The Etchings of Charles Meryon

A CENTURY has passed since the birth of Meryon, a circumstance which excuses, if it does not actually demand, a survey in retrospect of the great etcher’s work and the growth of his renown. There is no indication, it must be said at once, that the lapse of time has weakened in any degree the sure fabric of his fame. About no other modern etcher, save Whistler, is there an equal consensus of opinion among those whose opinion counts, that he ranks among the great masters of his art. Whistler himself was a dissentient; he spoke one day to Mr. Wedmore of “Meryon, whom you have taken out of his comfortable place.” Without insinuating that he was jealous of a confrère with whom he was forced to share the honour of a Wedmore catalogue, it may be remarked that the utterances of such a lover of paradox as Whistler need not be taken too seriously. Nor is an artist always the best judge of a fellow artist who pursues very different aims from his own. Meryon’s reputation, though it is ungrudgingly admitted and admired by most etchers of to-day and yesterday, was established by the critics and collectors of a generation now extinct. Philippe Burty, who published the first critical article on Meryon and the first catalogue of his etchings in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts of 1863, was the first to discern clearly and to proclaim to the world his peculiar genius. Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier added their words of praise and the Galerie Notre-Dame evoked the enthusiasm of Victor Hugo. Bracquemond, by twelve years his junior in age but his contemporary in the practice and mastery of etching, gave him all the support of his appreciation, and there was a small enlightened circle of collectors, including Wasset of the War Office, Niel of the Ministry of the Interior, Meryon’s former shipmate De Salicis, the English etcher Seymour Haden, and a few others who saw the great merit of his work from the first. But on the whole his reception in France was cool and discouraging; academic opinion at the time was unfavourable to original etching. The editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts grudged admission to Burty’s essay and asked, if two articles were to be devoted to a modern etcher, how many would be needed for Raphael. His Galerie Notre-Dame was refused by the Salon in 1853, and though many of his Paris etchings were exhibited there, they gained no prize. The public collections did not acquire his works and it was not till 1866 that Burty induced the Chalcographie Impériale at the Louvre to commission and publish one of his plates, L’Ancien Louvre, after Zeeman. The stories told of the pitiful sums that he used to accept for proofs of his finest etchings, a franc and a half or two francs, sometimes, seem almost incredible now, when such proofs sell for hundreds of pounds. In a pathetic letter which he addressed in 1854 to the Minister of the Interior, appealing to him for the support which he could not obtain from the public, he announced his intention of producing a set of ten etchings of Bourges, and charging fifteen francs for the set. He actually sold the whole series of his masterpieces, “Eaux-fortes sur Paris,” as a set, for twenty-five or thirty francs. They sold very slowly indeed. A receipt is extant from him for twenty-five francs paid by Baron Pichon in 1866, twelve years after the publication of the set, for “une suite de vues anciennes de Paris, gravées par moi à l’eau-forte, intitulées Eaux-fortes sur Paris.”