hammer renewing the face of the stone-work, and giving a singular lightness to the streets; sidewalks, too, have multiplied, and the whole aspect of Paris made new, commodious, and progressive.1 Tuckerman 1867, p. 17.

He notes the surprisingly cosmopolitan nature of the renovated city, in which the Gallic character he knew has been “invaded and encroached upon” by “foreign elements.” In restaurants he is amused, and a little dismayed, at being offered “cotelettes à la Victoria.” Streets, theaters, and cafés are thronged by foreigners and French dressed in the latest fashions. Signs of prosperity and change greet the visitor at every turn:

Baron Haussmann, the Prefect, has cut through streets, demolished whole quarters, made space and substituted modern elegance for old squalor. Those parts of the city which are in a state of demolition, present enormous high walls with the irregular smoke-stains of the dismantled chimneys, moving zig-zag higher and higher, and looking ready to topple over as you slowly pass through a crush of vehicles and debris of mortar and stones.

In the midst of his wonder and fascination, Tuckerman is also struck by the loss of the old Paris, and he places himself among those

who, in the midst of the “improvements,” like to recall the Paris of the time before the Empire; to turn from foreign clubs and cosmopolitan corso, from American gossip and Imperial receptions, from gas and glitter and the immense crowds…, and revive the memories of a favorite saloon, the talk of a cosy old café, the traditions of the first revolution—the spirit whereof yet gleams from the savage eyes of many a surly ouvrier, on his long walk from his work to the suburbs—in a word, the characteristic and normal traits and triumphs of the French metropolis, when it was more exclusively the nursery of Gallic genius and character….2 Tuckerman 1867, pp. v-vi.

He wonders, then, if all the glory of the new Paris has not been won at considerable cost: loss of the historic old Paris and of the old “Gallic genius.” All his instincts as an ardent democrat are sharpened by what he sees about him, “a certain reserve alien to the genius of the place, and discordant with our recollection of it.” On the street he witnesses a policeman in the act of silencing a pedestrian for singing the Marseillaise, forbidden because of its evocation of revolution. He is unable to get his English newspaper from the post office, because it contains an article “obnoxious to the government,” and when he expresses surprise that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is translated as Père Tom, the bookseller answers: “Monsieur, there have been so many jokes about ‘His Uncle’ that the word is suspicious here.” Tuckerman hardly needed such reminders of imperial power to conclude that “the trampled throne, the spasmodic republic, the bloody massacre, the cunning usurpation” have intervened “between the Paris of my remembrance and the Paris of today.” He informs his readers that no alert American would be fooled by “the physical renovation of the metropolis, the sagacious device of a great Exposition of the world’s products” into an unalloyed admiration of the material splendors laid before him.

As for the Parisians, they have simply been bought off by prosperity. “From the duchess to the drab,” he writes, “the shop-keeper to the dandy, all have their brokers; increase of luxury, larger need of cash, in a word, ‘pecuniary considerations,’ have done more to strangle incipient revolution than the army.” Louis Napoleon, Tuckerman sees, “works cunningly upon the prejudices and passions of the people, making old men exclaim ‘he is doing for France more than his uncle,’ as they complacently examine a new vista of streets.”3 Tuckerman 1867, p. 67; for other phrases cited, see pp. 15–17. Tuckerman was an unusually perceptive observer, but he was not alone in his views. A good many Parisians, from the exiled Victor Hugo on the Left to Louis Veuillot on the Right, shared his view that Paris’s rampant prosperity and public show were a disguise for Louis Napoleon’s dictatorial power and for his destruction of the old Paris, whose torn-down sites he handed over to speculators, and whose salvaged bits and pieces were placed in the new Musée Carnavalet, cynically devoted to “vieux Paris.”

To the historian of Impressionism, it is important to look at this altered Paris, because its new streets and squares, its expositions, cafés, restaurants, and theaters are the images we see in the paintings of Manet, Degas, Morisot, Cassatt, Monet, Caillebotte, and Renoir. Manet shows us men and women in the fashionable new brasseries and cafés; he paints the approaches to the fairgrounds of the 1867 exposition and the streets in the renovated district where he lives, near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Degas shows men outside the stock exchange and at the racetrack; he shows middle-class women in fashionable hat shops, and prostitutes seated at sidewalk cafés. Monet represents the grands boulevards, glittering centers of commerce and tourism, he and Renoir paint the new squares and quais. Caillebotte takes us upon the new bridge over the tracks of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and Monet places us in the train shed and also out on the tracks.

Does this mean that they are partisans of the Emperor’s new society, that they celebrate its shiny exterior, that they wear the mask of gaiety which, Tuckerman tells us, “reconciles many a giddy noddle to the loss of the liberty cap”? The answer to this question is not a simple yes or no. The impressionists, whose politics, as far as they can be determined, vary greatly one from the other, do not line up neatly on the side of Tuckerman or Veuillot. They do not cozy up to the Emperor nor to the government which succeeded his. The nature of their art which, superficially viewed, seems a whole-hearted adoption of the new city, is extraordinarily complex. In it we shall find not just happy strollers and charming waitresses: we shall find also pensive women alone in cafés or theater loges; couples seated in cafés or offices, bearing troubled expressions; men at windows, looking out on a few isolated pedestrians in the unfriendly expanse of pavement and sidewalk. We shall follow the impressionists out to the suburbs, also, and witness the effects on once-quiet villages of picnickers and others who seek entertainment outside the city. We shall go further, out to the seaports along the Channel coast, and see how impressionist painting reveals the conversion of fishing ports into outposts of Parisian society.

Paris Transformed

Before 1848 Paris was characterized by narrow, encumbered streets and bridges (Pl. 2). Earlier plans for transverse avenues that would speed movement through the city had seldom been carried through. The rue de Rivoli, cherished idea of the first Napoleon, was completed only over the years 1853 to 1857, providing the first clear route through the heart of the city from east to west. The new boulevard Saint-Michel through the Latin Quarter was continued northwards by the new boulevard Sébastopol. By the 1870s hundreds of miles of old streets had been altered, widened, and connected with new ones, including the hub of avenues around the Etoile, the boulevard Saint-Germain and the avenue de l’Opéra (Pl. 3). New streets like the boulevard Magenta were established to reorient the central city towards its suburbs, the near suburbs being annexed to the city in 1861.

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Description: The Rue des Sept Voies by Marville, Charles

2. Charles Marville, The Rue des Sept Voies, before 1862. Photograph, 31.4 × 26.8 cm. Paris, Musée Carnavalet.

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Description: The Avenue de l'Opéra by Unknown

3. The Avenue de l’Opéra. Photograph from Fernand Bournon, Paris-Atlas, 1900, p. 7.

Along the Seine, whole strips of buildings were razed to provide new quais which opened the banks of the river to vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Before 1848 the Seine often had to be approached at right angles along narrow streets. Masses of buildings crowded the river’s edges, frequently preventing movement along its banks. Between 1852 and 1863 eight new bridges were built, several others were rebuilt (including the removal of shops and other forms of superstructure), and tolls were suppressed on all but two of them. These drastic changes played a major role in opening up the river and its banks to increased commerce. They opened it up also to light and air, and contributed to the embellishment of the city that catered to tourism, a rapidly growing industry in its own right.

A good sense of the extent of these alterations can be gained from the views published by the architect Fédor Hoffbauer in 1885. He juxtaposed aspects of the contemporary city with visual reconstructions of the same sites as they would have appeared one or more generations earlier. Plate 4 shows the Petit Pont, which joins the Ile de la Cité to the left bank, as it looked in about 1830, and Plate 5, the same area in 1880. The old bridges have been replaced by single spans that offer no obstruction to river traffic. For the sake of improved land traffic, the old shops on the bridge in the distance were eliminated. The buildings along the bank were removed, a new street put in their place, and a new row of buildings was erected, set back from the river.

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Description: The Petit Pont as it appeared c. 1830 by Benoist, Philippe

4. Philippe Benoist after Hoffbauer, The Petit Pont as it appeared c. 1830. Color lithograph from Fédor (T.J.H.) Hoffbauer, Paris à travers les âges, vol. 2, 1882, pl. IV.

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Description: The Petit Pont as it appeared c. 1880 by de Bayalos, A.

5. A. de Bayalos after Hoffbauer, The Petit Pont as it appeared c. 1880. Color lithograph from Fédor (T.J.H.) Hoffbauer, Paris à travers les âges, vol. 2, 1882, pl. v.

These changes are not only of substance, but of “style,” that is, the altered forms of the later view embody the new Paris. Instead of being massive, and varied in their individual masses, the later forms are light in weight and very regular. The new bridge seems to leap across the river with the quickness of the new city. Our view down the river is no longer obstructed, and the new street that runs along it further opens up this view, accentuated in turn by the implacable regularity of those new buildings. Dark shadows are no longer cast across the river, and the small compartments of limited space have given way to the open display of light and air.

These and other alterations of Paris were done at great costs, of which the least significant was the monetary one. Many tens of thousands of people were evicted from old buildings to make way for new streets, quais, bridges, and buildings, nearly 14,000 from the Ile de la Cité alone. In a pattern all too familiar to twentieth-century city dwellers, poor residents (including Tuckerman’s “surly ouvrier”) were pushed out to the edge of the city, their homes replaced by government and commercial buildings, or by new apartments beyond their means. And an equally grievous loss was suffered as the result of the destruction of tens of thousands of old structures, some of them notable monuments, others the quasi-anonymous urban buildings of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Some writers voiced regret at the destruction of historic Paris: Veuillot, Hugo, des Essarts, Bouilhet, Fournel, de Lasteyrie. Haussmann was accused of vandalism. “Cruel demolisher,” wrote the poet Charles Valette in 1856, “what have you done with the past?/ I search in vain for Paris; I search for myself.”4 Cited in Citron 1961, vol. 1, p. 335. By the early 1860s there was a widespread movement to record buildings of “vieux Paris” before they were destroyed, and artists like Martial and Delauney made such sites the mainstay of their etchings. However, the boom in commerce and real estate, which shifted vast sums of money into the coffers of the entrepreneurs who increasingly dominated society, simply swamped the opposition. Théophile Gautier, for example, expressed some regret at the loss of historic buildings, but was seduced by the grandeur of the new city and the forward surge of France’s industry and commerce. He phrased it succinctly and cruelly: “Every man who takes a step forward treads on the ashes of his forefathers.” There is a cost, yes, in the loss of so much of old Paris, but this loss is put under the “purifying sign” of the renovated city, which

ventilates itself, cleans itself, makes itself healthier, and puts on its civilized attire [“toilette de civilization”]: no more leprous quarters, no more malarial alleys, no more damp hovels where misery is joined to epidemic, and too often to vice.5 Preface to Fournier 1855, pp. iii, xi.

History has to retire in favor of progress, according to partisans of the new order, and history means not just old buildings, but the traditional subjects of the arts. Artists are urged to cast historical subjects aside in order to plunge into the present. In 1858 Maxime Du Camp cried:

Everything advances, expands, and increases around us…. Science produces marvels, industry accomplishes miracles, and we remain impassive, insensitive, disdainful, scratching the false chords of our lyres, closing our eyes in order not to see, or persisting in looking towards a past that nothing ought to make us regret. Steam is discovered, and we sing to Venus, daughter of the briny main; electricity is discovered, and we sing to Bacchus, friend of the rosy grape. It’s absurd!6 Du Camp 1858, preface, p. 5.

The confrontation between the old and the new, between Venus and steam power, was made very graphically in the huge World’s Fair of 1867 (Pl. 6), devised by Napoleon III as a proof of France’s rise to new prominence in industry and the arts. Industry was represented by the latest machinery, both of large and small scale, the arts by a fine-arts section and, more numerously, by reproductions and imitations of earlier art with the aid of modern machinery. It was the “Exposition universelle” which drew Henry Tuckerman and millions of visitors to Paris, where they witnessed perhaps the highest moment of the Second Empire (they little expected it would shortly afterwards begin to falter). Edward King, another Exposition visitor, began his book about Paris in 1867 by asserting that

The modern Babylon gets improvements, wondrous adornment, so marvelously quick that one might imagine the last of the Caesars had been taught the secret of summoning the obedient genii. Myriad blue-bloused workmen stand in rows, wield their nervous arms, and straightway magic palaces rise, glittering promenades are thronged, where of late stood only mean and narrow streets, dirty and hideous pavements.7 King 1868, p. 1.

