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MANET
S NYMPH
20
Pissarro's
SURPRISED
was already aware that disquieting content could place consciousness itself between the viewer and the work of art and
that, once this was accomplished, the painting would be distanced by the viewer, rendered into a mute object, a 'mere'
painting, in a moment of self-defence that was also one of
self-knowledge. Since none of the accounts of the painting
by Manet's Parisian contemporaries mentions the male
figure, one can only conclude that after the painting was returned from Russia and some time before its exhibition in
1867 the satyr was removed and the picture's name changed.
Several months after the work's exhibition in Russia, in an
etching called La Toilette, Manet again used the voyeurist
idea to disrupt the spectator-object relationship. A servant,
attending a nude woman, looks up and out of the picture with
surprise, indicating to the viewer the sense of intrusion he is
to feel. This is the role that the hissing cat will play one year
later in the Olympia, a painting which remains during the
186o's the most complete statement of the ideas introduced by
the Nymph Surprised.
THEODORE
REFF
Portrait
of
deals exclusively with Cezanne's influence on the work. For the basic
pp.9-xo,
bibliography see L. R. PISSARROand L. VENTURI: Camille Pissarro,son art, son
euvre, Paris [I939], No.293.
2 The Renoir is
reproduced in j. REWALD: Paul Cezanne,New York [1948],
Fig.84; the others, in L'Amour de l'Art, xvII [1936], Figs. x4-16. Pissarro's
portrait is undated, but is generally ascribed to early 1874.
Cezanne
resembles him. He wore a cap, his long black hair was beginning to recede from a high forehead, he had large black
eyes which rolled in their orbits when he was excited.'3
There are of course other records of the close association
between C6zanne and Pissarro around 1872-4, among them
a fine etching of the younger man by his mentor and their
pencil sketches of each other; but none possesses the monumentality and depth of feeling of this large portrait in oil.4
And none has its degree of complexity in characterizing the
sitter, who appears here at once 'humble and colossal', to
use his own later epithet of Pissarro: 'colossal' in his compactness and immobility, his mass filling most of the picture
surface, yet 'humble' in his coarse outdoor clothing and
unkempt beard and in the unpretentiousness of the works of
art surrounding him - a small rural landscape and two
satirical newspaper prints, all of them unframed and simply
tacked to the wall. That they reveal a taste for the popular
and the rustic which would have been congenial to the
group of artists around Pissarro, working outside Paris in
the villages of Pontoise and Auvers,5 becomes more apparent
3 Letter to his brother Paul, undated;
quoted in w. s. MEADMORE: Lucien Pissarro,
un CceurSimple, London [1962], pp.25-6.
4 It is on
canvas, 72 by 59 cm. The other portraits are reproduced in REWALD:
j.
REWALD:
627
PISSARRO
'S
PORTRAIT
when they are compared with the objects in the backgrounds of such typically Parisian images of the creative
man as Degas's portrait of James Tissot and Manet's of
Zola (Fig.22), both painted about eight years earlier.6 The
latter, particularly relevant since Zola was C6zanne's closest
friend at this time, expresses perfectly the contemporary
ideal of the artist as a dandy, whose elegant attire and casual
posture are consistent with the cultivated taste revealed by
the objects around him, among them a Japanese screen and
colour woodcut, an etching of Velizquez's Borrachos,and a
photograph of Olympia.
Valuable as a souvenir of his friendship with C6zanne,
Pissarro's portrait is no less fascinating as an artistic conception in its own right. It was in fact one of his favourites and
could still be seen hanging in his studio at Eragny towards
the end of his life.7 In his auvre, which consists almost entirely of landscapes and genre scenes, it occupies a place
apart, not only as one of the relatively few portraits, but as
the only one (excluding the two commissioned by his friend
Murer) of someone outside Pissarro's immediate family. And
even when compared with those of his wife and children, it
is unique in its calculated treatment of the background. For
they normally show a broadly rendered interior and focus
so exclusively on the sitter that the pictures which occasionally appear are unidentifiable; and the same is true of his
only self-portrait of this period;8 whereas here the wall has
been brought forward and the images on it have obviously
been chosen and arranged in relation to C6zanne. Spaced at
equal intervals around his figure but very close to it, with
some of their contours paralleling his, they serve both to
enclose it on the surface and, through their diminutive scale,
to enhance its appearance of massiveness. Yet they are also
so distinctly characterized, even to the legibility of the title
at the upper left, as to invite speculation about their symbolic meaning in relation to C6zanne. It is this intellectual
conception of the portrait, at once humorous and serious,
that we shall attempt to elucidate.
