Consuming Painting: Food and the Feminine in Impressionist Paris 9780271089959

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Consuming Painting

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Consuming Painting Food and the Feminine in Impressionist Paris allison deutsch

the pennsylvania state university press University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Deutsch, Allison, 1989– author. Title: Consuming painting : food and the feminine in impressionist Paris / Allison Deutsch. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical ­references and index. Summary: “A reexamination of French Impressionism, focusing on the culinary metaphors that the most influential nineteenthcentury critics used to express attraction or disgust toward artworks”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034124 | ISBN 9780271087238 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Impressionism (Art)—France—Paris. | Painting, French—France—Paris—19th century. | Art criticism—France—Paris—History—19th century. | Metaphor in art criticism—History—19th century. Classification: LCC ND547.5.I4 D48 2021 | DDC 759.409/034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034124 Copyright © 2021 Allison Deutsch All rights reserved Printed in Lithuania Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Jean Béraud, La Pâtisserie Gloppe, 1889, detail (fig. 29), Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Agence Bulloz. Additional credits: Page iv, Gustave Caillebotte, Fruit Displayed on a Stand, 1881–82, detail (fig. 26), Photo © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; page xiv, Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873, detail (fig. 3), by permission of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; page 14, Édouard Manet, Fish (Still Life), 1864, detail (fig. 11), Photo Scala, Florence; page 46, Gustave Caillebotte, Veal in a Butcher’s Shop, c. 1882, detail (fig. 25), © Comité Caillebotte, Paris; page 76, Gustave Caillebotte, Langouste à la Parisienne, 1880–82, detail (fig. 42), Private collection, Europe; page 112, Camille Pissarro, Le Marché, 1889, detail (fig. 46), Private collection, Photo courtesy of the Richard Green Gallery, London; page 144, Gustave Courbet, The Artist’s Studio, A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, 1854–55, detail (fig. 57), Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Photo © RMNGrand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Gérard Blot / Hervé Lewandowski. frontispiece:

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contents Illustrations  vi Acknowledgments  xi



Introduction  1

Metaphor and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Art Criticism  15

chapter one

chapter two

The Flesh of Painting  47

chapter three

The Confected Canvas  77

chapter four

Impressionist Market Gardener  113



Conclusion  145

Notes  154 Bibliography  182 Index  194

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illustrations

fig. 1.  L. Le Riverend, illustration from Le Pot-au-feu: Journal de cuisine pratique et d’économie domestique, May 15, 1894, 157. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 fig. 2.  L. Le Riverend, illustration from Le Pot-au-feu: Journal de cuisine pratique et d’économie domestique, December 15, 1893, 2. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

fig. 5.  6 Menus en forme de palettes de peintre, c. 1870 –1900. Color lithograph, 29.5 × 37 cm (sheet). BnF, Estampes et photographie, li-84-pet fol, coll. Roger Braun. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 fig. 6.  Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882. Oil on canvas, 96 × 130 cm. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London . . . . 19

fig. 3.  Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873. Oil on canvas, 61 × 80 cm. By permission of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow . . . . . . . 6

fig. 7.  Édouard Manet, Le Bon Bock, 1873. Oil on canvas, 94.6 × 83.3 cm. Phila­ delphia Museum of Art, The Mr. and Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson, Jr., Collection, 1963-116-9 20

fig. 4.  Édouard Manet, La Palette au bock, 1873. Oil on wood, 51 × 38 cm. Location unknown. By permission of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York . . . 16

fig. 8.  Alfred Le Petit, 9e Année, 104 e dîner du Bon-Bock . . . invitation personnelle, November 8, 1883. Autolithography, 27 × 22.5 cm. BnF, Estampes et

vi

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­ hotographie, li mat-5-boite pet fol p (Menus: de 1843 à 1883). By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . 21 fig. 9.  Adrien Emmanuel Marie, 6e Année, 61e dîner du Bon-Bock . . . invitation personnelle, March 5, 1880. Autolithography, 27.5 × 22 cm. BnF, Estampes et photographie, li mat-5-boite pet fol (Menus: de 1843 à 1883). By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 fig. 10.  Alfred Le Petit, Édouard Manet: Roi des Impressionnistes, 1876. Caricature from Les Contemporains, June 16, 1876. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 fig. 11.  Édouard Manet, Fish (Still Life), 1864. Oil on canvas, 73.4 × 92.1 cm. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, 1942.311. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago. © Photo Scala, Florence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 fig. 12.  Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Silver Tureen, 1728. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 108 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fletcher Fund, 1959. Acc.n.: 59.9 © Photo Scala, Florence . . . . . 38 fig. 13.  Édouard Manet, Still Life with Fish and Shrimp, 1864. Oil on canvas, 44.8 × 73 cm. By permission of the Norton Simon Art Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 fig. 14.  Édouard Manet, Eel and Mullet, 1864. Oil on canvas, 38 × 46 cm. Paris, Musée

d’Orsay. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski . . . . 45 fig. 15.  Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 190 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski . . . . 49 fig. 16.  Bertall, Manette, ou la femme de l’ébéniste, 1865. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 27, 1865, 2. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . 53 fig. 17.  Cham, Le Salon comique, 1865. Caricature from Le Musée des familles, lectures du soir, June 3, 1865. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . 53 fig. 18.  F. Grenan, La Foire aux jambons. Illustration from Almanach manuel de la bonne cuisine et de la maîtresse de maison (Paris, 1865), 45. By permission of the Wellcome Collection, London . . . . . . . . . . . 54 fig. 19.  F. Grenan, illustration from Almanach manuel de la bonne cuisine et de la maîtresse de maison (Paris, 1865), 32. By permission of the Wellcome Collection, London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 fig. 20.  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Study: Torso, Effect of Sunlight, c. 1876. Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm. Paris, Museé d’Orsay. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 fig. 21.  Cham, Le Peintre impressionniste, 1877. Caricature from Le Charivari, April 22, 1877. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . 62

illustrations   vii

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fig. 22.  Cham, Le Peintre impressionniste, 1877. Caricature from Le Monde illustré, May 5, 1877. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . 62 fig. 23.  Cham, Exposition des peintres impressionnistes, 1877. Caricature from Le Charivari, April 15, 1877. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . 63 fig. 24.  Cham, Le Peintre impressionniste, 1877. Caricature from Le Charivari, April 26, 1877. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 fig. 25.  Gustave Caillebotte, Veal in a Butcher’s Shop, c. 1882. Oil on canvas, 144 × 74 cm. Private collection, © Comité Caillebotte, Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 fig. 26.  Gustave Caillebotte, Fruit Displayed on a Stand, 1881–82. Oil on canvas, 76.5 × 100.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fanny P. Mason Fund in memory of Alice Thevin, 1979.196. Photo © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . . . . . . 68 fig. 27.  Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, The Slaughtered Ox, 1655. Oil on panel, 94 × 69 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Tony Querrec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Musée Carnavalet. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Agence Bulloz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 fig. 30.  Bertall, Le Jeu de loto, 1865. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 27, 1865, 4. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . 81 fig. 31.  Bertall, Promenade au Salon de 1869. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 15, 1869, 5. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . 82 fig. 32.  Bertall, Au Buffet, 1869. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, June 5, 1869, 3. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . 83 fig. 33.  Bertall, À la Renommée de la brioche, 1869. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 22, 1869, 7. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . 84 fig. 34.  Stop, Le Salon de 1872. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, June 8, 1872, 2. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 fig. 35.  Stop, Rêve, 1875. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 22, 1875, 4. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

fig. 28.  Paul Cézanne, A Modern Olympia, 1873–74. Oil on canvas, 46 × 55 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Stéphane Maréchalle . . . 72

fig. 36.  Claude Monet, Cliffs of the Petites Dalles, 1880. Oil on canvas, 60.6 × 80.3 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Denman Waldo Ross Collection, 06.116. Photo © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . . . . . . 88

fig. 29.  Jean Béraud, La Pâtisserie Gloppe, 1889. Oil on canvas, 38 × 53 cm. Paris,

fig. 37.  Stop, Chatigny, 1872. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, June 1, 1872, 5.

viii   illustrations

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By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 fig. 38.  Gustave Caillebotte, Cakes, 1881. Oil on canvas, 54 × 73 cm. Private collection, © 2003 Christie’s Images Limited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 fig. 39.  Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. Oil on canvas, 212.2 × 276.2 cm. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection. © Photo Scala, Florence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 fig. 40.  Claude Monet, The Galettes, 1882. Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm. Private collection. Photo Archives Durand-Ruel, © Durand-Ruel & Cie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 fig. 41.  Claude Monet, Portrait of Père Paul, 1882. Oil on canvas, 64.5 × 52.1 cm. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, © Belvedere, Vienna. Photo: Johannes Stoll . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 fig. 42.  Gustave Caillebotte, Langouste à la Parisienne, 1880–82. Oil on canvas, 58 × 72 cm. Private collection, Europe . . . . 105 fig. 43.  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Swing, 1876. Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt 108 fig. 44.  “Lobster Tail” Bustle, c. 1885. Cotton, wool, and blue velvet ribbon. Palais Galliera, Musée de la mode de la Ville de Paris, © P. Joffre, C. Pignol / Galliera / Roger-Viollet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

fig. 45.  Mr. Punch’s Dress Designs (After Nature), 1876. Caricature from Punch, or the London Charivari, March 11, 1876, 90. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 fig. 46.  Camille Pissarro, Le Marché, 1889. Watercolor on paper, 29.3 × 22.7 cm. Private collection. Photo courtesy of the Richard Green Gallery, London . . . . . . . . . . 123 fig. 47.  Camille Pissarro, The Market Place, 1889. Watercolor, gouache, black and brown ink, and black chalk on off-white wove paper, 29.5 × 22.8 cm. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, © President and Fellows of Harvard College . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 fig. 48.  Jean Béraud, Les Halles, 1879. Oil on canvas, 65.7 × 81.3 cm. By permission of The Haggin Museum, Stockton, California . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 fig. 49.  Victor Gabriel Gilbert, Le Carreau des Halles, 1880. Oil on wood, 53.7 × 73.7 cm. By permission of the Musée d’Art moderne André Malraux, MuMa, Le Havre. Photo © MuMa, Le Havre . . . . . 126 fig. 50.  Claude Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train, 1877. Oil on canvas, 83 × 101.3 cm. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest from the Collection of Maurice Wertheim, Class of 1906, © President and Fellows of Harvard College . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 fig. 51.  Stop, L’Écorcheuse des Halles centrales, 1875. Caricature from Le Journal

illustrations   ix

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amusant, May 15, 1875, 4. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . 128 fig. 52.  Camille Pissarro, The Pork Butcher [La Charcutière], 1883. Oil on canvas, 65.1 × 54.3 cm. Tate Gallery, on loan to The National Gallery, London. Bequeathed by Lucien Pissarro to the National Gallery, 1944, © Tate, London 2019 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 fig. 53.  Camille Pissarro, The Market Stall, 1884. Pastel and watercolor over black chalk on board, 61 × 48.3 cm. The Burrell Collection, Glasgow, © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 fig. 54.  Camille Pissarro, The Gardener— Old Peasant with Cabbage, 1883–95. Oil on canvas, 81.5 × 65 cm. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 139

fig. 55.  Camille Pissarro, The Market on the Grande-Rue, Gisors, 1885. Oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm. Private collection. By permission of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 fig. 56.  Bertall, Promenade au Salon de 1865. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 27, 1865, 1. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . 146 fig. 57.  Gustave Courbet, The Artist’s Studio, A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, 1854–55. Oil on canvas, 361 × 598 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Gérard Blot / Hervé Lewandowski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 fig. 58.  Trock, Chez un impressionniste, 1881. Caricature from La Caricature, April 23, 1881. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France . . . . . . . . 149

x   illustrations

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acknowledgments

This book is deeply indebted to the feminist history of nineteenth-century French painting and to the scholarship in this area by the authors cited in these pages. My gratitude is owed first of all to Tamar Garb for inspiring and supporting my interest in nineteenth-century French art through years of conversation and close looking while I completed my doctorate under her supervision. I have relied on the excellence of her scholarship and the generosity of her mentorship through each stage of this book’s evolution, and I will be ever guided by her example as author and educator. Ting Chang and Lynda Nead both read a version of the entire manuscript and offered penetrating observations and questions that shaped my writing. At University College London, Mechthild Fend, Rose Marie San Juan, Richard Taws, and Alison Wright shared their perspective and expertise at defining moments in the process. I would also like to

thank Frédérique Desbuissons and Marni Kessler for an ongoing dialogue about food and painting in nineteenth-century France. This book was completed with the assistance of a Junior Research Fellowship at University College London’s Institute of Advanced Studies from 2017 to 2018. While writing, I benefited from presenting work in progress. I am grateful to those who listened and responded to papers given at the Sackler Research Forum at The Courtauld Institute of Art, the Graduate Research Seminar Series at the University of Cambridge Department of History of Art, the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London, and the annual conferences of the European Society for Nineteenth-Century Art and the Society of Dix-­Neuviémistes. Portions of chapter 1 appeared in the article “Good Taste: Metaphor and Materiality in NineteenthCentury Art Criticism” in Object, and chapter 2

   xi

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is derived in part from the article “The Flesh of Painting: Caillebotte’s Modern Olympia,” published in Dix-Neuf. Anonymous peer reviewers for both articles provided important feedback that impacted the arguments presented here. My research has been enabled by librarians and archivists, most notably at the University College London Library, the National Art Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, and the archive center at the Musée d’Orsay. I would also like to thank the private collectors and staff at the museums, galleries, libraries, and foundations that granted me permission to reproduce artworks from their collections. The Leverhulme Trust generously contributed funds to assist in publishing those images. At Penn State University Press, Eleanor Goodman has supported this book at all stages of publication and has expertly guided me through them. Two anonymous readers offered

commentary on the manuscript that greatly strengthened and clarified the presentation of my arguments. I could not have asked for a more dedicated or thorough copy editor than Nancy Evans at Wilsted & Taylor. I would also like to thank Maddie Caso, Hannah Hebert, Jennifer Norton, and Laura Reed-Morrisson at Penn State University Press, and Christine Taylor at Wilsted & Taylor, for all their work through the publication process. Last, but far from least, to the friends and family whose patience and encouragement made this book possible, I owe more than I can express. I gratefully acknowledge Robert Deutsch, who has always been my first editor, and Sebastian Herdt, whose enthusiasm, support, and affection are indispensable. This book is dedicated to my mother and Olympia’s biggest fan, Laurie Egger. Her passion for art and food is in every page.

xii   acknowledgments

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Consuming Painting

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Introduction

in the early 1890s , Le Pot-au-feu: Journal de cuisine pratique et d’économie domestique appeared for the culinary instruction of middleclass French women. Each issue opens with a lesson from a professional male chef followed by recipes, humorous anecdotes, discussion of historical dining customs, reviews of culinary exhibitions, and illustrations. One of these illustrations from 1894 shows a woman seated before a canvas at work on a pastel still life of the flowers, bottle, and fruit on a table to her left (fig. 1). As was typical in Le Pot-au-feu, the drawing appears without context or caption. The depicted artist does not look toward the ­subject of her painting but outward in the viewer’s direction. The male figure standing beside her is her cook, made identifiable by his hat, jacket, and the set of knives slung about his waist—tools comparable to those instruments required to make a painting. He points to the

canvas and leans in close to the artist to offer suggestions, a role that must derive from his expertise in the appearance as well as the material qualities of her subject matter. Readers are asked to consider whether his specialized culinary knowledge may prove useful in representing it visually, as the image poses the processes of art making and cooking as analogous. The woman’s pastel is echoed in the cook’s extended finger, and they wear corresponding hats and aprons. The drawing raises gendered concepts of professionalism. While most domestic cooks in later nineteenth-century Paris were women, a particularly well-off household might employ a man, and restaurant chefs were exclusively men. In the fine arts, affluent women were encouraged to develop their skills as amateur painters, especially of still lifes, while male practitioners dominated the field of professional painting.

   1

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Fig. 1

L. Le Riverend, illustration from Le Pot-au-feu: Journal de cuisine pratique et d’économie domestique, May 15, 1894, 157.

This illustration of a stylish female painter in need of direction for her still life can be interpreted along these lines; a dilettante requires male assistance, even if it takes an unconventional form. And yet, she sits with her foot ­assertively placed on the easel stand, holds her pastel as if interrupted mid-gesture, and looks outward to engage the viewer. Perhaps she is ­better understood as waiting politely for her cook to return to the kitchen. Represented with a debonair moustache and an outstretched finger that comes uncomfortably close to the bosom of his employer, the male figure has taken on airs that leave the viewer dubious.