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Description: The Paris World's Fair, 1867 by Unknown

6. The Paris World’s Fair, 1867. Unsigned engraving from L. Dubech and P. d’Espézel, Histoire de Paris, 2 vols., 1931, vol. 2, p. 162.

The fair, ostensibly dedicated to progress and peace, was built on the Champ de Mars, the military parade ground in front of the Ecole Militaire, an irony not lost on Tuckerman, nor on some other contemporaries. That new industry, progress in short, was linked with the armed might of the last of the Caesars was made clear in the military displays of the “National Panorama,” one of the “magic palaces” on the fairgrounds (few visitors, if any, recognized the ominous portent in one of Prussia’s main exhibits, a huge Krupp cannon).

In Edouard Manet’s painting of the 1867 fair (Pl. 7), three imperial guardsmen on the far right represent the Empire. One is seated, and another has his hat off, so they have no threatening aspect, but their red trousers are the brightest spots of color in the painting. Like Henry Tuckerman, Manet has made us aware that soldiers are omnipresent in 1867. His painting is both a confrontation with the Empire and a celebration of it.8 See Mainardi 1980 for an astute analysis. Fearing exclusion by the jury of the official Salon exhibition (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Cézanne were all rejected), Manet had built his own exhibition pavilion on the place de l’Alma, across the river from the fairgrounds. He showed fifty of his paintings there, not far from another self-directed pavilion, this one by Courbet, that other enfant terrible of the Second Empire whose Pavilion of Realism of 1855 had given Manet the idea. By the time of the fair, Manet had succeeded Courbet as the most controversial living artist, and he had something of the older painter’s pride in the powers of self-advertisement. The giant fair nonetheless overwhelmed his exhibition, and his confrontation with officialdom drew little public notice.

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Description: View of the Paris World's Fair by Manet, Edouard

7. Manet, View of the Paris World’s Fair, 1867. 108 × 196 cm. Oslo, National Museum.

Had Manet walked westward down the Seine a short distance from his unpopular pavilion, he would have reached the hill of the Trocadéro, newly landscaped for the occasion; it was from this hill that he has us look out on the 1867 fairgrounds. Probably done in June 1867, the painting is ambitious in its size, but it was never completed. Along the left, its most unfinished section, one makes out the overlarge stone arches of the Pont de l’Alma (leading to his and Courbet’s exhibitions). Near it is the National Panorama, the one devoted to changing displays of military prowess. Above the roofs of the numerous “magic palaces” rise two lighthouse towers, whose purpose was to demonstrate the wonder of electric light, the French tower left of center, the British one off to the right, further back. In the constant disputes between past and present which Maxime Du Camp had pointed to in 1856, the British lighthouse was attacked as too much industry, too little art. Its open girder work was compared unfavorably to the well-sheathed French spire. Industry has its symbol also in the puffs of smoke from the fairgrounds’ steam works in the center which partly obscure the distant dome of the Invalides: a piece of visual naturalism in which Manet confounds a well-known symbol of military authority. Far more prominent than this obscured dome, echo of the past, is the balloon in the upper right, “The Giant,” that saucy symbol of progress which belonged to Manet’s friend, the famous photographer and caricaturist, Nadar.

From the balloon Nadar could have looked down on the sweeping curve of the Seine which separates the Champ de Mars from the hill of the Trocadéro. One of the curious features of Manet’s painting is the disappearance of the river behind the slope in the foreground, as though he had stood further back and looked through binoculars, whose distortions create such flat, rising planes. This radical shortcut let him juxtapose the people in the foreground directly to the fair buildings, requiring us to compare, or adjust, the two areas of concern. In the foreground Manet arranged a panorama of Parisian society in 1867. In the lower left is a groundskeeper, one of the ubiquitous “blue-bloused workmen” that Edward King noticed. Above him are two women in lower-class dress, while next to them, walking to the right, are two more elegantly costumed women. Further back is a well-dressed couple, the man gazing at Nadar’s balloon through binoculars. In the center is that contemporary figure, an amazone, a woman riding without escort. Behind her are two city children seated on the grass, providing contrast for the elegant young boy in the right foreground. Above him, next to the guardsmen, are two fashionably dressed men. Like the other figures, they are given a contrived position, since they stand on a neat line going from the workman in the lower left back across to the guardsmen. Crossing this line is its symmetrical counterpart, from the boy and his dog in the lower right back to the women on the left; the Amazon is the common pivoting point for both diagonals. Further symmetry is established by the couple to the left of the Amazon and the children to her right. The more we look into this picture the more apparent is its order for, despite his spirit of confrontation, Manet gives his composition something of the implacable regularity of Napoleon’s and Haussmann’s scheme of things.

Of course this form of celebrating Paris in 1867 would not have been to the liking of either of those autocrats. Manet had marked himself out as a rebel against the government’s art policies and the radical abbreviations of his style were hardly its kind of art. Louis Napoleon would have been even more convinced of Manet’s rebelliousness had he known of the artist’s next major undertaking. His View of the Paris World’s Fair was left in an unfinished state and never shown, partly because Manet turned his attention to another notable current event. On 19 June 1867, the French puppet, Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, was executed by Mexican nationalists. When news of this event reached France in July, Manet began the first of a series of four paintings (Pl. 63) and a lithograph on the subject. Although his intentions in choosing it are not known, the fall of Maximilian could only be seen as a disgrace to the French government and indeed, the printing of his lithograph of the execution was subsequently forbidden by the government censor.

Not to be favored by the government was the lot also of Renoir, Monet, and the other impressionists. They did not have Manet’s notoriety, but it should also be said that their paintings seldom confronted established authority to the same polemical degree. The history of their rejection by official exhibition juries is the more expected one: the reluctance of members of established institutions to accept the innovations of their challengers. Both Monet and Renoir were rejected by the jury of the 1867 Salon, whose exhibition coincided with the World’s Fair. They joined with Manet, Morisot, and several others in trying to arrange a separate exhibition of their work, but the project was not realized that year. Like Manet, they nonetheless found ways to join in the celebration of Paris in its festive garb, that is, in its newly widened streets, squares, and quais, whose reconstruction had been accelerated to provide a proud setting for the great fair.

For The Champs-Elysées during the Paris Fair of 1867 (Pl. 8), Renoir chose a panoramic view that emphasized trees, shrubbery, and lawns, with only two hints of the surrounding city: in the distance, the roofs of the Palais de l’Industrie (built for the 1855 fair), and on the right, the Café des Ambassadeurs. The axis of the avenue slants back to the right, but it is so unobtrusive that we might imagine ourselves in a huge park. Along the sand pathways some thirty adults and children can be distinguished, all of them neatly dressed. A further number are bunched on the left and in the right distance; a group sits on the grass in the lower left, others in the center. In the foreground is a newly planted mound, attended by a worker in vest and shirtsleeves. This portion of the composition reminds us of Manet’s view of the fair, but whether or not Renoir saw the unfinished work in Manet’s studio, he gave to the Champs-Elysées a similar, well-disposed order.

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Description: The Champs-Elysées during the Paris Fair of 1867 by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

8. Renoir, The Champs-Elysées during the Paris Fair of 1867, 1867. 76 × 130 cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Wildenstein & Co.

In another picture done that same spring, Le Pont des Arts (Pl. 9), Renoir shows the extent to which he favored the new city over the old. He could, after all, have selected one of the quaint, dark streets that still twisted through Paris, many of them near the narrow rue Visconti on which he, Bazille, and Monet then lived. To have done so, however, would have placed him automatically in the camp of romantic artists of the previous generation, rather than the forward-looking group he had attached himself to. This can be made clear by comparing Le Pont des Arts with a work by one of the great romantics, Decamps’s Job and his Friends (Pl. 11). Each typifies its generation, and the differences are instructive. Decamps treats a biblical subject, and gives it the urban environment favored by so many painters and writers of the Romantic era, one of those cramped streets rich in shadows and human events (Pl. 2), those same streets whose destruction was lamented by Henry Tuckerman when he reached Paris in 1867. Renoir instead chose one of the most conspicuous of the new vistas of the Second Empire. He shows the Pont des Arts from the quai Malaquais (Pl. 17) which Haussmann had altered and widened. We are directly below the Pont du Carrousel, whose shadow along the base of the picture tells us of the people walking across the bridge overhead. What a contrast this shadow is with those in Decamps’s painting! Decamps’s “malarial alleys” dominate his painting in order to reinforce the drama of his subject. Renoir’s shadow pulls us instead into the matter-of-fact activity of the present moment. He floods his picture with light and air, as Haussmann has done for Paris, and he shows us the tourists and strollers who admire the new Paris while benefiting from the new prospects it offered them. Responding to the dome of the Institut de France, the visible presence of history, on the right side, there loom along the left edge of the composition the twin roofs of the theaters of the Châtelet, built only five years earlier. Some forty people, anonymous as ants, cross the new bridge in the left mid-distance. In the middle distance (Pl. 10) people are coming to and from the sightseeing boat, whose wake is churning below the French flag, just beyond the moored barge in the foreground. These people, dressed in current fashion, are framed on the right by a working-class woman and two children, and on the left by a sailor seated at the quai’s edge. To round out this society, two imperial guardsmen stand at the top of the curving ramp.

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Description: Le Pont des Arts by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

9. Renoir, Le Pont des Arts, 1867. 62 × 102 cm. Los Angeles, The Norton Simon Foundation.

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Description: Le Pont des Arts, detail by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

10. Renoir, detail of Le Pont des Arts (Pl. 9).

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Description: Job and His Friends by Decamps, Alexandre

11. Alexandre Decamps, Job and his Friends, c. 1855. 119.4 × 85.7 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Gift of Mrs. Erasmus C. Lindley.

As he had in his Champs-Elysées picture, Renoir furnishes a representative selection of current society, albeit one that favors the well-to-do visitors and strollers of 1867. These casually posed figures, standing and walking about, have supplanted Job and his friends. Religion, history, and mythology, the mainstays of French painting until 1848, were simply done away with by the impressionists. This casting out of history had been well launched by Courbet, Millet, and other artists in the 1850s, but the process was completed and urbanized, as it were, by the impressionists. It was a drastic “purification,” a wrenching of art into the present. It may not seem as ruthless a process as Haussmann’s demolishing of thousands of historic buildings, but by refusing to go through government art schools, by creating independent exhibition societies, by opposing so much of traditional art, the impressionists helped destroy the whole academic system. After 1870 few significant artists grew out of the old system, and one can easily detect the anguish of conservative artists, unwilling to give up their Venuses and Bacchuses, unwilling to forsake the whole system of schools, prizes, and exhibitions that underpinned traditional subjects and styles.

Directly across the river from Renoir’s site is the eastern end of the Louvre. Like the quai Malaquais, this area had been cleared and reconstructed by Haussmann, and it is here in April and May 1867, just when Renoir was painting the Pont des Arts, that Monet set up his easel for his first important pictures of Paris.9 In Isaacson 1966 the three paintings are perceptively studied. From the second-floor balcony of the Louvre itself Monet made three paintings. In one (Pl. 12) he showed the gothic church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois and the newly cleared-out square in front of it, well populated by a dense throng under the shelter of young trees. A number of sightseeing carriages and about twenty-five people are out in the open, well-dressed people rather like those Renoir painted on the quai opposite. In the other two paintings Monet looked over towards the dome of the Panthéon, creating a deeper space whose skyline is punctuated by easily recognized domes and spires. In the foreground of one of this pair (Pl. 13) he represents numbers of people on sidewalks and in the street, and in mid-distance, the narrow but prominent sweep of the Seine. In the other, Garden of the Princess (Pl. 14), the dome of the Panthéon is placed exactly on the center line of a dramatic vertical composition.

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Description: Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois by Monet, Claude

12. Monet, Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, 1867. 79 × 98 cm. Berlin, National-galerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

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Description: The Quai du Louvre by Monet, Claude

13. Monet, The Quai du Louvre, 1867. 65.5 × 93 cm. The Hague, Haags Gemeentemuseum.

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Description: Garden of the Princess, Louvre by Monet, Claude

14. Monet, Garden of the Princess, 1867. 91 × 62 cm. Oberlin, Allen Memorial Art Museum. Gift R.T. Miller, Jr. Fund, 48.296.

In Garden of the Princess, the water virtually disappears and it requires familiarity with the scene to realize that the river flows along between the trees in mid-distance and the darker mass of foliage further off. Through a convenient gap in the near foliage, the knowing eye also spots the superstructure of a moored bathing establishment below the distant foliage, that is, along the edge of the Ile de la Cité. Above it is the brightest patch of color in the whole picture: the red, white, and blue of the national flag, marking a government dock at that point (perhaps another bâteau mouche for the visitors swarming through Paris). This is a curious, indirect way of locating the Seine which, after all, determines the plans of the adjacent quai and the buildings beyond to the left, on the island, and to the right, on the opposite bank.

