Charles Méryon

Charles Meryon (sometimes Méryon, 23 November 1821 – 14 February 1868) was a French artist who worked almost entirely in etching, as he had colour blindness. Although now little-known in the English-speaking world, he is generally recognised as the most significant etcher of 19th century France. His most famous works are a series of views powerfully conveying his distinctive Gothic vision of Paris. He also had mental illness, dying in an asylum.

Meryon's mother was a dancer at the Paris Opera, who moved to London around 1814 to dance there. In 1818 she had a daughter by Viscount Lowther, the future William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale, a wealthy aristocrat and politician, and 1821 Charles Meryon by Dr Charles Lewis Meryon, an English doctor, returning to Paris for the birth, and remaining there for the rest of her life. The household in Paris was supported financially by both fathers, but more so by Lowther, whose indirect funding remained important throughout Meryon's life; he made very little money from his art.

Starting at the age of 16, Meryon spent ten years as a naval cadet and finally officer, which included tours of the Mediterranean, and a four year voyage around the world, for most of it based in New Zealand, where the French then maintained an imperial toe-hold. On his return he fought and was wounded in a pro-government militia during political disturbances in 1848.

He had become seriously interested in art during his naval career, starting to take lessons. He gradually and reluctantly realized that his colour-blindness ruled out painting, and by 1848 settled on etching, then out of favour as a medium for fine art, though about to undergo a considerable revival. His best period lasted between 1850 and about 1856, before his increasing mental illness reduced his output. He spent fourteen months in an asylum in 1858 and 1859, then continued to work until 1866, when he re-entered the asylum for the final time.

Birth and childhood

Meryon's mother, Pierre-Narcisse Chaspoux, was a Parisian, born in 1791, who became a dancer in the Paris Opera in 1807 with the stage name of Narcisse Gentil. Her appearances there stop in 1814, and it was presumably about this time that she moved to London, where she became the mistress of Viscount Lowther, the future William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale, then an unmarried Tory MP, junior minister, and friend of the Prince Regent. She had a daughter Frances (Fanny) by him in 1818. She was also friendly with Dr Charles Lewis Meryon, who had been a fellow boarder at 10 Warwick Street, Charing Cross, off Cockspur Street, around 1818. In 1821, when she was appearing as a dancer at the London Opera, Pierre-Narcisse became pregnant by Meryon, and returned to Paris with Fanny, Dr Meryon having left for Florence. Charles Meryon was born in the rue Rameau, round the corner from the then site of the Opera.

His father, Dr Meryon, had been working at St Thomas' Hospital at this time, but had spent the years 1810 to 1817 in the Middle East as (at that point unqualified) doctor to the aristocratic traveller Lady Hester Stanhope, who he was later to visit in Lebanon three times, seeing her for the last time in 1838. He continued to correspond with Pierre-Narcisse, and pay maintenance for his son, probably of 600 francs a year. The letters became increasingly uncomfortable, and she only found out about his marriage, which had been in 1823, by accident in 1831. Equally, Pierre-Narcisse was rather more generously supported by Lowther, who saw her and Fanny when he was in Paris, but she was keen to keep him unaware of the existence of Charles, although the two fathers were acquaintances in London. Both fathers apparently continued to know her under her stage name of "Narcisse Gentil".

Charles was registered at birth as a "Chaspoux", and eventually (in 1829) baptised in the Church of England by the chaplain of the British Embassy in Paris. In 1824 his father legally acknowledged paternity, and he was re-registered as "Meryon", although apparently usually known as "Gentil" as a child. For over a year after his birth he lived with friends of his mother some 20 kilometres outside Paris, visited not very frequently by his mother, sister and grandmother. He could walk at 9 months. He was moved back to Paris in January 1823, and from late 1825 Fanny was at a boarding school.

By late in 1826 he had entered the "Pension Savary", one of a number of small boarding schools in the Paris suburb of Passy; Camille Pissarro was a pupil some years later. He remained there until 1836, apart from a period with his father in 1834–35, and it seems to have been a generally happy time in his life. In 1834 his father, with his wife and children, was living in Marseilles, where Charles joined them for an extended visit in May 1834; he had previously seen him on a few occasions. They spent the winter in north Italy, reaching as far as Florence; Charles was back in Paris by May 1835. Although in most respects he enjoyed the visit, and had happy memories of it, it appears that "the relationships within the family were not explained" to Charles, and perhaps other members, and this, the last time he would see his father, contributed to a growing resentment Charles felt towards him.

