Charles Meryon

Born Paris, 23 Nov 1821; died Charenton, 14 Feb 1868.

French printmaker. He was the illegitimate son of Lady Hester Stanhope’s companion and chronicler, Dr Charles Lewis Meryon, and Narcisse Chaspoux, a dancer at the Paris Opéra. He was acknowledged in 1824, but initial separation from his father and the stigma of illegitimacy oppressed him throughout his life. After private schooling at Passy, he entered the French Naval Academy at Brest in 1837 and travelled with his parents in western Europe and on voyages to North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. A precocious draughtsman, Meryon took some drawing lessons on his return to Toulon in 1840 from Vincent Courdouan (1810–93), from whom he learnt to value the elegant precision of line he was later to develop to a supreme degree. He served as midshipman on the corvette Le Rhin during its mission to the French possessions in Oceania (1842–6). Meryon drew small but lively sketches of shipboard life, minor ethnographic studies and more laboured topographical views. Signs of incipient mental instability occurred as he resigned from the navy in 1848. Having travelled in northern France, Belgium and to London, he settled in Paris to study painting with the minor David pupil, Charles-François Phélippes (d 1867), when he was diagnosed as colour-blind. Despite his unusual visual acuity, Meryon suffered from a common form of Daltonism, or red–green confusion, as is poignantly attested in the pastel the Fishing Boat (Paris, Louvre).

The Revolution of 1848 stimulated only verbal plans for an allegorical painting, but an elaborately finished, if somewhat conventional, monochrome cartoon for the Assassination of Marion Dufrêsne in 1772 (Wellington, NZ, Turnbull Lib.) was exhibited at the Salon of 1848. In the same year Meryon encountered Eugène Bléry, with whom he resided temporarily, and studied etching (1849–50). He began by copying prints by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, Salvator Rosa, Karel Dujardin, Adriaen van de Velde and, most enthusiastically, eight by Reinier Nooms, the Dutch sailor–artist whom he venerated as ‘another self’ and whose Paris views clearly prompted his own series, Etchings of Paris. The first great original print of this series, the haunting Petit Pont (1850), was shown at the Salon of that year and was followed by the spectacular sequence of master prints on which his consistent reputation as a major etcher rests: the Clock Tower Turret, Rue de la Tixéranderies, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont and the Notre-Dame Pump (1852), The Chimera, the Arch of the Pont Notre-Dame, the Notre-Dame Gallery and The Pont-Neuf (1853), and, climactically, the Rue des Mauvais-Garçons, The Morgue and the Apse of Notre-Dame (1854). A projected suite devoted to the early architecture of Bourges was not realized, but three subjects, most importantly the compelling Rue des Toiles at Bourges (1853), preceded by the extremely rare Gate of an Old Convent (1851), were produced. Prior to the commercially published editions, principally for the Artiste, most subjects were proofed through numerous states by the artist himself, who was unprecedentedly sensitive to the effect of printing variation in wiping, ink tint and paper tone and texture, and inscribed presentation impressions of great brilliance and subtlety exist. From the outset a few enthusiasts realized that for all the precise clarity and ostensible objectivity of his views of the old buildings of Paris, the plates project a mysterious aura and a dream-like, somewhat sinister atmosphere.

From 1855 Meryon’s physical and mental health deteriorated and the concentration of his incisive style and geometrically crisp composition weakened, although he began to receive increasing recognition—select, but important—from Baudelaire, Gautier, Hugo, Mantz, Bürger and Burty. His precarious and inadequate livelihood became based on reproductive hack-work, book titles and illustrations, many portraits and ephemera, although the privately commissioned panoramic views of San Francisco of 1856 (based on photographs) is more ambitious. The connoisseur Duc d’Arenberg invited him to Enghien to work, but the visit from the summer of 1857 to March 1858 was unproductive. Beset by melancholia and bizarre and complex delusions, Meryon was confined to the asylum at Charenton from 12 May 1858 to 25 August 1859.

When he resumed printmaking, Meryon reworked and modified in hallucinatory manner the earlier Paris views and elaborated several new subjects, but both conception and execution had deteriorated in intensity and images of arcane and more obvious allegory intrude on the architectural compositions. Always apprehensive of drawing publicly from life, Meryon appended reproductive etchings from Paris drawings by earlier artists to the initial group, and a sequence of his youthful drawings made in Oceania was etched, together with a frontispiece, between 1860 and 1866 in a loose and more casually diffuse manner. Friends and admirers attempted to obtain sales and minor commissions for Meryon. The Ministère de la Marine (1865), the sky replete with Polynesian and marine phantasmagoria, was published by the Société des Aquafortistes in 1866. In the same year his sole plate for the Louvre Chalcographie, the Old Louvre, after a painting by Reinier Nooms, was finished.

Although Meryon was represented in the Salon from 1863 to 1866, serious paranoid delusions, semi-starvation and religious mania necessitated re-admission to Charenton on 12 October 1866. He died there insane in February 1868 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, with a copper tomb plaque by Félix Bracquemond, who had etched the two most important portraits of the artist.

Harley Preston. "Meryon, Charles." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T056995 (accessed March 7, 2012).