It becomes obvious that Monet’s interest is not that of the topographical artist (Pl. 15), whose purpose is to provide the maximum of information. Taken from higher up on the Louvre, and closer to the building’s corner, the lithographer’s view is remarkably different. It represents Paris of several years earlier, when the trees along the quai were still quite young. Even so, the topographer’s goal is to exhibit to its advantage the rebuilt city, and foliage would not be permitted to hide any significant features. Monet’s goal is to make a naturalistic interpretation of the city so that the observer locates the Seine by adjusting a series of clues, seemingly casual in their arrangement. Other aspects of the painting lead to a feeling of this same apparent casualness. In the foreground, the large green segment of the garden floats off the bottom and right edges. Thanks to its eccentric angles, we have a feeling of excitement and tentativeness in Monet’s picture, appropriate to our height and to the expression of wonder that the new Paris induced in Monet, and now in us. Our eye plunges across and up, to find the compact mass of urban activity in the center (Pl. 1). The fact that this Y-shaped funnel of action is buoyed up by the tilted plane of the garden is one of the secrets of Monet’s structure, for it lacks the prominent inward-slanting axes and the heavy weights that we find at the base of traditional cityscapes. As a painter, not a topographer, Monet builds his composition with just a few units, and these are simply treated; his aim is effect, not information. The same was true of Manet, who dropped the Seine out of the middle of his picture of the World’s Fair (Pl. 7), and of Renoir, who obscured the axis of the Champs-Elysées (Pl. 8).

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Description: View of Paris from the Louvre by Benoist, Philippe

15. Philippe Benoist, View of Paris from the Louvre. Lithograph from Armand Audiganne and P. Bailly, Paris dans sa splendeur, 2 vols., 1863, vol. 2, pl. 60.

Squeezed into its confined area, the only activity in Monet’s painting consists of several dozens of pedestrians, one horseman, and five carriages (one of which heads towards us to mark the path of the street to our left). With astonishing virtuosity, the twenty-seven-year-old artist invents a visual shorthand—the notorious “tongue-lickings” hated by conservative critics—to capture the movement and variety of urban traffic:

The flicker of the passage of a form behind a grille of repeated verticals is masterfully recreated. The visual effect of such a situation, in which neither body nor grille can be clearly perceived, is captured by the thin, incomplete, and dryly brushed uprights of the fence—here interrupting a figure, there interrupted by one.10 Isaacson
1966, p. 20.

The only figures easily detached from the crowd, more clearly silhouetted than any others, articulate the open spaces: to the right of center, two figures punctuate the gap between the trees; they are walking in front of the ramp that curves down to the lower quai. Towards the left edge, a woman and man stroll inside the garden, making its geometric emptiness all the more apparent.

The artful care with which Monet built his exhilarating view of Paris, although its parts may seem randomly chosen, is signalled by its echoing symmetries. The dome of the Panthéon is flanked by the tower of Saint-Etienne du Mont and the dome of the chapel of the Sorbonne. The clump of buildings on the far left is echoed by another on the right edge. The dome above, on the picture’s central axis, is saluted by the tree along the bottom edge, just right of center. Stability is reinforced by our sensing the visual square that the city forms beneath the skyline (the distance from the top of the Panthéon to the base of the picture exactly equals its width). The sky, taking up two-fifths of the surface of the canvas, establishes the moist, grey light so typical of the Paris basin, that soft, shadowless light which helps unify the composition. We are tempted, in fact, to think of this painting as a homage to natural substances. Approximately four-fifths of its area represents sky, tree foliage, and the garden. However, except for the sky, this is man-made, or man-determined nature. More than that, it is the newly rebuilt, well-controlled nature of the Second Empire, symbolized by that busily colored flag amongst the foliage. The Garden of the Princess, evocation of aristocratic lineage, is observed from the balcony of the royal, now imperial palace, looking over towards the pantheon of France’s great figures. Buildings redolent of French history and authority surmount a space whose support is that neatly trimmed garden, blocked off from the ordinary life of the street, accessible to those willing to observe its well-regulated paths. Monet’s painting, like those of Renoir and Manet, is characterized by order, symmetry, nature made the servant of government as well as of artistic purpose, throngs channeled into prescribed patterns, clear, natural light suffused throughout the scene. What is this but a homage to Paris in 1867, to the city which, like it or not, was being endowed with purifying light and air by society’s new planners?

The End of Empire

Henry Tuckerman, that unreconstructed republican from America, wondered just how long the bubbling prosperity of Louis Napoleon’s Paris could keep discontent from bursting forth. If, he wrote, “we inquire into the condition of the working class, we learn that occupations too expensive for the coffers of the state are projected to keep them busy, and therefore less disposed to rebel.” Tuckerman was no revolutionary, but he had sensed a pent-up desire for change, a desire frustrated since the European-wide ferment of 1848. An intelligent observer in 1867 was bound to sympathize, he said, with

the problems which, in spite of bayonets, surveillance, treaties, cowardice, and hypocrisy, wait solution in Europe. The conviction is overwhelming that the people ‘stand and wait;’ their experiments, however futile in appearance, are only suspended, not abandoned; their wrongs accumulate only to be the more certainly vindicated.11 Tuckerman 1867, p. 20.

Tuckerman correctly predicted a crisis, but he could not have foreseen the peculiar and tragic form it took: war, siege, and famine in Paris, the brief hegemony of the Commune, and its bloody repression in the May days of 1871.

For, three years after the Paris Universal Exposition came a great watershed in the history of Paris and of France. Haussmann, under increasing attack for the ruthlessness of his projects and the financial legerdermain that sustained them, was finally dismissed by Louis Napoleon in January 1870. Seven months later the Emperor was manoeuvred into war with Prussia, and on 2 September, at the head of his troops, he suffered a disastrous defeat at Sedan. Krupp’s cannons rumbled towards Paris, this time not for exhibition, but for the real business of siege and bombardment. In January, after a four-month siege of the capital, which suffered ever-worsening famine, the interim French government had to sign a humiliating armistice with the new German empire.

Defeat and occupation would have been a sufficient national trauma, but still more was to come. In mid-March, angered at what they regarded as betrayal and incompetence, Parisian insurgents established a radical government, the Commune of Paris, and took over the city. Hopes of a permanent revolution proved chimerical, and in May government troops marched in from Versailles to put down the Commune. The civil war that ensued was short-lived, but it left deep wounds. Paris was badly damaged (the most famous loss was the palace of the Tuileries), thousands of communards were executed without trial, and the political and psychological scars that resulted were palpable for decades.

Manet and Degas both served in the artillery, but apparently did not see active service. They suffered through the famine, however, and although they were not partisans of the Commune, both were repelled by the slaughterous repression of the insurgents.12 In a letter of 5 June (Morisot 1950, p. 58), Mme Morisot wrote her daughter that Degas and Manet “continue to condemn the drastic means of repression. I think they are mad, don’t you?” Manet’s reaction endures in the form of two lithographs and associated drawings, one that shows dead fighters by a barricade, the other (Pl. 16), Versailles troops shooting communards. For the latter, Manet used the composition of his Execution of Maximilian of 1867 (Pl. 63), transplanting it to the barricaded streets of Paris. His customary reserve and his graphic shorthand suggest the neutrality of a reporter, but at the very least he was pointing to tragedy, not to triumph. We know that he was much shaken by the whole bloody era and suffered a depression that lasted into 1872. Among the other impressionists, Bazille enlisted in the Zouaves and was killed; Renoir was conscripted into the cavalry and was returned unharmed to civilian life. After the outbreak of war in the summer of 1870, Monet and Pissarro had left for England, where they sat out the war and the Commune; Monet went on to Holland and did not return to Paris until late the next year. None of the impressionists, with the possible exception of Pissarro, was a partisan of the Commune, and, as we shall see in succeeding chapters, they accommodated well to the Third Republic as it recovered from the ashes of 1871.

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Description: The Barricade by Manet, Edouard

16. Manet, The Barricade, c. 1871. Lithograph, 46.5 × 33.4 cm. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

War reparations were paid to the Prussians with unexpected speed, and a reasonable normalcy returned to Paris by 1873, although the aftermath of the war and the Commune continued to dominate politics and people’s memories. A number of Haussmann’s projects, only partly carried out, were completed in the next few years, including the boulevard Saint-Germain, the avenue de l’Opéra, and the Opéra itself. Louis Napoleon had intended that huge building to be the setpiece of his empire, but it opened only in 1875, five years after his fall. Essentially, however, the construction of the 1870s was a consolidation of the transformation of Paris that was largely completed by 1870, and the main features of Parisian life followed the patterns already established. Newcomers continued to flood into Paris, among them many who catered to the growing population by providing the goods and services it demanded. There was a steady increase in the numbers of cafés, cafés-concerts, restaurants, theaters, and hotels, and a constant growth also in large department stores, and in shops selling Parisian fashions, cosmetics, and similar goods.

The population that supported this urban commerce, abetted by seasonal influxes of foreign and provincial visitors, had nearly doubled between 1840, the year of Monet’s birth, and 1870. In certain districts the rise in population was remarkable. In 1830, the village of Montmartre had numbered about 6,000 inhabitants and, with its immediate environs, perhaps double that number. By 1861 it had 106,000 and in 1886, just before Toulouse-Lautrec settled there, it had risen to 201,000. To cater to this huge mass of people, horse-drawn omnibuses rumbled along the new streets in great numbers. In 1855, the omnibuses carried 40 million passengers, in 1873, 116 million, and in 1882, about 200 million.13 For population and transport figures, see Merlin 1967 and Levasseur 1889–92. These figures say nothing of horse-drawn cabs and carriages for hire, and other vehicles that clogged traffic to the constant complaint of contemporaries. Already in 1866, Louis Veuillot could lament that

The streets of Paris are long and wide, bordered by immense houses. These long streets become longer every day. The wider they are, the more difficult it is to cross them. Vehicles encumber the vast pavement, pedestrians encumber the vast sidewalks. To see one of these streets from the top of one of these houses, it’s like an overflowing river that carries along the debris of a society.14 Veuillot 1866, ed. c. 1914, p. 2.

And in the following decade, city traffic grew to such an extent that by the early summer of 1881, a daily average of between 11,000 and 18,000 vehicles were counted crossing the Pont Neuf, 20,000 along the rue Royale, and the staggering figure of 100,000 down the rue Montmartre.15 Gourdon de Genouillac 1893–98, vol. 5, p. 476.

Les Grands Boulevards

The most prosperous district in central Paris through this whole period of 1850 to 1880 was formed by the grands boulevards near the Opéra, the linked avenues which stretch northeast from the church of the Madeleine (Pl. 17). This continuous arc changes its name successively from the boulevard de la Madeleine to the boulevard des Capucines, then to the boulevard des Italiens, before bending eastward to become the boulevard Montmartre and the boulevard Poissonnière. In one day, 20,000 vehicles passed along the boulevard des Italiens, according to that survey of 1881. (As a measure of the significance of this figure, the important commercial boulevard Saint-Denis further east had only 15,000 vehicles a day.) “What is the secret of the great attraction of this promenade?” wrote Edward King, at the time of his visit in 1867:

Other streets are as fresh and gay, have the same advantages of lightness, airiness, verdure of trees in the midst of rush and crowds, but no longer the same prestige. The boulevards are now par excellence the social centre of Paris. Here the aristocrat comes to lounge, and the stranger to gaze. Here trade intrudes only to gratify the luxurious…. On the grands boulevards you find porcelains, perfumery, bronzes, carpets, furs, mirrors, the furnishings of travel, the copy of Gérôme’s latest picture, the last daring caricature in the most popular journal, the most aristocratic beer, and the best flavored coffee. But prices have of late years crept up in this fashionable quarter, and he must have a long purse who will “do” the boulevards.16 King 1868, pp. 45–46. For charming and well-documented accounts of life along the boulevards, see Carnavalet 1985.

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Description: Plan of Paris from the Louvre to the Gare Saint-Lazare, detail of engraving by Ward,...

17. Plan of Paris from the Louvre to the Gare Saint-Lazare. Detail of engraving, Ward, Lock & Co., from Karl Baedeker, Paris and Environs, Leipzig 1891, frontispiece.