Meryon's mother died in October 1838, when he was already in the French Naval School in Brest in Brittany. After this his half-sister Fanny went to live in England, where she married in 1840. She remained in touch with him for the rest of his life. He had his grandmother still in Paris, until her death in 1845, and various cousins and family friends in and around Paris.

In the Navy

Training

Meryon later said that he first became attracted to a naval career by "the animation of the quays of Marseilles", on his visit to his father, and from his letters to his father it is clear this had become a clear intention by the end of 1835. He entered the Naval school in Brest in November 1837, having come 47th in the competitive entry exam, out of 68 candidates who passed.

By the end of his first half-year he was ranked 15th, then 19th six months later. By September 1839 he was 11th out of 60 remaining in his class. He "consistently scored a near-perfect mark in Drawing", did well in English (after greatly improving this when with his father) and Gunnery. The training in drawing covered not only making charts and sketches of coastlines, important skills for naval officers, but "picturesque and linear" drawing of heads and landscapes.

The school for future naval officers had only been founded in 1827. It was based on the ship ''Orion'' and the course lasted two years. The pupils almost never set foot on shore, and Meryon's claim to have not done so for 22 months seems plausible. The routine and discipline were harsh, but Meryon made life-long friends, including Ernest Mouchez.

Meryon joined his first ship, the ''Alger'' at Toulon in October 1839, as a cadet, second class. Initially he lodged onshore. After a trip to Algiers carrying troops, the ship left Toulon to join the French Levant squadron in the Aegean Sea in February 1840, allowing Meryon to visit Athens, Corinth, Argos, Melos and Mycenae. In April 1840 he transferred to the ''Montebello'' near modern Izmir (then Smyrna) in Turkey, with which he revisited Greece, then France, before visiting Tunis, then of great political interest to the French, and Carthage. In January 1842 he was promoted to cadet, first class.

Voyage around the world

In the corvette "Le Rhin" he made a voyage round the world from 1842 to September 1846. The purpose of the voyage was to promote French interests in New Zealand, which the French government was not yet ready to accept as wholly a British territory; there were also French whaling interests to protect. A small French settlement on the South Island had been established on an earlier voyage. The French naval "New Zealand station" was to end while the ''Rhin'' was returning home, when the replacement ship, the ''Seine'', was wrecked on the coast of New Caledonia.

The French base in New Zealand was Akaroa, or Port Louis-Philippe as the French still called it, then a small whaling-station, with a mostly French population. The ''Rhin'' reached it on 18 January 1843, and was replaced in April 1846. The outward voyage began on 15 August 1842, heading across the Atlantic, passing Tenerife, but not landing until Bahia in Brazil was reached in October, where they spent nearly two weeks. They then changed direction, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and arriving at Hobart, Tasmania in late December, staying only a week, before sailing for Akaroa, which they reached on 11 January 1843.

Relations between the French and British populations, and even their officials, were cordial or friendly, despite the British tightening their control over this period, for example restricting the fishing rights allowed to French boats. But both sides were aware the question of French claims would be settled back in Europe. In May and June 1843 the ''Rhin'' visited Wellington for ten days, then Auckland. In October they set off for Australia, via Kororareka near the tip of the North Island, today Russell, New Zealand, where they stayed until early November. Less than 18 months later the so-called Flagstaff War between the British and Māori was to break out there. In November Meryon was, back in Paris, promoted to ensign, the lowest rank of naval officer, although the news did not reach him on the ''Rhin'' until July the next year.

At the end of August 1844 the ''Rhin'' sailed for Valparaiso in Chile "to buy stores, particularly wine, which was very expensive in Sydney". After staying two weeks they set off on the return voyage on 6 November 1844, stopping at the Marquesas and Tahiti, which had just come under French "protection", and where there were a total of seven French naval ships at that point. The ''Rhin'' reached Akaroa again on 8 February 1845, hoping to find that its replacement ship had arrived, and they could return to France. But the ship had not come, and in March tensions between the Maori and Europeans had sharply increased, increasing the warmth of local Franco-British relations.

