5. Parks, Racetracks, and Gardens

Herbert, Robert L.

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5. Parks, Racetracks, and Gardens

Robert L. Herbert

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

James McCabe, the American visitor, was convinced that Louis Napoleon had enacted Meryon’s “Loi Solaire.” His account of Second Empire Paris is especially revealing when placed alongside Henry Tuckerman’s. Tuckerman saw through the sheen of imperial splendor to the authoritarian power it disguised....

Author

Robert L. Herbert

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.141-193

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00067.009

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15806

Chapter subject tags:Hippodrome de Longchamp (Paris, France)Degas, Edgar, 1834-1917Bois de Boulogne (Paris, France)Manet, Édouard, 1832-1883Impressionism (Art)--FranceClothing and dress--France--History--19th centuryLeisure in art--France--History--19th centuryMonet, Claude, 1840-1926Morisot, Berthe, 1841-1895Renoir, Auguste, 1841-1919

5. Parks, Racetracks, and Gardens

If I were Emperor or King of some powerful state… I would formulate a law determining as precisely as possible an extent of land, cultivated or not, that would be required to surround every dwelling place… in such a way that the Air and the Sun, these two essential principles of life, would always be plentifully apportioned. This law, source of all material and consequently moral well-being, would be called Solar Law.

—Charles Meryon, 1855

Numerous gardens, squares, fountains, and public buildings, besides innumerable edifices erected by private capital, have taken the place of the former haunts of vice, suffering, and disease.

—James McCabe, 1869

A garden should not be an exact copy of nature, because a garden is a work of art.

A garden is a melody of forms and colors.

—Adolphe Alphand, 1868.

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Description: Luncheon on the Grass, central fragment by Monet, Claude

139. Monet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (central fragment), 1865–66. 248 × 217 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

James McCabe, the American visitor, was convinced that Louis Napoleon had enacted Meryon’s “Loi Solaire.” His account of Second Empire Paris is especially revealing when placed alongside Henry Tuckerman’s. Tuckerman saw through the sheen of imperial splendor to the authoritarian power it disguised. McCabe believed that Louis Napoleon had taken “a mess of crooked streets, dark, dingy buildings, dirty and unwholesome” and transformed them into a magnificent, healthy city: “Light, cleanliness, and fresh air, priceless gifts of Napoleon III to his birth-place, have accomplished this.” He pointed to the new avenues, squares, and parks, pleased that they had cut through insalubrious streets and buildings, pleased also that “the crowded haunts of the Ouvrier class” had been broken up, and that “the working classes are scattered to the suburbs, and the danger which formerly existed from their being concentrated in the heart of Paris, is to some extent, if not entirely, removed.”1 McCabe 1869, pp. 60–62. Tuckerman viewed the same expulsion of the working class as a diminution of the vitality of the city, and a disaster for democratic aspirations.

Juxtaposed to Tuckerman’s analysis, McCabe’s endorsement of “private capital” and dictatorship seems disingenuous, but McCabe was not especially reactionary, nor was he stupid. He saw well into many foibles of contemporary Parisian life, and disliked its hypocrisy and commercialism. In this he was more like Taine, Théophile Gautier, Maxime Du Camp, and countless others, who could be critical of some consequences of imperial power, but who equated the new open spaces with health, progress, and morality. Louis Napoleon had ridden to power chiefly on his uncle’s coattails, but he was initially favored by many on the left who admired his pamphlet The Abolition of Poverty, and who believed him to represent a newliberal society. They saw in him the means by which aristocrats, monarchists, landowners, and clergy could be forced to accept new industries, expanded transport and trade, freer credit, and new uses of the land. These had been the demands of the Saint-Simonians, those radicals of the previous generation who now flourished as engineers, bankers, and builders of the Second Empire. They included the Pereire brothers, founders of the Crédit mobilier and builders of the Grand Hôtel, Eugène Flachat, the designer of the expanded Gare Saint-Lazare, and Père Prosper Enfantin himself, imprisoned in 1832 but chief developer of the Paris-Lyon railway before his death in 1864.

Louis Napoleon, “Saint-Simon on horseback,”2 Albert Guérard, Napoleon III (Harvard, 1953), p. 214. brought enlightened ideas with him from his long exile in England, and took care that the plans for Paris incorporated parks, squares, gardens, and tree-lined avenues. This policy combined a genuine conviction in the virtue of open spaces with political expediency: the new green areas were safety-valves for urban dissent, improvements whose role in taking the steam out of the opposition equaled that of state-sponsored exhibitions, festivals, and laws that favored public entertainment. “Nature,” that is, man-made gardens, marched hand-in-hand with modern industry.

In 1848 there had been only forty-seven acres of municipal park in Paris (mostly along the Champs-Elysées), plus private gardens open to the public on certain days: the Tuileries, the Luxembourg Gardens, and the Jardin des Plantes. These were all turned over to the public after 1848, and new parks, squares, and gardens were created, totaling by 1870 not 50 acres, but 4,500.3 Pinkney 1958, passim. The largest by far were the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes on either side of the city, but more than twenty new squares added up to twenty acres; redesigned and new parks within the city totaled 126 more. The Emperor was well served in all this by Haussmann, by Adolphe Alphand, whom Haussmann put in charge of park services, and by Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, Alphand’s chief gardener. One of their cleverest strokes was to convert the old quarries of the Buttes Chaumont into a huge park (Pl. 140). In the heart of the working-class districts of Belleville and La Villette, it had been the site of public executions and of waste disposal. At enormous cost, twice that of redesigning the much vaster Bois de Boulogne, Alphand built a pseudo-mountainous landscape (with concrete added to the rock to form the desired picturesque arrangements), an artificial lake, two streams, and a waterfall, all fed by a pipe from the Canal Saint-Martin, a grotto with fake stalactites and stalagmites, and surmounting the whole, a facsimile of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. Opened in time for the Universal Exposition of 1867, the park had restaurants, cafés, chalets, and extensive greenswards laid upon topsoil laboriously brought from the outside. Not anticipating the debacle in Mexico that year, the authorities named the various portals and nearby streets “Mexico,” “Vera Cruz,” and “Puebla,” commemorations of imperial adventure that could have suited Offenbach’s imaginary court of Gerolstein.

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Description: The Buttes Chaumont by Hildibrand, H.T.

140. H.T. Hildibrand after E. Grandsire, The Buttes Chaumont. Lithograph from Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris, 2 vols., 1873, vol. 2, n.p.

Not all redesigned or new parks were as well received as the Buttes Chaumont. Adolphe Joanne, the guide-book author, led a fruitless campaign in 1866 against the amputations that reduced the size of the Jardin du Luxembourg by ten acres in favor of new streets. More muted was the opposition to the alteration of the Parc Monceau, since it had been a private garden and semi-abandoned when the city acquired it in 1860. New streets, including the broad boulevard Malesherbes, truncated the park on three sides, and large chunks were sold for expensive building lots. This left less than half the original area for Alphand’s new lawns, plantings, pond, waterfall, and artificial grotto. These embellishments, of course, were treated as gifts to the people of Paris, because turning the park over to the public was the best disguise for the frantic speculation in the real estate created by the truncations (on one of the new lots Zola placed the town house of the speculator Saccard, in La Curée [The Rush for the Spoils]). Further, to treat the altered park as a splendid addition to the city’s refinement, the newly created streets that led to it were named Velasquez, Ruysdael, Murillo, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck, a pantheon that was deemed appropriate to the idea of Paris as the premier nexus of international culture.

Among the impressionists, it was Monet who responded to the appeal of this former aristocratic park, a logical site because he had consistently painted the city’s renovated spaces, beginning in 1867 with the area east of the Louvre (Pl. 14). In the spring of 1876 he made three paintings of the Parc Monceau, each showing an allée bordered by residential buildings, and in the spring of 1878, three more. These three followed his impressive group devoted to the Gare Saint-Lazare, and were in turn followed by two paintings of Paris streets decked out in flags for the national holiday of 30 June (which Manet also recorded, Pl. 35). They should therefore be assimilated with the artist’s homages to contemporary Paris. The most remarkable of the paintings of the Parc Monceau (Pl. 141) combines old and new in an unwitting parallel to Alphand’s renovation. The old is the central alley crowned by foliage, a traditional way of representing gardens and parks. The new is the color structure: the startling slab of yellow and green in the foreground, the complementary violets and reds of the pathway, and the daring abbreviations that register the effects of light and shade on the figures. A lone man seated to the right accompanies typical weekday visitors, a group of nannies seated with children at their feet, and to the left and beyond them, several mothers strolling with older children. Above, in slightly attenuated brilliance, the foreground colors reappear in the sunlit foliage and the facade of a bordering residence.

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Description: The Parc Monceau by Monet, Claude

141. Monet, The Parc Monceau, 1878. 73 × 54.5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Loula D. Lasker, New York City, 1961. (59.206).

Monet also commemorated another of the city’s redesigned parks when he painted four views of the Tuileries gardens in 1876 from the window of the impressionist collector Victor Chocquet (Pl. 142). The Tuileries palace itself, which was the westernmost extension of the Louvre, had been gutted by fire during the Commune, but the wide gardens between the old palace and the place de la Concorde remained one of the most pleasing memories of Louis Napoleon’s reign. Some had regretted the loss of old trees and dense copses that had graced the spot before 1848. These were sacrificed to an obvious kind of open geometry and, at the west end, to those twin monuments to imperial banality, the Orangerie (1853) and the Jeu de Paume (1861). However, because the Emperor had opened the whole of the garden to the public (portions had formerly been reserved for the royalty), it became one of his popular successes.

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Description: The Tuileries by Monet, Claude

142. Monet, The Tuileries, c. 1876. 53 × 72 cm. Paris, Musée Marmottan.

Equally popular were the extensive plantings of trees along the new, or newly widened streets. These often amounted to strip gardens, and had benches, fountains, flowers, and shade trees. (Alphand and Barillet-Deschamps devised special wagons to transport fully grown trees; they were usually trundled in during the night to the surprise of early risers.) The Champs-Elysées was extensively renovated, with many new plantings along pedestrian paths, now more “naturally” disposed, and graced with plentiful gaslights for nighttime strolling (see Renoir’s painting, Pl. 8). No matter how artificially arranged, the trees and paths were greeted as natural gardens. Even the raucous cafés-concerts, because of their outdoor settings, were called gardens: “The Parisian feels it his duty to make the rounds of the gardens once a week, to get the new songs in his memory. On either side of the grand avenue these gardens flourish.”4 King 1868, p. 231.

The Bois de Boulogne

The most famous and the most applauded of all the Second Empire’s new parks was the huge Bois de Boulogne, the former royal forest which was entirely rebuilt between 1852 and 1858. It bordered the fashionable west edge of the city and acquired an éclat never matched by the equally large Bois de Vincennes which fronted the more plebeian eastern perimeter of the city, although Vincennes was given a similar overhaul in the 1860s. The luster of the Bois de Boulogne derived in part from its middle-class and upper-class patrons. Contemporary guide books were pleased to recommend its attractions to foreigners, who would not be disturbed by the sight of the working class. It quickly became “the privileged promenade of a good half of Paris, the richest half, of course.”5 Delvau 1867, p. 31. The Bois de Boulogne (simply the “Bois” for Parisians) had long been a goal for excursions from the city. Duellists and lovers had frequented its dense brush and woods, and for more than two centuries, Parisians had paraded out to the old convent of Longchamp to show off their carriages and finery during Easter week.

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Description: Mare Saint-James, Bois de Boulogne by Hildibrand, H.T.

143. H.T. Hildibrand after H. Hochereau, Mare Saint-James, Bois de Boulogne. Lithograph from Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris, 2 vols., 1873, vol. 2, n.p.

The transformation of the Bois de Boulogne appears graphically in the plans published in Alphand’s famous Les Promenades de Paris (Pls. 144, 145). The forest had been crisscrossed with straight avenues in star-burst patterns. Only two of the allées were retained in the new Bois, which emulated the “natural” garden of Hyde Park and other British parks that Louis Napoleon greatly admired. The Emperor took a keen interest in the transformations and provided its general inspiration as well as some of its specific features, including the serpentine lakes. The plan of the Bois is a perfect symbol of his reign: curving paths among specimen trees, ponds and lakes, inviting lawns, broad alleys for carriages, undulating terrain punctuated by slight eminences which provide views—all that would appear casual and carefree, remote from the impositions of authority. It was also a massive deception.

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Description: The Bois de Boulogne, before 1852 by Chaumont, L.

144. L. Chaumont after E. Hochereau, The Bois de Boulogne, before 1852. Engraving from Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris, 2 vols., 1873, vol. 2, n.p.

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Description: The Bois de Boulogne, after 1870 by Unknown

145. The Bois de Boulogne, after 1870. Unsigned engraving from Adolphe Joanne, Paris illustré, 1885, following p. 186.

The soil in the Bois proved too porous for the larger of the paired lakes, so it was entirely encased in concrete—a huge bathing tub. The water that fed the lakes and other artificial streams and ponds was brought from artesian wells dug for the purpose in nearby Passy; it flowed through sixty kilometers of underground pipe. Departing from the lakes, it formed a sylvan stream to the west and north, where it supplied the large Cascade of Longchamp. This fall of water was formed of stones brought from the forest of Fontainebleau, aided by cut stone and disguised cement (two grottos were provided underneath). So great was the volume of water required that it had to be accumulated in a reservoir and could be released only once a day. It performed to the promenaders at the popular late afternoon hour.6 In Joanne 1885, pp. 186–200, are figures for the extent of lawns, pipes, trees, etc., and one of the best capsule histories and descriptions of the Bois.

Alphand and Barillet-Deschamps provided views, as well as waterfalls and grottos, views that were equally well arranged. Soil excavated for the serpentines was piled up to make the Butte Mortemart, from which there were views of the heights of Issy, Meudon and Saint-Cloud, and to the north, of the Arc de Triomphe. Elsewhere artificial eminences offered other views (Pl. 143). The lawns, ponds, streams, and woods were so disposed as to give “perspectives,” that is, views that recalled famous kinds of painting, those of Claude and Poussin in the more open areas, Hobbema and Ruysdael among the small ponds and copses. Certain areas and complementary park buildings were designed to suggest the mountains and valleys of Switzerland or the American savannah. To aid these effects, the ground was sculpted in slopes, plains, and hollows, and over 400,000 trees were planted, frequently along lines that directed the viewers’ perspectives. “There is as much study, arrangement and artificially sought-out effects in a picturesque composition,” wrote Alphand, “as in a classical plan; and although art is not expressed the same way, man’s genius ought to be equally revealed,”7 Cited by Ernest de Ganay, Les Jardins de France (Paris, 1949), p. 291. Contemporaries agreed with Alphand, and admired his views while recognizing his sleight of hand: “Thanks to the cleverness of the perspectives that have been drawn, this immense prairie which bears the name ‘pelouse de Madrid’ appears like a reminiscence of the plains of America. The illusion is complete….”8 A guide book of 1856, cited in Villefosse 1942, P. 319.

Among the larger features of the Bois were the new racetrack at Longchamp, opened in 1857, the zoo and botanical garden on the park’s northern edge, and the Pré Catelan, an amusement area in the center, just west of the serpentines. All of these catered to the conception of the Bois as a garden of varied pleasures for city dwellers:

Whatever you wish you may have there. You have only to go to Longchamp for the rush and rattle of the race-course or review; to the Pré-Catelan for garden gossip and sociability of the café; to the charming lakes to gather lilies; and a few steps will take you into the wild wood. It is useless to attempt to set an image of the wood [the Bois] before you; you will make your own when you wander there….9 King 1868, p. 152.

The history of the Pré Catelan (named for an old commemorative monument) is a typical one of financial speculation in the Second Empire: it was built with the connivance of government, it was based on leisure and entertainment, and it lasted only a short time. Alphand himself gave the story. Speculators, gazing upon a huge quarry which had provided sand and traprock for the Bois, convinced authorities to let them turn it into an amusement center (Pl. 146). Designed by Alphand’s team (annual rents spread over forty years were to pay for it), it contained a café, a restaurant, a tobacco shop, a children’s theater, various games, and a “theater of flowers” seating 1800. “Stairs, paths and grottos, contrived underneath the gardens,” reported Alphand, “furnished the entrances needed by the actors and ballet dancers who gave performances in this fairyland theater, lit by footlights whose reflectors were dissimulated among clumps of bushes and flowers.”10 Alphand 1867–73, vol. 1. P. 95.

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Description: Plan of the Pré Catelan, Bois de Boulogne by Unknown

146. Plan of the Pré Catelan, Bois de Boulogne. Unsigned engraving from Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris, 2 vols., 1867, vol. 1, p. 90. Among the references: 1 = Theater of Flowers. 3 = Café. 10 = Cow barn.

There was also a photograph shop in the Pré Catelan, built on a slope so that clients could remain in their carriages or on horseback, on the lower side, or enter directly on foot, on the upper. The buildings were made of rubble and plaster, portions of which were molded to look like wood (there were also pieces of wood appliqué), agreeing with the thousands of fence posts throughout the Bois, cast in concrete to resemble wood. One particularly clever idea, perhaps by a Saint-Simonian among the speculators, was a huge dairy housing 100 cows. Admission was charged to see them, but they made money in other ways: their milk was sold at retail within the Bois, and the balance at wholesale, in Paris (their fodder came from mowing the park’s 590 acres of lawn). Alas! The crowds that were numerous in 1856 and 1857, lured by similar entertainments at more convenient locations in the city, soon faded from the Pré Catelan, except on major holidays. Only the café and the dairy remained steady attractions. The photo shop became a tiny museum displaying stuffed hummingbirds, the theater of flowers gave only occasional performances, and the city had to take over the enterprise in 1861, five years after it had opened.

The poor fortune of the Pré Catelan was not an omen for the rest of the park. The racetrack was a huge success, but more significant, since the racing seasons in spring and fall were very brief, were the steady crowds which thronged the park most of the year simply to promenade, picnic, go boating in the lakes, or skating when the winter was cold enough. There was a regular promenading hour, from about four to seven o’clock in the warm half of the year, about three to five, the rest of the time. The beautiful people came in carriages and on horseback, led by the remnants of the aristocracy, but including many well-to-do, many cocottes and newly rich, and an occasional student or middle-class person who rented a carriage (provided sometimes with fake coat-of-arms). Omnibuses brought pedestrians to the edge of the park, and hired cabs plied back and forth. Chairs were placed at a number of key places in the park so that the less fortunate could watch the carriages and cavaliers go by. To see and to be seen was the aim, simply an extension of Parisian habits into more open spaces.

It was not to everyone’s liking. Many scoffed at the ostentation of horse-drawn fashion, including the comtesse d’Agoult (“Daniel Stern”):

In the well-enlarged, well-graded, well-watered avenues, and around the large lakes, four or five rows of carriages meet at the hours of fashion: phaetons, victorias, baskets, eight-springs. Women of high-life, as one says, and young ladies, galantes they are pleased to mingle with, disembark there by caprice and sweep the ground with their rustling trains. In the side alleys pass rapidly by, cigars in their mouths, some horsemen, and, whips raised, some horsewomen; their shouts and loud laughs, their remarks that mix all languages and slangs of Europe, astonish the foliage.

She concludes (she is writing in 1868) that the Bois “is now the resounding rendez-vous of the vanities, the impudences of the cosmopolitan pell-mell.”11 From Mes souvenirs (Paris, 1868), cited in Villefosse 1942, pp. 320–21.