The print at the upper left, as Lucien Pissarro recalled,
is a caricature by Andre Gill which had appeared in the
newspaper L'lclipse shortly before the portrait was painted,9
more specifically, in the issue of 4th August 1872 (Fig.25).
Its topical subject is the extraordinarily generous public
response to the Government's request for a loan to pay the
indemnity demanded by Germany after the Franco-Prussian
War, a response in which over forty billion francs were
pledged within twenty-four hours.'0 Gill shows Adolph
Thiers, who was then acting as head of the provisional
government, as a doctor proudly holding up the pledged
money in the form of a new-born infant which he has just
delivered from the figure of France at the left; hence the
6 See P.-A. LEMOISNE: Degas et son
Paris [1946 ff.], No.I75; and P. JAMOT
,uvre,
and G. WILDENSTEIN:Manet, Paris [1932], No.146. On the latter, which was
exhibited in the Salon of 1868, see s. L. FAISON,JNR: 'Manet's Portrait of Zola',
OF
COZANNE
title, 'La Dilivrance', which means both 'delivery' and 'salvation'. The magnitude of the oversubscription was indeed
a stirring proof not only of the country's vast wealth, unimpaired by the recent war, but of its confidence in the new
republican government. In an earlier version of this print,
published in a de luxe edition of L'b8clipse,Gill had shown
the reactionary opponents of Thiers's party - the Duc
d'Aumale, the Comte de Chambord, and Napoleon III
himself, clutching a dead eagle - as disgruntled witnesses of
the miraculous delivery;" obliged by the censor to remove
them, he superimposed the clouds that appear in the foreground of the popular version (the one Pissarro copied), thus
transforming the delivery into a vaguely defined apotheosis.
At the upper right in the portrait of C6zanne is another
popular print, a caricature of Courbet by Leonce Petit
(Fig.24), which appeared in the newspaper Le Hannetonon
I3th June 1867, on the occasion of Courbet's retrospective
exhibition outside the grounds of the World's Fair.12 Hence
the many recognizable pictures by him on the wall behind
him and the triumphant toast he seems to propose with his
glass of beer, which, like the clay pipe in his mouth, was a
familiar symbol of his proletarian habits. Hence, too, the
egalitarian message in his own handwriting printed below
ridicule qu'on
the drawing: 'J'ai toujourstrouvi souverainement
medemandel'autorisationdepubliermonportrait,dequelquefafonque
ce fft. Mon masqueappartientd tous; c'est pourquoij'autorise le
Hannetond le publier - d conditioncependantqu'il n'oubliebas de
l'encadrerd'une belle auriole.'13This sympathetic picture of
Courbet was accompanied by an article written by Eugene
Vermersch, the radically outspoken director of Le Hanneton,
who with obvious pride declared the painter a martyr of all
the reactionary tendencies in France and a champion of the
independent and progressive ones.
The third picture in the background of his portrait of
C6zanne is one of Pissarro's own landscapes, the Route de
Gisors,Maison duPdreGalien,which is inscribed 1873 (Fig.26).14
It shows one of the principal streets of Pontoise, where
Pissarro was living at the time, and thus represents in effect
an exterior view of that small rural world of which we see a
glimpse of the interior in this very portrait. It was evidently
one of Pissarro's favourites and perhaps also one of Cezanne's,
for it appears in the background of the latter's Nature Morte
d la Soupiere(Fig.23), which he painted at the same spot in
his friend's studio shortly thereafter, probably in i1875.15
Incidentally, the landscape is not accompanied here by the
print that would have been visible in this view, which confirms the conclusion that Pissarro introduced it quite deliberately into the portrait.
11 This version is reproduced in FONTANE:AndreGill, Ii, p.22.
628
PISSARROS
PORTRAIT
OF
CiZANNE
Both men were frequently caricatured at the time and would have been
readily identified, even without accompanying texts; see, for example, j.
DUCHE : Deux sicles d'histoirede Francepar la caricature,Paris [1961e], ch.XI.
22 This is consistent with the execution throughout, which is exceptionally
vigorous and, at the bottom, sketchy and unfinished.
23 See G. MACK:GustaveCourbet,New York
[1951], ch.XXX.