In a journal aimed at women, he becomes the target of a joke exchanged among those female readers all too used to unsolicited male advice, even if the illustrator’s intention was to ridicule the aspirations of both male cook and female painter as out of place before the canvas. Versions of these figures appear, with their roles reversed, in an earlier Pot-au-feu drawing by the same illustrator (fig. 2). This time it is the woman, endowed with the professional knowledge of the small cookbook or magazine on her lap, who advises the cook on his art. The two drawings are arranged similarly so that, when viewed together, the canvas in the first and the

2   consuming painting

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stove in the second are located in the same position, both vehicles for artistic creation, whether through the medium of paint box and pastels or frying pan and simmering sauce. The questions posed by this juxtaposition were being hotly debated in nineteenth-century French culture: What is the relationship between the visual and culinary arts, and what are the social politics at stake? In Paris, chefs, food critics, and dining enthusiasts relied on the example of the beaux-arts to legitimate gastronomy as a form of art in its own right. By the fin de siècle, culinary schools

were proposed that would be modeled on the Académie des beaux-arts, and haute cuisine was exhibited at elaborate culinary exhibitions, its own sort of Salon. Throughout the century, food was described in a range of print sources in the same tradition as art criticism and caricature, in specialized as well as mainstream journals.1 Culinary historians have firmly established these links and the ways in which culinary culture drew upon the fine arts. But the converse—that is, how the culinary field inflected the beauxarts—has been almost entirely overlooked in art-historical scholarship. Pursuing that ­question

Fig. 2

L. Le Riverend, illustration from Le Pot-au-feu: Journal de cuisine pratique et d’économie domestique, December 15, 1893, 2.

introduction   3

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offers a new perspective on some of the most canonical works of nineteenth-century art and the writings of its most influential critics. The burgeoning genre of gastronomic literature comprised a wide range of materials, including restaurant reviews, instructive magazines, advice pamphlets, and philosophical treatises on dining that established eating and drinking as objects of a discourse that attracted contributions by journalism’s elite, including art critics and caricaturists. Culinary journals such as La Salle à manger, with the considerable subtitle Chronique de la table: Revue anecdotique, recettes culinaires, menus de saison, approvisionnement, par des gourmets littéraires et des maîtres de bouche, included the writings of Charles Blanc, Arsène Houssaye, Théophile Gautier, and Jules Claretie in the 1860s, all of whom are better known to art historians for their publications about painting in the period’s major newspapers and art journals. These and many other authors applied their skills to describing and assessing culinary culture, writing to order for the daily and weekly presses and producing a shared language around consumption. For their part, artists designed menus, place cards, and banquet invitations as supplemental sources of income or for amusement and camaraderie. These ephemera might be destined for private use, the mass market, or reproduction in the press.2 And, as has long been noted but not systematically investigated in art history, dinner clubs, restaurant spaces, and their proprietors were paramount in the formation of artistic communities and trends. This point was of significant interest to contemporaries. One reviewer of the 1877 Impressionist Exhibition

chose not to discuss any of the paintings displayed at 6 rue Le Peletier but instead to reprint the full menu from a dinner that the exhibiting painters had shared with Émile Zola at the Café Riche, an upscale haunt for that company.3 The food seemed more noteworthy than the painting, and for the author it offered better insight into the social positions and personalities of the artists. The anonymous critic cites their refined meal and shared appreciation of modern French cooking as testimony that the painters were not the madmen their canvases might ­indicate. Their dinner was the best evidence that Impressionism might not be so fanatical after all. In many other reviews of the Impressionist Exhibitions and the Salons, painting, in turn, was described in culinary terms. This trend toward comparing painting and cooking, viewing and consumption, is the focus of this book. With rapid developments in the culinary sphere in French culture and urban life, the vocabulary of taste and appetite entered art criticism in force by the middle of the nineteenth century. Critics posed viewing as analogous to ingestion and used food comparisons to characterize the appearance of paint, to describe the painter’s process, and to report on represented figures. “Imagine that the Salon is an immense artistic ragout that is served to us every year,” proposes Zola in opening his series of reviews of the 1866 Salon, complaining that the jury “always managed, whatever might be the temperaments or the age, to serve the same dish to the public.” In a subsequent article from the series, Zola would defend Édouard Manet’s painting as “raw meat” amid the nauseating “sweets of the fashionable artistic confectioners,

4   consuming painting

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sugar-candy trees and pastry houses, gingerbread gentlemen and ladies made of vanilla cream.” Manet’s paintings are bitter in comparison to “the sickening sweetness” surrounding them.4 Zola’s art criticism is at the heart of this book, but his criticism is just the start. My inquiry begins with Zola in the mid-1860s because this is when modern-life painting began to be consistently described through culinary metaphors. I contend that these metaphors have particular significance when used in relation to work by Manet and the Impressionists. To date, Frédérique Desbuissons is the only art historian to have considered culinary language in art’s reception in depth, concentrating on Salon criticism and caricature. In her survey of this material, Desbuissons argues that, for the most part, comparisons to cuisine emerged out of the perceived distinction between the culinary and fine arts, and they were intended to denigrate painting by comparing it to a trade perceived as lower in a hierarchy of value.5 In the four chapters of this book, I argue that more was at stake than a mode of dismissal when critics described paintings by Manet and the Impressionists, works that have been consistently characterized by art historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in “purely optical” terms, to introduce Clement Greenberg’s influential formulation.6 The migrating language of food and consumption draws attention to the visceral effects of the material, facture, and technique of specific artworks, and it appears in some of the best-known critical texts of the period. When Louis Leroy suggests in his review of the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874 that the figures in Claude Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines

resemble “tongue lickings,” he relied on a wider connection between the qualities of paint and alimentary matter, its application and oral sensation, that was well established by that time and would be sustained in the reception of Monet’s work through the next decade (fig. 3).7 In 1882, Gaston Pérodeaud ridicules Monet for having “painted some cliffs made out of raspberry and currant ice cream, whose realistic melting is thoroughly impressive. You want to take a spoon to them.”8 Such metaphors call for an embodied viewer who might experience a combination of desire and appetite, nausea and disgust, through the visual. In arguing that works by Manet and the Impressionists—specifically Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, and Camille Pissarro—were principally understood through the bodily responses they effected in their earliest audiences, my approach runs against the grain of most twentieth-century histories of modernism that have privileged the visual in the production and reception of these paintings. The clearest proponent of this view was Clement Greenberg, whose modernist trajectory begins with Manet and the Impressionists precisely because of what Greenberg saw as their focus on opticality. In his influential “Modernist Painting,” he explains, With Manet and the Impressionists the question stopped being defined as one of color versus drawing, and became one of purely optical experience against optical experience as revised or modified by tactile associations. It was in the name of the purely and literally optical, not in the name of color, that the Impressionists set themselves to undermining shading and modeling and everything else in painting that seemed to connote the

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Fig. 3

Claude Monet , Boulevard des Capucines, 1873. Oil on canvas, 61 × 80 cm.

sculptural. . . . The latest abstract painting tries to fulfill the Impressionist insistence on the optical as the only sense that a completely and quintessentially pictorial art can invoke. Realizing this, one begins also to realize that the Impressionists, or at least the Neo-Impressionists, were not altogether misguided when they flirted with science. . . . That visual art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience, and make no reference to anything given in any other order of experience, is a notion whose only justification

lies in scientific consistency. Scientific method alone asks, or might ask, that a situation be resolved in exactly the same terms as that in which it is presented.9

The idea that Impressionism isolated and elevated “purely optical experience” did not originate with Greenberg, but it gained particular traction in his writings and their subsequent interpretation. It has since become one of art history’s most enduring orthodoxies that Impressionism’s practitioners, its most sensitive supporters, and its most virulent critics understood the painting as being dedicated to

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the visual to the point of repressing other forms of sensory engagement. While Greenberg’s privileging of opticality has come under intense scrutiny by scholars who contest its usefulness as a framework for considering twentiethcentury modernism and contemporary art, the relevance of that framework for understanding painting by Manet and the Impressionists is rarely questioned but is commonly and casually reinforced.10 Impressionist practice is overwhelmingly framed as an attempt to capture the appearance of specific optical effects rather than a range of somatic experience. Even a scholar like Michael Fried, deeply committed to matters of embodiment in nineteenthcentury art and to questions of how paintings affect and involve their beholders, argues that “the notion of opticality, of a mode of painting addressed exclusively to the sense of sight” is appropriate in relation to Impressionism—and only in relation to Impressionism. Fried agrees with Greenberg that “as a generalization about Impressionism or rather about the contemporary response to the work of the landscape Impressionists Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley, this is incontestable.”11 Characterizing Impressionism in this way allows Fried to distinguish Manet’s work in the 1860s from Impressionism in the 1870s and 1880s, and it is part of Fried’s larger proposition that Manet was implicated in the shift from what he terms the “bodily realism” of Gustave Courbet to the “ocular realism” of Impressionism, and that “the transition from a corporeal to an ocular realism that has been brought to light constitutes a new framework within which Manet’s art will need to be rethought.”12 My investiga-

tion of the language of bodily consumption used by so many of Manet’s critics allows me to take up such a claim for the centrality of the corporeal in interpreting the painter’s work and its reception. However, I also demonstrate how this language and its associated models of viewing continue into descriptions of Impressionism, challenging any assertion of a paradigm shift from the corporeal to the ocular and insisting on the relationship between them. Accounts like Greenberg’s—but especially Fried’s and those of the many other scholars cited in these chapters who emphasize the visual in the production and reception of early modernism—make frequent use of nineteenth-century sources, many of which this book revisits. Their arguments are informed by a specific and selective reading of the most vocal critics and champions of Manet and the Impressionists, who sometimes described their art as primarily addressed to the eye. Among the best-known nineteenth-century advocates of this position is Jules Laforgue, the poet who claimed in his 1883 essay “L’Impressionnisme” that the Impressionist eye was a scientific instrument that had liberated itself from its connection to all other sensory modes. For Laforgue, “the Impressionist painter is a modernist painter endowed with an uncommon sensibility of the eye” who is able to move beyond a type of vision that relies on the sense of touch and attain what Laforgue calls the “natural eye”: “So a natural eye—or a refined eye, for this organ, before moving ahead, must first become primitive again by ridding itself of tactile illusions—a natural eye forgets tactile illusions and their convenient dead language of outlines, and

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acts only in its faculty of prismatic sensibility. It reaches a point where it can see reality in the living atmosphere of forms, decomposed, refracted, reflected by beings and things, in incessant variations. Such is this first characteristic of the Impressionist eye.”13 Significant though Laforgue’s essay is, it was not published until 1902, and despite the author’s insistence on optical science and the turn away from tactility in terms very similar to those Greenberg would reprise, Laforgue goes on to describe how the viewer’s eye might be exasperated and exhausted by the impressions recorded by the painter in the “first sensory intoxication” experienced before the motif. That sensory intoxication would then be shared by a viewer destabilized by the impassioned painting. Laforgue considered these effects as a “new seasoning,” much more alive than the “sad and unchanging recipes for academic color.”14 The importance of the visual in Impressionist painting and its reception did not come at the expense of the rest of the body, and, as this book will argue, recourse to the optical was a strategy for mollifying critics who complained that Impressionism appealed excessively to the body and was in fact utterly resistant to the eye. When nineteenthcentury texts are read outside the retrospective framework of pure opticality that has largely determined our understanding of them, we find critics who reveled in the visceral, multisensory effects of modern-life painting and who believed that the artists they described were so invested in their contemporary reality that they wanted to capture not just its sights but its very flavors. For every Laforgue, Zola, or Louis-Edmond Duranty who elevated modern painting to

a form of optical science, dozens of critics recounted quite the opposite situation. Even the texts by Laforgue, Zola, and Duranty require reinterpretation. The four chapters of this book trace culinary language as it was used to defend work by Manet and the Impressionists against “academic recipes,” or, equally, to express unease with their art through reference to the body and the sense of taste. I explore the possibilities opened up by a set of questions that are not dominated by the customary privileging of visuality, but are instead guided by firsthand accounts of painting’s multisensoriality. I argue that the scope of nineteenth-century claims for the Impressionist celebration of the exclusively visual have been overestimated in retrospect by art historians from the mid-twentieth century through to today. This overestimation is inseparable from the fact that, as Tamar Garb and Norma Broude have shown, Impressionism was feminized in the 1890s and that, in order to resist that interpretation in the twentieth century, critics and art historians promoted a link between Impressionism and optical science.15 The feminization of Impressionism, a major subject in what follows, brings me to the central claim and organizing force of this book. The metaphorical languages followed in these chapters were deeply gendered, and studying them expands our understanding of the sexual politics of nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse. To start, gender was the base upon which comparisons to the culinary were elaborated. The foods chosen as analogues for paintings as objects, as well as for depicted figures, were aligned with specific female types. These

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connections remain familiar, and chapters 2, 3, and 4 are organized around them: sexualized, commercialized female flesh and red meat, the subject of chapter 2; fashionably dressed, made-up bodies and confected sweets, explored in chapter 3; and robust female peasants and hearty vegetables, the focus of chapter 4. This book historicizes these tropes that, in addition to offering an alternative framework through which to examine painting, provide insight into the fabrication of the feminine in the nineteenth century in ways that remain relevant in the twenty-first. Beyond the significance of particular foods and the figurations of femininity tied to them, the gendering of the metaphors explored here also had major consequences for constructions of masculinity. Cultural values were encoded in the language of the senses, which operated in a hierarchy established long before the 1800s. The legacy of that hierarchy extends into our day and is inseparable from the privileged place of the visual in art history. As is well known, the sense of sight, freighted with associations of detached reflection, has historically been masculinized. Taste and smell, considered baser senses inextricably bound to the body with its unruly desires and aversions, have been feminized, associated with female bodies and their capricious, seductive, sensual pleasures and dangers.16 A so-called “sensory turn” in the humanities and the expansion of the field of sensory studies have focused attention in recent years on the socially constructed nature of human perception.17 This book relies on that scholarship in tandem with the feminist critique of ocularcentrism that has its roots in phenom-

enology.18 To insist in the nineteenth century that paintings stimulated all the senses, even and especially the sense of taste, undermined the elevated status of the critic or artist as a dispassionate analyst, as Zola was fond of describing himself and those artists whom he admired. The result is that critics (including Zola), often despite their intentions, admitted to the contingencies of their embodiment and painting’s threat to their position and practice. As viewing was posed as a form of ingestion with concomitant effects on audiences, and painting compared to cooking with all the sensory pleasures and risks of eating, the fiction of aesthetic detachment on the part of artist or critic broke down along with the models of masculine authority premised upon them. Chief among those constructions of male authority is the flâneur, a figure that has functioned as an avatar for the modern artist in nineteenth-century studies. The flâneur signified on a plurality of levels in nineteenth-century Paris, but in art-historical literature has come to stand for optical connoisseurship par excellence as a male figure equipped with a dispassionate eye, keenly observing the city from a critical distance. The importance of this version of the ­flâneur for art history both evinces and contributes to the ways in which French modern-life painting has in retrospect been chiefly associated with optical experience and its representation, and how the nineteenth-century city has been predominantly conceived as a visual spectacle.19 The flâneur is most often tied to a specific reading of Charles Baudelaire’s now canonical essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” published in Le Figaro in 1863. In that essay Baudelaire

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describes the self-­consciously ­modern artist as the “perfect flâneur” equipped with an “eagle eye.”20 Because this figure is capable of disappearing into his urban surroundings (making Baudelaire’s flâneur, as feminists have long established, decisively male), in art-historical literature he has been characterized above all by a disembodied gaze. Flânerie has overwhelmingly been configured in visual terms, even among the many critics of this construction who aim to complicate assumptions about the flâneur’s purported mastery.21 What this approach neglects is how, for Baudelaire, the flâneur’s vision was thoroughly embodied. In a text that is at odds with an understanding of vision as detached, Baudelaire describes the flâneur as “drunk” and “insatiable” for his surroundings, so immersed in his milieu that he imbibes sights and becomes fervently attached to specific figures and objects in the crowd.22 Ten years later, when Zola would narrate the flânerie of aspiring modern artist Claude Lantier and his friends in the novel Le Ventre de Paris, scent directs the party, not vision: “They inhaled the odors of Paris, noses in the air. They could have recognized every corner with closed eyes, just by the scent of alcohol leaving the wine merchants, the warm breath of bakeries and patisseries, or the bland impression of fruit stands.”23 Despite continuing descriptions of the flâneur-artist’s eye as being somehow severed from the body, nineteenth-century writers consistently figured the artist’s or critic’s vision as ocular ingestion. In these accounts, the act of viewing a painting or the city did not unfold as a form of impartial witness or commanding oversight. Instead, vision was framed in the most physical of terms.

My line of inquiry therefore contributes to critiques of the flâneur and his mastering male gaze by returning to him a body vulnerable to desire and disgust. I rely on the insights of feminist art history and film theory that looking is never neutral, that it is always embodied as a result of being embedded in an erotic economy, and that it is constitutive of power structures. The concept of the gaze has been paramount in explaining these dynamics and politics.24 When Griselda Pollock writes that the flâneur “embodies the gaze of modernity which is both covetous and erotic” in her foundational account of the gendered structure underlying the mythology and practice of flânerie, she establishes that the visual is inseparable from the body and its appetites.25 But however bound the gaze might be to the body and the psyche, its theorization has been part of the same emphasis on the visual that has characterized the modernist narrative that feminists like Pollock seek to dismantle, as well as impeded the robust development of the role of the other senses in a sexually differentiated experience of modernity. Feminist critique of the flâneur is ongoing, fracturing any sense of a unified male subject that might stand for him, broadening the understanding of women’s participation in city space, and, of special relevance here, challenging the alignment of the flâneur with pure opticality.26 My arguments build on that work and do not contest the importance of vision and visuality in nineteenth-century Paris, especially when the subject is painting. This book complements existing scholarship on the history and politics of vision, particularly the profound changes in how vision was understood, experienced, and valued in nineteenth-century

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France.27 I write, however, from the premise that the key debates about the optical that have dominated art-historical thinking about this place and period have marginalized both other registers of experience and the complex ways that vision interacts with other sensory modes. This marginalization has hindered our ability to examine the intertwining of visual and visceral and to interrogate the gender politics of the sensory hierarchy operative in nineteenthcentury France. The four chapters of this book are loosely chronological, opening around 1865, when selfconsciously modern painting began to be consistently described in culinary terms. The chapters go on to follow evolving debates about Impressionism through the 1870s and 1880s, concluding around 1890, before the heyday of Symbolism. It is well known that the concept of synesthesia was of major interest in Symbolist circles, but it is less well known that the emphasis on the multisensorial at the end of the century had strong roots in earlier art and criticism. This lapse is in fact partially due to the Symbolist critique of Impressionism as merely science-based optical realism, a highly motivated argument intended to denigrate Impressionists as nothing more than passive transcribers of visual sensations who neglected the arena of the mind, the emotions, and the imagination. As Norma Broude has shown, that reading of Impressionism as optical realism was largely accepted rather than interrogated in the twentieth century, when the connection between Impressionism and the purely optical was reclaimed as positive and progressive, the foundation of modernism.28 My focus on Impressionism fills a gap in a growing

literature challenging art history’s privileging of the visual, but which has centered on art from Symbolism onward.29 It is especially striking that Impressionism has yet to be studied within existing critiques of the ocularcentrism of histories of modernism because Impressionism functions as the origin point of those histories. This book returns to the art upon which the modernist narrative depends, but which has escaped revision in these terms. Chapter 1 addresses the ways that culinary culture permeated artistic and literary circles and, as a result, how taste and sight could be allied in 1860s art criticism. I argue that the ability of paint to migrate between categories of the aesthetic and alimentary was especially pronounced in relation to Manet. Zola’s series of articles defending Manet in 1866 and 1867 provide the central case study. Zola’s culinary metaphors have received little attention in art history, but they deserve sustained scrutiny because they run counter to how Zola has typically been cast.30 Zola’s position is particularly significant because his view not only of Manet in particular but also of the Impressionists has been authoritative into the present. Because Zola championed the purportedly analytic gaze of the artist and critic, art historians have widely used his articles as evidence of a link between the painting that he promoted and the visual. To be sure, Zola wrote frequently and forcefully about the artist’s empirical eye, extending the terms of the positivism with which he identified to the painters that he admired. But to take such passages in relative isolation results in a partial perspective and obscures the fact that Zola established a model of spectatorship in which

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viewing painting was profoundly embodied. The chapter ends by exploring how the concept of vision as consumption enriches our interpretation of Manet’s painting, concentrating on his still life. The next three chapters turn to specific culinary metaphors and their implications for gender. Each raises the interplay between alimentary and sexual consumption, and the relationship of both of these to vision. Chapter 2 considers the link between red meat, the figure of the female sex worker, and the “flesh” of the paint surface, in and beyond Zola’s criticism. Manet was accused by supporters and detractors alike of painting raw flesh, paradigmatically in relation to the figure of Olympia, which was repeatedly described as well-aged meat. These accusations related to his subject matter, sexualized female flesh, as well as to his technique. Whatever the subject, Manet’s art was widely experienced as crude, direct, and harsh, with brushstrokes reminiscent of a butcher’s bloody cuts across the canvas. The analogies that critics posed between bodies in the Morgue, female figures, meat, and the fleshy material of paint became central modes of denigrating Impressionist paintings of women in the ensuing decades. In this context, I interpret Gustave Caillebotte’s Veal in a Butcher’s Shop (c. 1882), depicting anthropomorphized, gendered, and sexualized meat, as enacting the critical responses to Impressionist figures as animalized flesh (see fig. 25). Caillebotte’s painting foregrounds the violent operations through which bodies might be reduced to meat, whether literal or metaphorical. In their comparisons to rotting flesh, nineteenth-century critics expressed a

visceral reaction to works of art that Veal in a Butcher’s Shop demands. Chapter 3 examines the connection between pastries, the figure of the chic Parisienne, and the crusted surface of the “licked” canvas. Critics mocked fashionable painters by calling them confectioners of cakes and creams to be desired by Parisiennes, figures culturally conceived in similar terms as lightweight and appetizing. The process of these artists was not perceived to be like the butcher, breaking down subjects with strokes, but instead was seen as being akin to a pastry chef building up thin layers and shining surfaces. It comes as a surprise, then, to learn that critics also used pastry and confectionery metaphors to describe the materiality of Impressionist canvases. Connected to the feminizing of Impressionism as a movement, these accounts betrayed the sensual appeal or disgust provoked by coagulating swirls of creamy color. Analyzing still lifes by Caillebotte and Monet, I explore how the parallels between artist and chef, paint and food, were figured in paint by artists themselves, operating outside of explicit critical attention to undermine the boundaries upon which the typically derogatory painter-confectioner metaphor was built. The final chapter considers the correlation between fresh vegetables, the figure of the paysanne, and colors described as sandy, raw, and bitter. Camille Pissarro earned the nickname “cabbage painter” despite the fact that cabbages rarely appeared in his exhibited works. Instead, commentators exploited a perceived affinity between the humble vegetable, Pissarro’s paintings as objects, and his favored subject, female agricultural workers. The paintings

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and the figures in them were described as akin to the vegetables those figures harvested and sold. According to his supporters, looking at the works conferred good health just as eating a garden-fresh meal did. Malcontents instead described the paintings as meager and weak, as insubstantial as a dinner of salad, and claimed that they induced indigestion. To many critics, approving or not, Pissarro’s technique connoted the laboriousness of farm labor, and his paint coloration and materiality suggested soil and plant life. Comparisons between the materials of art and those of agricultural landscapes, and between the shared gestures of painter and

­ easant, provide insight into how Pissarro’s p works were understood to challenge vision and require other modes of sensory engagement to be comprehensible. The works discussed in these pages were not described in purely visual terms. Critics considered them products of the artist’s embodied encounter with the world, which in turn produced powerful reactions in viewers—an inadequate term in this context. This book explores how paintings addressed themselves to entire bodies. In the process, it reframes the interpretation of this art within a broader understanding of the experiences that it offers.

