Eaux-fortes sur Paris, vers 1850-1854

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Charles Meryon
Eaux-fortes sur Paris, vers 1850-1854
1850

About the Item

Charles MERYON Paris 1821 † 1868 Saint-Maurice Eaux-fortes sur Paris. Vers 1850-1854. Etchings of Paris. 1850-1854. Original etchings and drypoints. Large folio album [515 x 335 mm] in a cardboard folder with its original cover, comprising 14 plates (out of 22), in the following order : 1. Title page; 2. Coat-of-Arms Symbolizing the City of Paris; 3. House with a Turret, rue de la Tixéranderie; 4. Le Petit Pont; 5. The Clock Tower; 6. The Gallery of Notre-Dame; 7. The Vampire; 8. An arch of Pont Notre-Dame; 9. The apse of Notre-Dame; 10. Molière's Tomb, Père-Lachaise Cemetery; 11. The Mortuary; 12. Pont-au-change; 13. Pont-Neuf; 14. Pompe Notre-Dame. Very fine impressions printed in brown ink on Hudelist laid paper (the title printed on brown wove paper). Full margins. Dusty and damaged cover (several vertical creases, short tears, missing lower right corner). Inside pages are in very good condition. Rare set : “From the rarity of the impressions of the title page, verses and incidental pieces, one might conclude that complete published editions are extremely scarce. Indeed, it may be that the complete suite was a reality only in the artist’s imagination, a scheme by which he hoped to distribute and sell his work” (James D. Burke) Provenance : A.B.M. "Old Paris is no more…" Meryon's Paris, like that of Baudelaire's Swan, finds its nourishment in melancholy. Etched at the dawn of the great Haussmannian upheavals, his prints bear witness to a world on the verge of disappearing: the Petit-Pont, the Pompe Notre-Dame, the Pont-au-change, the Tourelle de la rue de la Tixéranderie, were demolished shortly after they were set in copper by the artist. Fascinated by the metamorphoses of the old city, Meryon often drew the vanished Paris during his career: he copied etchings of compositions from the 17th and 18th centuries - the Passerelle du Pont-au-change, after the fire of 1621, after Stefano Della Bella; Le pont-au-change, around 1784, after Jean Nicolle, to name but a few. The series of etchings on Paris was inspired by a plate by the Dutch artist Reinier Nooms (ca. 1623 † 1667), Le Pavillon de Mademoiselle, as he recounted in 1863 : "This first piece had a notable influence on me ; leafing through a box of etchings at the Vignères dealer's one day, it fell into my hands and immediately caught my attention [...] ; I immediately seized it with the intention of reproducing it in order to taste it better; and from that moment I even conceived this project that I was vaguely meditating on, to undertake a suite of views of Paris of my choice". Architecture and "Visions" To the 17th century etchers whom he cherished so much, Meryon owes a clean, un-emphatic craft, yet full of poetry. His Parisian landscapes, so meticulously done, exalt the austere beauty of old stones, sculpted with frank contrasts. The human being is secondary. Only the architecture and its shadows matter. The most scrupulous realism is mixed with chimerical and Hugolian visions : the Galerie Notre-Dame and its chiaroscuro, the mortifying sensuality of the Vampire, seem to come straight out of the novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831-1832). Meryon, like Victor Hugo, admires the Gothic edifice and increases its monumental power. In L'abside de Notre-Dame and in Le Petit-Pont, the old cathedral rises above the buildings with its fantastic mass, giving these urban pictures a dramatic solemnity. Meryon compulsively reworked his plates before cancelling them. He gradually scattered fanciful and dramatic details: winged creatures, whirling balloons, dark clouds of crows, worthy of an Edgar Poe poem or an Alfred Hitchcock film. “The breath of Immensity passes through all his work," wrote Hugo, "and makes his etchings more than pictures - visions”. To the monotonous Paris of rectilinear avenues, promoted by the Second Empire, the artist opposes a medieval Paris, tortuous but grandiose, favourable to "visions" and imagination, that "queen of faculties" dear to Baudelaire and the Romantics. Critical Reception and Commercial Success The hauntings of Meryon, twice interned for "melancholic delirium", were very real. From the time he was alive, they fed the myth of the cursed artist, casting a tragic shadow over his work, which was emphasised over and over again by his first biographers. In support of this portrait, they insist on the lack of recognition Meryon received from the official authorities. Certainly, as Gustave Geffroy and Loÿs Delteil write, Les Eaux-fortes sur Paris received no award at the Salon, whose jury even went so far as to refuse the Galerie Notre-Dame in 1853. Similarly, they were ignored by the Louvre's chalcography, which deeply affected the artist and deprived him of an appreciable source of income. There was no lack of praise, however. They came from the greatest writers: Hugo, Baudelaire, Philippe Burty, Henri Beraldi, Léon Godard. As for the commercial success, it seemed to be there. Very quickly, certain plates became unobtainable and were snapped up at a high price. Baudelaire pointed this out as early as 1862, in an article published on the occasion of the founding of the Société des Aquafortistes : "M. Méryon [...] will soon give new works. M. Cadart still has some of the old ones. They are becoming rare ; for, in a fit of bad temper, quite legitimate in fact, Mr. Méryon recently destroyed the plates of his album Paris. And immediately, at a short distance, twice in a row, the Méryon collection was sold at public auction for four and five times its original value. Recognition also came from England where, in 1868, the year of Meryon's death, the first reference text on the artist was published, followed in the next decade by the publication of catalogues (including one devoted to his views of Paris), exhibitions and prestigious public sales. The artist who was, in the eyes of Walter Benjamin, "the most impressive portraitist of the city of Paris", delivered to posterity images of the capital that have become mythical, by their nostalgic fragrance as much as by their visionary acuity. As a powerless witness to the demolitions instigated by the Prefect of the Seine, Meryon did his part to preserve the memory : some of the plates were etched in a hurry, to ward off destruction and oblivion. There is no doubt that the etcher contributed, alongside Charles Nègre and Henri Le Secq, to the very notion of "old Paris". But his topographical views, with their strange mineral purity, are not only of historical importance. They are also and above all powerful receptacles for dreams. Baudelaire was not mistaken, who at one point conceived the project of drawing "philosophical musings" from them. The first lines of his poem, The Seven Old Man, would form an ideal epigraph to the Eaux-fortes sur Paris : "Teeming, swarming city, city full of dreams, Where specters in broad day accost the passer-by ! Everywhere mysteries flow like the sap in a tree Through the narrow canals of the mighty giant." ------------------------------------- All items are sent by DHL well packed Taxes and customs fees are payable by the buyers.

Creator:
Charles Meryon (1821-1868, French)
Creation Year:
1850
Dimensions:
Height: 20.28 in (51.5 cm)Width: 13.19 in (33.5 cm)
Medium:
Etching
Period:
1850-1859
Condition:
Gallery Location:
PARIS, FR
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU2507212155772