The replacement ship ''Seine'' finally arrived on 8 March 1846, and the ''Rhin'' set sail for home on the 16th. They passed Cape Horn in early May, and landed at Saint Helena on 14 June, staying a week. Meryon's visit to Napoleon's final home would come to haunt him in later years. After a brief stop at Ascension Island, they passed into the Mediterranean and spent four days at the French North African port of Mers El-Kebir from 18 August. They finally landed at Toulon on 28 August, four years and 13 days after they left it.

Art during his naval career

Meryon had sketched in Athens, Algiers and other exotic places he had visited, and by late 1840 decided to take lessons in drawing from the Toulon artist Vincent Courdouan, who was then 30. He had thought of painting in watercolour, but decided he did not have time to learn this at first, but studied using sepia washes. He took full watercolour up in November 1841, when a letter to his father is the first documented mention of his colour-blindness; possibly he had not realized he had the condition before. At this time he seems to have hoped the condition would improve. Courdouan's style made much use of strong contrasts of light and dark tones, which is also characteristic of Meryon's art in the 1850s.

Throughout his voyage on the ''Rhin'' he made drawings, many of which he turned into etchings some twenty years later. He also dabbled in sculpture, having bought some plaster of Paris in Sydney in 1843. He made busts and heads of Maori people, none of which have survived. After a dead whale washed up at Akaroa he made a coloured plaster model of whale nearly two metres long, which was later placed on display in the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (National Museum of Natural History) in Paris, before being transferred to the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle de La Rochelle (in La Rochelle) in 1926.

A number of drawings he made of Maori men with heavily tattooed faces survive, but most of his drawings from the voyage show landscapes, houses, or boats sailing near the coast. His drawing of full human figures (or animals) shows his lack of training, but these views of areas where very few Western artists had reached by the 1840s are rather conventional. Some critics have been intrigued by the contrast between his lack of artistic engagement with the very different visual cultures he encountered on his voyage, some at this date relatively little subdued by Western expansion, and his exploration of his return to Paris of a sometimes sinister exoticism based on Gothic Paris. In particular ''Le Stryge'' has the forceful demonic energy which at that date French culture often attributed to exotic cult images from parts of the world where the West was just reaching.

In his last Paris etchings, or his last revisions of them, the fantastic flying creatures that appear in the sky in prints like ''Le Ministere de la Marine'' ("The Admiralty"), the last Paris scene, of 1865, include fishing boats from Oceania, and whales hunted or ridden, by harpoon-wielding horsemen. In this case the figures in the sky were present from the first state of the print.

File:Akaroa, South Island, New Zealand (20).JPG, alt=A plaque commemorating Meryon's visit, Plaque in Akaroa, New Zealand, where Méryon spent three years
File:Wallis,_pêche_aux_palmes,_1863.jpg, alt=A drawing of a small island with fisherman on the bank, People from Wallis Island fishing, drawn 1845, etched 1863. the drawing
File:Charles Meryon, Nouvelle-Calédonie - Grande case indigène sur le chemin de Ballade à Poepo, 1845 (New Caledonia - Large Native Hut on the Road from Balade to Puebo, 1845), 1863, NGA 9118.jpg, alt=A drawing of an elaborate hut on an island, New Caledonia, ''Large Native Hut on the Road from Balade to Puebo'', drawn in 1845, etched in 1863
File:Charles Meryon, Greniers indigènes et habitations à Akaroa, presqu'Ile de Banks, 1845 (Native Barns and Huts at Akaroa, Banks' Peninsula, 1845), 1865, NGA 33403.jpg, alt=A drawing of several simple huts, ''Greniers indigènes et habitations à Akaroa, presqu'Ile de Banks'', ("Native Barns and Huts at Akaroa, Banks' Peninsula"), New Zealand, drawn in 1845, etched 1865

Return to Paris

On his return from the ''Rhin'' voyage in August 1846, Meryon was given eight months leave, and went to Paris. He hoped, and rather expected, to be placed at the end of his leave with the team working on the official scientific publication of the voyage, especially as regards the illustrations; the French Navy had a tradition of taking these books very seriously.