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chapter one

Metaphor and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Art Criticism

this chapter introduces the shared l­anguages of the culinary and fine arts, showing how taste and sight could be productively paired in nineteenth-century art criticism. References to gustatory taste in art’s reception point to a gastronomic culture in artistic and literary communities that is not as easily separable from discourses of aesthetic taste as has been assumed. I begin with a palette upon which Manet painted a beer mug, a case study through which to trace how cultures of dining and the arts were intertwined in this place and period. The second s­ ection follows Émile Zola as he explicitly linked painting to food in his Salon reviews, while the third section turns to a subtler side of those culinary metaphors, occasions when the language of taste entered into Zola’s criticism to more implicitly configure spectatorship as a form of ingestion. In the final portion of the chapter, I consider the potential of fram-

ing viewing as consumption in relation to Manet’s seafood still lifes of the 1860s. It makes sense to enter into this material through Manet and Zola. The potential of paint to move between languages was especially pronounced when it came to Manet. His virtuoso paintwork attracted extensive contemporary attention and challenged existing critical vocabularies. In the face of descriptive difficulty, cuisine and its associated lexicon proved a rich resource for critics. Zola wrote prolifically about Manet’s painting and consistently relied on culinary metaphors to do so. These metaphors complicate art history’s typical reading of Zola’s reviews as evidence that self-consciously modern artists and their critics placed a new and exclusive importance on the visual. Not only have Zola’s writings about art been crucial to the subsequent understanding of modern painting in the 1860s and 1870s but those writings, as well

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as his novels, were also a touchstone for how that art was conceptualized in its time, when modern-life painting was consistently tied to naturalist literature. The list of reviewers from the 1860s through the 1880s who linked Zola to Manet and the Impressionists is extensive.1 Zola’s commitment to the corporeal, which nuances and complicates his constructions of dispassionate vision, would have been read along­side the imagined priorities of those painters with whom he was associated—Manet foremost among them.

situating the bock so that the curve of its oversized handle reflects the bend of the palette’s edge, and so that its void sits directly below the palette’s thumbhole. The analogies created between the palette and mug suggest that the paint can then be construed as a consumable substance, an effect heightened because Manet connected the material of paint, frothy and wet, to the foam of beer.4

La Palette au bock

Around 1873, Manet painted a beer mug across a vertically placed palette, known today only by an old, ill-defined black-and-white photograph taken before 1932 (fig. 4).2 On the palette, paint moves between signifying itself and signifying the object depicted. The mug looks to have been created quickly and freely from the extra paint left on the support. The top section of the palette is covered with such traces of remaining paint in an array of colors, at least according to Manet’s early biographer Adolphe Tabarant, who included it in his 1947 monograph on the artist.3 But as the eye moves downward, this mass of paint comes to resemble beer froth emerging from the thickly painted glass, which is anchored as though on a table by a shadow to its right. Just as a real mug would rest upon the wooden counter of a brasserie with its condensation or overflow spreading out under it, the painted mug is affixed to the wooden surface of the palette where the sticky traces of paint pool beneath it. The palette itself rhymes visually with the glass, which Manet emphasized by

Fig. 4

Édouard Manet, La Palette au bock, 1873. Oil on wood, 51 × 38 cm.

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Fig. 5

6 Menus en forme de palettes de peintre, c. 1870–1900. Color lithograph, 29.5 × 37 cm (sheet).

Suggestions of both touch and taste are accessed through La Palette au bock. The elision of the palette with the palate, or appetite, is implied. This connection was repeatedly exploited in nineteenth-century menu design, when the shape of the artist’s piece of equipment served as a popular prop for the listed courses of a meal. The shape of a palette not only conveniently mirrored the shape of a dinner plate but also proposed that the organization of a meal was a form of art, and that the deco-

rated menu was a precious object to be collected and preserved. Indeed this was often the case, for menus were frequently printed, painted, covered in textiles, made into booklets, and designed by artists and illustrators. The J. Minot printing house marketed a series of such paletteshaped menus that could be ordered. Decorated around the edges, these include blank space in the center for the inscription of the day’s dishes. One of these menus, seen in the upper right corner of figure 5, goes further than the rest in promoting analogies between painting, cooking, and eating. It features multicolored dabs of paint arranged along its upper edge as though ready to be applied to a canvas. Just as the painter would

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arrange mounds of paint upon the palette, so too would the chef place helpings of saucesoaked foods upon a plate, which the palette evokes with its ovular shape. In this way, as in La Palette au bock, the Minot menu proposes a correspondence between the materials of food and paint. The distinctive kidney-bean and thumbhole shape of Manet’s palette also indicates its tactile function and its status as an extension of the artist’s hand. A vogue for collecting painters’ palettes at this time reflected a patron’s desire to possess an object that an artist had held for long periods, one that seemed intimately connected to its original owner, standing for the artist with whom it was indexically and symbolically associated. If just one painted image on a palette could represent Manet’s practice, as a signature of sorts, it would be a still life ­element, and if one still life object could stand for Manet’s aesthetic commitments in this period, a beer mug would be an appropriate choice. Still life comprises a fifth of Manet’s total production, some eighty works, and nearly all of his large-format figure paintings include still life elements. These can function as signatory signifiers, made explicit in Manet’s decision to sign his name on the leftmost bottle of liquor in his last major painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère; like the bold red triangle of Bass Ale on the beer bottle adjacent to it, this bottle connects Manet’s painting as an object with analogous commercial goods such as liquor and beer (1882; fig. 6).5 More broadly, critics commonly complained that Manet’s figures themselves resembled still lifes, a critique related to their perceived lack of animation, haphazard

groupings, and ambiguous narratives. Thus, the genre came to represent how the artist’s production was understood in general. In addition, a beer mug held particular symbolic significance within artistic and literary circles in nineteenthcentury Paris. As Frédérique Desbuissons has shown, beer had already come to connote the contested category of realism through Gustave Courbet, who used his taste for beer to construct a coarse and provincial persona that he also mobilized to characterize his artistic production. Beer was considered a cruder, less mainstream beverage than wine and could stand for anticonservatism of various sorts.6 Beer was also linked to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, in which it was a frequent iconographic feature. In nineteenth-century Paris, a revival of interest in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting in the Netherlands crystallized around several artists, including Jan Vermeer, Frans Hals, and Rembrandt van Rijn. This legacy was particularly important within debates about realism formulated by artists who asserted the value of the present, and who claimed an affinity with Dutch painters who had also been invested in depicting contemporary reality. Manet traveled to Holland in 1872 and submitted a painting titled Le Bon Bock to the 1873 Paris Salon (fig. 7). This painting of a portly middle-aged man grasping a glass of beer in a café or beer hall, modeled for by the printmaker Émile Bellot, was understood to reference seventeenth-century Dutch genre scenes and portraiture. It was a critical success at the Salon, an unusual event for Manet at that time, and it inspired Bellot to found a dinner club in 1875 called the Dîner du Bon Bock, which attracted

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Fig. 6

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882. Oil on canvas, 96 × 130 cm.

artists, writers, and performers to Montmartre and its environs for some fifty years. Bellot presided over the club, which was committed to the antiestablishment ideals that many saw captured in Manet’s painting, however ironic it might be that Le Bon Bock actually afforded its artist a measure of approval in the more conservative critical press. In the second half of the nineteenth century, men’s supper clubs spread in popularity and prestige in Paris. They were frequently

organized as artistic and literary confraternities. Menus and lists of their members were regularly published in newspapers for the appetites and eyes of curious readers. The humorous, artfully decorated invitations to the Dîners du Bon Bock, made for a group that published an album of poems, songs, and drawings by its members in 1878 called the Album du bon bock, were of particular interest to the wider public.7 In 1883, the prominent illustrator Alfred Le Petit designed an invitation showing a man knocking on a door while holding a giant playing card representing Bellot as the king of hearts, holding a mug of beer (fig. 8). Manet was often accused of flattening his subjects and even, by none

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other than Courbet, of making paintings that resembled playing cards.8 Le Petit’s invitation is a jocular reference to Manet’s original painting of Bellot, Le Bon Bock. Both show the stout, bearded man in similar format, close up and wielding beer in the left hand, while the pipe that Bellot holds in his right hand in Manet’s painting becomes a scepter in Le Petit’s variation. Integral to the humor is the conversion of Manet’s ruddy figure and no-frills realism into an overblown royal portrait, so that both genres or styles are equally caricatured. The effects of

inebriation, which would transform the dour painted Bellot into the jolly drawn version, are also at play. According to Tabarant, Manet painted La Palette au bock in celebration of his Salon success with Le Bon Bock, decorating the very same palette that he had used while working on that canvas.9 The subject of this new, metonymic painting is no longer Bellot but Manet, whose left hand grasped the palette now emblazoned with a beer mug just as Bellot’s left hand clutches a beer in the painting, and whose right

Fig. 7

Édouard Manet, Le Bon Bock, 1873. Oil on canvas, 94.6 × 83.3 cm.

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Fig. 8 

Alfred Le Petit, 9 e Année, 104 e dîner du Bon-Bock . . . invitation personnelle, November 8, 1883. Autolithography, 27 × 22.5 cm.

hand held the paintbrush that finds its counterpart in Bellot’s pipe. La Palette au bock was exhibited in a boutique on the rue Vivienne, presumably to drum up publicity for the artist. There it functioned as a sign for Manet’s practice, just as the signs depicting beer mugs featured on the invitations to the Dîners du Bon Bock were a summons for the crowds of figures, sometimes toting paint palettes, united in celebration of liberal artistic ideals (1880; fig. 9). Manet’s critics were also fond of comparing his paintings, including Le Bon Bock, to

actual signage, implying that they were unrefined and schematic, the product of artisan labor rather than artistic creation. For example, Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne writes in his 1873 Salon review that “there are certainly tavern signs that are more life-like” than Manet’s submissions to the exhibition, Le Bon Bock among them, and a brasserie in the Latin Quarter actually took a reproduction of Le Bon Bock as a sign.10 Alfred Le Petit, author of the 1883 invitation to the Dîner du Bon Bock, produced a caricature of Manet in 1876 that directly engaged

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Fig. 9

Adrien Emmanuel Marie, 6 e Année, 61e dîner du Bon-Bock . . . invitation personnelle, March 5, 1880. Autolithography, 27.5 × 22 cm.

the question of the artist’s ascendant reputation achieved through Le Bon Bock (fig. 10). In the full-page illustration on the cover of the journal Les Contemporains, Manet appears enthroned on a massive palette supported by figures that we identify as Impressionists because of the palette’s inscription: King of the Impressionists. Manet holds a broom-like brush as his scepter, and a crown perches precariously atop his head. Stripped to his underwear except for a regal cloak, he sits not on a throne but on a chamber pot labeled “Bon Bock,” which suggests both

the role of that painting in elevating the artist’s reputation as well as the aftereffects of drinking too much beer. On its crudest level, the caricature suggests that Manet’s excrement, resting on the palette where the artist will dip his brush, becomes the substance of painting. Manet is here embodied in his works; it is his body that we find on the palette, along with the implication that his paintings are composed of his corporeal waste. Figuring the impasto of his surfaces as clumps of feces, the caricature speaks to the disgust that widely greeted

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Manet’s paintings in the 1860s and those of his “subjects,” the Impressionists, in the 1870s and 1880s. These reactions will be the subject of later chapters. For now, my objective has been to show how the visual and material culture relating to food, dining, and the arts could be fundamentally interconnected. Le Petit aspired to a career as a painter but is far better known for his caricature, and he also designed dinner invitations on the side. He is just one example of the many journalists who, in addition to addressing the fine arts, contributed to culinary culture. The consequences of these interactions between spheres can be recognized in art criticism.

Fig. 10

Alfred Le Petit, Édouard Manet: Roi des Impressionnistes, 1876. Caricature from Les Contemporains, June 16, 1876.

Zola’s Culinary Art Criticism

The importance of food and scenes of dining in Zola’s fiction is well known. In Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris, 1873), the third novel in his Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty books chronicling an extended family during the Second Empire, the true protagonist is the teeming Paris food market Les Halles. In Le Ventre and elsewhere in his fiction, Zola explored the sensory adventures of the modern city, delighting in describing pungent odors and flavors in order to stake his claim as a naturalist unafraid of addressing modern experience in its fullness and corporeal complexity.11 Less well known is the fact that, prior to achieving fame as a novelist, and over the course of twenty years, Zola used the language of cooking, taste, and eating as central devices in his art criticism.12 Nowhere is this more evident than in his descriptions of Manet’s work, which preoccupied him in the second half of the 1860s.

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Zola set out to establish himself as a major player in debates about contemporary art in an ambitious series of reviews of the 1866 Salon published in L’Événement, which were later collected and reissued as Mon Salon, 1866 and reprinted again in the collection Mes haines: Causeries littéraires et artistiques in 1879. The inaugural article opens with a thirteen-page discussion of the exhibition jury: Imagine that the Salon is an immense artistic ragout that is served to us every year. Each painter, each sculptor, sends his morsel [morceau]. Now, as we have delicate stomachs, it was thought prudent to name a group of cooks to accommodate the food to our varied tastes. One fears indigestion, and said to these guardians of public health: “Here are the elements of an excellent meal: hold the pepper, because the pepper gets us overheated; put water in the wine, because France is a grand nation who cannot lose her head.” It seems to me, therefore, that the cooks play the greatest role. Since we season our admiration and chew over our opinions, we have the right to attend first and foremost to these complacent men who want to ensure that we do not gorge ourselves like gluttons on bad quality food. When you eat a beefsteak, do you concern yourself with the cow? You think only of thanking or cursing the cook who served it to you overcooked or not cooked enough. It is therefore clear that the Salon is not the entire and complete expression of French art in the year 1866, but is an attempt at a sort of ragout prepared and fricasséed by twenty-eight cooks deliberately named for this delicate task. The Salon today is not the work of artists, it is the work of a jury. So I attend first to the jury,

the author of these long, cold, and pallid rooms in which, under raw light, all these timid medio­c­ rities and stolen reputations are hung. Formerly, it was the Académie des beaux-arts that put on the white apron and got involved in the cooking [mettait la main à la pâte]. At that time, the Salon was a fatty and solid meal, always the same. We knew in advance what courage was necessary to swallow these classical morsels, these thick, softly rounded meatballs, which smothered you slowly and surely. The old Academy, that founding cook, had her recipes from which she never strayed; she always managed, whatever might be the temperaments or the age, to serve the same dish to the public. [Zola goes on to discuss changes to the composition of the Salon jury, which had not fixed the problems that he identifies with the selection process, which remained dominated by the biases of its members.] . . . The public, not allowed in the pantry and unable to witness the cooking, will accept these various Salons as the true expression of the artistic moment. Audiences will not know that it is only some painter who put together the entire exhibition; they will go there in good faith and swallow the mouthful, believing they are swallowing all the art made that year.13

Zola compares the Salon jury to a gastronomic committee like the one made famous earlier in the century by Alexandre Grimod de La Reynière, a food critic of unprecedented fame who assembled a jury to evaluate dishes from the capital’s top restaurants. He mocks the self-perceived importance of the jury, dominated by establishment painters and members of the Academy who also set the curriculum and

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contests at the École des beaux-arts, and thereby maintained specific—and, Zola thought, outdated and constricting—artistic practices and ideals. In making their selection of works for the Salon, the jury members believed themselves to be presenting a gourmet, or at least a salubrious, meal to the public. On the contrary, Zola argues that the combination of morceaux, those individual paintings served or exhibited, was merely predigested, bland, and sobering. He uses morceau as a pun. A common argument about a painting’s merits turned on the distinction between the tableau, a work that attained formal unity, expressive closure, and technical finish, and the morceau, a fragmentary painting without compositional coherence or adequate technical development.14 But morceau was more commonly used to name a small piece of food, a morsel. The same wordplay underlies the claim that the Academy “mettait la main à la pâte,” a phrase generally meaning to get involved, but which here signifies in its literal sense of putting a hand in the dough or batter. Pâte, the word for dough, was also used as a term in painting to describe a thick mass of colors, similar to impasto.15 The jury gets its hands dirty combining the painted morsels into a ragoût, a thick stew that, like the term fricassé that follows it, was a relatively common way to suggest that a show or its art was muddled because the ingredients were not clearly defined or harmoniously integrated.16 For Zola, the 1866 Salon was not an epicurean feast prepared for discriminating palates, but a sloppy mush designed for public edification that was swallowed with difficulty. Comparing paintings to foodstuffs turns paintings into just

another commodity for sale, drawing attention to the similarity of their increasingly bourgeois markets. Likening the jury members to aged cooks, Zola suggests that as artists they are no better than the cooks of the Salon buffet. This was a means of calling the fine artist just another ouvrier, a worker, a turn of phrase that Zola commonly applied to Academicians in order to argue that skill in the métier of painting did not spell artistic creation or innovation, but merely the production of “fashionable merchandise.”17 Most broadly, it was the “taste” of the jury members that Zola called into question, accusing them of carefully composing recipes and menus to keep France healthy and thereby sustaining a specific version of public good taste and decorum. The concept of goût had, of course, long been a crucial term in artistic discourse. When it was adopted as a key idea in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the slippage between gustatory taste, a mode of sensory perception, and aesthetic taste, a metaphor for cerebral judgment, was of paramount concern. In aesthetics, taste named the ability to appreciate specific qualities of beauty. Voltaire defines goût in its entry in the Encyclopédie: “this capacity for discriminating between different foods has given rise, in all known languages, to the metaphorical use of the word ‘taste’ to designate the discernment of beauty and flaws in all the arts.”18 Most eighteenth-century philosophers maintained a distinction between aesthetic and gustatory taste, the latter being denigrated among the five senses. It was associated with animalistic bodily appetites and disgusts, and considered too relative to each individual to attain the disinterested universality central to constructions of aesthetic