The main approach to the Bois from the city was the ostentatiously wide avenue de l’Impératrice (now avenue Foch) which, despite its 140 yard span, was regularly described as impossibly crowded during promenade hours. Afternoon brought the largest numbers to the Bois. The crowds were so characteristic of the times that Zola began La Curée by having two of its protagonists caught in a traffic jam of carriages along the lakes, waiting to exit. The Bois was even frequented at night: at least two of its restaurants were well-appreciated evening spots; there were nighttime concerts; and when ice formed, there was skating on the ponds and on the rink built by the city in 1866 for the new Cercle des Patineurs. The rink was well provided with the new electric lights, the ponds with less splendid gas lamps. Gaslight marked all the major concessions, and the main internal avenues. The avenue de l’Impératrice was liberally festooned with lights, joining up with the Champs-Elysées to form a linear féerie (to use the guide-book term) all the way from the place de la Concorde to the heart of the Bois. This illuminated link pointed to the continuity of urban entertainments that were surrounded by “nature,” from the public concerts and cafés-concerts along the Champs-Elysées to the evening activities in the Bois.

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Description: Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

147. Renoir, Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne, 1868. 72 × 90 cm. Private collection.

Two paintings by Renoir give some idea of the social pleasures of the Bois (although not its nighttime festivities), Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne of 1868, and The Morning Ride of five years later (Pls. 147, 149). The earlier picture shows a skating pond in the west of the park, near Longchamp. Touches of red enliven the grey surface, picking out scarves, shawls, edges of skirts, and in the right distance, the trousers of two imperial guardsmen. To the rear a picket of onlookers completes a circle begun in the foreground. On the ice an occasional attendant pushes the snow aside (Pl. 148). A few skaters glide smoothly, one pair left of center do a joint pirouette, a man pushes a bundled figure on a sled, just to the right of the central lamppost, and another does the same, further back to the right. In the foreground, partly detached from the crowd, are figures who give relief to the pleasure-seekers: two policemen on the left, and on the other side, an aproned male, probably a vendor.

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Description: Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne, detail by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

148. Renoir, detail of Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne (Pl. 147).

Renoir’s picture is a knowingly managed representation of middle-class Parisians enjoying wintry pleasures. Of course the Bois de Boulogne itself was one gigantic representation. Its perspectives, specimen trees, bathtub lakes, and performing cascades were not nature, but “nature,” a reconstruction of the physical world derived from the British tradition of the natural garden—also a society’s representation of an ideal. Alphand’s own phrase “picturesque” means “like a picture” or “suitable to a painter,” just as his “perspectives” created the desired arabesques of leisurely informality by suppressing the former straight lines that smacked too much of man’s arbitrariness and power. The Bois was so evidently a representation that Alphand’s contemporaries regularly used artists’ terms to describe it. Snow and ice, rather infrequent adornments, were called “an opera décor painted by winter,” and likened to the powdered head of a society woman at a masked ball.12 By Amadée Achard, in a guide book of 1867 (cited in Renoir 1985, p. 74), and by Whitehurst (Whitehurst 1873, vol. 1, p. 227), also in 1867. Renoir’s painting was virtually predicted by an author of one of several early books devoted to the Bois:

Scatter this crowd along the shores of the lake, on the paths and nearby roads. Sprinkle the skaters in their hundreds over the vast expanse of ice, and give some of them the agility and grace of swallows skimming a pool. Send out light, swift sledges with beautiful women in them, and fine gentlemen to push them. Stick frost on the trees, spread a grey sky over everything, with a dull, unshining copper sun, and you will have before your eyes one of the strange pictures which you sometimes see in the Bois in the coldest season of the year.13 Edouard Gourdon, Le Bois de Boulogne (Paris, 1861), p. 281, cited and translated in Richardson 1971, p. 209.

Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne is among the earliest of Renoir’s multi-figured compositions, and follows in the line of his pictures of 1867, Le Pont des Arts (Pl. 9) and a panoramic view of the Champs-Elysées (Pl. 8). These two were somewhat more finished than the skating picture, which is more of a pochade or sketch. The three canvases are Renoir’s first renderings of modern Parisian life. He chose out-of-door activities in newly transformed areas, celebrations of the Second Empire’s devotion to social leisure that should be grouped with Monet’s views from the Louvre (Pl. 14) and Manet’s View of the Paris World’s Fair (Pl. 7), also of 1867. Manet’s large composition remained unfinished, and neither Monet nor Renoir had hopes of exhibiting their pictures, except perhaps in the shop of an enlightened dealer. Their cityscapes lacked sufficient narrative to qualify for genre pictures, and were too daring in their brushwork to be acceptable. Renoir nonetheless carefully worked out the composition of his Skaters. He arranged his figures in curves, arabesques, and tilted lines that etch out a space that one reads easily; they lead progressively back to less active horizontals whose smoother brushwork and greyer tones fortify the illusion. The high horizon line, favored also by Manet and Monet, allows the arabesques to run over the surface, separating the groups. The oversized pine tree is a rather obvious clue to the painter’s search for some accommodation to traditional recipes for landscape.

Renoir’s other painting of the Bois de Boulogne is as nearly opposite a composition as one could imagine. The Morning Ride (Pl. 149) of 1873 is a posed studio work, awkward and unconvincing. The pond and the small figures to the rear, like the bridal path, are so indefinite that they could refer to any park. Perhaps contemporaries would have thought of the Bois despite this lack of specificity. A British observer reported that in the late 1860s, riding in the Bois was so much the rage that “the ladies have started a new fashion since the hot weather set in, and go early in the morning. Princess de Bauffremont on a dark bay mare, the Duchess of Fitzjames and her two sons, Baronness Lejeune, Countess de Baulaincourt, Baroness de Pierre and Baroness Saint Didier may be seen almost every morning enjoying a canter in the shady alleys of the Bois….”14 North Peat 1903, p. 95, entry for 1865. Isaacson 1972, fig. 30 and n. 61, gives evidence of the popularity of the amazone, the woman rider, in contemporary illustrations.

Renoir’s huge composition seems full of compromises with traditional art. His models were Joseph Le Coeur, the son of friends, and Henriette Darras, wife of Captain Paul Darras. The couple had commissioned portraits by him in 1871, and Renoir hoped that his riding picture would win him favor among their friends and others of the class who rode in the Bois. Accordingly he destined his picture for the official Salon in 1873—only to have it rejected. His disappointment was compensated for, however, because the painting was shown in the Salon des Refusés, a reprise of the special exhibition of 1863, and it was purchased shortly afterwards by Degas’s boyhood friend Henri Rouart, the industrialist, collector, and amateur painter.

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Description: The Morning Ride by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

149. Renoir, The Morning Ride, 1873. 261 × 226 cm. Hamburg, Kunsthalle.

It is easy for us to bring in a verdict against Renoir’s large picture, with its palpable echoes of equestrian portraits of the seventeenth century and its respectably “finished” surface. Most of us have been taught to admire the poor artist who struggles against adversity to maintain his independence, and a compromise like Renoir’s seems tainted (for moral purity is part of the myth we have constructed). Renoir was indeed poor in 1873, and he had to find clients in the free market to which he was condemned. He also wished to be accepted and praised, an urge that Manet was no stranger to, even though he was not poor. Manet refused to exhibit with the impressionists, and made more than one compromise in his attempt to penetrate official circles. The truth is that Renoir and Manet were complex beings who embraced conflicting aspirations. Renoir’s Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne does not represent artistic truth, nor his riding picture, falseness. His art, like Manet’s, was a compound of invention and recipe, of contemporaneousness and tradition. In this he was a perfect exemplar of a nascent industrial society still clad in the garb of pre-modern traditions. Those who went skating in the Bois were taking part in an informal middle-class activity, one that banished weighty ceremony and that did not invoke the glories of present or past rulers. Those who went riding were indulging in upper-class privilege, calling up associations with hunting and other equestrian customs of the wealthy and the powerful.

Louis Napoleon saw to it that the plan of the Bois catered to both skaters and riders. (The working class was kept out of sight, quite literally unrepresented in imperial nature.) Middle-class and upper-class leisure-seekers were encouraged to cross paths; the skating ponds were just as calculated as the bridal paths. For that reason we should regard Renoir’s two paintings of the Bois as equally revealing. One looked forward to his most informal celebrations of contemporary life out of doors, the other to his “sour period” of the 1880s and its return to classical traditions. Both pictures are required if we are to understand his art, which reveals his era’s use of “nature” to represent its ambitions as well as its pleasures.

Taking the air in open carriages was a more commonplace activity in the Bois than riding horseback, and Mary Cassatt’s Woman and Child Driving (Pl. 150) affords an amusing contrast with Renoir’s pretentious canvas. Its figures are stiffly posed, but they share space with a daringly sliced-off carriage, led only by the rump of a horse. Painted eight years after Renoir’s huge picture, it has the looser brushwork and flatter composition shared by all the impressionists by then, but it has Cassatt’s distinctive note: in its solemn figures and oddly truncated horse and cart, she deliberately created a matter-of-fact effect rather than a fashionable one. The picture nonetheless sprang from the artist’s upper-class life. Her parents and older sister Lydia had moved to Paris in 1877 and subsequently bought a pony and cart. The well-off family had a groom, who sits deferentially on the right in the picture. His dark colors and backward-facing pose tell us much about a servant’s place in society. Lydia is driving, and beside her is Odile Fèvre, Degas’s niece. Cassatt was herself a practiced horsewoman, and perhaps the attention paid to harnesses and cart reflects her familiarity with the business end of promenading. Surely the striking pattern indicates a disdain for mere elegance. By calling attention to its skeletal configuration, Cassatt merges the structure of the composition with that of the cart. The figures, immobile and crowded to the right, are balanced by the three-pronged shaft and harness that provide a needed leftward thrust. The greenery behind, said to represent the Bois de Boulogne, is little more than a backdrop, sufficient to give relief to the brilliant colors of the women’s costumes.

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Description: Woman and Child Driving by Cassatt, Mary

150. Cassatt, Woman and Child Driving, 1881. 89.5 × 130.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This is the only picture by Cassatt that can be associated with promenading, and with the Bois. Berthe Morisot, however, treated the Bois many times. She lived on the western edge of Paris, and enjoyed the large park on family outings, as well as on painting excursions. In the fifth impressionist exhibition in 1880, she showed three pictures identified with the park, Summer’s Day (Pl. 151), Women Gathering Flowers, and Avenue in the Bois de Boulogne, Effect of Snow. Summer’s Day shows a more mundane activity than riding, one that typified the average middle-class visitors. Rental boats were immensely popular, and the play between amateur oarsmen and their female passengers was the stuff of current cartoons. Women rowed by themselves, as well, but Morisot apparently represented her two women seated in the ferry that plied back and forth to the tiny islands in the larger lake (one of them held a café-restaurant in the form of a Swiss chalet). The tip of an island appears in the upper right of her canvas.

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Description: Summer's Day by Morisot, Berthe

151. Morisot, Summer’s Day, 1879. 45.7 × 75.2 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London. Lane Bequest, 1917.

Morisot’s painting has a startling freedom of handling (Pl. 152). This reflects not merely the progress of Impressionism over the decade of the 1870s, but the artist’s particular daring. More than any other painter of the group, she broke her edges with fluttering brushstrokes and set portions of her figures against grounds of nearly matching lightness and hue, so that one cannot readily separate the different forms. Try as one might, the viewer cannot bring into focus the three ducks is Summer’s Day, and the struggle to do so strengthens the impression of strong outdoor light. All the critics who reviewed Morisot’s work in 1880 noticed this quality (usually favorably), calling her brushwork “vaporous,” “airy,” and “floating.”15 See the excerpts cited in San Francisco 1986, nos. 95–97.

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Description: Summer's Day, detail by Morisot, Berthe

152. Morisot, detail of Summer’s Day (Pl. 151).

She was carrying to a further point the logic of the impressionists’ abandonment of modeling in light and dark. Comparison with exactly contemporary work of Manet is revealing. In Chez le Père Lathuille (Pl. 67), the brushwork within the contours of each form is extremely free, and most of the edges are laid in flatly with notches and overlaps that prevent us from finding a rigid contour. However, Manet plays color against color and light against dark so that there is greater definiteness of shapes than in Morisot. In her picture, for example, there is no equivalent to the way Manet made the man’s yellow smock stand out against the green foliage. The light strikes his figures strongly from above, a further aid to identifying his form as a separate volume. The sun also shines on Morisot’s grey-clad woman from above, but some of her tones are repeated in the adjacent water, and there are no parallels to Manet’s contrasting patches of dark and light. Instead of Manet’s crispness, and his sense of reflecting surfaces, Morisot created a diffuse color-light that wraps all her forms in an atmospheric unity. Strong accents are not given to shapes, but to zones of color, such as the contrast of blue parasol and orange gunwale, or red hair and green foliage.

When she painted Summer’s Day, Morisot must have intentionally reformulated two paintings by Manet, Boating (Pl. 238) and Argenteuil (Pl. 239), done five years earlier. It is not just men who compete with men. We should not perpetuate the idea that a woman “derives from” or merely emulates the established male artist. Morisot, uninterested in the male-female encounter so central to Manet’s concerns, put two women in a boat. She separated the two, who have different poses which subtly imply dissimilar temperaments, but there is no social interaction between them. Instead, they share a lazy moment in the sunlight, young Parisiennes in proper outing costume celebrating their leisure. Like Manet, who called the picture of his dockside couple Argenteuil, and Degas, who entitled the painting of Lepic and his daughters Place de la Concorde, Morisot made her figures stand for a famous Parisian haunt: in the 1880 catalogue she listed the picture simply as The Lake in the Bois de Boulogne.

At the Racetrack

The most important feature of the Bois de Boulogne, judged by the attention it received in Parisian society, was the racetrack at Longchamp, opened in 1857. Its prominence was out of all proportion to its short racing seasons, a week in April, four days in late May or early June, and an equally brief period in September. The races were at the center of an elaborate social arabesque for the upper class, involving balls and parties in honor of les turfistes, new fashions in clothing, new or newly furbished equipages for horses and carriages, and the promenades to and from the Bois. The April meet took precedence over the others, because its promenade usurped the age-old spring pilgrimage of fashion to the grounds of the abandoned convent of Longchamp. The new social form, in other words, benefited by swallowing up the old. It galvanized the milliners and clothiers, the vendors of jewelry and perfume, the carriage and harness workers, the gamblers, the journalists, the publishers of racing sheets, and the public who lined up along the Champs-Elysées to decipher the signs of high society. The knowing could find their clues among the open and closed carriages and the horsemen who pranced up the avenue: who was with whom, and who wore which new fashion.

Characteristically of the Second Empire, benches and chairs were placed along the edge of the Champs-Elysées so that leisure-seekers could watch the passing parade of life. Felix Whitehurst gave a lively account of an early April afternoon in 1868: “From the Place de la Concorde to the Rond Point are ranged, on either side of the well-watered road, three rows of chairs, which… inevitably call to mind opera stalls on the night of a new ballet.” Among the viewers were rentiers killing time, but also, after five o’clock, “attachés and undersecretaries… dressed within an inch of their lives.” Most of the onlookers, he tells us, were respectable middle-class people, often accompanied by children who swarmed over the adjacent paths and the occasional swings and roundabouts:

But we must look at the gorgeous procession of carriages and mounted cavaliers…. Here comes M. Aguado, with two brown horses, a perfect match Mr. Vansittart (a good judge) seems to think, as he stops to examine them and light another cigarette…. “Very neat T-cart.” Quite right; it belongs to Mr. Ashton Blount, the Captain Little of the French Turf…. That chestnut hack? Oh! that belongs to a petite dame Anglaise, who can ride…. Bright yellow and very neat brougham, “C” springs, and chestnuts—Madame de Gallifet…. And so it goes on—a living kaleidoscope, ever changing, ever amusing….16 Whitehurst 1873, vol. 2, pp. 95–97.

Longchamp, the destination of this well-caparisoned exodus, was the only part of the Bois which interested Manet and Degas. Between 1864 and 1872 Manet did several oils and watercolors, and one lithograph, of the races at Longchamp. Degas was yet more devoted to the races, which are only outrivaled in his oeuvre by the ballet. Most of his pictures of horses and jockeys after about 1873 cannot be placed at Longchamp—they have a generalized, rather than a specific environment—but several of his early works apparently show the famous track in the Bois. That these two artists should be interpreters of racing is no surprise. The races were a central preoccupation of upper-class Parisian males, among whom they found many of their friends and their subjects. We know instinctively that neither Pissarro nor Cézanne would paint the racetrack—the very idea is risible—nor would Cassatt or Morisot. To map out these territories among the artists is to deal with the intersections of social history and artistic biography.

Organized racing in France was linked with the onset of the industrial revolution and the rapid expansion of Paris, and linked also with the dominant men of Paris, their clubs, their investments, and their dependence upon British precedent. Of course horses had long taken major roles in French social life, from country fairs to military parades and royal hunts. The hunt, with its elaborate aristocratic ceremony, was the source of more than one kind of middle-class ritual in the nineteenth century. Racing on a fixed track, however, with well-codified rules, had not taken firm hold in France before the 1830s. By that decade, the British, chief investors in the expanding French economy, were in large numbers in Le Havre, Rouen and in Paris, and they set the tone for major innovations in social life. Exclusive clubs on the British model were established in Paris, the most prestigious being l’Union, founded in 1828; half its charter members were British. The next most prestigious, organized in 1833, was “The Society for encouraging the improvement of horse breeding in France,” thankfully shortened to “Le Jockey-Club,” or simply “Le Jockey.” Just why horses should be the focus of this powerful club requires a bit of explanation.

In addition to the large numbers of British residents in Paris, there were substantial numbers of aristocratic emigrés who had returned after Waterloo. Some of their children had been born in England, and had acquired British tastes, including a love of horses. British men and some of the emigrés encouraged a taste for racing among Parisians, especially the dandified upper-class males who were seldom athletic horsemen, but who prided themselves on a gentleman’s ability to ride, on his knowledge of carriages and equipages, and of course, of racehorses. Close interest in improved breeding of horses was perfectly consistent for the remnants of the French aristocracy, rightfully worried about the dilution of its own blood. Racing in Britain had been clearly marked out as an aristocratic sport, and the Dandy had derived much of his style from the wealthy who were devoted to racing (the original Jockey Club was established in the eighteenth century in order to insulate its members from the profane rabble). The French somewhat misunderstood the British Dandy, but nonetheless “le Dandy” became the lion of Parisian society. The anglomaniac dandy

liked to fancy himself a centaur. It was more than fashionable, it was essential to ride a horse, drive a horse, own a horse, bet on a horse or, at the least (often at the most), talk horse all day and all night long. This attitude was the most foolish and the most colourful mistake in the history of anglomania: confusing the urbane dandy and the horsey buck. For Brummell and Pelham, horses had been incidentals, hunting and racing vulgarly energetic; but the French Dandy at least pretended that racing, driving and Jockey-Clubbing were his primary interests.17 Moers 1960, p. 117.

Among the founders or early members of the Jockey Club were the Franco-British aristocrat, Lord Henry Seymour; the flamboyant Dandy, comte d’Orsay; the returned emigré, duc de Guiche (who acquired in England the expert knowledge of horse breeding which lay behind racing); Charles Laffitte, the banker and partner of Edward Blount, the British backer of French railways; Louis Philippe’s son, the duc d’Orléans; the art collector and Russian emigré, Anatole Demidoff. In 1838, Monsieur de Morny, later made the duc de Morny by Louis-Napoleon, joined the Jockey and eventually became one of its most powerful figures. The Jockey Club set the fashions for Parisian males for two generations and was one of the principal conduits for the penetration of British manners. The chic young men of the Second Empire wore clothes inspired by the British, engaged in the British passion for boating (les yachts were of British manufacture), and read the same reviews that were on the tables of the Jockey Club: Le Jockey, Le Derby, Le Bulletin Officiel des Steeple-chases, La Chronique du turf, Le Sportsman, and Le William’s Turf. In 1862, the prosperous club built a new headquarters on the corner of the boulevard des Capucines and the newly devised rue Scribe, next to the equally new Grand Hôtel (it is just off the edge of Monet’s famous picture, Pl. 18). “Here everything speaks of races,” wrote its first historian, Charles Yriarte. “Here are special books, special reviews, emblems, escutcheons, portraits of celebrated jockeys, equestrian pictures. It is a corner of England. The paintings represent the Derby and celebrated exploits.” He goes on to give evidence of the pervasiveness of British taste and British industry. Even the bathrooms were conceived

in the English manner, provided with large marble tables and sinks which affect British proportions…. I don’t need to add that the details of hot and cold water faucets, of electric bells and wires, are treated with the care which characterizes the English in this sort of installation.18 Yriarte 1864, pp. 108, 117.