It is true that Haussmann and Louis Napoleon could not claim credit for making this area, already prominent under Louis Philippe, into the center it was in their day and continued to be during the Third Republic, but their policies had a large, indirect share in its glitter. The Opéra was strategically placed as the culminating point of the new avenue de l’Opéra (Pl. 3). Although this avenue was not entirely pierced through and completed until 1877, the immediate environs of the huge new building were recast, so that it was joined to the expanded Gare Saint-Lazare, to the northwest, and ringed by a whole series of entirely new streets, including the rue Auber, the rue Halévy, and the rue du Dix-Décembre (now the rue du Quatre-Septembre); the latter led to the Bourse, the city stock exchange, to the east. Between the Opéra and the Bourse, along the boulevard des Italiens, there was a thriving financial center, including a number of new deposit banks. The rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, described as the “rendez-vous principal de la fashion parisienne,”17 Joanne 1875, p. 62. intersected the boulevard des Capucines as it changed its name to the boulevard des Italiens. Several major theaters were also near the Opéra (among them the Vaudeville, the Italiens, the Nouveautés, and the Opéra comique), and the wealthy, cosmopolitan crowds were served by some of the city’s most famous cafés and restaurants. Along the boulevard des Italiens were the restaurant Maison Doré, and the cafés Riche, du Helder, Anglais, and Tortoni; along the boulevard des Capucines, the Café Américain, the Grand Café, and the Café du Grand Hôtel.

The last-named café was on the ground floor of the Grand Hôtel, in the heart of the district described by Henry James as “the classic region, about a mile in extent, which is bounded on the south by the Rue de Rivoli and on the north by the Rue Scribe, and of which the most sacred spot is the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines, which basks in the smile of the Grand Hotel.”18 James 1875–76, p. 6, letter dated 22 November 1875. In Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines of 1873 (Pl. 18), the Grand Hôtel is the building to the left. Typical result of the rampant speculation of the Second Empire, the Grand Hôtel was opened in 1862, one of the many buildings erected by the real-estate firm established by the Pereire brothers. It occupied the entire triangular plot between the boulevard des Capucines, the rue Scribe, and the new place de l’Opéra. An engraving of it under construction (Pl. 19) shows the extent of the renovations in this area (the flattened zone in the upper right is the site of the new Opéra). Baron Haussmann’s policies facilitated the demolition of old buildings along established thoroughfares, and the resultant changes of ownership favored entrepreneurs like the Pereires. The Prefect’s powers were such that he could impose uniform designs upon these buildings, as well as upon those along entirely new streets. The Grand Hôtel was required to align the levels of each story with those of nearby buildings, a policy which ensured near uniformity of design along entire streets. It was just such uniformity, not to say banality, that struck Henry Tuckerman and others as a great loss, compared to historic Paris. L. Vitet, writing in the prestigious Revue des deux mondes in 1866, complained of the monotony. He understood, he said, the virtues of modernization, “but in the midst of this more convenient, less harsh, less suffocating life, what happens to art?” The evil, as he saw it, was the triumph of the engineer over the architect, of material over art: “merely editors of projects, or passive surveyors of projects that they have not conceived, the architects of the city of Paris today are engineers. Should we be astonished that in their hands art is suffering?”19 “Le nouveau Louvre et les nouvelles Tuileries,” Revue des deux mondes 64 (1 July 1866): 93.

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Description: Boulevard des Capucines by Monet, Claude

18. Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873. 61 × 80 cm. Moscow, Pushkin Museum.

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Description: The Grand Hôtel under construction by Unknown

19. The Grand Hôtel under construction, c. 1860. Unsigned engraving from Lucien Dubech and P. d’Espézel, Histoire de Paris, 2 vols., 1931, vol. 2, p. 150.

We know that Renoir shared these ideas by 1877, when he published the first of a series of statements which decried the loss of historic buildings and their replacement by structures that are “cold and lined up like soldiers at review”;20 Letter to the editor, L’Impressionniste 3 (21 April 1877): 8. See also below, the last section of Chapter Five. statements which demanded instead that initiative be granted to the individual artist. His painting of The Great Boulevards (Pl. 20) was done two years before he composed the first of these pleas for individual creativity, but it seems reasonable to assume that he had these views already by 1875. His picture shows a Haussmannian building much like the Grand Hôtel, but only a portion of it, its regular lines softened, its roofline partly absorbed by the sky, partly assimilated by the line of tree foliage. Although these trees form a clear recession into depth, there is no strong canyon of space favored by contemporary photographers and others who were bent on capturing the long, regular vistas that characterized Second Empire planning (Pl. 3). In the foreground, near a kiosk,21 The kiosk is a “Morris column,” a typical piece of Haussmannian management; in 1868 Haussmann granted an exclusive license for its use to the Morris advertising agency. See Carnavalet 1985. a figure is seated in the shade of the trees, reading a magazine or book. Out on the pavement, in the shadow of these trees and the unseen buildings to the left, two top-hatted men converse; near them is an elegantly dressed woman, with an equally well-got-up boy and girl. To the right, a carriage is coming down the boulevard, bearing another top-hatted man and a woman with a parasol.

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Description: The Great Boulevards by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

20. Renoir, The Great Boulevards, 1875. 50 × 61 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Henry P. McIlhenny Collection.

Such figures characterize the wealthy patrons of the grands boulevards, and, like the kiosk, they constitute also diverse spots of color and life which emphasize the animation of the district with pleasing irregularity. Together with the foliage overhead (which occupies slightly more than one-quarter of the picture’s surface) and the strong play of light and shadow from the midday sun, Renoir’s figures cover over the stark regularity of Haussmann’s conception. They help expiate the crime of monotony with the aid of the picturesque. One can find similar figures in contemporary topographical views, for example, in the representation of a similar street corner (Pl. 21) published a decade earlier. The comparison shows Renoir’s alertness to the tradition of such prints. After all, he wanted to find a client capable of buying the more elegant and permanent record of a famous street which an easel painting provides (the impressionist exhibitions and Renoir’s dealer Durand-Ruel were located in this same district). The commerce he was engaged in, in other words, was related to that of the guide book.

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21. The Grand Hotel. Unsigned engraving from Adophe Joanne, Le Guide Parisien, 1863, p. 13.

Despite these real, if indirect connections, Renoir’s painting separates itself from the guide-book print, revealing their different functions. The print, like the text it accompanied, had to supply a lot of information. Its many figures and vehicles are a cross section of traffic along the grands boulevards. To the right is a corner of the new opera building, and far down the Capucines, on the extreme left, is the church of the Madeleine. Dominating all is the Grand Hôtel; nothing is allowed to interfere with the description of this massive structure. The trees, so prominent in Renoir’s picture, are inconspicuous here. They had been newly planted in 1861 or 1862, when the Grand Hôtel was completed, and the boulevard refurbished, but the function of the illustration required their subordination in any event. By contrast, the function of Renoir’s painting was to embellish the elegant street, and his foliage, like that in Monet’s Garden of the Princess (Pl. 14), was treated as a kind of verdant costume, pulled over the body of the city, which would be too plain without it.

It is not only the image of foliage, but also the brushwork and color which seem like a gauzy textile that Renoir has placed between the viewer and the harder substances that traditional painting would have disclosed. The famous “impression”—the term “impressionism” had been coined a year before Renoir’s painting—is the effect of immediacy which the artist sought, an effect achieved by strong color and rippled brushwork, which replace the crisper forms that resulted from conventional modeling. In Jean Béraud’s slightly later Paris, On the Boulevard (Pl. 22), for example, each of the forms is readily distinguished from its environment. Béraud is bent upon giving a lot of information, a plain view, not an embellished one, of a typical spot along one of the grands boulevards. We can distinguish thirteen posters on his Morris column, the legend “[Café-] Restaurant Américain” on the awning to the right, and above it, “Grand Re[staurant].” From an outdoor vendor, or perhaps from hosing down the restaurant terrace, a homely liquid stream makes its way to the gutter, the kind of detail that has no place in Renoir’s idealized view. Eleven main figures people the foreground, including an American (or perhaps British?) couple with a boy in sailor costume, and a smart French couple. Scattered behind these are twenty-nine subsidiary figures, standing on the sidewalk, seated at the restaurant, or riding in carriages. Overhead, the trees, so unlike Renoir’s, are rather mechanically separated by virtue of individual points of foliage, repeated in the shadows on the pavement.

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Description: Paris, On the Boulevard by Béraud, Jean

22. Jean Béraud, Paris, On the Boulevard, c. 1878-82. 64 × 80 cm. Collection unknown. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s.

Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (Pl. 18) looks down on a similar area near the Opéra. It was done in the autumn of 1873, preceding the first exhibition of the impressionist group (so named in the wake of that show). Like Renoir, Monet used natural forms to disguise the banality of Haussmannian architecture. We are looking out over the boulevard des Capucines towards the place de l’Opéra (Pl. 17). The Grand Hôtel is to the left, and in the center, divided by the almost imperceptible place de l’Opéra, is its virtual twin, a huge building that incorporated the Théâtre de Vaudeville; Béraud’s Café-Restaurant Américain was on the ground floor of this huge structure of 1869. Tree branches, perhaps still bearing a few autumn leaves, hide portions of the buildings and help soften the remainder. Their screening effect is enhanced because Monet adds their orange-yellow and orange-brown tones to the sunstruck pavement and buildings, the whole calculated to create the sense of midday sunlight in moist air. The line made by the huge shadow gives the axis of the street, but unlike Béraud’s composition and contemporary stereopticon photographs, Monet’s composition flattens and widens the avenue. It seems, in fact, more like a city square than the long ravine of space that contemporary photographers liked to capture. The distant sidewalk forms a horizontal, not a receding diagonal, and below it the street assumes the shape of a broad rectangle, subdivided into light and dark geometric pieces. As our eye sweeps to the right, we suddenly come to the silhouettes of two top-hatted men leaning into the picture from an unseen balcony; below them are the buildings along this side of the boulevard, a surprising effect which brings us closer to the street by making us aware of our vantage point. If the extreme right portion of the composition is blocked off, the scene becomes strangely flat and distant.

What Monet accomplished here, in 1873, and Renoir two years later, was to readjust the new Paris according to the conventions of their new art. They gave the city, to use Gautier’s phrase, its “civilized attire.”22 See above, note 5. Haussmann and Louis Napoleon had boasted of giving the city light, air, and space, and with their trees and gardens, they literally brought nature into the Parisians’ daily environment. These beneficial by products of their modernization were, of course, stated to be its actual goal and succeeded in winning the endorsement of many who regretted the destruction of old Paris. Even Vitet, when he attacked the dullness of Haussmann’s plans in 1866, admitted the gains:

These large spans, these openings, these junctions, these vast outlets that abridge distances, these creations of entirely new districts suddenly sprung from the ground, these trees, these gardens, this water that here and there interrupts and cuts across the fastidious series of streets and buildings, these are really conquests.23 P. 93 in article cited above, note 19.

Monet and Renoir took a positive view of Haussmann’s alterations. They reoriented his spans, openings, and outlets, they interpreted his light and air in terms of the intense color-light of their new palette, they rendered his trees in flickering brushwork that hides the banality of his buildings and blocks off his long, authoritarian vistas. It is as though the painters, with the passing of time, had fulfilled the wishes of Louis Bouilhet, one of Haussmann’s staunchest opponents, who had written in 1859 of the new streets and buildings in his Demolitions:

To cover them, climb up, O vines,
Break up the sidewalks’ asphalt,
Throw over the modesty of the stones
The veils of your black branches.24 Cited in Citron 1961, vol. 1, p. 336. “Pour les couvrir, montez, o lierres,/Brisez l’asphalte des trottoirs,/Jetez sur la pudeur des pierres/Le linceul de vos rameaux noirs.”

Monet’s vantage point was the second floor at the corner of the boulevard des Capucines and the rue Daunou, in Nadar’s former studio. The boulevard des Capucines offered social prestige, a location convenient to both city dwellers and suburbanites (the Gare Saint-Lazare was nearby), and a large walk-in clientèle from the crowded street. The craze for photographs had coincided with the rise of the Second Empire, and fortunes were rapidly won and lost in this business, whose volatility so well characterized Louis Napoleon’s Paris. Nearby were the quarters of Mayer et Pierson, prominent photographers of suitably international name, and on the boulevard des Italiens was the “exhibition room” of Eugène Disdéri, inventor of the photographic visiting card.25 All these photographers’ shops were listed among the attractions of the grands boulevards in Joanne 1875.