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taste. According to its best-known theorist, Immanuel Kant, the type of discernment that could be called aesthetic judgment needed to operate independently of physical drives or personal desires.19 The philosophical and cultural landscape was different in nineteenth-century France. ­Cuisine had moved into the public sphere and consciousness in new ways and was aestheticized, intellectualized, and nationalized.20 Menus were published in newspapers and posted outside boulevard restaurants, establishments that grew exponentially in number during the first half of the nineteenth century but had been virtually unknown before then. Culinary journals and columns in the popular press furnished readers with descriptions of meals that would probably never be tasted. The newly coined “gastronome” could even be held up as a model of discipline, cultivation, and restraint—providing evidence that throughout the century concerns about appetite and its connection to baseness and gluttony were being at least partially shed from elevated discourses about taste by a segment of the population fascinated with, proud of, and able to participate in cultures of public dining and the construction of a uniquely French cuisine. In other words, aesthetic taste was less rigorously separated from gustatory taste, and, in fact, the two could be seen as mutually inflecting. Self-proclaimed philosopher of taste Jean Anthelme Brillat-­ Savarin posed gustatory discernment as the ­pinnacle of aesthetic appreciation in his Physio­ logie du goût (1825), a book so popular that it was reprinted eight times in the nineteenth

century, including in an edition illustrated by Bertall, the pseudonym of Charles Albert d’Arnoux, one of the most penetrating caricaturists of contemporary art. Philosopher François Marie Charles Fourier imagined a future society guided by the principle of “gastrosophy,” or the pursuit of pleasure.21 La table became an ever more decisive location of distinction, and the proliferation of gastronomic literature testified to the importance placed on comprehending the code gourmand. The emergence of countless guides to behaving appropriately at the table, now often located in public restaurants, was inseparable from the growing urban populace and the changing cityscape of the Haussmannian era. Debates about what constituted good taste, synonymous with respectability, and who could develop it helped the reader and eater navigate new city spaces and social groups. The reliability of the sense of sight to accurately assess class or status was energetically debated, and the refined use of all the senses was considered essential in rendering hierarchies transparent.22 For Zola in Le Ventre de Paris, written the year after the class warfare of the revolutionary Paris Commune and its bloody suppression, the entire class system could be summarized by the dichotomy detected between Fats, thriving members of the bourgeoisie, and Thins, those whose economic or social struggle to fit into society is figured as never getting enough to eat. Le Ventre is set in the newly renovated pavilions of the central Paris food market Les Halles. Florent, the main character who returns to Paris after incarceration abroad, is a stranger

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in the new quartier, which resists his recognition after its Haussmannian reorganization. As Florent’s sight fails to orient him, Zola uses the other senses, most notably smell, to describe the new city, its inhabitants, and its products for his marooned hero. On display in Zola’s text is his own ability to sort through the sensory landscape of modern Paris, a task that he took seriously in the detailed notes that survive from his research. Zola’s goal of representing the bustling marketplace in prose is paralleled in the ambition of the character Claude Lantier, an aspiring modern artist and Thin who believes that an oil painting set in Les Halles, with its soaring iron shed, its piles of foodstuffs of every color, texture, odor, and flavor, and its population of foulmouthed vendors and street urchins would serve as the manifesto of modern painting. Manet was sympathetic to this concept. In 1879 he proposed a mural project for the council chamber of the new Hôtel de Ville comprising “a series of compositions representing, to use an expression that has become consecrated and clearly expresses my thought, Le Ventre de Paris.” It was predictably rejected.23 Foreshadowing his ultimate inability to create his “masterpiece” in Zola’s 1886 novel centered on him, L’Oeuvre (His Masterpiece), Claude does not deliver on this painting. But in the young artist’s description to Florent of the most successful work he ever made, Claude stakes out his modernism through alimentary materials. He explains that his best painting was in fact the rearrangement of the display window in his aunt Lisa’s upscale charcuterie, in which he composed a still life using the vibrant colors of

meat arranged in an upsetting combination to give viewers indigestion, revolting the stomach through the visual and uniting eye and body. I made a real work of art. I took the dishes, the plates, the terrines, the jars; I arranged the tones, I set up an astonishing still life, where firecrackers of color burst, all along the color scale. Gluttonous flames extended from red tongues, and the black pudding, alongside the pale song of the sausages, cast the darkness with tremendous indigestion. I painted, did I not? The gluttony of New Year’s Eve, the midnight hour for overeating, the gluttony of stomachs inspired by the singing of hymns. . . . The crowd gathered in front of the window, anxious about the display that blazed so brutally . . .24

This vignette may appear to mock the painter whose failure to represent the marketplace in his proper medium throws into relief Zola’s success representing it in prose, but more is at stake. Zola used the same terms to defend Manet’s intervention in the field of art, the same conflation of painting with raw meat to be encountered with disgusted ambivalence by bourgeois viewers turned consumers. In another of his L’Événement articles on the 1866 Salon, “M. Manet,” published a week after the discussion of the jury, Zola explains the effects of Manet’s paintings at the exhibition. Quite simply they burst open the wall. All around them stretch the sweets of the fashionable artistic confectioners, sugar-candy trees and pastry houses, gingerbread gentlemen and ladies made of vanilla cream. The candy shop becomes pinker and

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sweeter, and the artist’s living canvases take on a certain bitterness in the midst of this river of milk. Also, one must see the faces made by the grownup children passing through the gallery. For two cents you will not make them swallow veritable raw meat, but they stuff themselves like famished people with all the sickening sweetness served to them.25

Here, Zola compares widely popular artists trained or teaching at the state-sponsored École des beaux-arts to pâtissiers or confiseurs selling delicious sweets. These were labels for artists like Alexandre Cabanel, Édouard Louis Dubufe, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, whom Zola understood as flattering the vulgarized taste of the bourgeoisie by striving toward a preconceived beau absolu that displayed no artistic subjectivity or originality. Zola no longer describes the public trudging through the exhibition dutifully digesting the year’s art, as in his opening article on the jury, but imagines a wild crowd rushing in to satisfy obsessive cravings for the likes of Cabanel’s “delicious” female nudes made of white and pink “pâte d’amande,” as he characterizes that artist’s The Birth of Venus (1863) in his review of the art exhibition at the 1867 Universal Exhibition.26 Viewing is voracious as the visitors are propelled forward in a corporeal crush resembling the crowds of women at department store sales in Zola’s later novel Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise, 1883). Zola was not the first to use this comparison to confectionery, which is the subject of chapter 3. Charles Baudelaire, for example, had employed a similar metaphor in his Salon de 1846 to describe paintings by Narcisse Virgile

Diaz de la Peña, an artist whom Baudelaire found only superficially appealing. Staging a discussion with an apologist for Diaz de la Peña, Baudelaire writes, Every artist has a role, you [Diaz de la Peña’s advocate] say. Great painting is not for everyone. A good dinner contains some pièces de résistance and some appetizers. Would you dare to be ungrateful to Arles sausages, peppers, anchovies, mayonnaise, etc. [common appetizers]? But you call these appetizing hors-d’œuvres [replies Baudelaire]? They are nothing but nauseating candies and sweets. Who would want to fill up on dessert? One barely grazes upon it, when one is content with his dinner.27

For Baudelaire, Diaz de la Peña’s painting was not even fit as a prelude to “la grande peinture.” It did not whet the appetite but was a nauseating, superfluous addition to the exhibition, easily overlooked if one had filled up on more substantial painting. The gender and class implications come across clearly, as they do with Zola. Bourgeois women and children were the groups understood to crave confections with irrepressible appetites. The lightness of pastries made an easy comparison with perceived female superficiality and infantile innocence, and real and painted women were frequently described in terms appropriate to confectionery, as delicious, delectable, sweet, and so on. Zola’s claim for the bitterness of Manet’s painting standing out from the rivers of milk and cream—the “vast candy shop with sweets for all tastes” as he put it the following year in his monographic essay “Une Nouvelle Manière en peinture: Édouard Manet”—allowed him to stake

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out Manet’s masculinity by feminizing and ­infantilizing fashionable artists and the crowds that devoured their work.28 Going further than Baudelaire, Zola used the metaphor of art as pastry or confectionery to address technique, finish, and training. The tools of the trades—including brushes, knives, spatulas, and sponges—overlap. The artist in a smock makes an easy comparison with the pastry chef in an apron, both adding fatty oils to create the desired consistency of materials, and both applying those materials to a canvas—in the chef’s case, a nonstick pastry cloth for rolling out dough. The surfaces of paintings by Cabanel, Dubufe, or Gérôme were often referred to as “licked” (léché) because they shone with varnish, not unlike the surface of a pastry glazed with mixtures of butter, egg, and sugar.29 Zola and others referred to methods by which “fashionable artistic confectioners” arrived at these effects as recipes, implying that the techniques learned at the École and in the ateliers of Academicians, analogous to the precise measurements required of baking, were based on mere copying that denied individual artistic imagination. “You talk about rules,” Zola writes to the artists enjoying their success at the 1868 Salon, “to make us believe that there is a perfect cuisinier de l’art who can teach you the recipes for the sauces to prepare the ideal. But you do not see that when you want to find the true rules, traditions, and masters, you have to look for them in the works of these artists whom you accuse of ignorance and rebellion.”30 For Zola, deliciousness was an insult, and he explained that the tastier a work, the less it contained the personality of its artist, who merely succumbed to the “goût de jour” and

appeased audiences with delicious “dishes.”31 Zola’s references to “sugar-candy trees and pastry houses, gingerbread gentlemen and ladies made of vanilla cream” also related to subject matter that he despised, including prettified landscapes and figures idealized as delicate and dainty rather than being rooted firmly in the purportedly impartial observation of contemporary reality. By contrast, Zola described Manet’s painting as viande crue (raw meat), called it bitter instead of sweet, and praised the fleshy materiality of his brushstrokes (“les taches sont grasses,” which translates as “the colored patches are fleshy, fatty, meaty, or greasy”) as the trace of the artist’s individual hand; as we will see in the next chapter, Zola went as far as to claim that Manet’s paintings embodied the very “flesh and blood” of their artist.32 Just as the connection to confectionery feminized fashionable artists, the comparison of Manet’s painting to meat drew upon wider associations of meat as hearty, substantial, and particularly healthy for men.33 Positing viewing as carnivorous attested to the virility of the artist and his sympathetic audiences. Zola never minced words when expressing his conviction that truly modern art, which required painters to “study and render nature truthfully,” was a male business. “Painting dreams is a game for women and children; men are responsible for painting realities,” he claims in another of the 1866 reviews titled “The Realists at the Salon,” in which he appoints himself the task of searching for “real” men in the sea of “eunuchs.”34 That Zola described Manet’s painting as raw rendered it untouched by the culinary practice that had been proved dubious through its association with painters that Zola ridiculed.

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Beyond the Analytic Eye

These metaphors comparing artists to cooks, viewers to diners, and works of art to meat and confectionery introduced the arena of taste— with its unruly consequences—into the appreciation of painting. In 1867, Zola published a lengthy monographic essay in La Revue du XIXe siècle with the title “Une Nouvelle Manière en peinture: Édouard Manet” (“A New Manner in Painting: Édouard Manet”), in which he further developed his 1866 descriptions of the bitter pungency of Manet’s paintings and the pleasure he derived from relishing their particular flavors. These references to flavor point to a subtler side of culinary metaphors, outside of Zola’s highly self-conscious posing of artists as cooks, in which the sense of taste is summoned to stand in for sight when a painting exposes the limits of the eye’s abilities or puts pressure on the operations of art criticism. These discussions draw attention to the physicality of paint and its effects in ways that challenge the more general trend in art criticism, including Zola’s own, to allude to cuisine as an insult. “Une Nouvelle Manière” includes a short introduction followed by sections: The Man and the Artist, The Works, and The Public. In the introduction, Zola begins by stating that Manet “has produced very particular works, of a bitter and strong flavor, that have hurt the eyes of those accustomed to other appearances [il a ainsi produit des œuvres particulières, d’une saveur amère et forte, qui ont blessé les yeux des gens habitués à d’autres aspects]” (329). If painting can injure the eye, its offenses are best invoked through the language of taste, upon which Zola lingers throughout the essay. He

opens the first section, The Man and the Artist, by comparing Manet to a bourgeois shopkeeper: “an artist’s life is the same as that of any quiet bourgeois; he paints his pictures in his studio as others sell pepper over their counters” (331). This comparison disputes the public perception of Manet as a revolutionary, just as the reviewer of the 1877 Impressionist Exhibition quoted in the introduction to this book used the example of an Impressionist dinner party at the Café Riche as evidence that the painters were, like the assumed journal readership, refined bourgeois men. Zola’s comparison to a shopkeeper selling spices is not accidental, but is in line with his consistent references to the new or particular flavors unique to Manet’s paintings. In his description of Manet’s work in general in The Man and the Artist, Zola asserts that the “various elements that compose his oeuvre, taken perhaps from here and there, have been melted into a whole that possesses a new flavor and particular perspective [Les éléments divers qui la composaient, pris peutêtre ici et là, venaient se fondre en un tout d’une saveur nouvelle et d’un aspect particulier]” (337), and explains that “we must . . . forget a thousand things to understand and taste this talent [Il nous faut, je ne saurais trop le répéter, oublier mille choses pour comprendre et goûter ce talent]” (346). In the following section on The Works, Zola repeats his claim that “this elegant abruptness, this violence of transitions . . . is the personal accent, the particular flavor of the work [Et ces partis-pris sont justement cette séche­ resse élégante, cette violence des transitions. . . . C’est l’accent personnel, la saveur particulière de l’œuvre]” (358). He attempts to describe that

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flavor, though the result is paradoxical: “there is both bitterness and sweetness in the first look cast upon the walls [of Manet’s studio] [Il y a de l’âpreté et de la douceur dans le premier regard qu’on jette sur les murs]” (351). In the final section on The Public, when Zola protests the ferocity of “delirious” audiences that have “a bone to pick” with Manet, readers are reminded of his earlier discussion in 1866 of Manet’s paintings as “raw meat” that have “a certain bitterness.” Audiences see red when confronted with a body of work that Zola repeatedly calls the “flesh and blood” of its painter (337, 352, 357, 369), a construction that elides paintings with the flesh of the human animal (the next chapter explores this idea in detail). Zola may be chastising those angry audiences for consuming painting incorrectly, but, despite his apparent disdain for the culinary insofar as it enters painting—his condemnations of those artists who would “season” or “sweeten” subject matter with superficially appealing tricks to disguise bad quality—Zola depends on the language of consumption when describing Manet’s work, even before he self-consciously applies a metaphor.35 In this he was not alone. George Heard Hamilton, whose Manet and His Critics (1954) presents a sizable portion of the criticism generated by the artist’s accepted Salon submissions, notes that many of Manet’s critics used language that did not belong to the typical vocabulary of pictorial criticism, including acrid, savor, and pungency.36 The appropriation of this terminology relates to the commonly experienced difficulty of writing about Manet’s works and their impact, which, in T. J. Clark’s terms, could simply fail to signify

by established metrics and received vocabularies.37 Given the challenge of putting words to flavors, it makes sense to turn to the domain of taste to characterize art that stubbornly resisted narration. In Zola’s criticism or more generally, when culinary vocabulary manifested a struggle to explain or to come to terms with contested practice, those occasions have a different significance than other, more elaborate culinary conceits that did not necessarily push the boundaries of visual experience or criticism as a form. Zola’s descriptions of Manet’s paintings that unfolded as though he were tasting them went beyond his metaphorical opposition of cake and meat. They put pressure on their author’s other favorite metaphor, developed at length in “Une Nouvelle Manière” and much more familiar to art historians, of the artist or critic as a scientific analyst. Zola writes, I see in him [Manet] a painter-analyst. All the problems have been re-examined, science needs to have solid foundations and this requires the exact observation of facts. And this movement has not only occurred in the scientific order; all the branches of knowledge, all works of mankind tend to seek firm and definitive principles in reality. . . . Édouard Manet applies the same method to each of his works . . . he quietly places some objects or some people in a corner of his studio, and begins to paint, analyzing everything carefully. I repeat, he is a simple analyst. . . . [Manet and other painter-analysts] do not have that preoccupation with the subject that concerns the crowd above all. For them the subject is a pretext for painting, while for the crowd it is the subject alone that matters.38

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Manet is not the only one whose talents of scientific analysis are at play here. Zola refers to his method of art criticism as analysis no less than seven times in the essay (327, 328, 342, 344, 349, 351, 357). Just as Manet’s practice depends on “the exact observation of facts,” Zola explains that, as a critic, “I only want to analyze facts, and works of art are simple facts” (342). Recourse to science advances Zola’s goal of aligning himself and Manet with the principles and processes of positivist progress. Positivism, as elaborated by Auguste Comte in his Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), called for the empirical observation of material reality as the basis of all knowledge. Comte argued that a scientific method of careful analysis of perceived data was the answer to comprehending the laws not only of the universe but also of human nature. His work met with widespread approval and was incorporated into art theory, notably by critic and historian Hippolyte Taine, whom Zola eventually considered a mentor. Taine described art as the product of “race, milieu, and historical moment.” While Zola initially found this schema reductive, he nonetheless saw its utility as a framework for his naturalism, which he claimed was grounded in the impartial study of contemporary reality. Zola set out to explore the outcomes of such factors as physiology, temperament, and environment on fictional individuals in his Rougon-Macquart series and on artists in his art criticism. As we have seen, he argued that his criticism was a form of analytic questioning of visual evidence and wrote that art was likewise approaching science.39 Integral to this notion of artist or critic as analyst is the trained, discerning eye, the organ most

allied with constructions of scientific method. The ideal of scientific objectivity was enshrined in vision above any of the other senses. Because the eye requires distance from its object in order to see, sight could sustain frameworks of detachment, impartiality, and exactitude.40 While scholars such as Jonathan Crary and Michael Baxandall have done much to complicate any easy alignment of vision and objectivity—as Crary shows, by the nineteenth century it was well known that vision was not a neutral reflection of external events, but was instead contingent on the body of the individual observer and thus inherently subjective—taste could never in the first place approach the concepts of detachment and neutrality upon which the conceptions of scientific method depended.41 Aphorisms derived from de gustibus non est disputandum (there is no disputing about taste) were repeated in the major dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the entry for goût, and it was well known that the same flavors could produce different sensations in diverse individuals.42 In other words, Zola’s oxymoronic statement that “there is both bitterness and sweetness” in the first impression of Manet’s work coincides with contemporary connotations of taste as subjective and imprecise, despite a growing culture of culinary connoisseurship that was trying to overcome the implication that food could not be subjected to rigorous universal metrics for judging its value. Appropriately, and in tension with his discussions of the difficult-to-characterize flavors of Manet’s painting, Zola’s descriptions of the artist as analyst emphasize the particular physiology of Manet’s eye and the faculties of his vision.