Louis Napoleon had spent impressionable years in England, and riding paths, such as those in Hyde Park, were much in his mind when he launched the rebuilding of the Bois de Boulogne. He was easily convinced of the merits of installing a racetrack for the Jockey Club on the large plain to the west of the park, all the more so because the duc de Morny was behind the plan. Before the Empire, the club had only makeshift tracks, including the Champ de Mars in the city. Morny realized the social and financial advantages of racing, both to the club and to the new Empire, always eager to provide elegant distractions to the public, eager also to rival Great Britain. Morny devised a plan whose fruition at Longchamp required the collaboration of many interests, striking proof of the degree to which racing was imbedded in the new society.

The arrangement was this: the city of Paris remained the owner of the land, and paid for the extensive leveling and drainage of the site; the Jockey Club paid for the grandstands and attached buildings, and received a fifty-year lease in exchange for a modest annual rent. Haste and costs meant that painted decoration garnished the stands rather than the planned woods and enamels, but hierarchy was duly observed. The Emperor’s section was in the center, spanned on both sides by a declension of social order, from the membership’s own tribune to the public stands on the outer flanks.

Longchamp rose rapidly to international prominence in the decade that followed its opening, and French racing enjoyed an astonishing expansion. Morny got the five leading rail lines to put up half the money for the new Grand Prix at Longchamp, inaugurated in 1863 (the city supplied the other half). The winner of the first Grand Prix was an English horse, but in 1864 it was Vermouth, a French horse, which won. A French filly, Fille de l’air, won the Derby at Epsom that same year, a feat which led to an all-night celebration at Le Jockey. Its owner, the comte de Lagrange, followed this in 1865 with the double victory of his Gladiateur at Epsom and Long-champ. Gladiateur was given a triumphal parade in Paris, and the comte de Lagrange received a standing ovation from the legislature, which did not mind that his grooms, jockeys, saddles, bridles, even his horse’s shoes, were British.19 North Peat 1903, p. 291. French pride was well served by Gladiateur, a most political horse.

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Description: Race Course at Longchamp by Manet, Edouard

153. Manet, The Races at Longchamp, 1864. Watercolor, 22.3 × 56.5 cm. Cambridge, Harvard University Art Museums (Fogg Art Museum). Bequest, Grenville L. Winthrop.

Suiting its rivalry with Britain—the rivalry was one of the agents of France’s industrialization—the Jockey Club was more open to new blood than the staid Union (for whom the very phrase “new blood” meant spurious lineage), and more clearly a cross section of the high strata of the new entrepreneurial society. Its members were leading financiers, industrialists, politicians, and military officers, along with some foreign businessmen and diplomats. Morny used the Jockey Club to favor his investments in the railroads and in Deauville (see Chapter Seven), a merging of politics, finances, and sport which added up to great power. It was an alliance that set a pattern for the whole modern era. Logically, this connection with power made racing the preserve of upper-class men, just as the ballet was the fiefdom of the Jockey Club. It is therefore fitting that Manet and Degas, who found both patrons and friends among these men, were the impressionists who most favored the races. The British sporting print on the wall of Degas’s Sulking (Pl. 58) was a sign of being up with the times. It points to the function of racing as a conversational lubricant in business society.

Manet, whom Degas once drew at the races (Pl. 154), incorporated Longchamp in his conception of modern Paris. In his proposal of 1879 to the city for a suite of paintings on “the public and commercial life of our day,” he included “Paris Racetracks and Gardens,”20 Proust 1913, p. 94. and towards the beginning of his career he did several paintings of Longchamp. In 1865 and 1867 he exhibited pictures of the races there, and in 1872 painted another (Pl. 159). The two exhibited works were cut up or lost, but other oils, watercolors, and drawings survive to document his early interest in the chief ornament of the Bois. His watercolor of 1864 (Pl. 153) presumably approximates the composition of the dismembered work shown in 1865. On the extreme right edge is the south corner of the public stands. Several horses race towards us, watched on the left by a crowd along the fence inside the privileged oval. Behind them are several carriages, the nearest one a Victoria driven by two uniformed coachmen, and bearing two women with raised parasols (Pl. 156). The cavalier nearby might have accompanied them up the Champs-Elysées and down the avenue de l’Impératrice, a role taken by both husbands and admirers. He is looking towards the front, not at the race, and so is the most prominent woman in the foreground. Like other Parisian entertainments, the races were distractions as much as attractions. The social rituals at Longchamp did not require constant attention to the race, and the possibility that the mounted man is looking at the woman buttresses his dominant position on the left edge of this panorama.

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Description: Edouard Manet at the Races by Degas, Edgar

154. Degas, Manet at the Races, 1870–72. Pencil, 32 × 24 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One of the pieces of the large oil, reworked after it was separated, shows the same foreground woman (Pl. 155). She and the other woman have their hats tied down with long scarves, the normal outdoor raiment which shows also in Music in the Tuileries (Pl. 41). They wear heavy, capacious garments, a protection against the chill of spring or fall. Flanking them are portions of carriage wheels whose yellow and red spokes betoken the bright trim that added to the glitter of the parade of vehicles. Instead of the broad expanse of Longchamp which the watercolor embraced, the now autonomous fragment is a tightly packed space, a crowding of forms that speaks more of city than of country. Were it not for the barrier and the patch of green ground, we might imagine spectators at a city parade. They are, however, far above the common herd. Entrance to the oval required a double supplement (twenty gold francs for a large carriage), so Manet’s women are an élite among the élite. These onlookers have become our show, which is only reasonable, since one went to the races, as to the theater, partly to look over the women and their apparel. In a play published in 1864 (but censored for being too risqué), Les femmes du sport by A. Bourdois and Emile Colliot, the second act is dominated by women, some of them watching the races by climbing up on their carriages; the grandstand was relegated to the side wings. The protagonists included a ballet star, a dancer from the Prado, Lord Crockmerton, a British businessman and “pure-blood sportsman,” and John, “a well-dressed groom.”21 Published in the series Bibliothèque dramatique 268 (1864): 107ff.

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Description: Women at the Races by Manet, Edouard

155. Manet, Women at the Races, 1865. 42.2 × 32.1 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum, Fanny Bryce Lehmer Endowment.

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Description: The Races at Longchamp, detail by Manet, Edouard

156. Manet, detail of The Races at Longchamp (Pl. 153).

In contrast to the painting of the two women, which says “crowd,” Manet painted a horizontal canvas which says “race” (Pl. 157). This other picture recapitulates the right-hand two-thirds of the watercolor (Pl. 153), but pulls the horses closer to us. Manet opened out the surface to the green turf, the slopes of Saint-Cloud, and the windy sky. On the left, two foreground figures can be distinguished, and further back, a man upright in a carriage, arms outspread to steady his binoculars. All the figures left and right, as far as we can make them out, are concentrating on the race. There seems to be no precedent for the foreshortened, two-legged horses they are watching, Manet’s way of suggesting speed. The horses are pinned down by the patch of foliage overhead, and pulled back by the sharply receding turf, a balance of opposites that restrains their forward surge so that the picture remains intact.

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Description: The Races at Longchamp by Manet, Edouard

157. Manet, The Races at Longchamp, c. 1867. 43.9 × 84.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Potter Palmer Collection, 1922.424.

The brushstrokes of both pictures are far too loose to have pleased many of Manet’s contemporaries, but they are the real building blocks of his visual architecture. For the two women, the artist used rather wide strokes whose texture and direction define both surface and volume, a process of drawing in color that prepared the way for the liberties taken by Van Gogh two decades later. For the racing scene, Manet employed smaller and more varied strokes (Pl. 158), because there are more varied images. Horizontal strokes, partly blended, define the green turf. The slope in the left distance has long, diagonal strokes that fade to horizontal ones at the crest; the sky, curving and dabbed touches; the dark-green poplars to the right, vertical strokes, and the bushy trees, diagonals. The fences consist of vertical streaks, and the spectators, of mixed dabs that separate hats, parasols, faces, and bodies which nonetheless never quite come into focus. Rounded swipes of the brush describe the hunched-over jockeys, and thin rays of yellow run over the surface of the horses to suggest reflections from glistening muscles. Whether applied to horses, viewers, or landscape, the artist’s marks seem to result from spontaneous response to a scene, a perceptual quickness that we know is a trick—the composition, well pondered, repeats portions of other works—but one that works admirably.22 Richard Shiff has made the most astute analysis of impressionist brushwork in its multiple meanings (Shiff 1984, passim).

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158. Manet, detail of The Races at Longchamp (Pl. 157).

Manet painted the last of his Longchamp views in 1872, The Races in the Bois de Boulogne (Pl. 159). It is said to have been commissioned by a sporting enthusiast named Barret,23 Tabarant 1947, p. 202. and, if this is true, Manet may have deliberately reverted to the profile race in order to evoke the prototypes that were ubiquitous in horsey circles. In British sporting prints and in Géricault’s famous Races at Epsom of 1821 (one of the early instances of French anglomania), the horses rush laterally across the surface in the position of the flying gallop, legs extended front and rear. Photography and cinema now make Manet’s horses seem too toy-like and his jockeys too rigid—and only later did jockeys, with shortened stirrup leathers, ride forward over the horses’ shoulders—but in 1872 the hobbyhorse gallop, whose flight above the ground Manet accentuates with streaky shadows, may well have channeled speed more successfully than the foreshortened poses of the earlier painting.

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Description: The Races at Bois de Boulogne by Manet, Edouard

159. Manet, The Races in the Bois de Boulogne, 1872. 73 × 92 cm. New York, From the collection of Mrs. John Hay Whitney.

Drama, more than speed, is conveyed by Manet’s earlier race, and this is true also of Degas’s Steeplechase, the Fallen Jockey (Pl. 160) of 1866, his largest racing picture and the only one he ever showed in the official Salon. A fallen jockey is at least as dramatic as a frontal charge of horses. The Goncourts put a steeplechase at the very heart of their scandalous play Henriette Maréchal, premiered in 1865 and published the next year. Young Pierre has won the adulterous love of Mme Maréchal, but at the critical juncture of the play he switches his affections to her innocent daughter, Henriette. He breaks the news to the mother by speaking of an outing to the steeplechase at Caen:

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Description: Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey by Degas, Edgar

160. Degas, Steeplechase, the Fallen Jockey, 1866. 180 × 152 cm. From the collection of Mrs. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia.

You were not there. You had let Mlle Henriette go there with her father. My brother was racing that day. He fell, as you know, at the first barrier and remained for a moment without moving; we thought he was dead. I couldn’t see anything. A hand had taken mine, a hand that I felt to tremble until my brother was gathered up. It was the hand of your daughter.

It is a coincidence that Degas’s fallen jockey is dated the same year as the play, but the subject is revealing both for painter and writers. In the 1860s, the Goncourts, Degas, and Manet often bore the imprint of the theatrical appeals which marked romantic art. Degas’s picture, furthermore, is an unusually large one for him, and must mean that he wished to rival history painting by elevating a contemporary subject to such a scale. His drama comes from the danger to the fallen jockey, of course, but the threat is managed in pictorial terms, keyed to the unusual “empty” slope below the figures. The weight of the horses is all the more menacing because the lower portion of the canvas is flat and exposed, heightening our fear that the crumpled jockey is vulnerable to the moving bodies overhead. Their poses can be found in British sporting prints, but Degas frames them in an unusual and more dynamic way. The front horse is barely contained by the sides of the canvas, which means that we see him between the two edges much as we might catch a moving horse in the gap between two buildings or trees. If space opened out on both sides, he would seem frozen or suspended. And behind him, the two rear horses are hardly visible at all. Their jockeys ride the crest of brown hide and would seem to careen out of the picture were it not for the power of our left-to-right vision, and the eye-catching figure of the pink-jacketed jockey on the ground.

The Salon picture of 1866 is Degas’s only major rendering of a steeplechase, and one of only two that depict a race in progress (the other is Plate 166). Steeplechases were not conducted in the Bois de Boulogne until 1873, when the terrain at Auteuil was opened, supplanting a wooded area that had been denuded during the Franco-Prussian War. Degas may have attended steeplechase meets at Vincennes, la Marche, or while vacationing with friends in Normandy, but his painting lacks any sense of a specific site. This is true also of his other racing scenes, even those few that have been identified with Longchamp, including The False Start (Pl. 161) and Jockeys in front of the Grandstands (Pl. 163). The stands in the latter rather closely resemble those at Longchamp, and the factory chimneys beyond are logically those of the nearby industrial region of Puteaux. The sun, however, is coming from due north! The same boreal sun is casting shadows in The False Start, whose stands do not closely imitate Longchamp’s. (Manet’s sun “correctly” comes from the west and the south in his two Longchamp races.) It is not hard to conclude that Degas made studio compositions without much regard for specific locations. He had a notorious disdain for faithfulness to landscape, and it was enough for him that a contemporary kind of racetrack was evoked. He used various studies of his own and occasional drawings after other artists, shuffling and rearranging poses (often repeating them) until he had a satisfactory result. The principal horse of The False Start could have come from the sporting print he painted on the wall of Sulking (Pl. 58), and the left foreground mount in Jockeys in front of the Grandstands was borrowed from a battle picture by Meissonier.24 Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino (Musée d’Orsay), 1863 (Theodore Reff, “Further Thoughts on Degas’s Copies,” Burlington Magazine 113 [1971]: 537–38).

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Description: The False Start by Degas, Edgar

161. Degas, The False Start, c. 1869–72. 32 × 40 cm. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of John Hay Whitney.

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Description: The Agility and Daring of Juanito Apinani (Tauromachia, pl. 20) by Goya, Francisco...

162. Goya, The Agility and Daring of Juanito Apinani (Tauromachia, pl. 20), c. 1815. Etching, 24.5 × 35.5 cm. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Douce Collection.

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Description: Jockeys in front of the Grandstands by Degas, Edgar

163. Degas, Jockeys in front of the Grandstands, c. 1869–72. 46 × 61 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

Degas’s racetrack compositions show horses milling about before the races, a choice he must have regarded as more subtle than Manet’s races in progress, and a more suitable field for his insider’s knowledge. He gave The False Start a touch of drama by showing the horses’ anticipatory excitement. Taking a cue, perhaps, from Goya’s bullfight prints (Pl. 162), he headed his horse into a clear expanse, increasing its illusory speed with the aid of the horizontal fence and railing, but then slowed it down with the other horse, and stopped it with the starter and his red flag. In Jockeys in front of the Grandstands, instead of a horizontal flow of action, he used sharply receding orthogonals. One horseman splits the wedge of space formed by the grandstands and the echelon of horses. This produces a smaller wedge which heads up the center of the composition, a dynamic one because at its apex is the only exuberant horse. Its dash to the rear threatens the stability of this wedge, and also threatens the sense of control which the other jockeys preserve over their powerful animals. The potential for swiftness—one should sense it before a race—is not just in that fractious horse, it is more especially vested in Degas’s artistic devices. By emptying the tracks of everything but the horses and their shadows (another parallel with Goya), Degas induces a sensation of quickness in our very perception. Our eyes can race into the imagined space, hastened along by those distinctive shadows. They result from the sun’s glancing off the ground from its unusual position in the rear of the space (this is why it had to come from the north!). Here and in The False Start, the shadows dematerialize the ground, converting it into a surface that reflects perceptual speed. To most modern observers, his two pictures suggest horses’ ability to sprint more convincingly than do Manet’s two races.

Degas’s flat racing terrains are another instance of the impressionists’ discarding the traditional complexity of modeled surfaces. If we turn back to the beginning of organized racing in France, we shall find the nearest equivalent to his cleared-out planes in the work of Carle Vernet. In Mounted Jockeys (Pl. 164) Vernet also creates a wedge of space with an echelon of jockeys, and endows the furthest horse with the greatest motion.25 By introducing Vernet, and then Cuyp, I wish to deal in broad precedents, not in “influences” on Degas. A more thorough discussion of representations of horses and races would have to deal with the British tradition, particularly with Stubbs. His horizon line is so low, however, that we read the illusion more easily than its manifestation on the surface. Additionally, he includes a still life in the foreground and models the earth with patches of growth and slight undulations, as well as with strips of shadow. Lacking pronounced area, the strips serve as slender pedestals for the horses, whereas Degas’s shadows are large shapes that rival the horses as they slide downward on the picture plane. If we go back to a still earlier era, Degas’s innovations will seem even more evident. Albert Cuyp’s Starting for the Hunt (Pl. 165), for example, has a density of information along the earth that prevents us from accelerating into the space as Degas has us do.

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Description: Mounted Jockeys by Vernet, Carle

164. Carle Vernet, Mounted Jockeys, c. 1820–25. Watercolor and ink, 15.7 × 29.3 cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox.

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Description: Starting for the Hunt by Cuyp, Albert

165. Albert Cuyp, Starting for the Hunt, c. 1652–53. 108 × 154 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931. The Friedsam Collection.

The contrast of Degas’s smooth, tilted-up plane with the earlier compositions should not be explained, as it usually is by art historians, by saying that it results from some sort of impulsion towards twentieth-century abstraction (a prevalent form of circular reasoning). The efforts of the Jockey Club had been bent on getting rid of the temporary and often uneven tracks of Vernet’s day. Racetracks in Degas’s era were flatter, since they were better graded, drained, rolled, and groomed in order to increase track times and diminish risk to the horses and their riders. Degas was not “influenced” by their manicured geometry—that would be a naive conception—but he adopted it as the ground on which to set his equine puppets. His pictorial devices were profound expressions of his class and his era because they literally gave shape to aspirations and anxieties that his society formulated in the races. Tracks, horses, and jockeys had all been removed from their once-countrified precincts. Like animated urban machines, horses and jockeys made their rounds on confined belts of ground, with ever-increasing speeds. Gauged by the exacting standards used by modern city dwellers to calculate time, location, appearance, and monetary value, they became one of the chief embodiments of industrial capital’s drive for productivity and speed. They were parallel forms, barely different from one another, who rushed along a prescribed track, investments whose risk was measured by split seconds, mobile stock coupons who gave life to the spirit of competition and enterprise.

This is not to say that all horses were so viewed. The racehorse was the exponential development of an animal that Parisians saw at every turn; it was a symbol of continuity, as well as of speed and change. In the world of entertainment, equestrian shows were a staple of circuses, and more than one hippodrome was devoted entirely to “equestrian spectacles.” In daily life, there had been a vast increase in the number of horses in Paris, paradoxical result of the urban-industrial revolution. They pulled the city’s buses, its hired cabs, and private carriages, and its produce. The wealthy rode horses, so did police and military. Parisians were constantly at risk in the streets from the congestion of horse-drawn vehicles: 100,000 a day along the rue Montmartre in 1881, 20,000 on the boulevard des Italiens, nearly 18,000 across the pont Neuf.26 See Gourdon de Genouillac 1893–98, vol. 5, p. 476 and passim; Avenel 1900–1905, vol. 5, pp. 140–41, 156–57 and passim; Merlin 1967, pp. 14, 36–44. Those killed or maimed by horses formed a large statistic in the city’s lugubrious registers, but were only a small percentage of the 122 million passengers transported in 1875 by the city’s horse-drawn buses and tramways, and 12 million, by carriages and cabs. Some of those passengers would have been taken to Longchamp, where they could leave the city’s cares behind. There, in the open if well-regulated space of the track, they could indulge their thirst for leisure and entertainment by observing a more perfect form of the animal they knew so well.