When Monet painted his picture in the fall of 1873, Nadar’s studio was vacant. He had moved on to other quarters, and had offered his space to Monet and his friends who were then working out their first group exhibition, to open the following April. The idea for an exhibition separate from dealers and official exhibition societies was endorsed most enthusiastically by Monet, who was constantly in need of money, and who pursued it with great determination. A sudden slump in the economy pinched off most of the scant dealers’ sales the young painters had been making, and they felt driven to fend for themselves. By the end of December 1873, the group had registered itself as a “Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc.” In banding together in this manner, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Berthe Morisot, Sisley, and several of their friends were emulating both the guild-like associations of artisans and craftsmen, and the small cooperative businesses that tried to find their places in Parisian commerce. “The Limited Company of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers,” that is, was forced to seek its own clients, and what better place than that most fashionable of locations, the boulevard des Capucines? Art lovers already knew the district well, not just for its shops, theaters, and cafes, but also for its numerous art dealers. Georges Petit, for example, was just a block away, on the rue de Sèze, at the beginning of the Capucines, and Durand-Ruel was further down the Italiens, on the rue Laffitte. The area remained important to the impressionists, and six of their eight group exhibitions through 1886 were held along or near the grands boulevards.

Degas was one of the most faithful contributors to those now famous exhibitions, partly because, like Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley, he had urgent need of money. Until about 1874, unlike the others, he had lived a life of relative ease and sold few works, openly expressing disdain for the art market. The death of his father in February 1874 revealed the very poor state of the family banking business, and the family’s struggling enterprise in New Orleans was itself deeply in debt. Degas felt obliged to help liquidate the business debts by seeking all means of selling his work, a painful procedure for a proud man. He might anyway have joined Monet and the others in their entrepreneurial ventures, but necessity was an additional factor.

The association of Degas’s art with the impressionists’ exhibitions shows particularly well in his Women on a Café Terrace, Evening (Pl. 47). The boulevard Montmartre continues the boulevard des Italiens at its eastern end, near the rue Le Peletier. It was on this street, near the Italiens, that the impressionists held their second and third exhibitions in 1876 and 1877. Degas’s café view was in the 1877 show, so he brought the nearby street scene into the exhibition, as Monet had in 1874, on the boulevard des Capucines. Degas’s composition was singled out by Renoir’s friend, the critic Georges Rivière, for its truthful, unembellished observation of ordinary life. Degas, he wrote,

is an observer; he never seeks exaggeration; the effect is always obtained from nature herself, without caricature. That is what makes him the most valuable historian of the scenes he shows us…. Over here are some women at the entrance of a café, in the evening. One of them strikes her thumbnail against her teeth while saying “not even that much,” which is quite a poem…. In the background is the boulevard whose bustle is diminishing little by little. This is another really extraordinary page of history.26 “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,” L’Impressioniste 1 (6 April 1877): 6, cited in Venturi 1939, vol. 2, pp. 313–14. Most of the articles in this journal, which had only four issues, are reprinted by Venturi.

Appropriately enough for the effervescent nature of a boulevard exhibition, Rivière published his article in L’Impressionniste, the short-lived journal which he put out with Renoir’s help during the 1877 show (it was here that Renoir launched his written campaign against monotony in architectural design). Like others marketing a new product, the painters had to advertise in the hope of attracting sympathetic attention. Along the grands boulevards, after all, wealthy people went shopping, and paintings were among the objects they shopped for. Two years later, still in need of the advertising that favorable reviews provide, Renoir associated himself with La Vie moderne, a weekly launched by his patrons, the Charpentiers, publishers of contemporary literature. Renoir’s brother Edmond was put in charge of exhibitions in the weekly’s premises, suitably located on the boulevard des Italiens. The new journal announced that “our exhibitions will merely transfer momentarily the artist’s studio to the boulevard, to a hall where it will be open to everyone, where the collector can come when he pleases….”27 Cited in Rewald 1973, p. 430.

One of the impressionists’ collectors, Gustave Caillebotte, took on a unique role in the boulevard exhibitions, for he was a painter, and therefore both patron and participant. Several years younger than the other impressionists, he had met Degas by 1874 (Degas had listed him as a potential participant in the first impressionist show). Upon Renoir’s invitation, he joined the group in the second exhibition, held in 1876 on the rue Le Peletier. Independently wealthy, he began buying works by his fellow exhibitors—he was the owner of Degas’s Women on a Café Terrace, Evening (Pl. 47)—and eventually bequeathed to the Louvre an extraordinary collection of impressionist pictures. Immensely loyal, it was he who found and paid for the quarters for the 1877 exhibition on the rue Le Peletier. Wealth and social position obviously do not guarantee artistic talent, but Manet, Morisot, and Cassatt prove that they do not inhibit it, either. Caillebotte’s financial independence coincided with his father’s death in 1874 (the consequences for him were the opposite of Degas’s bereavement the same year), but so too did his radical independence as an artist. In the second impressionist exhibition, in 1876, he showed his Floor Scrapers, three workmen vigorously scraping the wood floor of a bourgeois apartment. It was loosely associated with Degas’s pictures of washerwomen, in the same exhibition, as a piece of contemporary realism, but it had no close precedents in recent French painting and was striking evidence of an original point of view.

In the same exhibition, Caillebotte showed The Man at the Window (Pl. 23), a picture in which, like Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (Pl. 18), the viewer looks out over a Paris street. Seen from this bourgeois apartment, Caillebotte’s streets have a stark emptiness that contrasts sharply with Monet’s boulevard. The apartment is that of the artist’s family, on the third floor of a building on the corner of the rue de Miromesnil and the rue de Lisbonne.28 Berhaut 1978 and Caillebotte 1976–77. We are looking over the shoulder of Caillebotte’s brother René, down the rue de Miromesnil to its intersection with the boulevard Malesherbes, which it meets at an acute angle. It is afternoon, because we are facing northward, and the sunlight is coming from the west. Perhaps it is Sunday or a holiday, but since this is a residential area whose ground-floor shops attracted only a modest clientèle, there is little reason for the streets to be as well peopled as Monet’s boulevard.

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Description: Young Man at His Window (Jeune homme à sa fenêtre) by Caillebotte,...

23. Caillebotte, The Man at the Window, 1876. 117.3 × 82.8 cm. Private collection.

In fact, Caillebotte’s painting is, precisely, a record of a new Haussmannian residential quarter built in the 1860s, not of the fashionable boulevards, and therefore we should expect it to create a very different effect. Caillebotte’s brother watches a street that is quiet, but full of psychological import. Because of the vantage point the artist has chosen, the insistent angles of Haussmann’s regular building lines virtually crush the space of the street (Pl. 25). In that imploding space is the psychological focus of René Caillebotte’s gaze, therefore of ours: the woman who is about to cross the intersection. Her distance and size make her curiously vulnerable, like some insect captured by the artist’s perspective lens. She is the anonymous city dweller, whose fragile aloneness is so different from any of the busy figures crowding Monet’s boulevard of shoppers and strollers. Because René stares directly at her, he is not at all like Monet’s top-hatted men leaning out over the boulevard des Capucines. These men are peering out over the public space, participating in the current of activity that flows along that fashionable avenue. René Caillebotte is sheltered by the obtrusive reality of his interior. Because his empty chair faces the window, we can surmise that his vigil on the city is habitual.

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Description: Young Man at His Window (Jeune homme à sa fenêtre), detail by Caillebotte,...

25. Caillebotte, detail of The Man at the Window (Pl. 23).

Caillebotte’s figure is the thoughtful observer, the characteristic urban person who appears in so much naturalist literature of the period, in the act of seeking the meaning of private interior versus public exterior. Caillebotte’s view has been likened to the ideas expressed by Edmond Duranty, one of the leading naturalist writers, in his pamphlet La nouvelle peinture, a polemical defense of the impressionists’ exhibition of 1876 in which The Man at the Window appeared. Duranty was especially close to Degas, who was consistently rumored to have been his collaborator on the brochure. Duranty makes an ardent plea for painters to cast aside traditional subjects, and turn to contemporary city life:

And because we cling closely to nature, we shall no longer separate the figure from the background of an apartment or of the street. In real life, the figure never appears against neutral, empty, or vague backgrounds. Instead, around and behind him are furniture, fireplaces, wall hangings, or a partition that express his fortune, his class, his profession….29 Duranty 1876, p. 45. Duranty and Caillebotte were compared in Caillebotte 1976–77 (drawing upon earlier work by Marie Berhaut).

He asks the artist to remove the wall that separates the studio from ordinary life outside, to create “an opening on the street.” Thirteen times in this thirty-four-page essay, Duranty juxtaposes apartment or studio to the street. In so doing, he gives witness to the topicality of Caillebotte’s pictorial dialogue between anonymous pedestrian and brother/self/viewer. He points out that “the frame of the window, depending on whether we are near or far, seated or standing, cuts off the outside scene in most unexpected ways….” Because the observer’s eye is constantly moving, she might see just a portion of a nearby figure, or at other times, “the eye takes one in from up close, in its full size, while all the rest of a street crowd… is pushed off into the distance by the play of perspective.”30 Duranty 1876, pp. 45f, 47. Duranty insists more than most of his contemporaries on the window as a compositional frame, but the idea was widespread in this generation. Henry James, for example, in 1876 referred to his hotel window as a frame, and to what he saw through it, as a “canvas” (James 1875–76, p. 191).

Caillebotte’s Man at the Window, in other words, takes up a theme common in contemporary naturalism. Nor must it be thought that his matter-of-fact presentation was inconsistent with the psychology inherent in it. Duranty’s pamphlet and his early writings on realism tell us that the artist who deals with contemporary life seems to disappear behind the apparent objectivity of his presentation, but in fact has implanted in the viewer’s mind the conclusions he aims for.31 There is a parallel here with the changes in French politics begun by Louis Napoleon in the 1850s, and continued by later republican politicians. They gained power by manipulating the public through plebiscites, elections, and other devices, more than by employing the autocratic fiats of earlier leaders. The political leader of giant stature gave way eventually to the democrat, as the romantic hero-author did, to the naturalist. By choosing salient elements from daily life, the artist is far from neutral in his observations. Out of the vast array of objects and events that make up experience, he selects only a few. These choices alone constitute acts of judgment, but in addition the artist transforms them by the artificial conventions of his art. For this reason observation itself is not a passive act, but one that transforms the things being seen by lifting them out of the full context of life’s complexities and subjecting them to the handful of associations that the artist cleverly manipulates. “What a wonderful thing observation is,” wrote Victor Fournel,

and what a fortunate man an observer is! For him boredom is a word empty of meaning; nothing dull, nothing dead to his eyes! he animates everything he sees…. Where others see only a rose, the observer discovers a worm lurking in its calyx…. What a cruel thing observation is, and how unfortunate is the observer.32 Fournel 1858, p. 271.

Gare Saint-Lazare

The year after the appearance of Duranty’s pamphlet, which firmly attached Impressionism to the ideas of naturalism already current in literature, the painters held their third group exhibition. It was again on the rue Le Peletier (a few doors from the site of the second show), and again the artists were aided by friendly pens, including this time Rivière’s journal devised for the exhibition, L’Impressionniste. The second of Renoir’s two articles33 See above and note 26. is what retains our attention today, but the review was dominated by Rivière’s passionate and rather maladroit attacks on the contemporary press for ignoring or disliking the exhibition. His steady refrain was that the impressionists had turned their backs on traditional subjects and were instead devoted to contemporary life, rendered in sincere and highly original works. Among the most original of the paintings shown in 1877 were three street scenes by Caillebotte and seven views of the Gare Saint-Lazare by Monet. These works had few precedents in French painting, and they take important places in the artistic record that the impressionists made of the transformation of Paris.

Each of Caillebotte’s three city views has a striking, funnel-like perspective which immortalizes Baron Haussmann’s long vistas. (Pl. 3) The House Painters (Pl. 24) shows two workers looking at the shop facade they are painting, while to the left the street zooms back with unaccustomed abruptness. Paris, A Rainy Day (Pl. 26) presents umbrella-laden figures at the intersection of eight streets near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Le Pont de l’Europe (Pl. 27) takes the viewer to the street bridge over the tracks of Saint-Lazare. The modernity of these paintings lies, in part, in their exploitation of Haussmannian planning, a seeming acceptance of the Second Empire’s most controversial feature: its ruthless urban geometry. The site of the first of the three paintings is unidentified, but Paris, A Rainy Day represents one of those star-burst intersections that typified Haussmann’s work, the crossing of the rue de Turin, the rue de Moscou, the rue de Leningrad, the rue Clapeyron and the rue de Bucarest (Pl. 17). The Pont de l’Europe is a multi-spanned bridge completed in 1868. Both sites were entirely recast during the impressionists’ lifetimes, and nothing remained of the previous era.