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He states in “Une Nouvelle Manière” that the “whole personality of the artist consists in the manner in which his eye is organized” (343). He champions the “accuracy of the eye” and directness of the painter’s vision, the “simplification produced by the artist’s clear and correct eye” (358, 360). If such passages celebrating Manet’s hypersensitive vision are read in isolation, it would seem that the artist could be reduced to a specially endowed eye. Indeed, art historians have focused on these statements about the artist’s powers of vision in order to align Manet with advanced opticality and to frame Zola as the one who recognized it. In his arguments to this effect, Clement Greenberg looked back to Zola. Because Greenberg contended that Zola and Manet (as well as Courbet) purged their production of the anecdotal or the “idea” in favor of dispassionate description, he considered Zola and Manet as linked in their aesthetic commitments. Indebted to Zola’s allusions to scientific method, focus on the formal aspects of paintings, and assertion of the triviality of Manet’s subject matter, Greenberg emphasized Manet’s “flat color-modeling” and “insolent indifference to his subject” as integral to modernism, for “Modernist painting asks that a literary theme be translated into strictly optical, two-dimensional terms before becoming the subject of pictorial art.”43 Greenberg’s legacy, and the transformation of Zola into a champion of painting’s pure opticality, continues. Passages from Zola’s 1860s art criticism that address the importance of Manet’s eye—that the artist must “see through his own eyes,” “be guided by his eyes,” and other similar formulations—appear most frequently in

art-historical debate. One recent study of Manet goes so far as to claim: “In 1866, Zola evacuated from Manet’s canvases everything but strictly visual experience.”44 We have seen that Zola did no such thing and that in fact, references to the visual alone were not adequate for capturing Manet’s paintings. Their complexities were better elaborated through the more ambiguous and ambivalent language of taste (as well as sound, although allusions to the accent and language of Manet’s works lie outside the scope of this discussion). This side of Zola’s art criticism suggests that whatever importance the novelist placed on the eye—and certainly he was firmly invested in exploring the competencies of the painter’s vision—it did not require ridding canvases that have “hurt the eyes of those accustomed to other appearances” (329) of the range of effects that they produced. As we will see in the next chapter, the emphasis on vision that does exist in Zola’s criticism may be best appreciated as a defense against just that pervasive accusation that Manet’s paintings damaged the eyes and appealed directly to the body. Tasting Still Life

Opening up the metaphorics of gustatory appreciation offers a new aspect of art criticism for analysis and complicates the frameworks of detachment and distance that have been invoked since Zola to describe Manet’s relationship to his subject matter and the viewer’s relationship to his art. The concept of vision as consumption also enriches the interpretation of paintings. I begin to explore those possibilities in relation to Manet’s 1860s seafood still lifes, an appropriate choice not just because of

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their subject matter but also because still life meant more in relation to Manet’s production than simply the representation of food. Critics, including Zola, often placed all of Manet’s work under the still life umbrella, positioning the genre as representative of his production. “His painting is no more interesting than a still life,” declares Paul Mantz characteristically in the Gazette des beaux-arts in 1869.45 Figure painting was compared to still life to condemn figures perceived as inanimate—wooden, plaster, or doll-like, to name just a few epithets. However, when it came to Manet’s actual still life production, critics were often begrudgingly respectful, causing Zola to comment that even the “most avowed enemies of Édouard Manet’s talent grant that he paints inanimate objects well” (“Une Nouvelle Manière,” 361). In “Une Nouvelle Manière,” Zola writes that the artist approaches all subjects in a manner associated with still life. We must, I cannot repeat enough, forget a thousand things to understand and taste this talent . . . what is called composition does not exist for him, and the role that he takes on is not to represent some thought or historical act. . . . He treats his figure paintings in the same way that it is permitted, in the schools, to treat still life; I mean that he groups the figures in front of him, a bit randomly, and then has no other concern than to fix them on the canvas just as he sees them, with the lively oppositions that they make against one another.46

As a result of this working method, Zola explains, Manet was naturally skilled at still life painting: “After all, according to the mechanism of his talent, the workings of which I have

tried to describe, the artist must necessarily render a group of inanimate objects with great power” (361). This commentary assumes much about still life, at least as Zola saw it conceptualized by the École: namely, that composition was less important to the genre; that the objects chosen were of small consequence; and that narrative reading was inappropriate in relation to it. This understanding implies that the primary significance of the painted objects is as vehicles for color and form, and that the genre grants the artist free rein to explore those qualities without the pressures of composing a coherent narrative or capturing a specific human likeness. In approaching all of Manet’s production through this still life filter, Zola could advance his argument that any subject was merely a pretext for painting and therefore conveniently avoid the question of subject matter by describing any work in the following terms: Then I am impressed by the inevitable consequence of this exact observation of the law of values. The artist, in front of any subject at all, lets himself be guided by his eyes, which perceive the subject in broad areas of related tones. A head placed against a wall is nothing more than a more or less white spot [une tache plus ou moins blanche] against a more or less gray background; and the clothing next to the face becomes, for example, a more or less blue spot beside a more or less white spot [une tache plus ou moins bleue mise à côté de la tache plus ou moins blanche]. From this derives the great simplicity, with almost no details, an ensemble of true and delicate patches [taches], which, from a few steps away, give the painting a striking relief.47

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Zola employs the concept of the tache, signifying a colored patch, to discuss Manet’s abrupt juxtapositions between different planes of color. He argues that Manet’s vision is organized around these colored patches, which might belong indiscriminately to a human face or an inanimate object, and that the artist’s skill lies in transferring them to the canvas with sincerity and simplicity. When viewed from an adequate distance, Zola felt that Manet’s taches endowed the paintings with relief, thus creating the effect of the modeling that the system of taches eschewed. In 1867, claiming that subject matter was insignificant strongly challenged the Academic hierarchy of genres, in which still life remained at the bottom because of the belief that it was less demanding to paint and compose than the human figure and less stimulating to the mind than narratives of history, allegory, religion, or myth.48 Usually smaller in scale and perceived to be less ambitious, the genre was considered appropriate for the amateur painter or female artist. It was also linked more explicitly than other genres to the marketplace, for its purpose could be understood as mere decoration for bourgeois interiors. Still life paintings were frequently a source of steady income for artists, especially those who struggled to gain acceptance to the Salon or sell their work. Still life ran less of a risk of scandalizing the jury or the public. Despite nineteenth-century challenges to this denigration in the form of a revival of seventeenth-century Dutch and eighteenthcentury French still life painting, the hierarchy remained. In 1864, art historian and eminent critic Léon Lagrange rebuked those who, like Zola two years

later, would attempt to dispense with categories of genre and elevate the painterly tache instead. He used terms similar to Zola’s own disparaging comparisons to cuisine, referencing the famous seventeenth-century chef François Vatel and the celebrated cookbook La Cuisinière bourgeoise, written in 1746 for bourgeois housewives or domestic workers and continually reprinted through the nineteenth century. M. Ribot makes blacks, as M. Viry makes a white, as M. Manet makes a yellow or a pink [M. Ribot fait des noirs, comme M. Viry fait un blanc, comme M. Manet fait un jaune ou un rose]. The watchword is given, and a small school, believing it has found the philosopher’s stone of art, abolishes in the same blow, in its hatred of the subject, thought, feeling, composition, line, drawing, color, charm, and beauty, beauty above all. Make a black, make a white, that is all there is to the secret of the masters.—“Make a roux,” says the Cuisinière bourgeoise.—But a self-respecting Vatel despises these vulgar recipes and only serves those dishes skilfully prepared. An artist worthy of the name does his cooking at home, keeps his sketches in the studio, and only brings serious paintings to the public. (Emphasis in original.)49

The real artist is a Vatel, the male chef to French nobility who invented his own dishes, while the lesser school of artists follow their cookbooks like the women for whom La Cuisinière bourgeoise was written. This passage turns the tables on a method like Zola’s, arguing that critics who defend Manet and others in terms of the painterly tache, or the coloristic effects of a work, do not liberate artistic subjectivity but

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merely create a new recipe book to produce selfconsciously modern artists. For Lagrange, such recipes reduce painting to a formula whereby the artist’s cuisine, or the ingredients of art making, is valued above all, and unfinished paintings are prematurely exhibited on the grounds that they reveal the hand of the artist and thereby communicate unique artistic temperament. But artistic identity is just what Lagrange deflates in his comparison as he equates a signature Manet to any old roux, the base of a sauce that requires the addition of other ingredients, a generic and ubiquitous preparation in French cooking. Just like a roux, a painting full of visible taches requires completion. While the tache appears in the Littré dictionary in 1873 as a specifically derogatory term in the arts—“term in painting: mass of colors without connection, without harmony”—the primary definition of the word is a stain, a dirty smudge or smear frequently associated with grease, significantly, kitchen grease.50 Ironically, two years later Zola himself would mock formulaic novelists as following recipes like a housewife with her Cuisinière bourgeoise, a dismissal doubly damaging because it aligned male artists with a quality perceived as feminine, the innate capacity for imitation rather than invention: “Monsieurs Adrien Robert and Jules Cauvain have followed the recipe exactly, like women who play house and hold the ragout spoon with one hand, the Cuisinière bourgeoise with the other.”51 In 1864, the same year that Lagrange challenged critics like Zola with language that the author would soon make his own, Manet painted a series of still lifes of seafood that appeal heartily to the body and do not shy away

from analogies between artist and chef. Fish (Still Life) is a larger-than-life depiction of carp, red gurnard, eel, and oysters obtained fresh at the market in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France’s largest fishing port, where Manet painted this scene in his summer studio (fig. 11). The ingredients suggest the beginnings of a fish stew in a bourgeois home, and the artist shares the perspective of a cook who chooses and arranges ingredients as the painter does motifs. Whether or not critics would have used culinary puns to analyze the work must remain an open question, for very little contemporary criticism of it is recorded. Manet’s 1860s still lifes were not shown in the Salon, where most reviews were produced. Instead, several were exhibited at the galleries of dealers Louis Martinet and Alfred Cadart in 1865, including most likely Fish (Still Life). The artist also showed this painting in his 1867 retrospective, held in an independent pavilion outside the Universal Exhibition, indicating that he considered it important or, at least, salable (it did not in fact sell in his lifetime).52 Certainly, viewers would have associated Fish (Still Life) with the legacy of Jean-BaptisteSiméon Chardin, who had elevated the status of still life and genre painting in the preceding century. In the 1850s and 1860s, Chardin’s work entered the Louvre and became a newly popular and valued part of French artistic heritage. This recognition contributed to a revival of interest in Chardin’s typical subject matter, domestic still lifes and genre scenes, by such nineteenth-century painters as Henri FantinLatour, François Bonvin, Théodule Ribot, and Antoine Vollon. His work also received new critical attention, including in Edmond and

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Fig. 11

Édouard Manet, Fish (Still Life), 1864. Oil on canvas, 73.4 x 92.1 cm.

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Fig. 12

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Silver Tureen, 1728. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 108 cm.

Jules de Goncourt’s important 1863 essay “Chardin,” published in the Gazette des beaux-arts and incorporated into the book L’Art du XVIIIe siècle (1873–74). Manet probably saw some forty works by Chardin in the show organized by critic Philippe Burty at Martinet’s gallery in 1860. One of the paintings exhibited, The Silver Tureen (1728; fig. 12), is most likely the compositional model for Fish (Still Life). In terms of subject matter, Manet’s painting has much in common with Chardin’s The Ray (1725–26), which was then in the Louvre.

Chardin was not classically trained and is known to have had a long and arduous painting process. He mixed his own color “recipes,” as contemporaries called them, which he guarded in secret.53 Art historians and critics from the eighteenth century up to today have noticed that his technique produced canvases that seem particularly tactile, as though the artist used his hand to paint objects that the viewer could grasp with the eyes. One such influential voice belonged to Denis Diderot, who describes Chardin’s work in the 1767 Salon: “One says about him that he has a technique all his own, and that he uses his thumb as much as his brush. I do not know if this is true. What is sure is that

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I have never met anyone who has seen him work; however that may be, his compositions call out to amateurs and connoisseurs. It is an incredible vigor of color, a general harmony, a piquant and true effect, beautiful masses, a magic that brings one to despair, a ragout in selection and organization.”54 Two aspects merit special attention here: the importance of touch and the language of taste. These senses are marshaled for painting that seems magical in its formation and has strong emotional effects on audiences. Diderot’s interest in and privileging of touch have been well studied. His writings are central to Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s argument that vision was not considered the “noblest” of the senses in the eighteenth century, when touch vied for primacy in philosophical debates about how knowledge was acquired and the fine arts encountered. Her discussion, while challenging scholarly assumptions about the ocularcentrism of Enlightenment thinking, discounts the senses of smell and taste in the processes of knowledge formation and art appreciation. She explains that “it is difficult to see what cognitive function would be fulfilled by the faculties of taste and smell. Too deeply immersed in the world of the physical, these two senses scarcely lend themselves to metaphorical use, the sole route by which sensation can attain the domain of truth. One can ‘see’ an idea, ‘touch on’ a theoretical difficulty, ‘hear out’ a problem, but one never ‘scents’ an argument and one rarely ‘tastes’ a concept.”55 Intended to paraphrase the perspective of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, this assessment ignores the fact that taste was the primary metaphor around which

eighteenth-century aesthetics revolved, and it does not leave room to take seriously Diderot’s reference to a spicy quality in Chardin’s painting and his comparison of the composition to a ragout, a compliment that by the nineteenth century, as we have seen with Zola, had been transformed into an insult. Both references affirm that taste held metaphorical significance for Diderot. Given the rise to prominence of gastronomic discourse in the nineteenth century, the metaphorical potential of taste comes across more strongly in nineteenth-century reactions to Chardin. To narrate the qualities of Chardin’s paintwork in the 1860s, the Goncourt brothers turned to the culinary and works of art became semantically edible.56 For example, here is their passage addressing La Pourvoyeuse (The Return from the Market, 1739), showing a young female domestic worker returning from shopping with loaves of bread and meat: . . . this radiant woman, from shoes to bonnet in a clear whiteness, creamy, in a manner of speaking: everything emerges victoriously and harmoniously from the canvas, the contour fatty in its outlines, the scratched scrapes of the brush, the clots of color, in a sort of crystallization of the paint [pâte]. The lightweight tones, tender and shimmering, thrown everywhere and returning back and forth incessantly, even into the white of the casaquin, have risen like . . . a dust of heat, like a floating vapor enveloping this woman, her clothing, the buffet, the bread on the buffet, the walls, and the back of the room. (Emphasis added.)57

The creamy, clotted colors rise like dough (the primary meaning of pâte), giving off heat

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and steam as though freshly out of the oven, like the loaves of bread that the figure places on a table. A term favored by the Goncourts is “buttery,” used to name the material qualities of Chardin’s “raw,” “fresh,” “rich” paint as well as its application, “the butteriness of his touch.”58 Colors are described as “burned,” and the com­position of Chardin’s paint is acknowledged as a mystery for his contemporaries: “They interrogated him and tried to learn about how he crushed his paint, his mixtures of color, his painterly cuisine [sa cuisine de peinture; emphasis in original]. They asked for the recipes of this colorist, the basis of his talent. . . . It seemed impossible to them that this man should paint as he painted, if he indeed painted with the materials common to all painters.”59 Jacques Rancière has characterized the Goncourts’ mode of spectatorship as a de-figuration that transforms figurative details into events of pictorial matter, granting new autonomy to the materials of paint and the artist’s gestures.60 With their emphasis on materiality and facture, the Goncourts reconfigure the optical not only in terms of the tactile, as Rancière suggests, but also in terms of the gustatory. Instead of imagining the process of viewing painting as occurring between a self-contained subject standing at a required distance from the object of reflection, in the Goncourts’ prose the viewer is positioned as proximate to, even contiguous with, the painting that is touched (scratched scrapes), tasted (creamy, fatty clots of color), even inhaled (floating vapor). The continuity of this language of multisensory engagement runs through to recent accounts of Chardin’s painting from Norman

Bryson to Ewa Lajer-Burcharth.61 For Jonathan Crary, Chardin’s works actually mark a historical shift in representation from the fullness of sensory experience toward what he argues are the ocular paradigms of the nineteenth century: “His [Chardin’s] still lifes, especially, are a last great presentation of the classical object in all its plenitude, before it is sundered irrevocably into exchangeable and ungrounded signifiers or into the painterly traces of an autonomous vision.”62 This statement forms part of Crary’s thesis that by the early nineteenth century theories of vision had shifted away from the incorporeal relations modeled on the camera obscura, where the eye was imagined to reflect the exterior world, to emphasize how each person saw according to his or her anatomy. Paradoxically, despite this new appreciation of corporealized vision, Crary contends that, with these developments, vision became increasingly privileged and divorced from the other senses over the course of the nineteenth century. According to his argument, a “pervasive ‘separation of the senses’ ” enabled the modernist drive toward the representation of “pure perception” that we have seen described by Greenberg. He writes: “once vision became relocated in the subjectivity of the observer . . . the multiple affirmations of the sovereignty and autonomy of vision derived from this newly empowered body, in modernism and elsewhere,” took hold.63 For Crary, then, Chardin escaped the preoccupation with vision that would characterize nineteenth-century modernism. I find different implications for Crary’s demonstration that by the nineteenth century the eye and body were understood to be intertwined: namely, that we see precisely that intertwining in the

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reception of works of art, rather than claims for the autonomy of the visual in the experience and process of painting.64 Rich metaphorical languages configured vision as being connected to the other senses rather than increasingly divorced from them. While the Goncourts used the language of bodily consumption to describe their encounter with eighteenth-century painting, their culinary art criticism came out of a specifically nineteenth-century context and their conceptualization of spectatorship as embodied was shared by other art critics who wrote about contemporary painting. Manet’s Fish (Still Life) complicates any easy break between Chardin and those nineteenthcentury painters who purportedly privileged autonomous vision, and it lends itself to the metaphorical possibilities of consuming painting. In the work, visual transparency and ease are replaced with the opaque density of a bodily confrontation with paint that is applied as if to suggest the experiences of tasting, touching, or smelling its viscous surfaces. The painting pre­ sents challenges to the eye that include distorted perspective, migrating outlines, and discrepancies in scale and paint application. The seafood is shown as larger-than-life and out of proportion: a red gurnard too small next to the oysters piled around it, the carp surprisingly large in front of the copper pot with its lid ajar, echoing the fish’s open mouth and foregrounding orality as a reverberating theme. The objects on display are disconcertingly poised between life and death, still fleshy bodies and not yet appetizing for human consumption. Some oysters are shucked, others still closed. The eel slithers along the tablecloth. The arched tails of the fish

suggest both rigor mortis and an upward flapping movement, and intimate the decay of oncefresh food and its effects on the nose and palate. These creatures occupy an ambiguous setting, placed on a cloth-covered wooden side table that is reprised in the contemporaneous Still Life with Fish and Shrimp, which connotes a dining room rather than a kitchen (fig. 13). The tablecloth behaves strangely. Undulating strokes of white, gray, brown, and blue, especially at the painting’s upper left, make it look more like a sea than pressed white linen. At the bottom right its corner flows up to meet the knife, only to fuse again with the surface as the eye moves to the left, like a breaking wave or like the process of painting, with each new stroke folding into the surface, seeping into the paint and canvas like the salt water from the oysters leaking into the whitish cloth. The mixing of colors in the tablecloth adds a fluidity to forms that is reflected in the curving right edge of the cauldron, flickering by virtue of a few patches of fiery orange, as though seen through water. What should be solid flows in an organic rendering that takes its cues from the aquatic home of the transposed creatures and sets the viewer adrift with the eddies and currents of the paint. As if to demonstrate this instability, painted outlines do not adhere to the objects they represent. At the lower right where the tablecloth points upward, a thick black contour line pulls away from the peak. Parsley floats above it, a late addition that is seasoning for the painting. Its color livens the medley like the uncut lemon beneath it, bitter yellow, balancing the somber browns of copper and background as acidity would cut through a rich dish.