In his early years, and occasionally later, Degas drew and painted all sorts of horses: ploughhorses, hunters, cavalry mounts, and carriage hacks, but he made racehorses his special choice. His preference for the moments before a race was at least partly owing to his interest in the ways horses and riders were studied in order to predict the outcome of the races. Knowledgeable observers knew, for example, that an experienced jockey could provoke an opponent’s horse into a false start, to make both mount and rider more nervous. He could make his own mount seem unduly high strung, or the opposite, in order to throw his opponents’ calculations off, for vital to a jockey’s tactics during a race was knowledge of the other horses’ temperaments and capabilities. Degas’s concentration on the jockeys and horses was like that of the gambler who pins his hopes on close judgments of mounts and riders. He paid little attention to the social life which swarmed around track meets and seldom represented any of the officials and attendants who appear in Vernet’s drawings, and in the racing scenes of his contemporaries. Of his finished works, fewer than ten show figures other than jockeys. One is The False Start, with its tiny starter, and among the remainder are three that let us examine the maximum variety within this realm, with due awareness of their exceptional nature.

At the Races in the Country (Pl. 166) represents the family of his boyhood friend Paul Valpinçon. Degas frequently stayed with the Valpinçons at their country estate at Ménil-Hubert, in Normandy; his letters show that it was a peaceable retreat from the cares of the city. He stayed at Ménil-Hubert during the Commune, recuperating from the siege of Paris (he and Manet had served, without action, in the artillery). He probably began the little picture then, or shortly afterwards. As he did in Place de la Concorde (Pl. 37) and The Orchestra of the Opéra (Pl. 91), Degas put friends in an ambience that typified them, combining portraiture with genre painting. The infant Henri Valpinçon has just fallen asleep after nursing: his wet-nurse’s breast is still uncovered. His mother bends under the sheltering parasol to look at him, while above, the dog imitates the father in an aloof observation (Pl. 168). Valpinçon, suitably elevated above the others, is dressed in the formal clothes of a wealthy Parisian.

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Description: At the Races in the Country by Degas, Edgar

166. Degas, At the Races in the Country, c. 1872. 36.5 × 55.9 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 1931 Purchase Fund.

The painting is more about a day’s outing at a country race than about the race itself, here relegated to the left distance. There is none of the anticipatory tension that distinguishes The False Start and Jockeys in front of the Grandstands. Widely scattered over the plain are a number of observers who are either still or moving slowly. The cart on the left edge leans into the picture to suggest its swaying motion; seen from the rear, with only two of its horse’s legs visible, it punctuates the space with quiet delicacy. One miniature horseman, facing forward, perches on the left corner of the open carriage as though responding to the dog; alongside the other corner are a man gazing to the right and a woman walking in the opposite direction. The tents and thin crowds in the distance, barely discernible in reproduction, locate the principal area of activity of this meet or fair. The race in mid-distance, perhaps a “gentlemen riders’” challenge, has attracted few spectators, and its speed is checked by the crossing axis of the cadet astride a white horse, and by the clumps of trees above. It is true that by cutting the Valpinçon’s carriage and the cart on the left with his frame, Degas produced an effect of alert vision, as though we had just come across this scene.27 This painting has been a favorite of those who posit an influence of photography on Degas. They point particularly to the truncated cart on the left. This claim now seems much exaggerated, for cut-off figures are common in painting and graphic arts. In Vernet’s Mounted Jockeys, for example, a figure exiting to the left is cut by the frame, as is the horse above. In another of this series, only the front half of a horse and half its rider protrude into the picture space. One can readily imagine Degas grafting his innovations on similar precedents. Moreover, historians frequently cite Japanese prints as sources for such cut-off forms, but surely the stasis of those prints would cancel out the other “influence.” Besides, there is nothing photographic about the deliberate placement of all the tiny figures, and of course the little race itself would have to be called “anti-photographic.” Degas’s known use of photographs (e.g., Pls. 122, 123) shows no interest in such effects, and the ones he later took or posed himself are notable for their centrality and symmetry. The charging horse in Plate 167, for its part, has the customary pose of the flying gallop, not that of contemporary motion photography. Ironically, when Degas did borrow poses from Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-action photographs of horses, after 1882, the result was stiff images with less potential motion. Despite this, the peaceful stasis of the whole scene is its dominant note.

At the Races, Gentlemen Jockeys (Pl. 167), painted a few years later, also has a carriage in the lower right, but it returns us to the tension of the races, even though only one of its horses is moving quickly. The excitement comes from the contrast of the charging horse with the figures to the right, and from the oppositions within the crowded group. The refractory horse starts a triangle that broadens until it reaches the far side, an encompassing shape that lets our eye dart quickly to the right. His charge is seconded by the distant train and its steam, and by the adjacent horizontals. Forward motion is nonetheless delicately checked by the tail of the horse to the right, and more firmly counterbalanced by the forms in the corner.

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Description: At the Races, Gentlemen Jockeys by Degas, Edgar

167. Degas, At the Races, Gentlemen Jockeys, c. 1877–80. 66 × 82 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

The entire absence of shadows in this composition shows the extent of Degas’s inventiveness by the late 1870s. In The False Start and Jockeys in front of the Grandstands (Pls. 161, 163), he needed the striking shadows because of the relative isolation of each of his horses. In just six or seven years he learned how to construct dynamic relationships by overlapping and interweaving his figures, playing one against another, reducing them to partial views. It is just like the development that his ballet pictures underwent in the same years. He also loosened his brushwork and heightened his palette, changes which were paralleled by the other impressionists. His shaggier brushstrokes produced softer edges and a more atmospheric effect than in his earlier racing scenes, dominated still by traditional modeling in light and dark, and his brighter colors helped pick out forms that might otherwise have been insufficiently differentiated in his busy patchwork of images.

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Description: At the Races in the Country, detail by Degas, Edgar

168. Degas, detail of At the Races in the Country (Pl. 166).

The arrangement of At the Races, Gentlemen Jockeys has its ancestry in seventeenth-century and later paintings which portray battles or hunting scenes. In Cuyp’s Starting for the Hunt (Pl. 165), the left side opens out to a racing horse, whose rear hooves just touch a nearby animal, one of the cluster that crowds the right foreground (in other Cuyps, one finds a distant horse charging towards a foreground group). Cuyp activated his huntsmen and mounts by facing them in different directions, a key feature of Degas’s organization. Such analogies do not deny the impressionist’s effects of accelerated speed and agitation. In the Degas, Cuyp’s shadows are lacking (how easily we accept their absence!), the foreground space is another incident-free wedge, and the countervailing poses of horses, riders, and spectators do not have Cuyp’s up-and-down rhythms, and hence are more readily grasped in a single sweep of the eye.

The jockey facing left in this picture has the chunky body of a non-professional rider, the only visual clue to the gentlemen’s race announced in the picture’s title. Most racing seasons at the tracks around Paris set aside at least one race for gentlemen riders, who wore the colors of their own or a friend’s stable. Bending into the picture’s right corner is a man in formal daytime wear. His cane, inclined to his rear, shows that he is striding forward; he looks down as though he were watching his steps (the carriage is perhaps passing by). His hat hides the head of one woman in the carriage, but the edges of her own hat show that she is facing to the right. Her companion looks into the picture from beneath her elaborate headpiece, decked in ostrich plumes, flowers, and lace.

Neither woman’s pose is easily read. One is largely headless, the other is armless, and her dress, cut in a square over her upper back, confuses us further. The well-packed corner of this painting consists entirely of fragments: the top-hatted man and the carriage are partial images, and none of the nearby horses has four legs. We see the front half of one, the rear of another, and only one leg of the furthest mount. Two of the jockeys head in the same direction (foretaste of the pending race), but the corpulent rider, the two women, and the man each look in different directions. The contrast with At the Races in the Country is complete, for there the carriage group concentrates on the infant, and we sense the openness of the environing plain. The field in the later picture is presumably equally broad, but it is closed off at the right and the jumble of fragments has the effect of crowding our perceptions, making us work hard to separate the pieces. We have come out from the city, in effect, to view this race, and Degas gives us a busy urban experience, rather than the peaceful country glimpse of the Valpinçon family.

The train off in the distance is another sign of the dialogue between city and country which characterizes the suburban and provincial races. The train’s smoke is assimilated with the fiery breath of the galloping horse, a playful touch that also reminds us of the symbiosis that joins the iron horse and the races. It was not just that trains brought crowds from Paris out to the suburban tracks. The railroads also put up prize money, ran special excursion trains, and advertised both heavily. Thanks to the power of the Jockey Club, and particularly to the duc de Morny, a special line was built in 1859 to serve the track at Chantilly. It transported 30,000 passengers a day during the racing season. Trains were even more vital to the tracks at a further distance from Paris, for at Chantilly, only twenty-four miles from Paris, omnibuses, carriages, hired cabs, and private carriages brought a still greater number. Major races drew over 100,000 spectators. Many came for the day, and some brought food and drink, the origins of “tailgate parties” so important today in collegiate football games in America. The chic thing to do, however, was to rent quarters in or near Chantilly, in order to take part in the round of dinners and balls that, for some, were as important as the races. Because of the associations with the famous château, there was at Chantilly “an air of aristocracy and of high living”:

Those favored by large fortunes have the habit of renting a house for the short season of the races, colonized by all the luxury of Paris. For those who really belong to the circles of Parisian sport, Chantilly is an obligatory rendez-vous, but it is so as well for those who wish to give the impression that they own their own horses and equipages. Chantilly is… a pell-mell of individualities which provide contrasts: real gentlemen, society women, orthodox countesses and duchesses, people of eminent distinction and good fortune, then the higher bohemia, profane and doubtful crowds, financial celebrities, a colorless, prosaic, untidy bunch, disdainful of the best traditions.28 Chapus 1854, p. 27.

Degas’s At the Races, Gentlemen Jockeys does not represent Chantilly (it is probably an invented terrain), but its “pell-mell of individualities” and its restrained excitement form an admirable interpretation of suburban races, this special form of entertainment for middle-class and wealthy Parisians. In addition to Chantilly, whose spring and fall seasons followed and extended those at Longchamp, there were meets at La Marche (near La Ville d’Avray), Le Vésinet, Versailles, Vincennes, Porchefontaine, and Fontainebleau. None of these challenged the primacy of Longchamp, but they also were epicenters for the swirl of Parisian fashion. Men could show their prowess in choosing women, as well as horses, and women, their flair for the latest fashion. The hat worn by the woman in Degas’s carriage (he was also a painter of milliners’ shops) is elevated to singular importance, since it is all we see of her head. Placed next to the man’s shiny stovepipe, it flags the role of fashion at the races. At Chantilly, wrote an American journalist in 1869,

one may study the most remarkable toilettes. The favorite colors seem to be pale blue, pale green, lavender, pink, pearly gray, and maize color, bordered with deep white lace or bound with satin or velvet of some contrasting shade. It is in the hat alone, with its pyramid of feathers, its large bouquets of flowers, bands of velvet, and puffs of lace that one recognizes the extravagance of the day.29 McCabe 1869, p. 523.

The appearance of fashionable spectators in At the Races, Gentlemen Jockeys should not distract us from observing the structure of Degas’s art, that is, we should not be so attracted by his subject that we lose sight of the fact that the picture is created, not seen. Each of its jockeys and horses appears in other paintings, proof enough of the fact that he built compositions out of pieces of art, instead of observing a scene and then copying it.30 The painting also has signs of numerous changes in its gestation. Pentimenti reveal that the carriage wheels were once much larger, and that there was a barrier or fence cutting across the now open foreground space, just below the central horse’s tail. In Before the Start (Pl. 169), a track official looks at some of the same horses and jockeys. He is the fulcrum around which the jockeys pivot—another instance of the actual structure of a picture contributing to its subject—so the composition is more symmetrical than the other. Because the foreground space is more evenly balanced left and right, there is no reason to isolate the charging horse. His speed is diminished by the blocking effect of the foreground mount, well to the left of its position in the related composition. The amateur rider of the latter, slimmed down, is here over on the right edge, and his costume is worn by another.

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Description: Before the Start by Degas, Edgar

169. Degas, Before the Start, c. 1875–78. 32.8 × 40.5 cm. Private collection.

Degas’s jockeys and horses are therefore puppets that he manipulated, as he did his ballet dancers. Like the dancers, his jockeys, absorbed in their work, do not talk to one another. They are skilled specialists, workers whom Degas and the members of the Jockey Club admired and judged from their privileged vantage points. Degas moved their images around on imaginary fields, as flat as rehearsal floors. He made wax sculptures of horses and of dancers, single figures that, once made, acquired the factitious reality of manikins. Surely he preferred the moments before races and before ballet performances because he could show the movements of training and control. He could act out the role of the dominant male connoisseur, the insider who knew the fine points of jockeys and their mounts, as well as of ballet dancers. His own analytical studies, while he devised his compositions, had kindred moments in the subjects that he rendered.

Degas did not need track officials nor spectators to induce the agitation of the racetrack. Jockeys (Pl. 170) is a tour de force in which landscape is reduced to a token patch on the left, horses’ legs are nowhere seen, and only two of the jockeys have visible mounts. We are extremely close to the horses, either on horseback or in a carriage. We can easily imagine their snorting and their motion, even to the point of being jostled by them. On the left the horses’ heads are lopped off, a startling pictorial mutilation. Our instinct is to imagine the existence of those missing heads, and then we jump over to the right where two heads are just bobbing their way into the composition. The right edge of the picture somehow becomes the left edge as our minds perform this back-and-forth reading which so wonderfully suits the subject.

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170. Degas, Jockeys, c. 1882–85. 26 × 39 cm. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of J. Watson Webb, B.A. 1907, and Electra Havemeyer Webb.

The jockeys in the center of this little picture have no horses. We assume that they do, because of the astute way Degas has used the conventions of scale and perspective, principally, diminished size and the declining slant of their heads. Color contributes to this, also. The foreground jockeys and horses are rendered mostly in dark and sonorous browns, purples and reds. This forms a wide V-shaped frame, through which we look to the backs of the jockeys. There we see the brightest colors: the jacket of the furthest jockey, reduced to three spots, has the most intense red in the painting. These strong hues attract our attention to the central region from all points on the perimeter, creating a funnel of space. The funnel is also a flat triangle, surrounded by other triangular shapes. The tension between the illusion of depth and the densely packed surface is simultaneously created and tamed by the artist’s geometry.

Degas’s astonishing modernity is fittingly embodied in his images of horses in motion. They stand for a society undergoing profound and rapid transformations. We confront an imaginary event that concentrates on the present moment, one that gives us little that is enduring or stable. It is, moreover, a passive entertainment, not truly a sport. The jockeys are hired entertainers who jostle one another in dense packs despite the open ground they are passing over. They prepare for the competition which Degas’s society said was the essence of progress. His genius is to have created pictures that render the strains which underlay this “progress.” Instead of a whole body or a whole scene, with its traditional unities, we are faced with an assortment of parts. We have to study the relationships among them, and this reconstruction becomes our mode of apprehension. Degas pushed the Renaissance tradition of verisimilitude to its limits and showed man’s power over nature by making his puppets believable, by making us accept headless horses, bodyless heads, and horseless jockeys.

Degas’s dynamic vision, with its choppy rhythms and abrupt shifts, looks forward to the twentieth century’s thirst for motion, for speed, for concentration upon the present moment in the hopes that it will control the future. The past is still with us, as it was with Degas, and threads of continuity keep the social fabric intact despite alterations, but the consciousness of change and rupture is one of our leading signs. The racehorse is an especially appropriate embodiment of all this. It is no accident that Umberto Boccioni, Raymond Duchamp-Villion, and Jacques Villon chose the horse as a vehicle for these modern sensations, and it is no surprise that “horsepower” and “harnessing power” are still basic conceptions, despite the anachronism of the terms. Degas’s pictures are close to us because of their dynamism, their assertion of the power of humans to impose patterns upon nature, and their threat of fragmentation.

Luncheons on the Grass

When Parisians took their lunches out to the racetrack at Longchamp or Chantilly, they were indulging in a latter-day version of the hunt breakfast and the picnics which had passed from the aristocracy down to the middle class in the eighteenth century (we still eat the invention of Lord Sandwich). Picnics were one of the common ways in which city dwellers enjoyed nature, and Alphand made allowance in his design of the Bois de Boulogne for a variety of open and semi-secluded areas favored by picnickers. Cafés and kiosks sold luncheon supplies to improvident visitors, and journalistic pictures of alfresco parties became a standard visual reference to the renovated park.

Picnics were social forms that were intimately tied to the Parisians’ concept of landscape. The landscapes created by the Second Empire and those painted by the impressionists were expressions of the age-old solace that urban peoples sought in nature. It is no paradox that landscape was one of the principal manifestations of the urban-industrial revolution. In England at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, painting was steeped in the imagery of nature, while the country was being rapidly industrialized. In France, landscape painting began its rise to prominence only a generation later, when its belated modernization began. Constable, Turner, and Bonington had a role in the development of French landscape partly because British culture and industry were then penetrating France, serving as beacons of modernity. It was fitting that Louis Napoleon’s ideas for the Bois de Boulogne derived from London’s parks, just as it is fitting that the impressionists exhibited pictures painted out of doors a half-century after Constable had done so.

To place the human figure in natural light was a task that most of the impressionists set themselves. Manet, Monet, Morisot, Caillebotte, Cassatt, Cézanne, and Pissarro each expressed this aim in one way or another, and their friends among the critics built their defenses around this same aspiration. Duranty, we recall, in his famous pamphlet of 1876,31 See Chapter One, p. 20. urged artists to knock down studio walls and go outside. Even though he meant city streets and not “nature,” he stressed natural light (“the vibration of sun-drenched air”), and gave the first major statement of the painters’ breaking colored light into its constituent tones. Except for Pissarro and Cézanne, who disliked Paris and its society (Pissarro’s views of Paris were done towards the end of his life), the impressionists painted landscape settings that were urban in feeling, even when outside the city: the strollers, picnickers, and boaters they showed in Argenteuil or Trouville certainly came from Paris.

As usual it was Manet who led the way. Ten years before Renoir exhibited his Morning Ride, Manet had shown his Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Pl. 171) in the first Salon des Refusés. Like Renoir’s painting, it showed townspeople out in nature, and it was also a singular mixture of historical reference and current observation. In that exhibition of works rejected by the Salon jury, it was the most notable painting, the one most talked about—nearly always negatively. Like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa or Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, it was one of those pictures that launched an epoch in painting by assaulting simultaneously traditional art and reigning social conventions. That it did so in a picture of townspeople relaxing in a wooded clearing is no accident. It evoked the aspirations the whole century felt so keenly, of accommodating oneself to nature, and drew to itself traditions of art history dating back to the Renaissance. From the immediate past it recalled the picnics that were ubiquitous in romantic art, in both popular prints and the paintings of artists like Diaz, who extended the previous century’s predilection for outdoor coquetry in bosky surroundings.

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Description: Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe) by Manet, Edouard

171. Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863. 208 × 264 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

The Déjeuner sur l’herbe was painted at the outset of Manet’s career. He had first exhibited in public only two years earlier, and he was only thirty-one when his picture’s appearance in the Salon des Refusés in 1863 gave him sudden notoriety. Courbet, whom he now began to rival, had exhibited his Young Women on the Banks of the Seine in 1857 (Pl. 172), a painting of two women of dubious virtue reclining on the riverbank. One has removed her outer garment and gives the viewer a sultry look. Manet’s picture put him in Courbet’s camp as a realist out to shock the conservatives. The extent to which he anticipated the viewing public’s scandalized reaction is not known (and has been much argued over), but by placing a nude among clothed men, he ensured a provocation that any dandy would have been proud of. The men are dressed as fashionable young students (and that is a silver flask near the basket, not a wine bottle), but this makes their companion’s nudity only all the more striking. The shift worn by the woman in the background is not reassuring, either. Since Manet exhibited his huge painting as Le Bain (Bathing)—he changed to the present title four years later—one must conclude that the two women were so liberated that they had doffed their clothes in the men’s presence in order to swim in that sylvan pool.