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Description: The House Painters by Caillebotte, Gustave

24. Caillebotte, The House Painters, 1877. 87 × 116 cm. Private collection.

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Description: Paris, A Rainy Day by Caillebotte, Gustave

26. Caillebotte, Paris, A Rainy Day, 1877. 209 × 300 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Fund.

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Description: The Pont de l'Europe by Caillebotte, Gustave

27. Caillebotte, Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876. 131 × 181 cm. Geneva, Musée du Petit Palais.

To place Caillebotte’s paintings in historical perspective, the twentieth-century viewer does well to recall the earlier opposition to the Second Empire’s destruction of the old city. The opponents were a minority, swamped by the power of autocratic government and by entrepreneurial prosperity, but among their number were prominent artists and writers, whose most frequent target was the long, straight avenue, symbol of arbitrary power and of the triumph of utility over history. The exiled Victor Hugo addressed a poem to Haussmann that wonderfully expresses this view:

Today this enormous Paris is a charming Eden,
Full of cudgels and decked out in Ns.
Lutèce, the old Hydra, is dead;
No more anarchic streets, running freely, crammed full,
Where in the evening, in a dark corner, a facade
With leaping gables made one dream of Rembrandt;
No more caprice; no more meandering crossroads
Where Molière confronted Léandre with Géronte;
Alignment! You are today’s password.
Paris, which you’ve pierced from side to side in a duel,
Receives right through the body fifteen or twenty new streets
Usefully leading out from barracks!
Boulevard and square have your name as their cockade,
And everything done looks forward to cannon balls.34 From Les Années funestes (1852-76), poem of about 1869, cited in Citron 1961, vol. 2, pp. 281–82. Hugo refers to the ubiquitous N which Louis Napoleon had emblazoned on buildings, banners, and proclamations; “gourdins” means thick-headed louts as well as cudgels.

Aujourd’huice Paris énorme est un Eden
Charmant, plein de gourdins et tout constellé d’N;
La vieille hydre Lutèce est morte; plus de rues
Anarchiques, courant en liberté, bourrues,
Où la façade au choc du pignon se cabrant
Le soir, dans un coin noir, faisait rêver Rembrandt;
Plus de caprice; plus de carrefour méandre
Où Molière mêlait Géronte avec Léandre;
Alignement! tel est le mot d’ordre actuel.
Paris, percé par toi de part en part en duel
Reçoit tout au travers du corps quinze ou vingt rues
Neuves, d’une caserne utilement accrues!
Boulevard, place, ayant pour cocarde ton nom,
Tout ce qu’on fait prévoit le boulet de canon.

Unlike Hugo, Caillebotte, born in 1848, was a child of the Second Empire. Only twenty-eight years old when he painted his city views, he treated Haussmann’s new streets as a normal constituent of his environment. The site of Paris, A Rainy Day was only five streets away from the family apartment on the rue de Miromesnil, on the other side of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and still closer was the sexpartite bridge over the tracks featured in Le Pont de l’Europe. The Paris of Hugo’s memory could not have supported the vehicular and pedestrian traffic near the Gare Saint-Lazare. A year after the new span was completed, that station was receiving over thirteen million passengers, 40% of all rail clients in Paris.35 Figures from Sutcliffe 1970, p. 155. More than 80% of the Saint-Lazare traffic involved the suburbs, for there poured out onto nearby streets a modern commuting society: workers, clerks, businesspeople, and shoppers who helped swell the crowds along the grands boulevards directly south of the station.

Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe deals with this contemporary society, organized along Haussmann’s lines, not along the picturesque, irregular lines that Hugo would have preferred. The perspective draws the eye inward, as was true of The Man at the Window (Pl. 23). It is an even starker network of perspective, because we are not sheltered by the imposing balusters of the earlier picture. Out on the street itself, little impedes the speed of our eye into Caillebotte’s visual tunnel.36 Caillebotte 1976–77, no. 16 and passim. Kirk Varnedoe and Peter Galassi have shown that the surface of the bridge slants upwards at this point, but that Caillebotte cleverly disguises the fact and so reinforces the effect of the inrushing lines. The prominent dog, like some animated projectile, hurries our view into the picture. We look down on it as though it were a horse, hitched to a carriage in which we are riding; not all of its shadow has made its way into the painting. This sense of rapid movement is enhanced by the force of the two figures who come towards us, especially the man, whose rapid pace has carried him beyond the woman, in whom, nonetheless, he shows an interest (as she does, in him). The perspective lines converge on the man, so he literally looms out from the far point of our vision, creating a push and pull of psychological and perceptual tension.

Distinct from the elegantly dressed pair are the men in working-class clothes. One, his back to us, walks into the picture, and yet he lines up with the bourgeois pair to form a diagonal grouping that blocks off the sidewalk from our view. The worker to the right, looking out over the unseen tracks, is so prominent that the viewer has to reckon up his particular significance, vis-à-vis the elegant strollers. A working-class variation upon Caillebotte’s bourgeois Man at the Window, he looks out, not on residential streets, but the tracks. Instead of protective stone balusters, it is the metal barrier and the huge girderwork through which he looks. Leaning on the metal railing, he is part of the world of industry and work, an association consistent with the rest of the picture. The worker further back looks towards the girderwork as he walks away from us, and further along are two more workers, both leaning on the railing, like the foreground figure. The raw industrial forms are the everyday domain of the working class, in contrast to the upper-class strollers (including the bourgeois whose bowler hat peers over the shoulder of the man), who keep their distance from the bridge supports. Perhaps they are merely out for exercise, but there is a purposive air about their brisk pace. The well-dressed male is a flâneur, a stroller, featured in contemporary naturalist writing, who reconnoiters city streets and stores up his observations for eventual use (hence the artist gives his own features to this man). The workers are treated as idlers (badauds), absorbed in a familiar environment, and lacking the flâneur’s powers of detached, analytical observation.

The key to Caillebotte’s painting is the cyclopean metalwork, embodiment of industrial power, aggressive symbol of the transformation of Paris. Caillebotte’s frank use of its unembellished geometry brings this raw power out into the open. Its stark lines are deliberately ugly, all the more so because they dwarf the humans. Revealed in a strong, pale light which casts prominent blue-grey shadows, they repeat the perspective lines of sidewalk, street, and buildings beyond. They stand for Haussmann’s controlling directives which slashed through this part of Paris to create a new quarter around the expanded rail station. Nothing of the old city is here: roadway, bridge, and buildings all date from the previous twenty years. Everything in Caillebotte’s painting conforms to the altered city: the plunging perspective, the opposed forward force of the figures on the left, the rapid pace of dog and flâneur, the plain surfaces of sidewalk and pavement, the impersonal brushwork, the bleached light. The girderwork, given its overpowering presence, and the perspective, given its exaggerated, eye-sucking action, reveal the extent of Caillebotte’s achievement. He does not praise the new Paris. He strips away the natural and the delicate (none of his three city views shown in 1877 has trees or foliage), and in doing so he exposes the harsh power, full of tensions, which underlay industrial Paris and its new society.

We are far, here, from Monet’s and Renoir’s grands boulevards, whose lively prosperity takes the most optimistic view possible of the renewed city. They cloak its harshness in foliage and sparkling light, and they point to its sociable, elegant exterior. Caillebotte’s view is closer to that later expressed by the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. At the end of his review of the fifth impressionist exhibition in 1880, Huysmans, echoing Maxime Du Camp’s earlier cry, appealed to painters to represent contemporary subjects, including factories and railroad stations, and also public places, such as “these vast boulevards whose American pace forms the essential framework for our epoch’s needs.”37 Huysmans 1883, “L’Exposition des Indépendants en 1880,” p. 122. Wide, straight streets and unvarnished utility were associated with America. Huysmans employed the slight pejorative of this analogy to indicate his reluctant acceptance of the new vernacular. A naturalist did not praise the environment he wrote about or painted, but treated its homely ordinariness as the only proper setting for his art.

Ordinary though it is, Caillebotte’s naturalism seems willful, even aggressive, when compared to the anecdotal naturalism of an artist like Jean Béraud (Pl. 22). Of course, Béraud does not want Caillebotte’s starkness. He has chosen a lively boulevard, not a road bridge, and his treatment of it has to suit the subject. The contrast between the two is therefore one of different streets in Paris. Granting this, the comparison makes us more aware of just how curious was Caillebotte’s choice of street and also just how striking are the devices he used to recreate it. Béraud’s perspective lines, for example, recede about as quickly as Caillebotte’s, but their rapid flight is obscured by the activity of sidewalk and street. The man standing by the kiosk, glancing at his newspaper, is a flâneur costumed like Caillebotte’s stroller. He is aloof from the other figures, but is treated as one of many people on the boulevard, not as a protagonist through whom we are forced to enter the scene, as in the Caillebotte. Working-class men are here, too, but they are the coachmen whose carriages bear bourgeois passengers, and there is nothing of the symbolic confrontation of classes that Caillebotte creates. Béraud’s several couples, also, have untroubled relationships which pose none of the questions raised by Caillebotte’s odd encounter of man and woman. His sidewalk and street have the stains that form a patina of daily use, instead of the glaring starkness of Caillebotte’s surfaces, whose pictorial functions are made all the clearer by this contrast.

Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe was accompanied in the impressionist exhibition of 1877 by Monet’s view of the same bridge, seen from the tracks (Pl. 28), and seven other paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare, including interiors of the train shed (Pl. 29). Monet had been living in Argenteuil for several years, but in the winter of 1876 to 1877 he rented a studio on the rue d’Edimbourg and began a group of paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare. His studio placed him near Caillebotte, Manet, and Degas, and their devotion to urban subjects probably helped turn him temporarily from the suburbs to the city. Manet had already painted the tracks (Pl. 31), and Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe was underway before Monet launched his series. Shared interest is the issue here, not “influence,” and besides, Monet had regularly used the Gare Saint-Lazare going to and from Argenteuil since 1872. He had painted the railway bridge at Argenteuil, and a few pictures of industrial sites along the Seine, so the city station was a logical extension of his interest in contemporary subjects.

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Description: The Pont de l'Europe (Gare Saint-Lazare) by Monet, Claude

28. Monet, Le Pont de l’Europe, 1877. 64 × 81 cm. Paris, Musée Marmottan.

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Description: Gare Saint-Lazare by Monet, Claude

29. Monet, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877. 75.5 × 104 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

Monet’s paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare do not closely resemble Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe. Huysmans, in his call for modern industrial subjects already referred to, acknowledged Monet’s attempts to paint the station, but wrote that the painter did not succeed “in extricating from his unclear abbreviations the colossal amplitude of these locomotives and stations.” Huysmans preferred Caillebotte to Monet, partly because he wanted clear images of the “imposing grandeur” of industry, partly because he was one of those writers who responded best to figure pictures and their narrative potential. He did not see that Monet’s “unclear abbreviations” were the vehicle of his interpretation of steam, the underlying force of industrial power.

In Monet’s Le Pont de l’Europe, we are out on the extremity of the suburban quai looking up at the bridge as it crosses over towards the rue de Rome. We are roughly opposite Caillebotte’s vantage point, which would have been just beyond the left edge of Monet’s picture. The perspective shares Caillebotte’s sense of drama. The bridge plunges inward from the right edge, and its axis—it is the rue de Londres—continues into the gap between the buildings in the distance. The top edge of the bridge, if continued downward, would reach the lower left corner of the canvas, so it is a radical use of perspective, one that has an emotional effect on us. To the left is a stationary locomotive, attended by two trainmen. We are on a slight rise above them, on the quai that then, as now, reaches far out on this side of the station (which is well off to our left). Steam and smoke pervade the scene, activating it while obscuring our view, merging at the top with the moist vapors of the sky to provide a unity of picture surface and of imagery. The steam and smoke in the foreground are so close as to be threatening. Has a train just gone by? Are these hissing arabesques instead rising from steam pipes along the tracks? In either case we are down in the entrails of the city, in one of those service arteries whose noises, smoke, smells, and movements were, in the preceding generation, commonly likened to hell. Most viewers of the 1870s would have brought to Monet’s paintings these long-standing associations of the railroad with power, danger, and a bestial, possibly malevolent, force. Georges Rivière, in his friendly review in the special exhibition journal of 1877, referred to Monet’s paintings of the station in highly colored terms, in which locomotives are monsters:

Around the monster, men crawl over the tracks, like pygmies at the feet of a giant…. One hears the workers’ cries, the piercing whistles of the engines sending out their cries of alarm, the incessant noise of iron and the formidable and puffing breathing of the steam.