In July 1847 he visited his sister Fanny in London, where she lived with her husband Henry Broadwood, like Fanny's father a Conservative Member of Parliament, from the piano-making family. The visit to London was notable for his refusal to visit his father, who was then living there. The two had corresponded during the ''Rhin'' voyage, and the day he docked in Toulon he wrote to his father offering to visit him in Nice, not realizing he was no longer there. In London, and in the main art cities of Belgium, which he visited on his way back to Paris, he spent much of his time on conventional museum visiting, also going to the theatre in London.

1848 saw rising political tensions in Paris, which overthrew the monarchy in February and culminated in the June Days uprising, when Meryon's immediate neighbourhood saw some intense fighting around the barricades thrown up by the insurgents. He was a member of the National Guard (probably obligatory for a naval officer on leave), which played a crucial role in resisting the uprising on behalf of the French Second Republic, which Meryon generally supported. He "spent almost three days in the street, broken only by hours snatched for sleep", and was slightly wounded.

In May 1847, when his extended leave came to an end, he should have returned to Toulon, but had not. The work on the naval publication, and much else in naval administration, had been thrown into confusion by the political situation, and in July 1848 Meryon decided to resign his commission, possibly to prepare his own book on the voyage, but apparently also because of his health, his doubts about his ability to command men, and because his next posting was unclear. Because he had not reported back to Toulon, at least months of his pay were caught in a bureaucratic tangle, recorded at great length in the naval records. Although the final recommendation for a ministerial decision, the following March, supported paying him, it is not clear whether this actually happened. Several of the memorandums mention his dire financial circumstances.

Professional artist

In a letter to his father dated 5 November 1846 Meryon announced that he was "getting ready to give myself completely to the study of Art". He first approached a minor pupil of Jacques-Louis David, who worked at the War Ministry, who agreed to take him as a student in August 1847, setting him drawing exercises copying famous classical statues and drawings, in the "conventional" academic curriculum. An early notebook (1847–48) with an ambitious list of possible subjects shows a predominance of maritime subjects, many with specific settings drawn from his voyage, such as a scene of Maoris fighting and an ''Assassination of Captain Cook'' (in Hawaii in 1779).

At least two finished pastel drawings survive from this period: a dramatic whaling scene, and the ''Assassination of Captain Marion du Fresne in New Zealand'' (by Maoris in 1772, at the Bay of Islands, killing 27 in total). Meryon knew the setting well, and the work was exhibited in the annual Paris Salon at the Louvre in 1848. In 1883 it was turned into an etching by Victor-Louis Focillon (father of the art historian Henri Focillon), which was adapted as a book illustration. His drawing is now in the National Library of New Zealand, and remains the best known depiction of the incident.

The drawing seems to have been intended to be redone on a larger scale in oils, and many writers on Meryon have thought that it was the failed attempt to do this that made Meryon realize the impossibility of pursuing a career in a technique using colour. In early 1848 he met the engraver Eugène Bléry, who according to some accounts had taken an interest in his du Fresne drawing. Bléry (1805–87) was a respected and technically very competent etcher, mostly producing landscapes. A precursor of the Etching Revival, he worked in front of his chosen scene not just in making drawings, but etching his plates. Unlike Meryon, he had little interest in architectural subjects, but both enjoyed strong contrasts of light and dark. Meryon later claimed that his long-term aim in learning printmaking was to participate in illustrating an account, either the official one or his own, of the voyage of the ''Rhin''.

Meryon joined Bléry's workshop, and was soon on excellent terms with him and his family. In September 1848 he joined Mme Bléry and her daughter on a holiday, and sketching tour, in Normandy for several weeks, when M Bléry could not leave Paris. By December he had accepted an invitation to move in to their house. He started to produce etchings, mostly copying landscape and animal paintings, or other prints, that allowed him to develop his technique, and could also be sold print-dealers, if only for modest sums.

He entered the studio of the engraver Eugène Bléry, from whom he learnt something of technical matters, and to whom he always remained grateful. Méryon had no money, and was too proud to ask help from his family. He was forced to earn a living by doing work that was mechanical and irksome. Among learners' work, done for his own advantage, are to be counted some studies after the Dutch etchers such as Zeeman and Adriaen van de Velde

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