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Description: Young Women on the Banks of the Seine by Courbet, Gustave

172. Gustave Courbet, Young Women on the Banks of the Seine, 1856–57. 174 × 200 cm. Paris, Musée du Petit Palais.

Because the picture contains references to past art, and because its figures have a posed and solemn appearance, Manet may have thought that his public would take the women as dryads or nymphs of spring and forest. In student days he had copied Giorgione’s Concert (Pl. 173) in the Louvre, in which two nude women accompany a clothed lutenist and a shepherd. According to Antonin Proust, Manet conceived of his Déjeuner as a modern version of that famous Venetian picture; it had darkened with age and he would make it over in fresh, outdoor tones.32 Antonin Proust, “Edouard Manet: Souvenirs,” La Revue blanche (February-May 1897). 171–72. The Louvre’s picture is now given to Titian by many specialists. For Manet’s Déjeuner, the most recent interpretations, incorporating mordant commentaries on earlier writers, are Anne Coffin Hanson’s (Hanson 1977, pp. 92–95) and Françoise Cachin’s (Manet 1983, no. 62). It is also known—although only Ernest Chesneau mentioned it in 1863—that Manet took the poses of his three main figures from a group of two river gods and a nymph in the engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael’s Judgment of Paris (Pl. 174). Because Raimondi’s engraving was famous among painters, Manet’s borrowing was the kind of send-up of history that many fellow artists would have appreciated.

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Description: The Pastoral Concert by Titian

173. Titian (formerly attributed to Giorgione), The Concert, c. 1508. 105 × 136.5 cm. Musée du Louvre.

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Description: The Judgment of Paris, detail by Raimondi, Marcantonio

174. Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, The Judgment of Paris, detail. Engraving. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Edward B. Greene, Yale 1900.

Just how oddly Manet mixed present and past can be seen if his picture is compared with Autumn (Pl. 175) by Puvis de Chavannes. This singular artist, working outside all “schools,” had regularly been rebuffed by the Salon juries in the 1850s, but was beginning to come into his own when the state purchased Autumn from the Salon of 1864. In his picture, a blue-robed woman of abundant proportions watches two nudes gather fruit. At their feet are harvested fruits, garnished with flowers and leaves; further back is another group of female harvesters. No specific sources have been recorded for the main figures, but they proclaim themselves borrowings from “art.” Not only do they strike half-familiar poses, they are also partly clad (better: accompanied by drapery) in a vaguely antique fashion. Although out of doors, Puvis’s setting has little sense of daylight, and few concessions to naturalistic vision. Grapes seem to be born of a tree instead of a vine, and the fruit in the basket held aloft defies all effects of gravity. There are no plebeian vegetables to diminish the beauty of the fruit, and no men to interfere with these seasonal dryads.

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Description: Autumn by de Chavannes, Puvis

175. Puvis de Chavannes, Autumn, 1864. 285 × 226 cm. Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

Puvis’s figures are so thoroughly like painted statues that the absence of communication among them is not disturbing. Indeed, their distance from us and from conventional narrative is what later attracted artists like Seurat, Gauguin and Picasso to Puvis: their figures seldom converse, either. In Manet’s Déjeuner, however, any sense of consistent, inclusive allegory is destroyed by its references to the present. It is true that we can, with effort, accept his picture as an allegory of summer-time, but it is more of a parody than an allegory, and it has a charge of irony running through it that was avoided by an artist like Puvis.33 For this reason, the association of Manet’s picture with the theme of earthly paradise seems a bit strained, even though attractively put forward by Werner Hofmann and Beatrice Farwell (see Isaacson 1972, p. 106, n. 50). It is Manet’s models rather than Puvis’s who compare favorably with the gods and the Greek royalty in Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène (1864). Puvis was independently minded and kept his distance from the academicians, but he loved history too much to ridicule it. Manet converted river gods, nymphs, and Venetian men into contemporary picnickers as a way of mocking history and its guardians, the academy; in doing so he insulted both traditional sources and the manner of presenting them.

The insult was carried in the broad, flat, and abridged modeling of figures and foliage, and in the bold appearance of the nude. She was recognized as the model Victorine Meurent, because another painting of her hung alongside the Déjeuner in 1863, Mlle V. in the Costume of an Espada. Artists’ models were believed to be of easy virtue, but that was not all: Meurent was not transposed into the kind of ideal nude who stayed within “art,” as Puvis’s women did. Her thickened body is too arrestingly real, and her frank stare fixes the onlooker’s eye. At the same time, her very boldness, like that of Olympia, thwarts any male expectations of sexual submissiveness. She not only gives the impression of a living model, but of one who is in entire control of her actions: “She in no way engages in the erotic fête champêtre of which she is apparently a member; stark naked, she nonetheless refuses the erotic script.”34 Lipton 1975, pp. 58–63.

An artist’s model does indeed belong in a work of art, but the irony of Meurent’s “real” presence was disconcerting. She no more remained within the fiction of a distant, ideal world, than did Paris, in Offenbach’s operetta, when he won the Greek kings’ charade by announcing the sought-for word: “locomotive.” Moreover, Meurent’s form jars with the more self-contained poses of the young men, just as their forms, and hers, stand out from the landscape. Not only do they appear as virtual cut-outs, arbitrarily transported from the studio, but their wooded clearing seems as artificial as a stage set. Among other things, our view back to the water on the left cannot be reconciled with our view through the center (the foliage over the nude’s head is too obvious a device to bridge the two perspectives successfully). Manet may have intended the illogical perspective as the sign of an imaginary, other-world space that would suit nymphs rather than contemporary bathers, but other features of the composition defeat such a reading.

Manet’s painting, in fact, is built upon the juxtaposition, rather than the integration, of its separate parts. One can even list them in the form of a faulty equation, one side cancelling the effect of the other:

contemporary dress	poses of river gods
saucy artist’s models	nymphs or dryads
undressed model	idealized nude
nude bather	clothed men
contemporary picnic	Renaissance poses
freshly observed nature	stage-set landscape
contemporary life	history painting
present	past

A brief jump forward to Manet’s more naturalistic Game of Croquet (Pl. 176) of a decade later shows just how strangely the early Déjeuner straddles past and present. The croquet picture moves fully into contemporary time. Its figures are dressed in appropriate middle-class garb, they display poses of convincing casualness, and they are integrated with the landscape. The setting is rather indefinite—we know it was the Parisian garden of the painter Alfred Stevens—but its light and dark areas, aided by the echelon of players, form a unified space. Of course, the very loose brushwork would alone make the picture seem unnatural to traditionalists, but a decade after the Déjeuner, Manet has shaped an integral, if still avant-garde style, and he has chosen a piece of contemporary leisure that embraces a more satisfactory narrative.

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Description: The Game of Croquet by Manet, Edouard

176. Manet, The Game of Croquet, 1873. 46 × 73 cm. Frankfurt, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut.

In the early 1860s, however, he was still battling traditional art by including it in his compositions—in order to undermine it. He was wrenching the past into the present not only by manipulating it, but also by disclosing the signs of his manipulation. This is true of The Old Musician (Pl. 65) of 1862, and Olympia (Pl. 62), painted the same year as the Déjeuner (but not exhibited until 1865). His witty game required both past ideals and contemporary realities, each employed to mock the other. He committed himself to neither and, like Offenbach, he challenged authority with the instruments of irony and parody.

One can almost imagine a friend of Manet’s defending the Déjeuner by pointing to his use of irony. Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (Pl. 177), shown in the official Salon of 1863, was lavishly praised and purchased by the Emperor. Next to its voluptuous forms, Manet’s nude seems reserved, if not chaste. In other pictures praised by officialdom, nude nymphs disported themselves in nature, so where was Manet’s offense? Alphand wrote of the artificial perspectives he engineered for the Bois de Boulogne, so why should Manet’s landscape be held to another standard? Leisure-time dalliance was one reason why Louis Napoleon converted a royal preserve into a public garden, and has not Manet also celebrated such dalliance? Do the government’s fine-arts representatives have the right to assault the Déjeuner when they built in the Bois a fake grotto, an artificial cascade that could be turned on only once a day, a Swiss chalet for a waffle stand, and a concrete basin for a “natural” lake—on which “Venetian” gondolas were for hire?

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Description: Birth of Venus by Cabanel, Alexandre

177. Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863. 130 × 225 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

We must surely doubt that Manet calculated all aspects of his ambitious painting along the lines of such ironic confrontations, but whether intentional or not, they served his purposes admirably. They made a disruptive presence in the history of French art, a fissure more than a bridge. In this painting, Olympia, and other works of the same decade, he forced open a gap with history, which could no longer be held up to the present as an intact world. It would not be imitated or emulated, only quoted, and the quotation marks would be visible.

As for the figures in Manet’s composition: they were not the only ones in the Second Empire to borrow poses of mythological creatures of river and wood. Louis Napoleon’s mistress, the comtesse de Castiglione, dressed for one ball as an acacia blossom; sixteen society women became naiades and salamanders for the amateur ballet “The Elements” in 1860; the comtesse de Brimont came to an imperial dance in 1863 as “a night in the forest,” swathed in foliage which sheltered live insects and a tethered squirrel.35 Mme Jules Baroche, Le Second Empire, notes et souvenirs (Paris, 1921), p. 225. See also Chapter Four, p. 130. These naiades and countesses should have appreciated Manet’s painting, because they shared something of his irreverence for mythology and for the current fad for nature, but as a matter of course, they put painting in a separate compartment and donned different clothing to view it.

Two years after Manet’s painting was shown at the Salon des Refusés, Monet undertook his own Déjeuner sur l’herbe. It was a recasting of Manet’s composition by an aggressive younger artist (then twenty-five, to Manet’s thirty-three), as anxious to rival his notorious colleague as the latter had been to displace Courbet. He destined his enormous composition for the Salon of 1866, and if it had been completed and accepted, it would have raised many an eyebrow: it was to be six meters wide (nearly twenty feet), five times the surface area of Manet’s canvas. Its size alone means that Monet intended it also as a challenge to Courbet, whose gigantic Burial at Ornans and Artist’s Studio had marked the previous decade, and as a symbol of defiance to academic painters, whose huge history paintings were called “machines” because of the equipment required to move them. Monet’s composition was, alas, never finished, and the artist later cut it into pieces. The central portion (Pl. 139) is the largest surviving fragment. It can be advantageously compared with the sketch of the whole composition, now in Moscow (Pl. 178). The sketch—itself a large picture, nearly six feet wide—was elaborated over the summer of 1865 at Chailly, a village on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, and probably touched up in 1866 when the artist signed it. The larger canvas was worked on in Paris beginning that fall, and abandoned in the spring of 1866.

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Description: Luncheon on the Grass (Study) by Monet, Claude

178. Monet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1865–66. 130 × 181 cm. Moscow, Pushkin Museum.

Monet’s picture is revealingly different from Manet’s. He did not have his elder’s aristocratic wit, and there was not an ironic idea in his head. A middle-class provincial from Le Havre, he was struggling upwards, and not at all part of the dashing Parisian society that Manet was teasing from within. His picture invites comparison with Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (Pl. 41), a painting of contemporary leisure that offers few nods to the past, and a work that must have encouraged Monet in his venture. Monet’s figures, by comparison, are a notch lower in the social scale, being solid middle class where Manet’s are upper class. Equally to the point, the irony that was so central to Manet was incompatible with Monet’s deep commitment to a believable naturalism. Puvis de Chavannes was, as we saw, also free from irony, but these two were at absolutely opposite poles; naturalism versus anti-naturalism. Monet looked towards history, but he hid his allegiances quite effectively, and it was especially recent painting that he favored.

Chailly was the village next to Barbizon, so in the summer of 1865, Monet was in the heartland of the region that had given rise in the preceding generation to the “Barbizon school.” At its center were Millet and Rousseau, but other painters were often in the region and were loosely grouped in the same school: Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Dupré, and Troyon among them. Monet looked to all these artists, and to Boudin and Jongkind, whose seacoast paintings had already afforded him many lessons. Like the impressionists in the parks and gardens around Paris, the Barbizon artists had shared much with their contemporaries in Paris. Excursions to the edges of the Fontainebleau forest were a common form of Parisian outing before 1848, and became still more popular afterwards, when the artists’ colony there helped celebrate the area. In Monet’s sketch (Pl. 178), the large birch to the right bears an inscribed heart and arrow, and the letter P. “P” and friends could have reached this and other forest clearings easily: there were excursion services at Fontainebleau, Melun, and Chailly which provided transport, drink, and food. The costumed man with a food hamper to the right of the birch tree in Monet’s sketch is presumably the representative of such a service.

The male attendant, when one’s eye finally spots him, puts into proper relief the well-got-up group that Monet assembled in his painting. He had friends pose for him, particularly Camille Doncieux, his future wife, and the painter Bazille (the lanky figure who appears four times in the sketch). Some of the men wear bowlers, all of them have ties and jackets, and the women are decked out in the luxuriant manner of the Second Empire. They are a far cry from the woodcutters and shepherdesses whom Millet and the other Barbizon painters placed in the Fontainebleau woods. Like the men of Manet’s Déjeuner, Monet’s picnickers are contemporary Parisians who have brought the city with them. Unlike Manet, however, Monet treated them as participants in a believable fiction. Monet does not let the past jostle the present, and if his picnickers seem a bit stiff to our eyes (we look through the lenses of later standards of naturalism), they are grouped harmoniously in relation to one another. They are boldly painted with little of the careful modeling tradition demanded, but they are not cut-outs, and are more carefully related to the environing growth than Manet’s foursome. The large tree to the right in the sketch is used to gather together the figures around it. Responding to it are the three standing figures on the other side, and the pair of trees in the center: together they form a triangle in space that anchors the whole scene.

Monet’s naturalism of the 1860s was built upon seemingly. unnatural elements, such as the broad swatches of paint that mark the edges of the figures left of center and the fall of light on the luncheon cloth. In the surviving pieces of the big composition and in the sketch, we are struck by Monet’s inventiveness in creating new devices, rather abstract in themselves, which articulate convincing volume and depth while floating on the surface as zones of colored pigment. This is in many ways the heart of the modernist enterprise in painting, the paradoxical balancing of flat surface and naturalistic content which eventually tips over in favor of surface. The ribbons of paint along the shoulders and backs of Monet’s figures, and the splashes of light on the ground cloth, will reappear with even greater autonomy in the work of Vuillard and Gauguin, thirty years later.

To achieve his unusual effects, Monet positioned his figures so that light struck them from behind. Compared with conventional lighting, which we would accept without thinking about it, this has the virtue of excusing his unusual means while also making light an active participant in his naturalism. Its more forceful presence is what distinguishes his paintings from Manet’s Déjeuner and Music in the Tuileries. Their bold abbreviations held more than one lesson for him, but they preserved studio light. Monet’s believable daylight marks his painting out even more strongly from Puvis de Chavannes’s Autumn, which willfully subordinated illusions of depth and immediacy to the permanence of an architectural wall. Puvis’s seated figure, with her Grecian profile and thick drapery, comes from a timeless distance. Monet’s seated Camille (Pl. 139), with the edges of her face lighter than its center, and with her flesh showing through her filmy garment, has a lively presence entirely alien to Puvis’s conception of art. Monet’s insistence on direct studies en plein air complicated his campaign in Chailly, but the essence of his new art was in those studies, even though they had to be transposed to a large canvas in the studio.

It was to painters of the preceding generation that Monet turned for the lessons he needed. In both watercolors and oils, Boudin summed up clothed figures in rapidly noted dashes of color, a graphism that often merged the identities of color and line; Jongkind often made sky, rooftops, water, and foliage shimmer in separate dabs of bright paint; Corot employed broad bands of buttery pigment to give the sense of sunlight streaking through foliage to fall on meadow or forest road; Diaz and Rousseau put spots of paint side by side to create a surface mosaic of foliage; Courbet commonly used opaque paint, scraped and dabbed with a palette knife, to form a patchwork of textured areas that adhered as much to surface as to imagined depth. It was Courbet, the arch-realist, who insisted that one must paint what one actually sees, as distinct from what one knows, and it is tempting to think that his example was before Monet as he worked on the large Déjeuner. From a letter of Bazille’s it is known that Courbet came to Monet’s Paris studio to see his large composition late in 1865, and some of Monet’s friends later claimed that Courbet had given Monet advice. Many have wanted to see Courbet’s likeness in the bearded man of the central fragment who replaces the younger man of the sketch. Not everyone agrees, but in the sketch, the broadly brushed birch tree that dominates the right edge is a certain homage to the master of Ornans.

Monet’s improvised technique, “sketchy” even in its most finished areas, was therefore a further development of the free, somewhat rough way of applying paint which had characterized the mid-century vanguard. In Courbet’s case, free handling was equated with opposition to authority because he was an outspoken radical. For other artists of the same generation, sketchiness was considered forward-looking, independent, and “democratic” because it was opposed to the highly finished surfaces of officially sanctioned art. Daubigny was accused of giving mere “impressions” of nature instead of proper renderings, and Millet’s shaggy surfaces were treated by friend and foe alike as appropriate to his peasant subjects. From the late 1850s onward, “sincerity” in an artist’s response to nature was brought forward by liberal critics as a key element, usually associated with a technique that could be a vehicle for spontaneity. Sincerity, truth, immediacy, spontaneity, natural light, and color, the banishing of muddy colors, the distrust of smooth finish—these were the moral underpinnings of artistic technique that Monet adopted. For, morality is indeed an issue, one that usually lays undetected beneath the findings of historians who conceive of technique as a neutral or self-defining recipe. Monet’s Déjeuner proclaimed sincerity, immediacy, and those other features as positive values, associated not with work or with the city, but with leisure and nature; not with the past, but with the present; not with historical or mythological personages, but with one’s own society; not with government agencies or fine arts commissions, but with the individual artist. This was true also of Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Cézanne. The latter two in particular equated “primitive” qualities of execution with the moral meanings they sought in village and countryside, an attitude most famously expressed in the following generation by Van Gogh. For Monet as well as for Van Gogh, the morality of plein-air naturalism was the source of artistic energy.

This does not mean that Monet’s Déjeuner was so saturated in the present that it lacked ties with history. His project renewed the eighteenth-century themes of hunting parties and fêtes galantes. The man with the hamper in his sketch is an archaic survivor, and so is the whippet hound in the foreground. They are found in eighteenth-century paintings of hunting parties in wooded clearings or meadows, such as Carle van Loo’s Halt of the Hunting Party (Pl. 179). There we find servants with food hampers, hunting dogs, a collation spread out on a large cloth, figures seated and standing in informal poses, women in voluminous dresses. Even Monet’s food is faithful to the menu of a hunting lunch: pâté, fowl, fruit, bread, and wine. In the fête galante (Pl. 137), of which Watteau was the most exemplary practitioner, dancing, strolling, and conversing in flirtatious groupings often take place without food or drink, since hedonistic pleasure in the open air was sufficient pretext. Monet was aware of the two eighteenth-century themes, because an early drawing for the Déjeuner (Pl. 180) has motifs from both: dogs, a figure reclining with arms raised over the head, an impressive allée as the setting. We may doubt, however, that “P” was aware of the eighteenth century when he carved the pierced heart on the birch tree, leaving there a middle-class echo of the statues of love that Watteau painted among his dawdling galants.

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Description: Halt of the Hunting Party by Loo, Carle van

179. Carle Van Loo, Halt of the Hunting Party, 1737. 220 × 250 cm. Musée du Louvre.

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Description: The Luncheon on the Grass by Monet, Claude

180. Monet, Drawing for Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1865. Charcoal, 31 × 47 cm. From the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia.