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As Carol Armstrong has argued of Fish (Still Life), reciprocity is established between the sticky materiality of paint and seafood.65 The cool slickness of the carp’s underside, placed in the middle of the canvas and made the brightest point of the painting, is rendered through broad strokes of creamy white paint that command the viewer’s attention. These strokes seem virtually licked onto the buttery belly. This is not a “licked” canvas—the term denoting the

Fig. 13

Édouard Manet, Still Life with Fish and Shrimp,

slippery sheen of extreme finish associated with Academic standards—but a more literal demonstration of paint’s potential to signify multiple materials, experiences, and objects at once. The viscosity of the open oysters is evoked not through the details of their appearance, but by broad, shining strokes that suggest what it would feel like to touch or lick one. Next to the opened lips of carp and copper, the shucked oysters double as open mouths, the white edges like teeth surrounding the beige and pinktinged flesh of a tongue. The actions of licking, slurping, and swallowing are further invoked

1864. Oil on canvas, 44.8 × 73 cm.

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by the paint, applied to the interiors in short, wide strokes as if with the tongue itself, implying the same motion of that muscle as would be required to lift the flesh out of its shell and into the mouth. The oysters resemble open eyes as well as mouths, leaking saltwater tears as they overflow with milky pigment. But like the eyes of the carp and gurnard they are blind, pools of gooey material that suggest not the penetrative power of vision but the aqueous tissue of the organs. The viewer’s own eye becomes stuck in the passages of oil paint, caught on the surface of a canvas that resists recession with its unelaborated background and table that rises too high at the back, tilted up as if to suggest an overlap between the cloth-covered table and the canvas, analogous surfaces that both support the still life objects. In front of this large painting the viewer is not set at a distance but is drawn into its airless, watery density and can imagine touching or licking its surface as well as its subjects. The materiality of the human body, animal bodies, and paint itself laps and overlaps. The slimy substances on display may easily cause disgust, especially when we consider the conditions of painting raw seafood in hot summer months. The clotting paint comes to suggest the subjects crusting over time. But the other side of a sensuous painting that appeals so thoroughly to the body is erotic.66 BrillatSavarin’s popular Physiologie du goût counted sexual arousal among the senses, and this drive for pleasure could be linked above all to taste because the mouth and tongue are also sexual organs, and ingestion, like intercourse, breaks down the boundaries between bodies.67 With

strokes that seem orally applied, Fish (Still Life) intimates the gratification of multiple appetites at the same time that it represents oysters, a food understood in the nineteenth century to stimulate desires both gustatory and sexual. Seen as providing the right nutrition for stamina, oysters were also visually associated with female genitalia, and they connoted erotic interaction through the motions of the tongue while eating the live mollusk.68 In Fish (Still Life) the male body is implicated, too, in the stiff tail of the engorged carp, with the penile fold of its head, on a fluid-stained tablecloth rumpled like a bedsheet. In this context of colliding sensations and reversibility between bodies, we are equipped to test descriptions like the one given by Richard Brettell and Stephen Eisenman of the related Still Life with Fish and Shrimp (see fig. 13), also painted in Boulogne, which shows a large fish much like the carp in Fish (Still Life) and a needlefish intimately intertwined on a white paper wrapper or cutting board alongside a small pile of shrimp: “The point of view here is that of the worldly gentleman, cosmopolitan, or flâneur. The components that constitute this still life are no more salient for the artist-observer than if they were flowers, shoes, or dead rabbits; they are observed with a connoisseur’s combination of keenness and dispassion.”69 Their assessment recalls the terms of Zola’s characterization of still life objects as insignificant and essentially interchangeable, and of the artist as a detached observer, which remain central to the tradition now known as formalist. Those premises are also commonly held in social art-historical accounts that position food and drink as ciphers of

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exchange value within the Second Empire and Third Republic’s rapid expansion of capitalist glamour in the form of spectacle, the situation that Crary describes when he claims that Chardin’s still lifes are the last to show objects before they become “exchangeable and ungrounded signifiers” severed from their phenomenal ­identities. Food and drink too easily become arbitrary vessels or commodities in these nar­ ratives, and their sensual complexities and individual significations are elided.70 Instead we might look back to a different Zola, whose construction of detached analysis was put under significant strain in his descriptions of embodied spectatorship, and whose orally inflected criticism was, as we will see in the next chapter, shared by many of Manet’s other critics. To do this is to look again at Still Life with Fish and Shrimp and notice not Manet’s keen powers of empirical observation but his manipulation of subjects that confound the eye’s expectations. What at first appears to be a paper wrapper is clearly too small to have carried home the catch and is so dense that it suggests instead a misshapen marble block, next to which the pile of shrimp is shrunken and peculiarly marooned on a wooden side table. To look back to this other side of nineteenth-century critical discourse is not to argue that Manet’s selection of objects is unimportant, and might as well be flowers or game, but to emphasize how again, as in Fish (Still Life), Manet explores the shared materiality of these animal bodies and the greasy paint representing them, suggesting nonvisual qualities of the depicted subject matter and of the paint itself. The agility of the broad strokes that

define the contours of the needlefish in Still Life with Fish and Shrimp, painted wet on wet, answer to the quick, fluid movements of that animal. Finally, to take critical constructions of consuming painting seriously moves us away from the claim that Manet observes the subject with dispassion, as a worldly gentleman or flâneur would purportedly do, but to notice how he foregrounds the disturbing aspects of the fish that are out of place in this elegant setting and seem to threaten the viewing body. The needlefish, an animal known for jumping out of the water and puncturing the flesh of other fish and fishermen alike, wraps around its companion, sharp jaws extending out of the frame as though it is ready to slide off the table. A slithering creature becomes even more alarming in the contemporaneous Eel and Mullet, in which a black eel pins down the flesh of a confetti-colored mullet, its curvature rhyming with a presumed tablecloth that rises uncannily into a mountain above the fish in broad gray, brown, and blue tones (fig. 14). In that painting the entire composition of thickly applied strokes comes to life, and identities do not remain fixed. The tail of the eel echoes the shape and coloration of the large knife painted next to it, confusing organic with inorganic, dead flesh with the instrument of its demise. The flowing strokes of this watery paint world, where cloth tosses and turns, make the effect of prolonged viewing resemble nothing so much as seasickness. In a place and time when writers and artists participated in a culinary culture with rippling outward effects, art critics adopted new languages. Their references to cuisine operated on

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Fig. 14

Édouard Manet, Eel and Mullet, 1864. Oil on canvas, 38 × 46 cm.

two levels. Critics relied on metaphors comparing artists to cooks and paintings to certain kinds of foods, but they also described paint itself as a consumable substance with distinctive flavors, as though the process of viewing were a form of ingestion. The latter tendency to relate to paint with all the tools of the sensorium should broaden our appreciation of the frameworks through which audiences encountered paint-

ings and allow us to move beyond art-historical accounts that emphasize the sovereignty of the visual for spectators. As I have suggested with respect to Fish (Still Life) and will continue to demonstrate in turning to paintings by Caillebotte, Monet, and Pissarro, the full significance of culinary metaphors is not limited to their use in relation to the particular paintings that they described. Instead, they initiate a field of engagement with works of art and criticism that is attuned to registers other than the visual.

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chapter two

The Flesh of Painting

the next three chapters address specific culinary metaphors and their related sexual politics. The foods to which paintings and figures were compared were endowed with gendered characteristics connected to cultural stereotypes that remain familiar. Here I turn to the meat metaphors widely used to target paintings of women by Manet and the Impressionists, metaphors that expressed the visceral reactions of critics and appealed to the reader’s senses of taste, smell, and touch, as well as sight. The equation of the female body with sexualized meat is a cliché by now, well established in the mass media. In the nineteenth century, it was being articulated in popular culture as well as in the discourses of art. I begin where the last chapter ended, with Manet and Zola in the 1860s. I have drawn attention to Zola’s construction of Manet’s painting as raw meat or flesh and blood, and

I will argue that these are mutually inflecting constructions that appeared outside of Zola’s writings. In the extensive art-historical literature generated by Olympia and its scandal, no art historian has brought together the critical reactions comparing the nude figure to decomposing meat, drawing the abattoir into the atelier and Salon. The disgust that Zola discerned on the faces made by the “grown-up children” forced to stomach Manet’s bitter viande crue was readily expressed by critics in 1865. After examining these responses to Olympia, I show that, surprisingly, Zola’s strategy for defending Manet and Olympia used similar terms, and that Zola’s description of Manet’s work as raw meat and of Olympia as the materialized flesh of its artist can be connected to other criticism that the painting engendered, even though it operated to very different ends. The result is that Zola’s defense is riddled with ambivalence related to the body

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and gender, offering another opportunity to probe the fault lines in his construction of the critic or artist as a dispassionate analyst. Moving into the next two decades, I then follow these analogies into the reception of Impressionism, when the theme of decomposition became a central mode of denigrating Impressionist representations of women. The final part of the chapter interprets Gustave Caillebotte’s Veal in a Butcher’s Shop (c. 1882) alongside that language of putrefaction, using the painting to explore the full-bodied responses that Impressionist canvases provoked in their earliest audiences. L’Olympia faisandée

As is well known, Manet’s Olympia (fig. 15) met with a barrage of hostile commentary at the 1865 Salon. Dirty, ugly, insolent, impossible to describe, and an affront to public decency, the painting caused such a scandal that it was rehung mid-run at the top of the exhibition wall. Much of the documented outcry focused on the pallor of the nude’s skin, perceived as tinged with yellow, green, and gray, and thus redolent of a dirty, diseased, or decomposing body.1 In his book-length study of the 1865 Salon, Victor de Jankovitz exclaims: “the facial expression is of a prematurely aged, vicious creature; the body has the color of aged meat [une couleur faisandée], reminiscent of the horror of the Morgue.”2 Paul de Saint-Victor echoes Jankovitz in his review for La Presse: “The crowd gathers, as at the Morgue, before this gamy Olympia [devant l’Olympia faisandée] and the horrible Ecce homo of Manet’s.”3 These joined a host of other accusations that the skeletal nude was “dead of

yellow fever and already in an advanced state of decomposition” and in dire need of “an exam by the public health inspectors!”4 Such assertions of illness and death established the figure as a low-rung prostitute in a brothel setting. Fears of venereal disease leading to bodily decay centered on sex workers. Seen as sickly, skinny, unwashed, and set in a painted context as well as an exhibition context where “she” was presented for sale, the supine figure proved alarming. Disgruntled critics also took advantage of the painting’s notoriety to express their disapproval in heightened, and profitable, terms. When the above commentary by Janko­ vitz and Saint-Victor has been translated from French into English, “putrid” has generally been chosen to stand for faisandé.5 Putrid is a term equally suited to the decomposition of human and animal bodies, and has likely been selected because Jankovitz and Saint-Victor also reference the Paris Morgue in their reviews. At the time it was a novel institution where anonymous dead bodies were displayed to the public so that the corpses might be identified; this provided a form of modern spectacle for the many visitors who passed through its halls.6 But faisandé has a more specific meaning, closer to “gamy.” The word refers to meat that has been hung to age in order to deepen its flavor and, as Frédérique Desbuissons has shown in her survey of the theme of rotten painting in nineteenth-century Salon criticism, it was widely used to debase art and challenge its claims to temporal endurance and continuing value.7 This distinction between putrid and gamy belongs to a wider and underappreciated trend in nineteenth-century art criticism whereby

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Fig. 15

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 190 cm.

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sexualized female figures were compared to rotting animal flesh. Joining Jankovitz and SaintVictor, another critic of the 1865 Salon likened the Diana painted by Paul Baudry, who would soon be elected to the Academy, to Olympia with mutual disdain: “The general tone of the goddess [Diana] is yellow, and her skin is that disagreeable yellow that one sees in the old chickens on market stands that are kept at bay by all knowing cooks. She seems to be in a state of decomposition almost as advanced as Manet’s Olympia. . . .”8 The damning comparison must have stung for Baudry. This language did not originate here. In 1798 the fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française noted a vulgar use of viande to connote the genital region, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, the link to meat was commonplace in descriptions of venal bodies. When Alfred Delvau published the first edition of his Dictionnaire érotique moderne in 1850 he defined viande as “Femme publique” and a boucherie (butcher’s shop) as a “brothel, where the large pieces of meat—human meat— abound.”9 This vernacular also appeared liberally in brothel guides that referred to sex workers as “meaty,” “juicy morsels,” as “fat as bacon.”10 One English guide to French brothels revels in the butcher shop conceit. The abbess [madam] has just put the kipehook on all other purveyors of the French flesh market. She does not keep her meat too long on the hooks, though she will have her price; but nothing to get stale here. You may have your meat dressed to your own liking, and there is no need of cutting twice from one joint; and if it suits your taste, you may kill your own lamb or mutton for her flock is

in prime condition, and always ready for sticking [slitting of the throat]. When any of them are fried they are turned out to grass, and sent to the hammer, or disposed of by private contract, but never brought in again; consequently, the rots, bots, glanders, and other diseases incidental to cattle, are not generally known here.11

The sex workers may be expensive, admits The Man of Pleasure’s Pocket Book, but they are young, plentiful, submissive, and cast out at the first sign of age or disease. Women and meat are linked through the twin fears of venereal and meat-borne illness. Through the metaphor of butchery, sexual intercourse is compared to penetration by the hook or knife. The consequence for the prostitute is continuous attack and finally murder. Like comparisons of prostitutes to “old meaty whores” or “dried-up, tough bits of meat that require a great deal of chewing before they can be digested,” the term faisandé was most likely to be applied to an undesirable woman, as Manet’s figure was classified.12 “L’Olympia faisandée” was doubly threatening, as contaminated meat as well as diseased human flesh. Sometimes the comparison to well-aged meat was specifically used as a mode of denigrating black women. Another English guide to French brothels, ambitiously titled The Pretty Women of Paris: Their Names and Addresses, Qualities and Faults, Being a Complete Directory, or, Guide to Pleasure for Visitors to the Gay City, describes a “sumptuous bagnio” on the rue Chabanais that included “a stinking, sweaty negress, who is always retained on the establishment for those who like to take their game when it is ‘high’.”13

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The directory drew demeaningly upon the rank odor and clammy surface of aging meat to evoke and debase racialized female physicality, rendering the black sex worker less than human, in step with nineteenth-century racist tropes. The figure of Olympia was twice called a “Venus Hottentot” in Salon criticism that connected the white woman with the black attendant by way of a reference to Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, who was transported from southern Africa and had been exhibited publicly in Paris earlier in the century. Criticism of Olympia was also riddled with less explicit but no less significant allusions to racial difference, including the above reference to yellow fever, a tropical disease, or the accusation that the nude appeared simian, like a gorilla or monkey.14 Descriptions of the figure of Olympia as faisandé join these comparisons to suggest a racialized as well as a sexualized identity for the recumbent white figure. A closer translation of faisandé is important for reimagining the reactions implied by a term connected to the culinary and the practices of butchery. The language conjures up the sick­ ening and pungent smell, slimy texture, and nauseating taste of meat left hanging too long, as well as the experience of food poisoning. References abound in 1865 to the painting’s ability to produce nausea and indigestion and adversely affect the viewer’s body and health. Maurice Drak sums up Manet’s submissions in 1865: “An artist’s hand guided by a brain full of paradoxes until the point of indigestion. Indigestion took place this year.”15 Amédée Cantaloube complains that Manet stole his tones from the Spanish, but “diluted [them] in some

foul-­smelling [nauséabonde, also translated as “sickening” or “nauseating”] mixture.”16 Marc de Montifaud argues: “We know how to recognize M. Manet’s touch amid the eccentricities that he wanted to serve us, like his Christ Mocked and his composition of Olympia, and this touch denotes a vigor which, used by a healthier mind, could have produced works of art” (emphasis added).17 The process of ingestion and the experience of indigestion provided powerful vocabulary for viewing potentially corrupting subjects because both imply physical contact with the revolting, reeking materials of painting, conflated with the contaminated flesh of female bodies. Eating collapses the boundaries between the body and other bodies or objects, threatening the autonomy of the subject and making affronts to the sense of taste the most privileged in theorizations of disgust or abjection.18 From the opposing camp and in support of Manet, we have seen that in the following year Zola compared Manet’s paintings to raw meat in his series of articles on the 1866 Salon. He used the metaphor to stress the unadulterated power of Manet’s works, which he considered as the direct translation of the artist’s personal perceptual experience and temperament into paint. He contrasted this with the superficial treats confected by Academicians using old recipes to flatter the taste of the bourgeoisie. All around [Manet’s paintings] stretch the sweets of the fashionable artistic confectioners, sugar-candy trees and pastry houses, gingerbread gentlemen and ladies made of vanilla cream. The candy shop becomes pinker and sweeter, and the artist’s living canvases take on a certain

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bitterness in the midst of this river of milk. Also, one must see the faces made by the grown-up children passing through the gallery. For two cents you will not make them swallow veritable raw meat, but they stuff themselves like famished people with all the sickening sweetness served to them.19