24 On their roles during the Civil War see ibid., chs.XXIV and
XXV; and
H. MALO: Thiers, Paris [1932], ch.XXVII.
25 'Une Entrevue de Thiers et de Courbet en
1870', Archiveshistoriques,artistiques et littiraires, II, Paris [189o-i], pp.279-81; reprinted in P. COURTHION:
Courbetracontipar lui-mimeet par ses amis, n, Geneva [195o], pp.4o-3.
26 CASTAGNARY:'Fragments d'un livre sur Courbet', Gazette des
Beaux-Arts,
ser. 4, VII [1912], p.24. On the copies commissioned by Thiers see Collection
d'objetsd'art de M. ThierslIgudeau Musie du Louvre,Paris [1884], pp.79-I I I.
629
PISSARRO'S
27
MEADMORE:
LucienPissarro,p.23; also
OF
PORTRAIT
B. NICOL-
Ricatte, Monaco [I956], p.55. See also the entry of 31st December 1867 on
Courbet's Sommeil;ibid., pp.73-4. The account in 0. LARKIN:'Courbet and His
Contemporaries', ScienceandSociety,im [1939], PP-57-63, ignores the favourable
reactions.
CEZANNE
There is no evidence,
C*zanne
however, that
would have
FONTANE:
PP.254-5-
No.123.
and
PISSARRO
630
LE
HANNETON
ILLUSTR,
SATTRIQUEE T
ITT RAIRt
'NM7
26. Route de Gisors, La Maison du Pire Galien, by Camille Pissarro. Signed and dated 1873. Canvas, 32'7 by
42'3 cm. (Collection Mr and Mrs John Warner, Washington D.C.)
PORTRAIT
PISSARRO'S
father's conservative values. And if such outspoken anarchists as Pissarro and the pdre Tanguy, the colour merchant
who had nearly been executed for his participation in the
Commune, were among his small circle of friends at this
time, they do not seem to have altered his fundamentally
apolitical position.37 On the contrary, as Cezanne grew
older he became more conventional in his opinions and public behaviour, resembling increasingly the prosperous bourgeois his father had been, and in his provincial isolation
even supporting the enemies of Dreyfus and reading reactionary newspapers like La Croixand Le Plerin - far removed
indeed from L'Aclipse and Le Hanneton. During the same
years Pissarro not only retained his anarchist and socialist
convictions, but expressed them more openly.38
Yet there was one area in which Cizanne, despite his
conservatism, shared Pissarro's radical views and indeed
referred to them explicitly, and this was in affirming his
belief that an art of personal expression must be created independently of all authority, even that of the greatest works
of the past. Exasperated by the excessive theorizing of Emile
Bernard, 'un intellectual, congestionnepar les souvenirsdes musies
mais qui ne voit pas assez sur nature', he was led to exclaim:
'Pissarro ne se trompaitdoncpas, il allait un peu loin cependant,
lorsqu'il disait qu'ilfallait brtler les ndcropolesde l'art.'89 And to
Bernard himself he wrote in even stronger terms: 'L'itude
modifienotre vision a' un tel point, que l'humbleet colossal Pissarro
se trouvejustifi6 de ses theoriesanarchistes',theories which, it is
worth recalling here, had also been popular among the
Realists around Courbet in the I850o's.40Pissarro was in turn
profoundly impressed by the authentically personal character of Cezanne's art, even when he recognized that it had
87On Tanguy and C6zanne see
LEONID
Russian
Pistols
in
the
OF
CEZANNE
pp.390-I.
42 Letter to his son, 7th March 1898; ibid., pp.450-I. See also his letters of
13th and 21st November 1895 on C6zanne's originality; ibid.,
43 See REWALD: History of Impressionism,p.313. Cezanne did ofpp.386-8.
course exhibit,
but was little appreciated even by sympathetic critics; see ibid., pp.328-30.
44 Letter to his mother, 26th September 1874; CEZANNE:Correspondance,
pp.1223. On the significance of this passage see T. REFF: 'Cezanne and Hercules',
Art Bulletin, XLVIII [1966], pp.42-3.
TARASSUK
seventeenth
century-
I. Portraitof PaulC~zanne, by Camille Pissarro. Canvas, 72 by 59 cm. (Collection Baron Robert von Hirsch, Basle.)
22. Portrait of Emile Zola, by Edouard Manet. Canvas. igo by III cm.
(Musde du Louvre.)