Because he suppressed his knowledge of the earlier pictures, Monet made the historian’s work a bit harder, whereas Manet, heir to the same traditions, led the searcher all the way back to the Renaissance origins of the fête galante. By conflating Giorgione’s Concert with Raphael’s river gods and nymphs, his picture evoked the early sixteenth century’s fascination with muses, gods, and mythological creatures disporting themselves in nature. This, in turn, was modernized in the eighteenth-century fête galante which transformed gods into courtiers.36 Fritz Saxl, “A Humanist Dreamland,” in his A Heritage of Images (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 89–104. Isaacson 1972, p. 106, n. 50, draws attention to Saxl’s essay, which situates Manet’s Déjeuner in this tradition. I am indebted to Isaacson’s perceptive analysis of Monet’s project.

In Monet’s and Manet’s paintings of parkland luncheons we therefore have a confluence of historical currents which lets us confront the history of pictures with the history of French society. The sequence from Renaissance painting to eighteenth-century fêtes galantes and picnics, then to woodland parties in romantic art, and finally to the impressionists’ paintings, is paralleled in social history, from the court of Fontainebleau in the sixteenth century, and its preference for Italian artists, to Louis XV’s hunting parties, then to Louis Napoleon’s outings at Compiègne during which Eugénie and the court picnicked in imitation eighteenth-century costume. It was not just in Monet’s Déjeuner, but in actuality that bourgeois picnickers went to Fontainebleau and, in former royal domains, ate the same kind of food that noble hunters had enjoyed a century earlier. On another day the same picnickers might have gone to the Bois de Boulogne, also a royal hunting park taken over by the middle class. Alphand’s picturesque landscape destroyed the aristocratic spokes of the old plan of the Bois, and gave to Parisians a “natural” precinct for their relaxation. From this perspective, Louis Napoleon, Haussmann, and Alphand can be seen as instruments of the bourgeoisie. They completed the process, begun in the Revolution, by which aristocratic places and privileges became middle-class terrains:

Monet’s Déjeuner, true to the social dynamic of its time and accurately reflecting the artist’s own class status, expresses the simple pleasures of the hitherto disenfranchised. The right to leisure rather than the privilege of pleasure, the paradisal world of the gods come to roost on earth—such is the larger subject of Monet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe.37 Isaacson 1972, p. 41.

Flowers and Fashion

The clothing worn by the women in Monet’s Déjeuner was one of the conspicuous signs of the artist’s determination to be modern. Their dresses were of the latest style, and to a viewer of 1866 would alone have borne the message of contemporaneity. Three of the four dresses in the Moscow sketch (Pl. 178) appear again in Women in the Garden (Pl. 181), where they take on even greater prominence. Monet turned to that painting in the spring of 1866, leaving the ambitious Déjeuner incomplete. In fact, by transferring to the new canvas many of the problems of painting figures in natural light, he made the earlier composition redundant.

In April 1866, Monet moved to rented quarters at Sèvres, near La Ville d’Avray, a suburb about two miles southwest of the Bois de Boulogne that Corot, Troyon, and other landscapists had long frequented. There, determined to carry still further the rendering of forms in direct light, he worked on the new picture without the intercession of painted studies. He apparently felt that the vitality of outdoor sketches suffered from transfer to studio compositions, a worry expressed often by Delacroix, Daubigny, and others of the preceding generation. He dug a trench into which he could lower the huge canvas, over eight feet high, so that he could work on any part of it while staring at his garden setting. He devoted himself to the task all summer, but continued working on the picture when he moved to Honfleur, where he spent that fall and winter. It therefore incorporated studio work, but it was still so uncompromisingly modern that it was rejected by the Salon jury in the spring of 1867. Apparently never exhibited in his lifetime, the painting was nonetheless a celebration of contemporary Paris and should be placed alongside his other homages to France in 1867: The Garden of the Princess (Pl. 14) and Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (Pl. 297). Its modernity can be expressed in an aphorism: the decorative in art becomes an expression of fashion in society. To inquire into this, we should first look at the way Monet set about inventing forms that would create the effect of natural light.

Women in the Garden reveals the strongest sunlight ever yet to have shone in a French painting. In the central fragment of the Déjeuner (Pl. 139), the impact of sunlight is largely limited to the edges of clothing and the mottled areas on the ground. In Women in the Garden, the two left-hand figures are in the shade, with only a few flecks of light on their dresses, but the red-haired woman to the rear is almost pushed around the tree by the force of the sun, and the broad skirts of the seated woman (posed by Camille Doncieux) seem energized by its glare, like some huge cloud that has only temporarily floated there. In a painting, light exists only in relation to shade, and here the shadow that runs across the foreground takes on a vital function. Its diagonal accent contributes to the illusion that space slants back to the right, and its separate colors on pathway, skirt, and grass call attention to light’s immaterial existence and its transforming power. The patches of shadow on Camille’s costume have a decided lavender tone (exalted by the yellow of her neckpiece), and the shaded portion of the sandy path has a related purplish cast, so color, and not just darkness, plays a decided role—the colored shadows that later were considered one of the hallmarks of Impressionism. The most remarkable of all the color-light passages is Camille’s face, even more mask-like than the central woman in the Déjeuner fragment. Despite the overhead sun, her face is illuminated from below, thanks to the strength of the light bouncing off her skirt. Set against this reflected glow, her features assume a strange look, like the subject of an illustrator or limner.

The symmetry and lack of expression in Camille’s face suit the decorative appearance of the whole painting. Her costume is the leading example of this decorativeness, which is a quality of the picture’s structure, not just of its images.38 A point made by Monet specialists, among them, Joel Isaacson in his dissertation “The Early Work of Claude Monet” (Berkeley, 1967). Isaacson’s subsequent publications form the best analysis of Women in the Garden. See especially Isaacson 1972, pp. 50–51, 83–89. The impressive width of the dress, more than half that of the painting, allowed Monet to display its embroidered pattern. Because the pattern is linear in nature, and because Monet deliberately spread it out laterally—in the center he suppressed its expected three-dimensional undulations—it has a calligraphic look and tends to float forward to the picture’s surface. It is nonetheless integrated with the rest of the painting, which accommodates many forms that jump back and forth between illusion and surface. The embroidery’s arabesques are echoed in the dark-green trimmings of two other dresses, in tree branches and profiles of foliage, and in the edge of the shadow along the ground. The pathway itself is flattened out by the high vantage point (similar to the foreground of the contemporary Garden of the Princess, Pl. 14) and by its radical division into light and dark zones. The three figures on the left are easily read as one shape, conveniently set off by tree branch and trunk, and the other woman is a nearly separate picture, framed by tree trunk, overhead branch, foreground foliage, and ground shadow.

The prominence that Monet gave to the decorative features of his painting is perfectly consistent with his aims. Plein-air naturalism is not an absolute, but a relative conception. In the previous decade, for example, Millet’s peasants had struck advanced viewers as naturalistic, but they no longer seemed so to Monet. His nature is a bourgeois garden, more like the Bois de Boulogne than the fields near Barbizon, and his women are middle-class city dwellers, dressed in the very latest style. In fact, they are manikins, for Monet had Camille and another friend dress for his picture and pose by the hour. They had posed for the Déjeuner of the previous year, but there, closer to Barbizon and its traditions, they took part in a more sociable event. The two women on the left in that picture stand a bit like models in an advertisement, but their stiffness is mitigated by the varied attitudes of their companions. In Women in the Garden Monet left the country behind, and placed his manikins in a suburban garden as though in a fashion print.

Monet’s four women are patently on display, and engage only in the perfunctory actions associated with fashion pages. Garden settings were common in fashion journals because of the association of feminine elegance with flowers, gardens, and languid leisure. It is not enough, however, to say that Monet’s women are at leisure, for leisure could mean lively conversation, a luncheon, reading, listening to music, or playing games, as in Manet’s later Croquet (Pl. 176). They are “doing nothing,” for, like the women in clothing advertisements, they are truly decorative: youthful vessels of current style and beauty, in a model setting of flowers, foliage, and a neatly managed garden. They are, in short, the bourgeois ideal. Men’s income and pride were vested in the appearance of their women, in clothing that vouched for their high standing, the “conspicuous consumption” that Thorstein Vehlen elevated to sociological theory. In Zola’s La Curée, the speculator Saccard, fearful of the poverty from which he came, encourages his wife to spend vast sums on fashions by the couturier Worth (thinly disguised in the novel as “Worms”). To proclaim one’s freedom (that is, one’s financial ability) to dress “appropriately” was to take one’s distance from the lower classes. Monet’s women are far removed from Millet’s not just because of their urban dress, but because they are untainted by any idea of work (Millet’s are so penetrated by labor that, even at repose, they give evidence of leisure earned from work).

We should not be surprised that fashion and art shared certain features. Many artists deliberately cultivated fashion in their paintings—Boldini and Chaplin come readily to mind—and for the impressionists there was an underlying association of contemporary life with fashion. Rejection of the past meant a devotion to the present, hedonistic moment, which also typifies fashion. Georg Simmel, with his usual perspicacity, pointed to the role of fashion in modern society:

We can discover one of the reasons why in these latter days fashion exercises such a powerful influence on our consciousness in the circumstance that the great, permanent, unquestionable convictions are continually losing strength, as a consequence of which the transitory and vacillating elements of life acquire more room for the display of their activity. The break with the past, which, for more than a century, civilized mankind has been laboring unceasingly to bring about, makes the consciousness turn more and more to the present. This accentuation of the present evidently at the same time emphasizes the element of change, and a class will turn to fashion in all fields, by no means only in that of apparel, in proportion to the degree in which it supports the given civilizing tendency.39 “Fashion,” 1904, in Simmel 1971, p. 303.

The decorative elements that dominate Monet’s composition commemorate the central role that fashion played in middle-class and upper-class French society in his generation. Of course, fashion had always had its place, but in Second Empire Paris it took on vastly increased importance. The much larger middle class, typified by childless and professional people, had money to spend, and foreigners also helped make Paris the fashion capital of Western society. Fashion was not simply a question of “style,” it was a commodity. The “articles de Paris” sold along the grands boulevards were one of the city’s principal money-makers, embracing all products of the fashion trade: clothing, millinery, jewelry, and cosmetics. Since fashion thrived on change, it was the perfect product of an entrepreneurial society. As soon as a particular fashion caught on, its upper-class initiators deserted it, because its very essence was the distinction it offered from the common herd.40 In addition to Simmel, see Veblen 1899, ed. 1953, pp. 112–18, and passim. The constant renewal of fashion was a never-ending turnstyle that generated business at all levels of capitalist industry in Paris, from grand couturier to the department store—and the rise of the large department store in the second half of the nineteenth century is intimately related to the fashion mill. Theodore Child, another of those perceptive American visitors, summarized the social mechanism of Parisian fashion:

Perdi, the grand couturier, creates a toilet for a lady of reputed elegance, for one of the princesses of Paris. If the toilet is a success Perdi’s rivals will copy it for their customers; the rich foreign ladies who get dressed at Paris will introduce it into their respective countries; the fashion journals will describe it and distribute engravings of it wherever they have subscribers. Thus far the toilet will have remained the monopoly of the half-dozen grand couturiers and their Parisian rivals. Now the Louvre and the Bon Marché [department stores] enter the field and take possession of the new model, provided that it can be copied at a reasonable price and with cheap elements; they order enormous quantities of materials, imitating those used by the artistic dress-makers; and in a few weeks they have for sale at moderate prices thousands of costumes, resembling more or less… the model created by Perdi for his elegant customer, la belle Madame X.41 Child 1893, pp. 89—90. This whole process lies at the heart of Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (Ladies’ Delight) of 1883.

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Description: Women in the Garden by Monet, Claude

181. Monet, Women in the Garden, 1867. 255 × 205 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

In the Second Empire, Eugénie and her court were the principal initiators of fashion, partly because the upstart regime needed the aid of ostentatious costume (frequently recalling past royalty) to assert its legitimacy. State coffers provided Eugénie with 100,000 francs a year for her toilet. Etiquette required several changes of costume each day for court and guests, twenty for a stay of one week at Compiègne. “At that time there was a sort of intoxication in the very atmosphere of Paris,” wrote the court governess Anna Bicknell,

a fever of enjoyment—a passion for constant amusement, for constant excitement, and, amongst women, for extravagance of dress. This was encouraged by the court, with the intention of giving an impetus to trade, and of gaining popularity by favoring constant festivities and consequently constant expense.42 Bicknell 1895, pp. 117–18. Bicknell—no radical she!—remarks that “Paris was a sort of fairyland, where every one lived only for amusement, and where every one seemed rich and happy. What lay underneath all this, would not bear close examination—the dishonorable acts of all kinds, which too often were needed to produce the glamour deceiving superficial observers.” On page 40, Bicknell discusses the state subsidies for Eugénie’s wardrobe. She describes the veritable costume theater involved in clothing the Empress, comprising several rooms for the wardrobes, and an elevator permitting one of the costumed dummies to descend through the ceiling for approval or alteration.

Once the court and elegant women had launched a new style, the new money stepped in—”encouraged by the court”—and made imitations. Upwardly mobile citizens then bought these second-generation designs as a way of associating themselves with high persons, another of the many ways the middle class was taking the place of the waning aristocracy, whose role was to provide the social patterns one aspired to. The new styles could be worn by anyone who had the money, and one could learn how to make social calls or hold garden parties. The increasingly mobile bourgeoisie used fashion as one of its principal agents in masking its separation from the upper classes, while asserting its distance from those lower down.

We must not isolate Monet from this phenomenon, despite the reluctance with which art historians approach matters of money and social ambition. In Women in the Garden Monet dressed his future wife in splendid costume and put her in a fine garden. She appears there as the middle-class heir of eighteenth-century élégantes in their gardens, and as the rival of Eugénie and her court ladies at Compiègne. Three years later in Trouville, he painted Camille on the beachfront near the fancy hotels, although they stayed in a small back-street hotel and left without paying the bill. At Argenteuil from 1872 to 1878, he represented her repeatedly in the gardens of their rented villas, as though she and he were the proprietors (they had a maid, but again left unpaid bills behind). When eventually he had a large income, he created his own gardens at Giverny, for he was every inch the Norman, shrewd in money matters, who eventually secured his own manor house and estate. In 1867, however, cadging money from friends and making an occasional sale, he was still like many another provincial trying to make his way in the big city. At least he could create the illusory world of Women in the Garden, and become a kind of grand couturier for Camille, reversing Theodore Child’s analogy: “The great dress-makers… are creative artists of prodigious genius. Draughtsmen and colorists at the same time, as the perfect plastic artist should be, they produce compositions of incomparable variety… ,”43 Child 1893, p. 90.

Contemporary fashions continue to be found in Monet’s paintings of the 1870s, but they no longer seem important. Most of his paintings after 1870 are landscapes, and when human figures appear, they are customarily in small scale, useful insofar as they give meaning to village street, garden, or riverbank, but not conspicuously fashionable. The only pictures in which clothing has some prominence are a few that show Camille in the garden of their rented villa at Argenteuil. She is often alone, or with their son Jean and their maid, but in one instance she is shown with visitors (Pl. 182). Her garment and hat are fashionable receiving costume, much as would be worn in Paris, and indeed, the very sign of her being a Parisian.44 Tucker 1982, pp. 134—35. As in Women in the Garden, there is little going on here, but it represents a shift towards the greater naturalism that characterizes all the impressionists’ work after 1870. The fashion-plate grouping of the earlier picture gives way to a more informal presentation of a quiet moment in an enclosed garden. The picture is less finished than many others of the same date, but even so it is fair to point out that the artist has discarded the contrasting shadows of Women in the Garden. The foliage, wall, and pathway are saturated in a pervasive light that creates structure and illusion through color, without significant recourse to light and dark (pinks, reds, oranges, and yellows against blues, greens, and violets). The dark tones that anchor the picture are not shadows, but portions of the park-like bench and of costume, those signs of urban life.

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Description: Camille Monet on a Garden Bench by Monet, Claude

182. Monet, Camille Monet on a Garden Bench, 1873. 60 × 80 cm. From the private collection of Walter H. Annenberg. Photograph by kind permission of The Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reid & Lefevre Ltd.).

Camille Monet on a Garden Bench is an oddly formal picture for Monet, perhaps odd because it is one of his very rare attempts at a social encounter in which fashionable dress has a part. It was instead Manet who made fashion loom large in the second decade of Impressionism. After 1870—it was one of the less obvious, but important consequences of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune—Manet turned wholeheartedly to contemporary subjects and gave up the dialogue with historical styles that had marked his first decade. Over the course of the 1870s he used costume to characterize class and place, from the city child’s oversized bow in The Railroad (Pl. 31) and her companion’s navy-blue outfit, to the boaters’ stripes and hats in Argenteuil (Pl. 239). At the end of the decade, he heralded fashion in a number of pastel portraits and paintings, chief among them In the Conservatory (Pl. 183).

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Description: In the Conservatory by Manet, Edouard

183. Manet, In the Conservatory, 1879. 115 × 150 cm. Berlin (West), National-galerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

In the Conservatory, shown in the Salon of 1879, invites comparison with Monet’s earlier canvas, but need not have been done with knowledge of it (the early history of Monet’s painting is not known). Manet’s Salon picture took its place logically among his views of contemporaries seen in casual moments, including Argenteuil, The Railroad (Pl. 31), At the Café (Pl. 70), and Chez le Père Lathuille (Pl. 67). Parisian conservatories were a development of the Second Empire, another bourgeois takeover of an installation once the exclusive preserve of the very wealthy, and another of the responses to the love of nature which marked the era. They should be associated with the rise of landscape in the middle of the century as well as with the love of unusual plants redolent of foreign lands and imperial adventures. One garden writer described greenhouse flowers as “rare, aristocratic, titled, so to speak: they come from the lands of the sun, from the scented shores of the Pacific or the Indian ocean.”45 Fulbert Dumonteil in 1887, cited in Los Angeles 1984–85, p. 211. Natural growth became a social commodity, a garden poured into containers and enframed in a cage of glass and iron, the same modern materials used for fair buildings and for department stores. Indoor gardens became de rigueur in Haussmannian Paris. Notable ones included those of princess Mathilde on the rue de Courcelles, and of La Païva, the famous courtesan, in her extravagant town house on the Champs-Elysées. Zola made one the symbolic center of the new town house of Saccard, the real-estate speculator of La Curée.

For his painting Manet used the conservatory of the painter Otto Rosen, whose studio he rented for nine months in 1878 and 1879. Amidst palms and other exotic plants, Manet posed his friends Jules Guillemet and his American-born wife (appropriately wearing a hat of ostrich feathers). The picture was neither commissioned nor shown as a double portrait, so we deal here with a modified genre piece. The critic Castagnary praised it as a treatment of “the elegance of fashionable life.”46 Cited in Hamilton 1954, ed. 1969, p. 215. In Boating (Pl. 238), which hung with it in the Salon, the yachtsman and his passenger are engaged in a fashionable pastime, but are certainly not elegant. The man and woman of Chez le Père Lathuille (Pl. 67) form a vignette of urban flirtation, but are not elegant, either. Monsieur and Madame Guillemet are in every conventional sense both proper and elegant. They are dressed in formal daytime costume, the husband in light trousers and dark jacket, the wife in a smart outfit of grey silk. She has removed one glove (this discloses her ring), an indication, along with parasol and hat, that she and her husband are not in their own home, but have dropped in for a visit.

In this upper-class environment, there is a reserve that speaks for the cool stylishness of Manet’s chosen society. The couple in Monet’s garden picture (Pl. 182) is found in similar circumstances, but the man’s weight is more fully on the back of the bench, his hand droops, and his posterior is thrust out. Guillemet has a frontal pose that we read as more dignified, a reading that involves both the fiction of a “real” man—he seems more self-contained—and his role in the picture’s abstract structure: he has a symmetrical, flatter overall shape. A similar contrast exists between Camille Monet and Mme Guillemet. Camille makes an unexplained gesture and looks slightly puzzled or anxious. Additionally, her garments billow while her body and the floating bench are angled into depth, helping create a moderately animated scene. In Manet’s interior, fittingly more confined than Monet’s outdoor scene, Mme Guillemet is wonderfully upright and sure of herself, and her bodily reserve is abetted by the way it matches both picture surface and bench. Her arms and shoulders echo the left and top sides of the canvas, and she takes the place of the corner members of the bench; the pleats of her dress sound notes of antiphonal relationship to its rungs and slats (Pl. 184).