Instead of the nude figure of Olympia, Zola compares Manet’s paintings themselves to viande crue. This is not so far from Saint-Victor’s use of the meat metaphor to imply that Olympia itself, and not just the figure within it, was fleshy— though for Saint-Victor that flesh was deliquescent, while for Zola it was fresh and healthy. Saint-Victor italicizes the title in his passage, thereby referring to the painting named Olympia, not, or not only, the figure called Olympia: “La foule se presse, comme à la Morgue, devant l’Olympia faisandée.” In his review, Jules Claretie explains that such perceptions of Manet had become so widespread in 1865 that they migrated onto other artists of the realist persuasion, and that “the public resists this bloody flesh, this raw, violent, bloody p ­ ainting.”20 These reviews directed at Manet’s painting as a whole related to the artist’s technique, displayed across the entire surface of the canvas. The “raw, violent, bloody painting” resulted from a style perceived as crude, direct, and harsh. The jarring color contrasts of white sheets set off against a dark background and the suppression of halftones reportedly hurt the eyes. Victor Fournel worries that “its coloring of verjuice [an acidic juice made from unripe grapes, used like vinegar], sour and acidic, penetrates into the eye as does the surgeon’s

saw into flesh.”21 Similar language had been used by the pseudonymous Bourgeois de Paris in the same journal to describe Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass two years earlier: “[Manet’s] acidic and irritating color pierces the eye like a steel saw. . . . He has all the harshness of green fruit that will never ripen.”22 These reactions combine the tendency to describe embodied shock through the sense of taste and the simultaneous destruction of the organ of vision, and they join other claims that the painting could stupefy, stun, or disarm the spectator, creating the effect of “a glass of ice water that each viewer receives in the face.”23 Another critic calls Olympia a “mixture of raw tones, of colliding lines that shatter the eyes,” once again uniting the sensual immediacy of the raw (bitter, sour, biting) with the annihilation of the eye, the critic’s most important instrument.24 Rhetorically or not, the forms and colors of the painting seemed to threaten the viewing body, as the artist’s tools became the weapons of the surgeon or the butcher, the “steel saw” turned against the audience as well as the pitiful model. Even Zola describes the coloration of Olympia in not dissimilar terms: “At first glance, one only sees two violently opposing hues . . . if you wish to reconstruct reality, you must move back a few steps.”25 As a spectator walks toward the painting, representation breaks down into its material elements. The effect could be akin to literal decomposition as the subject dissolves into the thick and variegated tones best appreciated in the sheets, the bouquet and its paper wrapper, and the attendant’s pink gown. Critics experienced Manet’s broad strokes as bursting free from their forms and the unified whole

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­ ispersing into morsels like an animal dismemd bered into its component parts.26 Critics also read this fragmentation across the bodies of the two women represented, particularly the nude. Manet arranged that figure’s limbs in ways that segment them, such as the tip of the left breast that intersects the edge of the left arm, the left hand that hides the connection of left leg to torso, and the slipper that divides the toes of the right foot from the lower right leg. The attendant’s body is mostly covered in a voluminous pink dress, but the right hand is surprisingly underdeveloped. It lacks a wrist joint and hovers, seemingly disconnected from the body, atop the pale pink and white passages of garment and paper.27 The prolific caricaturist Charles Albert d’Arnoux, better known by his pseudonym Bertall, drew attention to the disjunction in the nude body in his prints for L’Illustration and the Journal amusant (fig. 16). In these prints the head floats above the chest and shoulders in reference to the black choker, an enlarged bouquet divides the figure in half, and the engorged feet hardly seem to belong to the body. Even harsher, Charles Amédée de Noé, working under the pseudonym Cham, reduced the reclining figure to a schematic face and elongated neck floating above one grotesque, disconnected arm with a massive, claw-shaped hand (fig. 17). The hand of the attendant in this caricature has become nothing more than four dark marks that rest, spider-like, atop the bouquet. In text, the figure of Olympia was consistently called “deformed” and “unformed.”28 To Félix Deriège she was ­composed of “impossible forms” and “d[id] not have human form” because Manet had

Fig. 16

Bertall, Manette, ou la femme de l’ébéniste, 1865. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 27, 1865, 2.

Fig. 17

Cham, Le Salon comique, 1865. Caricature from Le Musée des familles, lectures du soir, June 3, 1865.

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Fig. 18

F. Grenan, La Foire aux jambons. Illustration from Almanach manuel de la bonne cuisine et de la maîtresse de maison (Paris, 1865), 45.

Fig. 19

F. Grenan, illustration from Almanach manuel de la bonne cuisine et de la maîtresse de maison (Paris, 1865), 32.

c­ rippled her so that she could not move her arms or legs. Deriège accused all realists of an over­eagerness to disarticulate the arms and dislocate the legs of their models. Félix Jahyer alleged that Manet had no sense of anatomy or of how a body fit together. The imperfections cited by Marius Chaumelin include “the flattened torso, the head pulled out of joint, the limbs [that] do not connect to the body.” Saint-Victor compared the figure to the crippled seventeenth-century poet and novelist Paul Scarron, who suffered from paralysis and a twisted spine.29 Bullemont’s comparison of Baudry’s and Manet’s nudes to plucked chickens in a market stall is close at hand. The purportedly contorted and rigid recumbent body was all the more audacious for the authority with which Manet delineated its contours. Critics complained that a dark outline of coal or dirt surrounded the undifferentiated planes of the figure’s skin, which seemed too flat, a “surface without depth.”30 As Zola remarked in “Une Nouvelle Manière,” this reminded viewers of the hard lines of printed images, including, perhaps, those found in cookbooks (357). Widely circulated, sometimes lavishly illustrated cookbooks were published for practical purposes as well as for perusal in a library. They occasionally played provocatively with the sexualization of butchered meat that was commonplace in bawdy vernacular. In this vein, the Almanach manuel de la bonne cuisine et de la maîtresse de maison (1865) features a print of a marketplace titled La Foire aux jambons (fig. 18). In the background, a young domestic worker discusses her purchases with a stallholder from an appropriate distance. Her

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bared right arm repeats the shape of the legs of ham held by the vendor and hung from the stand. In the foreground, a dandy with a cane and top hat bends down audaciously to smell a leg that the saleswoman holds out to him. We wonder, along with the skeptical male vendor surveying the exchange, what this gentleman is doing here, dressed up and obviously hungry for fresh flesh. The pluralized title suggests that more than one kind of market for flesh applies. In the boulevardier’s enthusiasm for a leg of ham proffered for his delectation by a saleswoman, the Almanach parodies a procuress parading young women for the fancy of wellheeled men. The success of the joke depends on a reader understanding that women might be identified as commodified flesh. Such jokes linger suggestively in mind when the reader confronts less explicitly feminized representations of raw meat in the rest of the cookbook. If certain criticism of the figure of Olympia is read without knowledge of its referent, it could convincingly describe a print of a skinned rabbit from the Almanach’s section on segmenting animals and identifying cuts of meat (fig. 19). Manet’s critics forced the nude body into a framework akin to this crude print of animal flesh, with its hard edges containing a body filled with empty planes, the limbs pulled out of joint and the bald head with grimacing features seemingly disconnected from the body. With the comparison of the nude Olympia to meat, the body was ripe for semantic butchery. The figure was broken into pieces by a public with “a bone to pick,” as Zola put it in “Une Nouvelle Manière” (365). While the painting was commonly dubbed undeserving of critical

attention or impossible to characterize, many indulged in a sadistic survey of the body parts. In Jules Claretie’s review, the final death knell occurred when the painting was moved to the top of the Salon wall, the result ensuring that “one can no longer tell whether it is a pack of nude flesh or of laundry.”31 Zola’s Defense

Zola would experience these critical dynamics firsthand. Just months after publishing “Une Nouvelle Manière,” in which he treated Olympia most extensively, his novel Thérèse Raquin was attacked in uncannily similar terms to the scandal that had surrounded Manet’s painting. Thérèse Raquin, the story of an adulterous love affair comprising murder and suicide, was written in the early months of 1867. In February, Zola pitched it for serial publication to La Revue du XIXe siècle, the same journal where he had published “Une Nouvelle Manière” in January. Thérèse Raquin would have appeared there when finished in June, had the journal not gone bankrupt in the meantime, causing Zola to publish it in L’Artiste instead. Following its publication, in a front-page article in Le Figaro written with considerable rhetorical flair and with the inflammatory title “La Littérature putride,” Louis Ulbach, writing under the pseudonym Ferragus, argued that the Morgue had entered the contemporary French literary scene, and from its privileged location in the arts it was causing the nation to degenerate like a body infected with gangrene. Calling fiction’s latest characters “faisandé,” the author accused Zola of exemplifying this “violent literature” by singling out Thérèse Raquin.

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Ulbach explicitly links Zola’s art to Manet’s: “[Zola] sees woman as M. Manet paints her, the color of mud with pink makeup.”32 The base materiality of dirty female bodies could not be hidden beneath any veneer, and the terms of this condemnation resonate with, but reverse, Zola’s account of the critical disdain for Olympia, which Zola attributes to Manet’s refusal to apply makeup to the figure (thus demonstrating his commitment to depicting reality). “If, at least, M. Manet had borrowed M. Cabanel’s rice powder puff and made up the cheeks and breasts of Olympia a bit,” Zola explains, “the young girl would have been presentable.”33 Worrying over the “screeching notes, the violent and violet blows of the brush,” Ulbach likens Zola’s pen to a vicious paintbrush that attacks and leaves traces of bruising where it lands, creating lines of prose that scream when put down on paper.34 Manet, too, was said to enact violence on his figure by butchering the form, on his viewers with acidic tones that injured the eyes, and on art itself by affixing the broken body to the canvas and asserting its value as painting. In a claim akin to Olympia’s ability to infect like yellow fever, Ulbach calls Thérèse Raquin contagious, a threat to its readers and to French culture. He reassures readers that, because his article might be read after a meal, he will not quote from a scene describing the decomposition of the character Camille’s body, which the male protagonist Laurent attempts to identify at the Morgue—a scene in the novel that also strongly recalls the terms of the reception of Olympia’s scandalous, decomposing body. “You can feel the worms [les vers] swarming,” Ulbach shudders. Zola’s lines fester just as Olympia’s

critics felt that paint itself, like the body it represented, was putrefying.35 Ulbach and Zola knew each other, and Zola may have encouraged Ulbach to write this piece in order to stir up a succès de scandale around his novel. If so, Zola wanted to align himself with the critical situation facing Manet. This would be unsurprising, given the parallels that the novelist drew between their artistic projects. Zola called Manet a fellow naturalist and claimed that in his writing he approached human subjects like the painter of Olympia. I found myself in the position of those painters of nudes who work without any desire crossing their minds, and who are deeply surprised when a critic declares himself scandalized by the living flesh in their paintings. . . . The humanity of the models disappeared as it does from the eyes of an artist who has a naked woman sprawled out in front of him and who thinks only of how to put that woman on his canvas in all the truth of her forms and coloration. . . . I wrote each scene, even the most passionate, with merely the curiosity of a scientist.36

This passage comes from the 1868 defense of Thérèse Raquin that Zola published as a preface to its second edition, in response to attacks by critics including Ulbach. The text is a clear reference to Olympia, that painting of the “naked woman” that “scandalized” audiences. Zola asserts that both he and Manet act as dispassionate scientific analysts driven toward truth in representation, an argument he had also mounted in his defense of Olympia in “Une Nouvelle Manière” the previous year.

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Like the 1868 preface to Thérèse Raquin, “Une Nouvelle Manière en peinture: Édouard Manet” was an artistic manifesto applying to both literature and painting. In the essay, Zola developed a privileged metaphor for Manet’s work, one that related to his 1866 characterization of Manet’s paintings as bitter-tasting viande crue. Like those critics who compared Olympia to meat, Zola also imagined that painting as flesh, but as human flesh. He declared that the work embodied the artist’s “flesh and blood,” and repeated this four times in the essay. The work that Zola believed demonstrated this transubstantiation best was Olympia. In 1865, Édouard Manet is again admitted to the Salon; he shows a Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers and his masterpiece, his Olympia. I said masterpiece, and I will not rescind the word. I contend that this canvas is truly the flesh and blood of the painter. It contains him entirely and nothing but him. It will remain the work most characteristic of his talent, as the highest mark of his power. I read in it the personality of Édouard Manet, and when I analyzed the temperament of the artist, I had only this painting before my eyes, which contains all of the others.37

Rather than focusing on the flesh and blood of the supine female figure, which so exercised the critics in 1865, Zola redirects attention onto Manet himself, so that the flesh in question is not hers but his. Instead of the semantic disempowerment of the nude, Zola’s strategy works with the captivating and commanding aspect of that painted body by substituting Manet’s body for it, neutralizing the figure’s threat as a brazen, lower-class sex worker or model while

affirming Manet’s abilities as a painter. Zola avoids the thorny question of the subject entirely by proclaiming that in front of a Manet painting, the viewer is looking not at any particular object depicted but instead at an artistic subject. Related to his conviction that art should not be confected or cooked up with recipes, he instead writes that it should be “sweated out” by the artist: “What I look for before all else in a painting is a man, and not a painting . . . art is a human product, a human secretion. It is our bodies that sweat out the beauty of our works.”38 Given that Zola tied Manet’s painting to the material of his body, it was by breaking down that body through the model of anatomical dissection that the critic hoped to locate the secrets of Manet’s subjectivity and its realization in paint. Using his metaphor of the critic as scientific analyst, Zola opens “Une Nouvelle Manière” with the claim that “there is, for the critic, a penetrating joy in saying that he can dissect a being,” referring to Manet as the object of a critical vivisection with parallels in the figurative butchery that critics enacted upon the nude Olympia.39 In an 1866 article for Le Figaro, Zola insists that “the novelist analyst . . . puts on the white apron of the anatomist [passe le tablier blanc de l’anatomiste] and dissects, fiber by fiber, the human beast laid out completely naked on the slab of the amphitheatre.” This echoes the language of the white apron that Zola used earlier that year for “chefs” of the Academy, “the Académie des beaux-arts put on the white apron [passait le tablier blanc] and got involved in the cooking,” suggesting an underside to the allusions to cookery that Zola so often elaborated, a twin discourse wherein the artist serves

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up, butchers, or dissects his model and the critic does the same to the artist.40 Zola’s anatomical analogy, like his descriptions of tasting the flavors of Manet’s art, depends on the dissolution of boundaries between critic and painter or painting, calling into question the framework of analytic distance on the part of critic toward artist or artist toward model or, at least, suggesting complications inherent in that framework and its claims to scientific detachment. Ulbach was attuned to those complications. He complained about the consequences of the anatomy metaphor, which was established more widely at the time and also used in relation to Balzac and Flaubert, and the concomitant intrusion of the body into or as art: “I do not intend to restrict the domain of the author. Everything, even to the skin, belongs to him: but to tear at the skin is no longer observation, it is surgery; and if once in a while, by chance, an écorché might be indispensable to a psychological demonstration, the écorché used systematically is nothing but madness and depravity.”41 For Ulbach, the artist should engage in direct observation, but not the “penetrating joy” that Zola described of probing beneath the skin. A line should exist between the author and the surgeon, the pen and the knife. Otherwise, the art would be “perverted,” “sick,” “violent,” and “brutal.” Overall, it would be addressed bluntly to the body, encouraging its vulgarities and exposing its vulnerabilities. Ulbach felt that Zola’s characters were motivated only by their “physical impressions,” the passions of their flesh. “A storm beneath the skull is a sublime spectacle; a storm in the kidneys is a despicable spectacle” (emphasis in original), he exclaims,

alarmed that Zola’s fiction concerned only the struggles of the body and not the mind.42 To make this point, he accused Zola of producing rancid prose just as others accused Manet of painting rotting flesh, relying on the repulsive qualities of fetid material that were sure to elicit a strong corporeal response in journal readers, mimicking the response that artists or authors imposed on their unlucky audiences or readers. According to their critics, both Manet and Zola were too invested in the body for their work to attain the status of art or science, and Zola’s recourse to scientific method as a defense of his art criticism, his literature, and the painting he admired had no traction for Ulbach. The historical gendering of the dichotomy between mind and body is inseparable from Ulbach’s protest and is also a source of ambivalence in Zola’s defense of Manet. Zola describes a situation in which Manet’s paintings are inseparable from the painter’s body, suggesting that they even share the same materiality (“art is . . . a human secretion”), and that paintings could therefore be conceived as chair or viande crue, which he sometimes used interchangeably.43 This proposition came with risks. Janko­vitz and Saint-Victor were able to use the concept of viande crue to denigrate the body of Olympia because of the wider association between sexualized female bodies and raw meat. They were furthermore able to suggest that the surface of the painting Olympia was also a rotting flesh because a painting canvas had long been metaphorically configured as female “flesh and blood.” This connection, rich with rhetorical possibilities, emerged from entrenched hierarchies that gendered the mind, with its power to create and to

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rise above the “conditions of creaturality,” in the masculine, and the body, with its base physicality, in the feminine.44 These tropes manifested in a figurative alliance between the female body and the surface of the canvas as the blank slate upon which feminized raw material was shaped and made meaningful by a masculine organizing force. As has been a central concern of feminist art history, the male painter’s process could then be couched in sexual terms, as a battle for mastery over the feminine.45 These patterns of thinking underlie the fusion by Manet’s hostile critics in 1865 of Olympia’s decomposing flesh and the abject fleshiness of the painted canvas, for while Manet painted two women in Olympia, the entire surface of the painting could be understood as feminized. This connection also informs Zola’s comparison of paint to cosmetics (“If, at least, M. Manet had borrowed M. Cabanel’s rice powder puff . . .”), another mode of figuring the canvas as a female body, this time to be made up with pigment.46 It is not just that the figure needs prettifying, but that the canvas as a whole requires polishing. Zola made use of the affinity of female flesh and canvas surface in L’Oeuvre (His Masterpiece, 1886), in which Claude Lantier of Le Ventre de Paris becomes the protagonist of his own novel. The book tells the story of Claude’s struggle to complete a monumental female nude, a figure to which Claude is increasingly more drawn than to his own wife, and which drives the passionate painter toward madness and eventual suicide before the beloved canvas. The plot derives from Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece, 1831), in which the artist Frenhofer works maniacally on a painting of a female nude

that only he can recognize as such. As figure and ground become indistinguishable in both stories, the entire canvas in each emerges as embodied, at least for the ill-fated protagonists. In this context, Zola’s assertion that Olympia embodies the artist’s male flesh is unexpected in its breakdown between the body of the artist, the painted nude called Olympia, and the feminized materials of painting. It exposes a male body to Zola’s vivisection and to public consumption, for Zola has already established viewing as a form of ingestion by a ravenous public. While “Une Nouvelle Manière” consistently refers to the dispassionate gaze of the critic or artist turned analyst, the encounter with paint that he describes in his account of Olympia is resistant to the penetrating eye: “At first sight, one only distinguishes two tones in the painting, two violently contrasting tones, set off against one another . . . this elegant abruptness, this violence of transitions . . . is the personal accent, the particular flavor of the work.”47 This is a striking summons of sound and taste to stand in for sight when the eye is bewildered. By suggesting that violence is the very accent or flavor of Manet’s work, Zola moves surprisingly close to other assessments that declare that Manet’s painting enacted brutality. Insisting elsewhere in the essay that the artist “has produced very particular works, with a bitter and strong flavor” (329), he approaches the consensus among critics who used alimentary metaphors of verjuice or unripe fruit to argue that Manet’s painting was in metaphoric, as well as literal, bad taste. As he positions the canvas as “flesh and blood” or viande crue, Zola figures immersion in painting as a disintegration of boundaries between