One sees the grandiose and distracting movement of a station whose ground trembles at every turning of a wheel. The walkways are damp with soot, and the air is clogged with the acrid odor that comes from burning coal.38 “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,” L’Impressionniste 1 (6 April 1877), reprinted in Venturi 1939, vol. 2, p. 312.

By contrast with Le Pont de l’Europe, Monet’s view within the train shed (Pl. 29) is deliberately balanced, and the drama subdued. It is an unorthodox view with few precedents in the history of painting, but one that users of the station would have been familiar with. We are placed at the terminus of the tracks, looking along the axis of the rails towards the Pont de l’Europe, whose criss-cross girderwork forms a pale, horizontal band on the level of the locomotive’s smokestack. From the way the blue clouds of smoke billow upwards, we can see that the engine is either backing out of the station, or possibly just entering it. To the right, nearby, is a rail worker, and further back are numerous passengers on the quai, which stretches off towards the distant bridge. On the left is the coal or wood car of an engineless train. The potential movement of both trains is directly towards, or away from, the observer, with the result that neither seems to move (Pl. 30). The sense of being held in a timeless moment is abetted by the puffs of steam which come from the undercarriage of the engine. They hide its wheels and further diminish its power to threaten us by making it float in an atmosphere of light, steam, and smoke.

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Description: Gare Saint-Lazare, detail by Monet, Claude

30. Monet, detail of Gare Saint-Lazare (Pl. 29).

To further the effect of a hovering balance, of a delicate resolution of forces, Monet constructed a symmetrical, measured composition. The locomotive is just to the left of the picture’s center line, which is exactly marked by the peak of the gable overhead. The distance from the top of the picture to the top of the horizontal bridge (which coincides, not by accident, with the top of the engine’s stack) is exactly half the width of the canvas, so that the areas left and right of the central axis, above the distant bridge, are perfect squares. On either side of the composition, at the same distance from its edges, are the spindly metal uprights which support the roof. They emphasize its lightness and airiness, for which even stronger evidence is given by the sunlight flooding through the skylight. The sun casts a measured pattern on the ground; its grid obscures the tracks (another instance of blurring the indicators of speed and power), and repeats the network of parallel lines found on the left, overhead, and in the buildings on the far right. Taken together with the shadows above and below, and the vertical supports on both sides, these networks act like so many filaments, drawn tightly around the central volume of colored light and steam.

By stressing the airiness of the train shed, Monet has caught the spirit of Eugène Flachat, the engineer who had redesigned the station a decade earlier, making the main, gabled shed one of the most daring of contemporary structures.39 My attention has been drawn, just before going to press, to a paper given by Karen Bowie at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Pittsburgh, 1985, “Polychromy in the 19th Century Parisian Railway Terminals: Creating a Picturesque Atmosphere.” Bowie points out that Monet pictured the old, simple tie-rods under the skylights, rather than the somewhat broader trusses that Flachat had installed. She posits that the painter deliberately chose the thinner rods in order to enhance the effect of the structure’s airiness. Making a further parallel with painting, she deduces that the designers of the Parisian train sheds sought to “frame” the tracks with an enclosure that would convert them to a “scene,” and thereby diminish the threat of rail travel. With skillful use of iron columns, reduced to slender shafts, and of overhead braces, Flachat constructed a wide span whose openness he exposed through huge skylights. Monet, by giving such prominence to the sunlight flooding down onto the tracks, particularly to its geometric network, seems to pay tribute to Flachat’s engineering. The rational patterns of the building’s design, recapitulated in the painting, are a celebration of the way sunlight is organized for modern man. From the station we look out to the large volume of sunlight, but since it also enters the station from above, industrial steam and nature’s vapors have been joined together. Solid mass is overcome in favor of light and air—by Flachat and by Monet. When we think of Impressionism, do we not think first of its rejection of traditional mass and modeling in favor of color and light? And have we not already recalled that Louis Napoleon and Baron Haussmann forced a new pattern upon Paris, widening streets, creating new avenues, parks, and squares, with the ostensible purpose of bringing light and air into the city? Flachat, for that matter, had been a prominent utopian socialist in his youth. The cry for modern engineering raised by the Saint-Simonists and other utopians, although by now transformed into the hum of technocrats at work, could still be construed as a progressive cry. After all, progressive social forces in France had long been demanding that Paris rid herself of dark, fetid streets and courtyards, of dank, windowless factories and slums. Louis Napoleon knew how to draw these genuine convictions into the web of autocratic power.

Manet’s Modern Paris

Monet’s and Caillebotte’s paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare had been preceded by Manet’s The Railroad (Pl. 31), shown in the official Salon exhibition of 1874 (two other paintings were rejected by the Salon jury). Manet placed Victorine Meurent, one of his favorite models, and the daughter of a friend on the edge of the street overlooking the tracks near the Pont de l’Europe. The huge bridge protrudes into the right edge of the composition, but is largely obscured by the smoke and steam; above Victorine’s head show the buildings on the far side of the railway cut.40 Theodore Reff (Reff 1982) concludes that Manet’s vantage point was on the western side of the tracks, but in that case the sun, which comes from above and slightly to the viewer’s left, would be coming from the north. Earlier writers have said that Manet’s site was a private garden along the tracks and that Manet must have suppressed indications of the street which would have intervened between such a garden and the tracks. However, in the panoramic view of the bridge that Reff reproduces (a print from L’Illustration, April 1868) and in other contemporary prints, the iron grill shows directly over the tracks at all points where the bridge’s girderwork ceases and the ordinary streets resume. The same prints show figures looking through the grill to the tracks. Although Manet would not have felt obliged to adhere exactly to any site, everything in this picture is consistent with a position along one of the streets bordering the tracks, namely the rue de Londres, close to its intersection with the place de l’Europe. The child looks out over the tracks, while the woman looks up from her reading to acknowledge the viewer’s presence. The two figures dominate the picture, yet Manet’s title gives us little indication of who they are. On the contrary, it seems a deliberate provocation, because the figures obscure our view of the railroad. The matter-of-fact presence of the two figures, nonetheless, is the heart of this striking composition. Like Degas, who put the vicomte Lepic and his two daughters in the foreground of the picture he called Place de la Concorde (Pl. 37), Manet offers not a conventional representation of a feature of Paris, but a new interpretation of it. Humans mediate the view, which becomes more than a view: it is a way of experiencing the modern city.

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Description: The Railway by Manet, Edouard

31. Manet, The Railroad, 1873. 93 × 114 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of his mother, Louisine W. Havemeyer.

Manet lived near the Gare Saint-Lazare and had long acquaintance with its environs. In 1864 he had moved to the boulevard des Batignolles, just north of the station, and in 1871, not long before he began this picture, he took a studio at the beginning of the rue de Saint-Petersbourg (now the rue de Leningrad), a few doors from the eastern edge of the tracks (Pl. 17). The rue de Saint-Petersbourg extended from one of the radiating arms of the Pont de l’Europe, and in Caillebotte’s painting (Pl. 27), we are looking directly down its axis (Manet’s studio was just behind the top hat of Caillebotte’s stroller). From his studio window, Manet could look at an angle out on the Pont de l’Europe. A visitor to the studio in 1873, the year Manet was working on The Railroad, described it as follows:

A pure and gentle light, always equal, penetrates the room from the windows which look out on the place de l’Europe. The trains pass close by, sending up their agitated clouds of white steam. The ground, constantly agitated, trembles under our feet and shakes like a fast-moving boat.41 Fervacques (Léon Duchemin), cited in Moreau-Nélaton 1926, vol. 2, pp. 8–10.

Manet chose to paint in this distinctively urban place, and its proximity to the railroad, felt in the trembling floor, was a constant reminder of contemporary life. His picture presents the railroad not in its obvious outer aspects, but indirectly, as it slices through his district, and as it affects everyday experience. Instead of the comforting perspectives and solid forms of tradition, he paints flat forms that have an odd abruptness. The woman looks out at us, while the child gazes off in the opposite direction; both are confined by the iron grill. Through its bars we see only indistinct forms, since the steam obscures so much. Against this backdrop, the tentativeness of the modern city is caught in the two figures, who fail to display any affectionate relationship. They face in opposite directions, and the woman forces us to recognize ourselves as that characteristic city dweller, the unknown passer-by. The viewer, in effect, has interrupted her reading. She looks up from her book in that moment when one registers the presence of another person, while guarding a neutral expression. As for us, we are passing down the street and look over at these two people stationed next to the tracks. It is the encounter of one stranger with others, one of those chance meetings that mark the modern city. We do not know if the woman is the mother, the sister, or the baby-sitter of the young girl. They are merely placed side by side, and the lack of any apparent bond between them reinforces the idea that we have simply happened upon them. It is in this fashion that Manet has characterized the role of the railroad in the modern city, its movement and its steam (like some exhibit in a cage, to be dispassionately observed), its comings to and fro, its moments of sitting idle while waiting.

Taken together, the paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare and its environs by Manet, Caillebotte, and Monet show the diverse ways in which the impressionists interpreted the modern city, diverse and yet interwoven by threads of common interest. Each of the three painters turned his back on history, on anything that smacked of sentiment or the merely picturesque. Each chose a central feature of the altered city, the hub of its new network of movement. Each expressed the mobility brought about by the industrial revolution, not by close views of speeding trains, but by oblique renderings of the ways the city and its people are forced to change their patterns of association. Manet and Caillebotte place us on the street where their figures are separated from the tracks by harsh forms of industrial power. The iron grill and the girderwork, which art historians see too exclusively as elements of style, are symbols of the segmenting of Paris, of the discontinuities between street and tracks, between the environment of middle-class strollers and railroad workers. The painters’ figures are on one side of a barrier, out-of-doors but artificially caged off from the spectacle they are reconnoitering. These figures share the same urban space, but the relationships among them, and therefore with the viewer, are discontinuous, unclear, an odd mixture of immediacy and lack of psychological contact.

Monet, less a figure painter than Manet or Caillebotte, relies more on the large effects of his active industrial spaces. Like them he features industrial ironwork, but he places us on the inside, looking out to the city. In Le Pont de l’Europe (Pl. 28) we are down inside the deep railway cut, and our unaccustomed closeness to the tracks and trainmen, a somewhat threatening proximity, makes the city above us seem all the more distant. Within the iron train shed (Pl. 29), we are in the more familiar position of a commuter but, since we are not used to being taken inside a station by a painter, our attention is seized. In the preceding generation, Théodore Rousseau had often placed the viewer under a canopy of trees, looking out into a sunstruck clearing. Monet’s pictorial structure is curiously similar, but we are in a noisy train shed, close to moving trains whose smoke and hissing steam activate the space, one that would not normally be considered beautiful or paint-worthy. Rousseau had fled such urban places for the comfort of nature; Monet thrusts them in front of us.

Monet exhibited several of his paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare with the impressionists in 1877, and in the same exhibition Caillebotte showed his Pont de l’Europe. Perhaps prompted by their display, Manet returned the following year to the environs of the station (Pls. 32-35). He made three pictures of the rue Mosnier (now the rue de Berne), a new street which begins just opposite his studio window on the rue Saint-Petersbourg and runs northward to its intersection with the rue de Moscou. It is separated from the railroad tracks only by a narrow row of buildings. The nearest building of that row shows in one drawing (Pl. 32), and a portion of it, bearing a large advertisement, in two of the three oils. In the drawing we find a puffing locomotive beyond the hoardings to the left and, further off, the tunnels of the Batignolles bridge; a figure is looking at the tracks through the boards. In each of the three paintings, the left edge of the composition stops short of the tracks; the essence of modern Paris is captured without the aid of this restless emblem of urban life.

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Description: The Rue Mosnier with Gas Lamp by Manet, Edouard

32. Manet, The Rue Mosnier, 1878. Pencil and ink, 27.6 × 44.2 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. Given by Alice H. Patterson in memory of Tiffany Blake, 1945.15.