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Description: In the Conservatory, detail by Manet, Edouard

184. Manet, detail of In the Conservatory (Pl. 183).

The reticent expression of In the Conservatory would surely be an enigma if we expected abundant signs of a happily married couple. Scholars recently have stressed the consistency with which Manet eliminated anecdote and narrative, in this case, those signs of affectionate exchange that an admirer of Victorian painting might hope for. Should we go so far as to see estrangement or tension between them? One scholar writes of an “almost brutally strained moment in an enduring relationship (the kernel of the situation offered in the stalled eroticism of the two juxtaposed hands …),”47 Isaacson 1982, p. 110. but should we not see instead both the reserve of an upper-class couple and the detachment of the artiste-flâneur who sought them out for his picture?

The views of critics friendly to the picture in 1879 argue against estrangement and in favor of the artist’s customary detachment. They greeted it as a moment in a quiet conversation, a typical male “conversation,” we might add, for the wife is merely listening. Manet makes it obvious that the couple are married by adjoining their hands and exposing their wedding rings, so there is no need for one to solicit the attention of the other, as occurs in Argenteuil (Pl. 239) and Chez le Père Lathuille (Pl. 67). And unlike The Railroad (Pl. 31), with which there are important analogies, the two figures do not face in opposed directions. They share a reflective moment, and are joined, not divided, by the play of repeated rectangles. The bench unites as much as it separates them, and the “stalled eroticism” of their approached hands is as much of a display as such a correct couple would have permitted themselves.

We can then put down the emotional reticence of the couple to a deliberate rendering of a wealthy marriage. More than that, however, we should recognize in Mme Guillemet the reappearance of the independent, unsubmissive woman whom Manet had favored in so many of his paintings. American women had been admired in Paris since 1867, when they were much noticed among the visitors to the Universal Exposition. Mme Guillemet not only has the favored Anglo-Saxon features, she also has the self-confidence and independence that were leading characteristics of the American woman. Manet knew her well, and chose her for his picture for the same reason that he had chosen the waitress in Corner in a Café-Concert (Pl. 77): she fits perfectly the pictorial role he envisioned. Her husband is there principally to exhibit his wife. To a certain extent he is like the man in Renoir’s Loge (Pl. 90), who also displays his consort without manifesting any possessive affection. For the same reason he is unlike Degas’s brother-in-law in the Morbilli double portrait (Pl. 51). Morbilli utterly dominates his wife amid signs of the striking differences between them. In the Guillemets, Manet was not looking for tokens of tension or disengagement.

“Display” is the right word for Manet’s painting. The Guillemets were not only fashion plates, they were the proprietors of a clothing store not far from the British Embassy, on the fashionable rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Both wear the commodities they sold, but it is distinctly the wife who is on display. She gives the impression of posing, of being placed by the artist (who must have directed the lay of the pleats, in addition to painting them) to the fullest advantage of her clothing and her slender, erect body. We can be sure that Manet studied her characteristic poses and costumes: he later sent her several saucy watercolors of her well-shod legs, presumably as a recompense for omitting them in his painting. As for Guillemet, his resemblance to Manet was publicly noted at the time, and in the painting he has not just the proprietary air of a husband, but also that of the clothier who quietly hovers over both model and wife.

In reproduction, In the Conservatory looks more severe than it should, for both the palette and the arrangement give to the original a delicate harmony that also argues against a reading of estrangement. The yellow of Mme Guillemet’s hat, neckpiece, glove, and parasol are repeated in duller tones in her husband’s trousers and in several of the flowerpots, just as the bench’s dark purplish-blues are found in her belt and bow. The greenery embraces both figures, with well-managed variations that supply exuberance to the otherwise sober, squared-up composition. To the right, the burst of the palm is a witty invention that closes off the composition by hinting at masculine strength and aggressiveness. On the other side, the greenery forms a tapestry backdrop for Mme Guillemet, and the diagonal spray of pink blossoms complements her rosy complexion. The blue of the ceramic planter, added to the pinks and yellows, completes the canonical triad of primary colors: offerings to the feminine half of the picture.

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185. Manet, Autumn, 1881. 73 × 51 cm. Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

Flowers, fashion, and femininity make up a good deal of the output of Manet’s last years. Mme Guillemet reappears in two pastel portraits, and her younger sister is shown in two oils, in stylish summer dress and hat, surrounded by the flowers and shrubbery of Manet’s rented villa in the suburbs. There were also several three-quarter-length oils of women promenading in gardens, and the half-length Jeanne: Spring (Pl. 187), Manet’s smashing success in the Salon of 1882. Although his Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Pl. 80) attracted more attention in that Salon, Jeanne was uniformly admired and it disarmed even his bitterest critics. It was the greatest public success of his lifetime, and his last Salon.

The painting, posed by the actress Jeanne Demarsy, sprang from a commission of four seasons from the artist’s friend Antonin Proust. Only Spring and Autumn (Méry Laurent in a brown pelisse, Pl. 185) were completed. The representation of the seasons in the guise of modishly dressed women was a commonplace of an era which lavished so much money and attention on women’s clothing—for which seasonal changes were an essential animator. Alfred Stevens, for example, another friend of Manet and the epitome of a certain order of chic, did a famous set of seasons (Pl. 186), and Berthe Morisot exhibited Summer and Winter in 1880, both paintings of women. Her Summer (Pl. 188) shares with Manet’s Spring the idea of a woman against a flowery backdrop, but fashion is not involved. It is only with some difficulty that we can read the hat and parasol she holds in her lap, while the details of her costume disappear beneath the flutter of brushwork. Morisot suggests summer light and air with filmy strokes of blueish, grey, and lavender whites that float between us and the images; even the woman’s lips have a light-struck indefiniteness. The brushwork in Manet’s Jeanne has his customary brio, but we can see all the salient elements of his figure’s costume. Presented to us in profile, his Spring is not merely a woman, she is a parisienne displaying the latest fashion by promenading in public. Morisot’s Summer looks at the viewer in a rather more private pose, certainly a deliberately unostentatious one that preserves her individuality. She is not a manikin, and we are in a domestic, not a public relationship to her. Neither she nor her clothes could be considered commodities.

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186. Alfred Stevens, Spring, 1874. 118.2 × 59.3 cm. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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Description: Jeanne (Spring) by Manet, Edouard

187. Manet, Jeanne: Spring, 1881. 73 × 51 cm. Private collection.

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188. Morisot, Summer, 1878. 76 × 61 cm. Montpellier, Musée Fabre.

For Spring, according to Proust, Manet chose Demarsy’s costume, including the hat. Like Monet for Women in the Garden (Pl. 181), he acted as couturier as well as painter, and like Baudelaire and Mallarmé, he instinctively associated high fashion with the essence of Parisian modernity. Mallarmé had founded a short-lived fashion review in 1874, and a decade earlier Baudelaire had made fashion a key feature of his unorthodox definition of modernity:

Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-à-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her reformation. And so it has been sensibly pointed out… that every fashion is charming, relatively speaking, each one being a new and more or less happy effort in the direction of Beauty, some kind of approximation to an ideal for which the restless human mind feels a constant, titillating hunger. … [Fashions] should be thought of as vitalized and animated by the beautiful women who wore them.48 The Painter of Modern Life, in Baudelaire 1964, pp. 32–33.

Manet’s dedication to fashion was rewarded by the critics, who praised Spring in words used for “articles de Paris”: “She is not a woman, she is a bouquet, truly a visual perfume”; she was “a Parisian perfume to make the head spin”; her flesh was “a flower of delicious coloring.”49 Maurice Du Seigneur, cited in Hamilton 1954, ed. 1969, p. 249; Armand Silvestre, then J.-K. Huysmans, both cited in Rouart and Orienti 1970, no. 352. Demarsy’s real name was Anne Marie-Louise Josephine Brochard. In these phrases, there is a tacit recognition of the degree to which Manet’s brushwork itself was among the brilliant products of Paris. Meissonier, Fortuny, Boldini, and Stevens were all admired for the jewellike luster of their painted surfaces, proving the association of commodity with artistic means, but none of them had the daring of Manet’s colored shorthand, and none so perfectly merged artistic chic with fashion.

There is little doubt that Manet’s triumph was aided by the popularity of la femme parisienne, the woman who could rival the flâneur when she promenaded in the Tuileries or the Bois, providing masculine society with the mobile decoration it sought. Forerunner of the Belle Epoque, Jeanne, Manet’s most decorative parisienne, was also the heir of the Second Empire. “In republican Paris,” wrote Theodore Child,

the conditions of the display of luxury are no longer the same as they were under the empire, but the traditions that animate the artists of luxury and their patrons are unchanged, and the leaders and marshals of fashion are still the ladies of the empire. These women made a study of elegance and a profession of beautiful appearance more complete and more intelligent, perhaps, than any of the daughters of Eve who preceded them on the face of the earth, and they achieved a perfection of harmonious bearing, an originality of composition, a stylishness, a chic, to use an accepted term, which has not yet been surpassed. The secret of this chic lies partly in the peculiar genius of the Parisienne, and partly in unfailing application, and in the striving after absolute elegance and fulness of pleasurable life in conditions of material beauty.50 Child 1893, p. 92.

Renoir’s Gardens

More than Manet, and even more than Morisot and Monet, Renoir surrounded contemporary Parisians with flowers and gardens. He was more of a landscapist than Manet, and more of a figure painter than Monet, so combining the two genres came naturally to him. He was especially devoted to women and children and, like so many men, he believed he was honoring them by separating them from work and life’s harsh realities. This thoroughly middle-class attitude shows Renoir’s distance from Millet, Daumier, and other artists of the preceding generation. In Girl with a Watering Can (Pl. 190), for example, the child is neither peasant nor daughter of a Parisian laundress. Her watering can is too small to be useful outdoors, and is even empty of water (otherwise it could not be held so lightly atilt). Any middle-class child in such a garden would personify carefree enjoyment, but the toy grants this child an even greater innocence from work by reminding us of an adult’s task.51 Middle-class people would have regarded watering flowers as a pleasant task, but this, in turn, is a parody of the real labor that goes into an outdoor garden. Innocent in other ways, this enchanting girl holds flowers in her left hand, and frankly poses for us. The red of her lips and her bow matches that of the bedding flowers beyond, and the tones of her hair, face, hands, and legs are found in the broad swatch of the garden path, as are those of the watering can in the green growth. Integrated in this manner with the rest of the painting, she nonetheless stands out against the flat geometry of the garden, thanks to her dark boots and costume. With the excuse of a high vantage point, Renoir divided his canvas into large curving shapes that lack conventional perspective, as radical a construction as those of Cézanne (who is too often given right of patent for such geometry). Since the child casts no shadow, she resembles a tapestry figure, and has the innocence of the realm of the decorative textile. Worthy of Velasquez, whose royal infants come readily to mind, this splendid picture is one of the greatest of all impressionist renderings of children.

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Description: Girl with a Watering Can by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

189. Renoir, Girl with a Watering Can, 1876. 100 × 73 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Chester Dale Collection.

Renoir’s paintings of garden figures are easily distinguished from Manet’s thanks to their impression of naive innocence. There is nothing of Manet’s fashion and chic about them. It is true that in the first impressionist show in 1874, Renoir exhibited La Parisienne (Pl. 190), a painting of the actress Henriette Henriot in an elaborate blue costume, and equally true that he loved contemporary dress; but he avoided (or lacked) the panache that lets us equate Manet’s women with haute couture. Even Henriette Henriot lacks chic, despite the ravishing way Renoir painted her clothing. She has a self-conscious expression, the naiveté of a doll, that removes her from the world of high fashion. Further, she is an exception, since most of Renoir’s models, like those in the Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (Pl. 135), wear a variety of contemporary dress that was not high fashion at all, but the more modest attire of the lower middle class.

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Description: The Parisienne by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

190. Renoir, La Parisienne, 1874. 160 × 106 cm. Cardiff, National Museum of Wales.

In order to study his Montmartre models in situ, Renoir had begun renting a studio near the Moulin de la Galette, in May 1876. Georges Rivière recounted the painter’s joy upon discovering the abandoned garden outside the dilapidated cottage on the rue Cortot. The ground floor, an old stable, served as studio, and from the two rooms above there was a view out on the luxuriant garden which extended through the center of the area between the rue Cortot and the rue Saint-Vincent. Renoir painted a great many canvases in that garden—1876 was a prodigious year in his work, hardly ever equaled afterwards—and at times his friends Lamy and Cordey brought their easels there as well. A portion of the garden shows in The Garden of the Rue Cortot (Pl. 191), where an abundance of dahlias gives way to a tangle of growth and a fence over which two men are chatting. The generous space occupied by the flowers makes it a “decorative” painting in the lexicon of Renoir, Rivière and their companions, a designation that is owing to its relatively large size (nearly five feet high), to its lack of narrative incident, its vertical format, and its mosaic of flowers and greenery.

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Description: The Garden in the Rue Cortot, Montmartre by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

191. Renoir, The Garden of the Rue Cortot, 1876. 151 × 97 cm. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Acquired through the generosity of Mrs. Alan M. Scaife, 1965.

The decorative feeling of this composition was not fortuitous. Renoir was preoccupied with the concept of the decorative in modern art, and he devoted two articles to the subject in Rivière’s L’Impressionniste in the spring of 1877, when he probably exhibited the picture.52 It was probably shown alongside a similar, smaller picture in the third impressionist exhibition of 1877, when the Moulin made its appearance. Two of Renoir’s entries, simply listed Jardin, have not been identified, but Plate 191 seems to conform to Rivière’s passing reference in his review: “the large panel where there are magnificent red dahlias in a mass of plants and vines. This big painting is a splendid decoration.” (See above, Chapter Three, note 66.) The smaller painting (in a private collection, Paris), two feet high, shows a man and woman talking over the fence.

It is in his later book that Rivière describes the discovery of the rue Cortot studio and its garden. “As soon as one passed through the narrow corridor of the little house, one faced a vast unkempt lawn whose grass was sprinkled with poppies, bindweed, and daisies. Beyond, a pretty walk planted in large trees traversed the whole width of the garden and, further still, one saw an orchard, a vegetable patch, then thick shrubs in the midst of which tall poplars balanced their leafy heads.” (Rivière 1921, p. 130.) One is only a short letter, but the other is a veritable manifesto which decries the stultified ornamentation of Haussmann’s architecture, damns the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and its derivative art, and urges the renewal of a sense of craftsmanship, based on nature. The concept of the decorative was a vital feature of the impressionists’ esthetic, relating as it did to the flat surface of the canvas, which they were all acutely aware of. In the process of liberating themselves from the rules of traditional art, they looked to several arts then considered decorative, including textiles, eighteenth-century painting, and Japanese prints. In the Western tradition, there had long been an association of flowers and gardens with the decorative, and Renoir had strong support in this from Monet. In 1876 Monet exhibited a painting entitled Decorative Panel (Pl. 265), and the same year painted four large works he called “decorations,” for Alice and Ernest Hoschedé’s château at Montgeron, a few miles southeast of Paris. All four were views of the chateau’s grounds, and one of them is dominated by a splendid display of dahlias.

Renoir showed another garden picture, The Swing (Pl. 193), in the banner exhibition of 1877 in which his Dance at the Moulin de la Galette and Monet’s four “decorations” were hung. According to Rivière, the woman in The Swing is Jeanne, the working-class girl of Montmartre who appears in the dancing picture.53 Rivière 1921, p. 136. She has on the dress that Margot wore in the larger composition, and she is similarly situated on a mottled pinkish-white and lavender-blue ground, here representing the central alley of the rather unkempt public garden that extended beyond Renoir’s, behind the rue Cortot. Compared to the bustle of the Sunday dance, this picture breathes serenity. “One feels the absence of all passion”; wrote Rivière, “these young people are enjoying life, in superb weather, with the morning sun passing through the foliage; what does the rest of humanity matter to them!”54 See above, Chapter Three, note 66. Jeanne is there to be admired, but she is deferentially listening to one of the men, as is his friend, leaning against the tree. The guilelessness of this benign patriarchal society is witnessed by the young child—a neighborhood girl in her everyday apron—who gazes up at the adults like some Renaissance or baroque putto. We cannot imagine Manet including such a child in his encounters among men and women. Chez le Père Lathuille (Pl. 67), Argenteuil (Pl. 239), and In the Conservatory (Pl. 183) would be impossible if a child were present. These compositions are a blend of cynicism and upper-class aloofness calculated to reveal contemporary truths. The husband and wife of In the Conservatory are shown closer together than Renoir’s Jeanne and her interlocutor, but their reserve militates against sensuality, and their calculated self-display indicates Manet’s interest in cool detachment of a penetrating kind. Renoir was alarmed by contemporary truths, which he found harsh and unwelcome, so he removed his models to another world.

This world is a garden oasis in Montmartre, a real place where ordinary (if beautiful) residents could be studied under natural light, for nature and real persons were essential antidotes to formula and artificiality. They are what separates his concept of the decorative from that of Puvis de Chavannes (Pl. 175), whose ideals were found in mural paintings derived from the classical tradition, with pale colors and sculpturesque, rather than contemporary, figures. Renoir’s garden, though real, was nonetheless insulated from the tawdry surroundings of Montmartre, and it is obvious that he used it to transport his figures away from Manet’s and Degas’s Paris to a kind of utopia, one that recalls the paintings of the fête galante (Pl. 137). He had begun life as a porcelain painter whose figures perpetuated the delicacy of the eighteenth-century tradition, and he logically adapted the impulses of that tradition to people and settings that conformed to his ideals. He particularly loved Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard. In the fall of 1883, writing to Durand-Ruel about bathers on the shore of the Guernsey Islands, he remarked: “nothing is so pretty as this mixture of women and men squeezed together on the rocks? I could more readily imagine myself in a Watteau landscape than in reality.”55 27 Sept. 1883, reprinted in Venturi 1939, vol. 1, p. 126. He found in eighteenth-century painting both an arcadian society to hold up as a model, and a palette to his liking, one that diminished the importance of light-and-dark modeling in favor of small strokes that separated the colors, and that seemed responsive to air, light, and movement.

Renoir shared his fondness for the eighteenth century with Monet, whose picnics of the 1860s, as we saw, continued the tradition of the fête galante and the hunting party. They were hardly alone in this, because there was a prominent vogue for the rococo, begun in the romantic era, that lasted into the 1880s. The southern painter Monticelli created a whole art based on the fête galante. Eugénie had sanctioned the vogue in her choice of revival costume, and the Goncourt brothers had begun publishing their notable studies of eighteenth-century art in 1859. The signs of the love affair with the rococo were everywhere after 1860: costumes, textiles, interior decoration, posters (Jules Chéret was called “the Tiepolo of the boulevards”), plays, and operettas. Renoir was swept up in this vogue more than the other impressionists, and at times was nearly swamped by it. He painted a succession of works beginning with The Promenade in 1870 (Pl. 192) which are patently modeled on the rococo theme of lovers strolling or seated in a wooded glade. In 1875 he painted two, The Lovers and Confidences, whose superb colors are almost ruined by their figures’ simpering expressions. Fortunately, he overcame his weaknesses in 1876 with the astonishing group of paintings, which, like The Swing, extract a richness from the previous century while distilling a new expressiveness from contemporary impulses.

~

Description: The Promenade by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

192. Renoir, The Promenade, 1870. 81 × 65 cm. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland.

~

Description: The Swing by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

193. Renoir, The Swing, 1876. 92 × 73 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

Writing of The Swing in 1877, Rivière said that “one sees there something of the voyage to Cytherea, with a note particular to the nineteenth century. It’s the same spirit, the same French taste, whose tradition was just about lost in the midst of the dramatic paintings inaugurated by Greuze and David.” And he added that “One must go back to Watteau to find a charm analogous to that which marks The Swing”56 “Les Intransigeants et les Impressionnistes,” L’Artiste (Nov. 1877): 298–99. We know that these phrases reflect Renoir’s own views, for, alone among the impressionists, he wrote essays on art that reveal his ideas clearly. In addition to the short letter and the longer polemic contributed to Rivière’s L’Impressionniste, he sent Durand-Ruel a manifesto in 1884 for a “Society of Irregularists,” he composed a whole series of social aphorisms which were later published by his son, and he wrote an introduction to a French edition of Cennini’s early Renaissance treatise, published in 1911.57 In addition to the Cennini introduction, the “Société des Irrégularistes” (manuscript in the Archives du Louvre), and the two articles in Rivière’s L’Impressionniste, Renoir wrote a large number of aphorisms on art and society, reminiscent of Delacroix’s unfinished dictionary of the arts (portions of which were published posthumously). They are undated but probably were done about 1884 when he was most enthusiastic for Cennini; they were published by his son Jean in Renoir 1962, pp. 241—45. Renoir had Pissarro’s cousin Lionel Nunès do some library research for him in 1884 in connection with his work on Cennini and the “Irrégularistes,” but it is not known if Nunès had a share in Renoir’s ideas or was merely supplying him with material. See Renoir 1985, p. 381, and Janine Bailly-Herzberg, ed., Correspondance de Camille Pissarro (1980), p. 299. Although there is some risk in using later, and undated, sayings to analyze ideas of the 1870s, Renoir’s writings, largely in germ in the published 1877 articles, are entirely consistent, and there seems little reason to doubt their application. In eighteenth-century art, Renoir found an echo of his convictions that man’s natural proclivities were the source of art and of goodness. Once, he tells us in his writings, religion was a support for the imagination, but modern man, devoted to industry, engineering and the “false mania of perfection,” has cast God out. Like John Ruskin, he believed that nature, not God, was now man’s guide to spiritual and physical goodness, and like Wordsworth, he believed that nature was the place where man could free himself from the taint of civilization. There he could listen to his instinctive inner being, and by acting according to his own nature, he could rediscover nature at large. “Go and see what others have produced,” reads one of his aphorisms, “but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.”58 Renoir 1962, p. 244.

The enemy of natural instinct, according to Renoir, was the spirit of rationalism in the urban-industrial world, the rationalism which he associated both with industry and with the Renaissance-derived traditions of the hated Ecole des Beaux-Arts, rather than with the Gothic, whose buildings he praised in his 1877 polemic. Together with others of his generation, he regarded reason as a tool of modern industrial organization, a tyranny that subjected feelings to mere calculation. At the age of seventeen, then a craftsman in a porcelain works, he had been put out on the street by new machinery which made hand painting redundant. This gave moral urgency to his proposal in 1884 for a “Society of Irregularists”:

Nature abhors a vacuum, say the physicists. They could complete their axiom by adding that it has no less a horror of regularity.

Observers know in effect that in spite of the apparent simplicity of the laws which preside at their formation, the works of nature are infinitely varied, from the most important to the least….

At this time when our French art, still at the beginning of this century so full of penetrating charm and exquisite fantasy, is perishing because of regularity, dryness, and the mania of false perfection that now tends to make the unadorned cleanness of the engineer into the ideal, we think it useful to react promptly against the mortal doctrines which threaten to annihilate it….59 Venturi 1939, vol. 1, pp. 127–28.

Renoir’s society, never established, would have prevented the use of the ruler, and would have required direct study from nature. The “false perfection” which he saw in industry had its counterpart in the despised perfection of academic style. The “finish” of Salon art was reprehensible because it was the result of mindless labor, rather than the spontaneous product of instinct. In this Renoir continued the view held by so many artists and writers of the romantic era, that instinctual freedom is the source of creativity. Labor was repressive because it was not freely granted, and even if the artist or worker was duped into giving willingly of his labor, this turned out to be a kind of standardized monotony in industrial society. Spontaneity, freedom, and nature became the watch-words of the avant-garde, and here again they viewed the art of the eighteenth century as a proper model.

Nineteenth-century artists looked back to the condition of art in the previous century because they saw a “pure” art, one not enslaved by daily reality, one that was the result of aristocratic patronage which had permitted the artist a status above the herd, that is, above the bourgeoisie. This privileged standing was associated with a well-deserved leisure, namely, leisure earned by artistic genius. Like the life of the aristocrats who supported art, it meant a triumph over mere work. It was a leisure that subsidized creativity. (We have already encountered it when discussing the flâneur, who took on many of the attitudes and trappings of the aristocrat.) Art was non-utilitarian and had to be freed from bourgeois restraints. Leisure, nature, and hedonistic release from work became the resort of the artists’ opposition to the bourgeoisie, despised because it based itself upon a materialistic work ethic and could not accept “pure” art remote from its immediate interests.

It was not the entire bourgeoisie whom the artists opposed, of course, for in this as in other matters, they aligned themselves with the progressive middle class. Already in the 1850s, a number of liberal theorists and industrialists concerned with the decorative arts, including Bonapartists like Léon de Laborde, agitated for reforms in schooling and in the applied arts that would favor the individual craftperson’s gifts, thereby contributing a meaningful originality to the product.60 Albert Boime, “The Teaching of Fine Arts and the Avant-Garde in France during the second half of the Nineteenth Century,” Arts Magazine 60 (December 1985): 46–57. Ernest Chesneau, a liberal art critic whose reviews were sympathetic to the impressionists, published an essay in 1881 whose terms are similar to Renoir’s. “Every object made entirely by one hand is superior in beauty to mechanical products, despite imperfections in details,” he wrote, and, in fact, “these slight imperfections themselves help give the object a personality, a soul, one might say.” The value of an object lies in its individuality, and this is a product of spontaneity which must not be suppressed by too much precision of execution.61 Introductory essay to Edouard Guichard, Dessins de décoration des principaux maîtres (Paris 1881). Chesneau’s ideas owe a definite debt to Ruskin, with whom he corresponded extensively. In the same essay he champions color “as an element of art sufficient by itself without the aid of idea,” and boosts it over design as the key element of the decorative arts.

Chesneau’s appreciation of individuality and spontaneity in the decorative arts probably led to his liberal attitude towards the impressionists, including their most controversial invention, their free brushwork. It was too free for Chesneau, but he could still praise Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro because, like them, he associated nature and hedonism with instinctual freedom. The artists themselves consistently linked individualism with spontaneity and therefore with their brushwork. This is why Renoir spurned academic finish, and why he praised the irregularities of handwork based on an immediate reaction to nature.62 In “The End of Impressionism,” his essay in San Francisco 1986, as in his earlier writings, Richard Shiff shows why and how apparent spontaneity involves complicated mental processes, and an amalgam of vision, earlier practice, and apperception. In this he was seconding the ideas expressed much earlier by Ruskin and carried throughout European culture by the Arts and Crafts movement, and by enlightened commentators like Chesneau. Even though the route of these ideas to Renoir has not yet been traced, his “Society of Irregularists” surely reflects the Arts and Crafts movement, and has a similar sense of moral outrage.

Both in that document and in the 1877 polemic published in L’Impressionniste, Renoir praised the Gothic over later, derivative arts. Like Monet and Pissarro, he was heir to the Gothic Revival, the forebear of the Arts and Crafts, and its conception of natural art as the product of natural man. This is why Monet would later paint Rouen Cathedral rather than a bank or a government building of classical design. This is why the impressionists gave such prominence to the hand-wrought qualities of brushwork rather than to the finish of traditional French painting. This is why originality itself, for both Arts and Crafts adherents and impressionists, was vested in the apparent imperfections of the handmade, free of the vice of mechanical perfection.

In these last phrases we find the links that join Impressionism to progressive currents of industrial capitalism. Thorstein Veblen gave the most famous formulation of the value of the hand-wrought in his Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899:

Hand labor is a more wasteful method of production; hence the goods turned out by this method are more serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary reputability; hence the marks of hand labor come to be honorific, and the goods which exhibit these marks take rank as of higher grade than the corresponding machine product…. The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought goods, therefore, is a certain margin of crudeness. This margin must never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that would be evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the ideal precision attained only by the machine, for that would be evidence of low cost.63 Veblen 1899, ed. 1953, p. 114. I have pointed out the appropriateness of Veblen in this regard in “Impressionism, Originality, and Laissez-faire,” Radical History Review 38 (1987): 7–15.

Renoir’s free brushwork, therefore, is an expression of his society’s longing for signs of those values that were threatened by the organization of the urban-industrial world: spontaneity, individualism, and the freedom to find consolation among natural things. For the well-to-do, those values could be translated into individually crafted paintings, furniture, or clothing. Veblen pointed out that the “honorific mark” of the handmade was not appreciated by the lower middle-class, who preferred the pseudo-perfection of the machine-made; the acquisition of “original” artifacts was consequently a way to distinguish one’s “taste,” that is, one’s standing above the common herd.

For the less well-off, like the young women whom Renoir painted at the Moulin de la Galette or in the garden of the rue Cortot, those values were associated with leisure, with dancing, flowers, a Sunday outing in a park. His paintings of gardens and promenades embody ideals whose social meanings we readily recognize in other domains. That is, the demand that social restraints be lifted to make room for natural instincts, the demand for access to nature, for leisure to cultivate the self—what are these, in another form, but the demands of that era’s labor unions and social reformers? Renoir’s gardens may seem remote from politics, but in fact the campaigns to lower the work day from twelve to ten hours, and then from ten to eight, were struggles for more leisure, for more independence from the workplace, and as the unions grew stronger, the activities they organized for their members grew from picnics to suburban outings, and eventually to vacation camps in the country or on the seashore.

1 McCabe 1869, pp. 60–62. »

2 Albert Guérard, Napoleon III (Harvard, 1953), p. 214. »

3 Pinkney 1958, passim. »

4 King 1868, p. 231. »

5 Delvau 1867, p. 31. »

6 In Joanne 1885, pp. 186–200, are figures for the extent of lawns, pipes, trees, etc., and one of the best capsule histories and descriptions of the Bois. »

7 Cited by Ernest de Ganay, Les Jardins de France (Paris, 1949), p. 291. »

8 A guide book of 1856, cited in Villefosse 1942, P. 319. »

9 King 1868, p. 152. »

10 Alphand 1867–73, vol. 1. P. 95. »

11 From Mes souvenirs (Paris, 1868), cited in Villefosse 1942, pp. 320–21. »

12 By Amadée Achard, in a guide book of 1867 (cited in Renoir 1985, p. 74), and by Whitehurst (Whitehurst 1873, vol. 1, p. 227), also in 1867. »

13 Edouard Gourdon, Le Bois de Boulogne (Paris, 1861), p. 281, cited and translated in Richardson 1971, p. 209. »

14 North Peat 1903, p. 95, entry for 1865. Isaacson 1972, fig. 30 and n. 61, gives evidence of the popularity of the amazone, the woman rider, in contemporary illustrations. »

15 See the excerpts cited in San Francisco 1986, nos. 95–97. »

16 Whitehurst 1873, vol. 2, pp. 95–97. »

17 Moers 1960, p. 117. »

18 Yriarte 1864, pp. 108, 117. »

19 North Peat 1903, p. 291. »

20 Proust 1913, p. 94. »

21 Published in the series Bibliothèque dramatique 268 (1864): 107ff. »

22 Richard Shiff has made the most astute analysis of impressionist brushwork in its multiple meanings (Shiff 1984, passim). »

23 Tabarant 1947, p. 202. »

24 Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino (Musée d’Orsay), 1863 (Theodore Reff, “Further Thoughts on Degas’s Copies,” Burlington Magazine 113 [1971]: 537–38). »

25 By introducing Vernet, and then Cuyp, I wish to deal in broad precedents, not in “influences” on Degas. A more thorough discussion of representations of horses and races would have to deal with the British tradition, particularly with Stubbs. »

26 See Gourdon de Genouillac 1893–98, vol. 5, p. 476 and passim; Avenel 1900–1905, vol. 5, pp. 140–41, 156–57 and passim; Merlin 1967, pp. 14, 36–44. »

27 This painting has been a favorite of those who posit an influence of photography on Degas. They point particularly to the truncated cart on the left. This claim now seems much exaggerated, for cut-off figures are common in painting and graphic arts. In Vernet’s Mounted Jockeys, for example, a figure exiting to the left is cut by the frame, as is the horse above. In another of this series, only the front half of a horse and half its rider protrude into the picture space. One can readily imagine Degas grafting his innovations on similar precedents. Moreover, historians frequently cite Japanese prints as sources for such cut-off forms, but surely the stasis of those prints would cancel out the other “influence.” Besides, there is nothing photographic about the deliberate placement of all the tiny figures, and of course the little race itself would have to be called “anti-photographic.” Degas’s known use of photographs (e.g., Pls. 122, 123) shows no interest in such effects, and the ones he later took or posed himself are notable for their centrality and symmetry. The charging horse in Plate 167, for its part, has the customary pose of the flying gallop, not that of contemporary motion photography. Ironically, when Degas did borrow poses from Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-action photographs of horses, after 1882, the result was stiff images with less potential motion. »

28 Chapus 1854, p. 27. »

29 McCabe 1869, p. 523. »

30 The painting also has signs of numerous changes in its gestation. Pentimenti reveal that the carriage wheels were once much larger, and that there was a barrier or fence cutting across the now open foreground space, just below the central horse’s tail. »

31 See Chapter One, p. 20. »

32 Antonin Proust, “Edouard Manet: Souvenirs,” La Revue blanche (February-May 1897). 171–72. The Louvre’s picture is now given to Titian by many specialists. For Manet’s Déjeuner, the most recent interpretations, incorporating mordant commentaries on earlier writers, are Anne Coffin Hanson’s (Hanson 1977, pp. 92–95) and Françoise Cachin’s (Manet 1983, no. 62). »

33 For this reason, the association of Manet’s picture with the theme of earthly paradise seems a bit strained, even though attractively put forward by Werner Hofmann and Beatrice Farwell (see Isaacson 1972, p. 106, n. 50). »

34 Lipton 1975, pp. 58–63. »

35 Mme Jules Baroche, Le Second Empire, notes et souvenirs (Paris, 1921), p. 225. See also Chapter Four, p. 130. »

36 Fritz Saxl, “A Humanist Dreamland,” in his A Heritage of Images (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 89–104. Isaacson 1972, p. 106, n. 50, draws attention to Saxl’s essay, which situates Manet’s Déjeuner in this tradition. I am indebted to Isaacson’s perceptive analysis of Monet’s project. »

37 Isaacson 1972, p. 41. »

38 A point made by Monet specialists, among them, Joel Isaacson in his dissertation “The Early Work of Claude Monet” (Berkeley, 1967). Isaacson’s subsequent publications form the best analysis of Women in the Garden. See especially Isaacson 1972, pp. 50–51, 83–89. »

39 “Fashion,” 1904, in Simmel 1971, p. 303. »

40 In addition to Simmel, see Veblen 1899, ed. 1953, pp. 112–18, and passim. »

41 Child 1893, pp. 89—90. This whole process lies at the heart of Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (Ladies’ Delight) of 1883. »

42 Bicknell 1895, pp. 117–18. Bicknell—no radical she!—remarks that “Paris was a sort of fairyland, where every one lived only for amusement, and where every one seemed rich and happy. What lay underneath all this, would not bear close examination—the dishonorable acts of all kinds, which too often were needed to produce the glamour deceiving superficial observers.” On page 40, Bicknell discusses the state subsidies for Eugénie’s wardrobe. She describes the veritable costume theater involved in clothing the Empress, comprising several rooms for the wardrobes, and an elevator permitting one of the costumed dummies to descend through the ceiling for approval or alteration. »

43 Child 1893, p. 90. »

44 Tucker 1982, pp. 134—35. »

45 Fulbert Dumonteil in 1887, cited in Los Angeles 1984–85, p. 211. »

46 Cited in Hamilton 1954, ed. 1969, p. 215. »

47 Isaacson 1982, p. 110. »

48 The Painter of Modern Life, in Baudelaire 1964, pp. 32–33. »

49 Maurice Du Seigneur, cited in Hamilton 1954, ed. 1969, p. 249; Armand Silvestre, then J.-K. Huysmans, both cited in Rouart and Orienti 1970, no. 352. Demarsy’s real name was Anne Marie-Louise Josephine Brochard. »

50 Child 1893, p. 92. »

51 Middle-class people would have regarded watering flowers as a pleasant task, but this, in turn, is a parody of the real labor that goes into an outdoor garden. »

52 It was probably shown alongside a similar, smaller picture in the third impressionist exhibition of 1877, when the Moulin made its appearance. Two of Renoir’s entries, simply listed Jardin, have not been identified, but Plate 191 seems to conform to Rivière’s passing reference in his review: “the large panel where there are magnificent red dahlias in a mass of plants and vines. This big painting is a splendid decoration.” (See above, Chapter Three, note 66.) The smaller painting (in a private collection, Paris), two feet high, shows a man and woman talking over the fence.

It is in his later book that Rivière describes the discovery of the rue Cortot studio and its garden. “As soon as one passed through the narrow corridor of the little house, one faced a vast unkempt lawn whose grass was sprinkled with poppies, bindweed, and daisies. Beyond, a pretty walk planted in large trees traversed the whole width of the garden and, further still, one saw an orchard, a vegetable patch, then thick shrubs in the midst of which tall poplars balanced their leafy heads.” (Rivière 1921, p. 130.) »

53 Rivière 1921, p. 136. »

54 See above, Chapter Three, note 66. »

55 27 Sept. 1883, reprinted in Venturi 1939, vol. 1, p. 126. »

56 “Les Intransigeants et les Impressionnistes,” L’Artiste (Nov. 1877): 298–99. »

57 In addition to the Cennini introduction, the “Société des Irrégularistes” (manuscript in the Archives du Louvre), and the two articles in Rivière’s L’Impressionniste, Renoir wrote a large number of aphorisms on art and society, reminiscent of Delacroix’s unfinished dictionary of the arts (portions of which were published posthumously). They are undated but probably were done about 1884 when he was most enthusiastic for Cennini; they were published by his son Jean in Renoir 1962, pp. 241—45. Renoir had Pissarro’s cousin Lionel Nunès do some library research for him in 1884 in connection with his work on Cennini and the “Irrégularistes,” but it is not known if Nunès had a share in Renoir’s ideas or was merely supplying him with material. See Renoir 1985, p. 381, and Janine Bailly-Herzberg, ed., Correspondance de Camille Pissarro (1980), p. 299. Although there is some risk in using later, and undated, sayings to analyze ideas of the 1870s, Renoir’s writings, largely in germ in the published 1877 articles, are entirely consistent, and there seems little reason to doubt their application. »

58 Renoir 1962, p. 244. »

59 Venturi 1939, vol. 1, pp. 127–28. »

60 Albert Boime, “The Teaching of Fine Arts and the Avant-Garde in France during the second half of the Nineteenth Century,” Arts Magazine 60 (December 1985): 46–57. »

61 Introductory essay to Edouard Guichard, Dessins de décoration des principaux maîtres (Paris 1881). Chesneau’s ideas owe a definite debt to Ruskin, with whom he corresponded extensively. In the same essay he champions color “as an element of art sufficient by itself without the aid of idea,” and boosts it over design as the key element of the decorative arts. »

62 In “The End of Impressionism,” his essay in San Francisco 1986, as in his earlier writings, Richard Shiff shows why and how apparent spontaneity involves complicated mental processes, and an amalgam of vision, earlier practice, and apperception. »

63 Veblen 1899, ed. 1953, p. 114. I have pointed out the appropriateness of Veblen in this regard in “Impressionism, Originality, and Laissez-faire,” Radical History Review 38 (1987): 7–15. »

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