Street Pavers, rue Mosnier (Pl. 33) concentrates on an equally clear sign of Paris’s constant metamorphosis. In the foreground are seven or eight pavers, whose nearly completed work is approaching Manet’s end of the street. Beyond them are a few carriages and pedestrians. The other two oils of the rue Mosnier show the street decked out for the national holiday of 30 June 1878, a celebration of the new World’s Fair, intended to mark France’s rehabilitation from the disasters of 1870–71. The MacMahon government set aside half a million francs for the embellishment of the capital.42 A good summary is found in Jules Bertaut’s La Troisième République, 1870 à nos jours, 9 (1931), pp. 100ff. Many street projects were hurried to completion (Manet’s Street Pavers apparently documents this civic stir), the city was generally endimanchée, outdoor music and dancing were provided, and the streets were festooned in flags. In The Rue Mosnier Decked out in Flags (Pl. 34), a huge red flag covers the entire left side of the composition, hiding that side of the street.

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Description: Pavers in the rue Mosnier by Manet, Edouard

33. Manet, Street Pavers, Rue Mosnier, 1878. 64.5 × 81.5 cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Christie’s.

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Description: The Rue Mosnier Decked Out in Flags by Manet, Edouard

34. Manet, The Rue Mosnier Decked Out in Flags, 1878. 65 × 81 cm. Private collection, Switzerland.

The Rue Mosnier Decorated with Flags (Pl. 35) is a less daring but a more finished and more interesting composition, not least because of its use of irony. Plate 34 can be construed as a pure homage to the national festival, but in Plate 35 we see more than festive flags. On the left, behind temporary hoardings, is the rubble-filled lot alongside the railway. Nearby is a one-legged man who, like the rubble pushed behind the fence, exposes the realities that lay beneath the showy displays of the MacMahon government.43 The ironic presence of this figure has been treated by Bradford Collins, “Manet’s Rue Mosnier Decked with Flags and the Flâneur Concept,” Burlington Magazine 117 (November 1975): 709–14, and more extensively by Ronda Kasl in Farwell 1985. Manet drew the figure of the one-legged man on a sheet entitled “Les Mendiants” (Beggars) which he destined as the cover of an album of music by his friend Cabaner, based on poems by Jean Richepin, La Chanson des gueux. Celebrating the outcasts of French society, Richepin’s volume had been suppressed in 1876, and the author fined. No copy of Cabaner’s proposed album has survived. (See Manet 1983, no. 163.) Monet made two paintings of Paris streets festooned with flags for the holiday of 30 June (Musée d’Orsay and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen), but neither has a hint of Manet’s irony. On 2 May, at the inauguration of J. B. A. Clésinger’s statue of La République at the exposition’s entrance portal, the Marseillaise had been played in public for the first time since 1870. MacMahon protested, since the association of the song with revolution and with the Commune was so strong, but he was enough of a pragmatist not to insist, and the famous national air was restored to use. Manet’s crippled man need not necessarily have stirred memories of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune, but his juxtaposition to the flags is at the least a mordant touch. Manet, portraitist of Clemenceau and of Rochefort, was an ardent republican, participant in the siege of Paris and of its attendant famine, author of lithographs of death dealt by the repression of the Commune. It would be naive to think that his mutilated, blue-frocked worker is an accidental image in his decoding of the holiday.

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Description: The Rue Mosnier with Flags by Manet, Edouard

35. Manet, The Rue Mosnier Decorated with Flags, 1878. 64.8 × 80 cm. From the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia.

It would be equally naive to think that Manet’s painting is a literal transcription of the rue Mosnier at a specific moment. Like most of his pictures, it is a composite, a putting together of various observations, but one that is calculated to seem all of one piece. In the eleven years that had intervened since his painting of the Paris fair of 1867 (Pl. 7), his naturalism had evolved, as had that of Monet, Degas, and the other impressionists. The darker tones and obvious symmetries of the composition of 1867 have ceded place to a much lighter palette, to translucent, sunstruck surfaces, and to an insistence upon the seemingly casual, everyday appearance of things. The strong angle of the sun coming from the west—it comes across the railroad cut, since there is no building immediately to the left—shows that it is late afternoon, an effect aided by the high horizon line. (The street actually rises steadily uphill from its beginning on the rue de Leningrad, so Manet, like Caillebotte in his Pont de l’Europe, had a natural source for his broad expanse of pavement.) Adding to the feeling we have of suddenly looking out of Manet’s window, the ladder of a window-repairman protrudes into the foreground (the nimbleness it implies is a further comment upon the one-legged worker). To the right, near a top-hatted stroller, a shirt-sleeved worker is bending over a utility cart. We realize with wry amusement what all this normalcy means: the holiday flags are not perched above a festive celebration. Instead they surmount a transient moment of everyday reality, either the late afternoon of the holiday or, equally likely, the next day. Manet’s three paintings therefore constitute a portrait of the street that he looked out on from his studio window. The view with the pavers precedes the holiday; the one dominated by the huge flag shows the height of the celebration; the third shows the street returned to normal.

A year after the rue Mosnier series, Manet wrote to Haussmann’s successor proposing a series of paintings for the rebuilt Hôtel-de-Ville, on the theme of “le ventre de Paris” (the belly of Paris): public markets, parks, racetracks, underground activities, railways, and bridges.44 Manet’s letter, published in Edmond Bazire, Manet (1884), p. 142, was translated in Hamilton 1954, ed. 1969, p. 224. Le Ventre de Paris was the title of a novel by Zola. The ceiling would bear images of living men who, like the flags of the rue Mosnier, would look down on daily life below. Military prowess would have no place in this overhead pantheon, for the artist stipulated “all the men now living who in civil life have contributed or are contributing to the greatness and wealth of Paris.” The men who governed Paris in 1879 would have found more than one thorn in this bouquet, and naturally made no reply to it. Fortunately the paintings that Manet had already done on most of these themes remain to us, and they are a rich compensation for the loss of his proposed series. Together with the paintings of Monet, Caillebotte, Renoir, Cassatt, Morisot, and others, they form an artistic register of the transformation of Paris, a register whose many entries are still waiting to be examined.

1 Tuckerman 1867, p. 17. »

2 Tuckerman 1867, pp. v-vi. »

3 Tuckerman 1867, p. 67; for other phrases cited, see pp. 15–17. »

4 Cited in Citron 1961, vol. 1, p. 335. »

5 Preface to Fournier 1855, pp. iii, xi. »

6 Du Camp 1858, preface, p. 5. »

7 King 1868, p. 1. »

8 See Mainardi 1980 for an astute analysis. »

9 In Isaacson 1966 the three paintings are perceptively studied. »

10 Isaacson
1966, p. 20. »

11 Tuckerman 1867, p. 20. »

12 In a letter of 5 June (Morisot 1950, p. 58), Mme Morisot wrote her daughter that Degas and Manet “continue to condemn the drastic means of repression. I think they are mad, don’t you?” »

13 For population and transport figures, see Merlin 1967 and Levasseur 1889–92. »

14 Veuillot 1866, ed. c. 1914, p. 2. »

15 Gourdon de Genouillac 1893–98, vol. 5, p. 476. »

16 King 1868, pp. 45–46. For charming and well-documented accounts of life along the boulevards, see Carnavalet 1985. »

17 Joanne 1875, p. 62. »

18 James 1875–76, p. 6, letter dated 22 November 1875. »

19 “Le nouveau Louvre et les nouvelles Tuileries,” Revue des deux mondes 64 (1 July 1866): 93. »

20 Letter to the editor, L’Impressionniste 3 (21 April 1877): 8. See also below, the last section of Chapter Five. »

21 The kiosk is a “Morris column,” a typical piece of Haussmannian management; in 1868 Haussmann granted an exclusive license for its use to the Morris advertising agency. See Carnavalet 1985. »

22 See above, note 5. »

23 P. 93 in article cited above, note 19. »

24 Cited in Citron 1961, vol. 1, p. 336. “Pour les couvrir, montez, o lierres,/Brisez l’asphalte des trottoirs,/Jetez sur la pudeur des pierres/Le linceul de vos rameaux noirs.” »

25 All these photographers’ shops were listed among the attractions of the grands boulevards in Joanne 1875. »

26 “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,” L’Impressioniste 1 (6 April 1877): 6, cited in Venturi 1939, vol. 2, pp. 313–14. Most of the articles in this journal, which had only four issues, are reprinted by Venturi. »

27 Cited in Rewald 1973, p. 430. »

28 Berhaut 1978 and Caillebotte 1976–77. »

29 Duranty 1876, p. 45. Duranty and Caillebotte were compared in Caillebotte 1976–77 (drawing upon earlier work by Marie Berhaut). »

30 Duranty 1876, pp. 45f, 47. Duranty insists more than most of his contemporaries on the window as a compositional frame, but the idea was widespread in this generation. Henry James, for example, in 1876 referred to his hotel window as a frame, and to what he saw through it, as a “canvas” (James 1875–76, p. 191). »

31 There is a parallel here with the changes in French politics begun by Louis Napoleon in the 1850s, and continued by later republican politicians. They gained power by manipulating the public through plebiscites, elections, and other devices, more than by employing the autocratic fiats of earlier leaders. The political leader of giant stature gave way eventually to the democrat, as the romantic hero-author did, to the naturalist. »

32 Fournel 1858, p. 271. »

33 See above and note 26. »

34 From Les Années funestes (1852-76), poem of about 1869, cited in Citron 1961, vol. 2, pp. 281–82. Hugo refers to the ubiquitous N which Louis Napoleon had emblazoned on buildings, banners, and proclamations; “gourdins” means thick-headed louts as well as cudgels. »

35 Figures from Sutcliffe 1970, p. 155. »

36 Caillebotte 1976–77, no. 16 and passim. Kirk Varnedoe and Peter Galassi have shown that the surface of the bridge slants upwards at this point, but that Caillebotte cleverly disguises the fact and so reinforces the effect of the inrushing lines. »

37 Huysmans 1883, “L’Exposition des Indépendants en 1880,” p. 122. »

38 “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,” L’Impressionniste 1 (6 April 1877), reprinted in Venturi 1939, vol. 2, p. 312. »

39 My attention has been drawn, just before going to press, to a paper given by Karen Bowie at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Pittsburgh, 1985, “Polychromy in the 19th Century Parisian Railway Terminals: Creating a Picturesque Atmosphere.” Bowie points out that Monet pictured the old, simple tie-rods under the skylights, rather than the somewhat broader trusses that Flachat had installed. She posits that the painter deliberately chose the thinner rods in order to enhance the effect of the structure’s airiness. Making a further parallel with painting, she deduces that the designers of the Parisian train sheds sought to “frame” the tracks with an enclosure that would convert them to a “scene,” and thereby diminish the threat of rail travel. »

40 Theodore Reff (Reff 1982) concludes that Manet’s vantage point was on the western side of the tracks, but in that case the sun, which comes from above and slightly to the viewer’s left, would be coming from the north. Earlier writers have said that Manet’s site was a private garden along the tracks and that Manet must have suppressed indications of the street which would have intervened between such a garden and the tracks. However, in the panoramic view of the bridge that Reff reproduces (a print from L’Illustration, April 1868) and in other contemporary prints, the iron grill shows directly over the tracks at all points where the bridge’s girderwork ceases and the ordinary streets resume. The same prints show figures looking through the grill to the tracks. Although Manet would not have felt obliged to adhere exactly to any site, everything in this picture is consistent with a position along one of the streets bordering the tracks, namely the rue de Londres, close to its intersection with the place de l’Europe. »

41 Fervacques (Léon Duchemin), cited in Moreau-Nélaton 1926, vol. 2, pp. 8–10. »

42 A good summary is found in Jules Bertaut’s La Troisième République, 1870 à nos jours, 9 (1931), pp. 100ff. »

43 The ironic presence of this figure has been treated by Bradford Collins, “Manet’s Rue Mosnier Decked with Flags and the Flâneur Concept,” Burlington Magazine 117 (November 1975): 709–14, and more extensively by Ronda Kasl in Farwell 1985. Manet drew the figure of the one-legged man on a sheet entitled “Les Mendiants” (Beggars) which he destined as the cover of an album of music by his friend Cabaner, based on poems by Jean Richepin, La Chanson des gueux. Celebrating the outcasts of French society, Richepin’s volume had been suppressed in 1876, and the author fined. No copy of Cabaner’s proposed album has survived. (See Manet 1983, no. 163.) Monet made two paintings of Paris streets festooned with flags for the holiday of 30 June (Musée d’Orsay and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen), but neither has a hint of Manet’s irony. »

44 Manet’s letter, published in Edmond Bazire, Manet (1884), p. 142, was translated in Hamilton 1954, ed. 1969, p. 224. Le Ventre de Paris was the title of a novel by Zola. »

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