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viewer and painter or painting modeled on dissection or ingestion. When artist and artwork are elided in these ways, and dissection or ingestion serve as metaphors for viewing, the artist’s body and the body of the work become permeable, penetrable, and vulnerable, characteristics powerfully associated with the feminine.48 Carol Armstrong has suggested that there are instances in “Une Nouvelle Manière” when Manet’s gender identity comes under pressure, as when Zola describes Manet’s affection for soirées and the rituals of upper-class life, which risks aligning him more with a socialite than with a hardworking, pathbreaking artist.49 We can go further than this and argue that the prevailing metaphor of the essay as a whole—the repeated comparison of paintings to their artist’s flesh— and the specific claim that Olympia, more than any other work, represents this fusion places the male body even more powerfully in a position traditionally associated with femininity. Impressionist Rotten Merchandise

The connections that critics posed with Olympia between the female figure, the painting itself, and decomposing flesh would be further developed in relation to Impressionism, sometimes with explicit reference to Manet. Manet was understood as a forefather to the group, despite the fact that the artist never showed in their exhibitions, and Olympia’s enduring infamy sustained and diffused the terms of the painting’s criticism long after 1865. The link between Olympia and Impressionism as mutually repulsive is set out clearly in Camille Delaville’s review of the fifth I­ mpressionist Exhibition in 1880: “Since Manet’s Belle

Olympia, we have seen so many colors that have been kicked and punched onto canvases, so many arms disconnected from bodies, so many figures out of proportion . . . that we are a little disgusted with it.”50 Delaville proposed a trajectory from Manet’s nauseating, violent painting that abused the canvas as well as the figures to Impressionism. The same critical language used to characterize the reclining Olympia was employed as a generalization about all Impressionist figures as well as applied to specific female figures in paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, and Paul Gauguin, which were compared to raw meat in an advanced state, faisandé. Nor was it just the figures that appeared to be decomposing. The frankly displayed materiality of paint, a leading source of concern for critics, meant that the paintings as objects seemed to carry the possibility of deliquescence. They were themselves “rotten merchandise,” as one critic of the fourth Impressionist Exhibition in 1879 states in his tentatively supportive review: “in this exhibition there are works of real value and exceptional flavor. If the fourteen artists in the catalogue had been willing to pick over and severely limit their output, instead of displaying their shipment of fresh and rotten merchandise, the exhibition on the avenue de l’Opéra would have been a success.”51 Painters are like shopkeepers hanging merchandise of unequal quality, some fresh and some rotten, for the viewer turned consumer. The application of this metaphor became commonplace at the second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, when Renoir displayed Study: Torso, Effect of Sunlight, showing a young

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female model nude to the waist and seated in a wooded landscape (fig. 20). Louis Énault describes it in the following terms: “a large study of a nude woman—to whom it certainly would have been better to allow a dress—saddens us with the purplish tones of rotting meat [ses tons violacés de chair faisandée].”52 His commentary joined that of Albert Wolff: “Try to explain to M. Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with purplishgreen spots that denote the state of complete putrefaction in a corpse!”53 Both objected to the purple, green, yellow, and blue paint worked into the skin, through which Renoir approximated the appearance of dappled light falling on the body through trees, reflecting the tones of the forest landscape. For Énault and Wolff, this coloration made the nude appear as a putrefying piece of flesh, whether human or animal, not a living, breathing young woman. Despite the jewelry and the white cloth covering the lower body, features that respectively indicate the figure’s connection to modern life and the tradition of nude painting, for these critics neither marker of “culture” could save the figure from the base domain of natural, rotting matter. The landscape leaves its traces physically upon the body and swirls energetically around it in vibrant colors and sweeping strokes, and in these reviews the entire canvas becomes an animate, feminized surface.54 Decomposition might indicate one body’s death, but it is far from a static process, as nature reclaims the figure for its own. This commentary would carry through Renoir’s ­reception going forward. The next year Louis Leroy singled out one of Renoir’s submissions (listed in the catalogue as Femme

Fig. 20

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Study: Torso, Effect of Sunlight, c. 1876. Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm.

assise, unidentified by art historians) with the comment: “Ah! What magnificent green flesh M. Renoir gives us in n. 194, Une Femme décolletée. Nothing but studies made at the Morgue to get to such a result!”55 In fact, by 1877 this critique of Impressionism using terms of decomposition and death had already become so well established that the caricaturist Cham, author of the most brutal­ izing caricature of Olympia in 1865, dedicated a series to the theme of putrefaction. These caricatures do not compare the figures to meat,

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Fig. 21

Cham, Le Peintre impressionniste, 1877. Caricature from Le Charivari, April 22, 1877.

(fig. 22). A painter was expected to treat a female portrait subject with tact and to tread carefully. Even if the artist was committed to the principles of realism, if these came into conflict with the ideals of female beauty and propriety, the painting risked rejection by both the sitter and the public. As we have seen, the connection of a woman’s flesh to decomposing material was primarily used in relation to explicitly sexualized female bodies, nudes like Renoir’s Torso or Manet’s Olympia. The trope implied that these bodies suffered moral as well as physical decay. In his caricatures, then, Cham emphasized the Impressionist’s failure both as an artist and as a gentleman; indeed, the wild hair and beard indicate ignorance of polite society’s conventions for self-representation as well as artistic representation. Another of Cham’s caricatures in 1877 shows a police commissioner visiting

but they do show how deeply gendered the wider metaphorics of decomposition were. In Le Peintre impressionniste, an unkempt male artist, unnamed so as to stand for any of the painters exhibiting except Berthe Morisot, explains to his model: “Madame, for your portrait there are certain tones missing from your face. Could you perhaps first spend a few days at the bottom of a river?” (fig. 21). The painter wishes to work “from life,” d’après nature, and fears abandoning the direct observation understood as (and here mocked for being) critical to Impressionist practice. The cost, of course, is that if the model acquiesced, the painter would be working “from death.” In another depiction of Le Peintre impressionniste, the model complains upon first glimpse of her portrait that she appears to have been painted at the Morgue Fig. 22

Cham, Le Peintre impressionniste, 1877. Caricature from Le Monde illustré, May 5, 1877.

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Fig. 23

Cham, Exposition des peintres impressionnistes, 1877. Caricature from Le Charivari, April 15, 1877.

the show who “demands the address of the models in order to bury them at once, considering their state of putrefaction” (fig. 23). Here is another mockery of the Impressionist’s commitment to direct observation. The commissioner supposes not that the coloration reflects aesthetic choice, but that the artists recorded nature faithfully; therefore fetid corpses are scattered about the city and threaten public health just as the paintings threaten the health of audiences, another of the most common accusations in Impressionist criticism. If the models could be mocked as literally decaying rather than being made to appear so through aesthetic choice, the material of paint could also be mistaken for other organic substances, even for flesh itself. The last of Cham’s

caricatures of the quintessential Impressionist in the 1877 series brings together these two sides of the putrefaction theme (fig. 24). Even more so than in the reception of Olympia, metaphors of paintings and figures as meaty or fleshy related not just to the subject—the mottled appearance of the typically female figures and their questionable social status—but also to paint itself as unruly and unstable, formless piles of pigment that could degenerate and carry infection in their congealing materiality. Impressionist practice was known for broad strokes, generous handling, and projecting impasto that clotted across the canvas surface. We have seen that Zola relied on the concept of the tache in his defense of Manet, which he used as evidence of Manet’s empirical vision. By the 1870s, Impressionists were widely called devotees of the tache, but for very different purposes, more along the lines of the primary definition in Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française of the tache as “a mark that dirties, that spoils,” or, when used as a term in painting, as a “mass of colors without connection, without harmony.”56 Critics of the Impressionist exhibitions widely considered a shared reverence of the “famous ‘taches’ ” to be the fundamental link among the participating painters, and Impressionism was commonly called “the school of the tache.”57 “Only the pure tache exists,” scoffs the critic for L’Art. “How do they represent the light and sun? With taches, taches, always taches . . . long live the pure tache!”58 In these cases, the tache denotes not the painter’s accurate transcription of optical effects, but messy patches of unregulated pigment smeared on the canvas in loose, separate, and separating strokes, the materiality

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Fig. 24

Cham, Le Peintre impressionniste, 1877. Caricature from Le Charivari, April 26, 1877.

of which is not ­sublimated into representation. Some argued that, for Impressionists, displaying paint as material was an end in itself, and that it was impossible even to discern the subjects of their paintings through it.59 It did not help that Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, and Cézanne frequently left their works unvarnished, for varnish could yellow over time, change the colors of pigments, transform the soft tactility of paint, and create a surface luster that obscured the hard-won light effects represented within the paintings. Without the slick layer

of brittle surface coating, the sticky physicality of paint announced itself and appeared pasty and soft. Unvarnished, these surfaces were also unpreserved, for varnish sets paint to protect it from the environment and the passage of time.60 Instead, in Impressionist works, the oil-suspended medium often came across as a substance vulnerable to deterioration. Cham’s caricature uses the theme of decomposition to draw attention to the visceral effects that these Impressionist taches of color could produce, setting into tension the fact that color,

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like a painting, is perceived through the eyes, but that paint, like the bodies of models, can be smelled, touched, and tasted (see fig. 24). An open-mouthed bourgeois gentleman, whose corporeal relationship to the canvas he assesses is staged as he grasps it in his hands, asks the painter, “But these are the tones of cadavers?” He seems befuddled by the artist’s choice of such revolting colors. The artist replies yes, they are colors borrowed from corpses, and “unfortunately, I cannot capture their odor!” The Impressionist strives to represent multisensory experience. His eagerness to conjure smell suggests that he would have liked to literally appropriate rotting matter, that the substances used to depict decomposing subjects would best capture their effects if they themselves were in a state of putrefaction. In the desired, even if not achieved, slippage between paint and bodily material, Cham emphasizes paint’s potential to appeal not just to the sense of sight but also to the viewer’s entire body. The bon bourgeois might not be able to smell the subject, but his raised eyebrows, open mouth, and stricken posture imply that the painting has achieved a strong effect. At the next exhibition in 1879, Degas’s paintings of female dancers were nicknamed “morceaux de haute saveur,” a phrase close in meaning to faisandé: “It’s not that there aren’t some morsels of good strong flavor at the exhibition of ‘Independents.’ I recommend certain greenish ‘dancers’ who give us a pretty good impression of what it must be like to witness electrified cadavers.”61 It makes sense for the meat side of the decomposition theme to reemerge in relation to the bodies of dancers—

bodies that, like Olympia, could be considered as for sale. The critic goes on to equate the dancers with the dead bodies temporarily animated with electrical charges in anatomical experiments. It is a nightmarish scene of halfdead, discolored corpses twitching and jerking, the very opposite of the refined elegance promised by the ballet. But for all his sarcasm, the critic seems willing to admit to some indecision with regard to these paintings: “It’s not that there aren’t some morsels of good strong flavor.” We are reminded that meat is hung so that its flavor might develop. Faisandage is a good thing, so long as the decomposition process is halted before its object becomes too far gone for consumption. Like the critic who suggested that “in this exhibition there are works of real value and exceptional flavor” before going on to urge Impressionists to pick through their merchandise more carefully to separate the rotten from the rest, the attribution of powerful flavor acknowledges that there may be something to admire in this arresting painting.62 But not for everyone. Also in 1879, Georges Nazim employed the meat metaphor to sum up the show. His entire review reads: monday.—It is raining. Could it be a second flood? Visit to the impressionists, alias independents. Mixture of the excellent and grotesque. This impression gathers before a canvas representing a green woman, literally green, the green of rotten meat [un vert de viandes corrompues]: —Hum! Extremely advanced, this particular woman [rudement avancée, cette particulière]! —It must be the portrait of an oratrice for the women’s congress.63

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No particular work is the subject of this imagined exchange, which functions as a more generalized evaluation. Nazim combines his criticism of Impressionist coloration and the search for “impressions” with social commentary about the contemporary feminist movement, both of which, he jokes, signify the end of the world, a second flood. In 1878 the International Congress of Women’s Rights was organized in Paris to coincide with the Universal Exhibition. Nazim chose the word avancé to suggest meat in an advanced state, faisandé, as well as that which was progressive, as a speaker at the women’s congress would have been considered by her feminist peers. The contemptuous joke judges feminists as corrupted (corrompu means both corrupted and rotten), and its appearance continues to highlight the gendered nature of the putrefaction theme as applying foremost to female bodies. Because the comparison of female flesh to decaying meat was a mode of sexualization, the critic undermined a feminist’s claim to activist intellectual pursuits, reducing her to a repulsive body. This language connecting female figures and meat continued into other critics’ assessments of Gauguin’s Study of a Nude (Suzanne Sewing) in 1881 as “cagneuse [knock-kneed] et faisandée” and of Degas’s pastel female bathers in 1886 as “la viande bouffée” (puffed-up meat).64 Caillebotte’s Modern Olympia

Critics compared both the painting Olympia and its nude figure to meat. But the full power of those metaphors is in how they migrate, which becomes clear in Impressionist criticism when we see them applied to entire exhibitions

of work. Metaphors relating to the body through their appeal to the culinary and the sense of taste allow for a reassessment of critical trends and orientations and also offer new avenues for interpreting paintings, whether or not those paintings were explicitly described in relation to putrefying flesh. Zola’s discussion of bitter, meaty, flesh-and-blood painting reveals a side of his art-worldview where detachment on the part of critic or artist has no place, where the critic’s eye is firmly embedded in a body and the artist’s body is firmly embedded in works of art. References to Impressionist paintings as decomposing suggest something similar, that these works challenge the eye and provoke a range of responses. To recuperate those responses, and suggest what an analysis inflected by these metaphors might allow, I turn to Gustave Caillebotte’s Veal in a Butcher’s Shop (fig. 25). This painting depicting anthropomorphized, gendered, and sexualized animal flesh was not shown during Caillebotte’s lifetime, but it engages the themes explored so far: the sexualization and gendering of meat as related to the carnal consumption of female flesh; the fact that, like shopkeepers, Impressionists hung “fresh and rotten merchandise” with the hope of its sale; the resemblance of thickly applied paint to other substances; and the embodiment of the entire canvas surface. In the early 1880s, Caillebotte produced some twenty-five still lifes of food and game. Ranging from depictions of restaurant meals, to haut bourgeois side tables, to upmarket urban shop displays, these paintings are some of the most remarkable examples of Impressionist work in the genre. Veal in a Butcher’s Shop is among the largest of these, surpassing even Fruit ­Displayed

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Fig. 25

Gustave Caillebotte, Veal in a Butcher’s Shop, c. 1882. Oil on canvas, 144 × 74 cm.

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Fig. 26

Gustave Caillebotte, Fruit Displayed on a Stand, 1881–82. Oil on canvas, 76.5 × 100.6 cm. Photo © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

on a Stand (fig. 26), the latter of which Caille­ botte included in the group exhibition in 1882. With dimensions that would typically have served for a full-length standing portrait, its size alone indicates that Veal in a Butcher’s Shop was an ambitious project. The painting shows the underside of a life-size slaughtered calf suspended by its hind legs from a wooden hanger. The body is placed in front of a freshly painted wall panel half covered by a starched and pleated white cloth. Such expensive décor

would have belonged to an elite establishment boasting hygienic practices within. With limbs stretching from corner to corner, the flattened calf dominates the close-up view, from which any further social or spatial context has been eliminated. For the viewer this produces a startling confrontation. The palette, with its strident red, departs dramatically from the muted colors of the artist’s better-known street scenes of the previous decade, in response to which critics consistently complained of monotonous gray compositions.65 Even the pale flesh of the calf’s skin, with only a very thin layer of varnish that

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reveals the rough application of pasty paint, is infused with patches of yellow, blue, green, and violet. Carcasses were not unusual subjects of contemporary painting. As Douglas Druick has shown in his discussion of Caillebotte’s still lifes, Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox (1655; fig. 27), then in the Louvre, served as an example for similar scenes by artists including Antoine Vollon, François Bonvin, and Victor Gilbert.66 In paintings by those artists, Rembrandt’s legacy typically manifested itself in dramatic chiaroscuro revealing massive carcasses in courtyards of butcher shops or back rooms of markets, where the power of the daunting dead animal still commands respect and implies the strength of the brawny butcher. Caillebotte’s calf is conspicuously out of step with this tradition. It is located not in a slaughterhouse but in an upscale shop, reflecting contemporary changes in abattoir policy. Baron Haussmann’s plans separated cleansed urban spaces from the violence and stench of slaughterhouses. In 1867, public abattoirs were centralized in a complex named La Villette, which Haussmann situated to the northeast, in the outlying nineteenth arrondissement.67 La Villette placed a greater distance between butchering and purchasing, for shopkeepers bought directly from the slaughterhouse and resold their goods in retail fashion in the city center. With its elaborate dressing, thoroughly cleaned and thoughtfully adorned for display, Caillebotte’s calf emphasizes this distance, not only from messy slaughterhouse practices but also from the animal’s identity before its transformation into meat. As several recent commentators on the painting have

observed, the proprietor’s display feminizes the calf’s body in the service of masking the disturbing realities of butchery and animal consumption.68 A garland of flowers and leaves, sculpted with impasto, hangs from the hind legs down to the severed neck like a ­necklace, attracting the passerby’s attention. A single thickly painted pink rose, inserted into skin that falls like

Fig. 27

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, The Slaughtered Ox, 1655. Oil on panel, 94 × 69 cm.

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breasts, projects outward from the flesh of the animal’s belly. Responding to this feminization of the calf, Paula Young Lee notes that veau was common slang for a youthful prostitute whose flesh was thought particularly likely to carry venereal disease, and she argues that this calf would have signified in terms of that other flesh market, the sex trade.69 Extending the significance of that potential allusion to prostitution, Lee connects Veal in a Butcher’s Shop to Manet’s Olympia insofar as both represent bodies for sale. There are other aspects that make the comparison compelling. Both paintings show pale flesh set off against a white sheet, while a curtain and wall block the eye from moving back into space. The pink rose decorating the calf parallels the pink flower in the figure of Olympia’s hair, among the other flowers in Olympia’s gifted bouquet or the animal’s garland. But more striking is how Caillebotte’s work seems to enact, in paint, the critical reception of Olympia, that verbal butchery through which the nude was broken into pieces for public scrutiny by critics who claimed merely to be commenting on Manet’s violence. If the body of the nude Olympia could be perceived as a destabilizing blend of animal and human, death and life, those distinctions are more explicitly blurred in Caillebotte’s anthropomorphized calf, eerily seductive while emphatically headless.70 Olympia’s outward gaze, perceived as impertinent, becomes obliterated by the decapitation that Bertall imposed on Manet’s figure in 1865 (see fig. 16). Olympia’s flexed hand covering the genitalia, which was subject to irony and outrage by critics who found the pose crude and even “immodest,”

can be seen as satirized in the calf’s limp tail hanging sadly between its legs.71 Instead of the nude’s closed legs and shielding hand that deny access to the genital “wound,” as contemporary vernacular sometimes referred to the vagina, in Caillebotte’s painting the limbs are pried apart and painfully flattened to expose the gaping underbelly and genital region, evoking not just a carcass splayed out on the butcher’s block, but a corpse on the anatomy table.72 Ligaments torn, skin pulled back tightly to reveal the interior, the calf resembles a human écorché, calling to mind one critic’s assertion that Manet flayed the nude Olympia with his brushes: “After all, I care little about Mlle Impéria [he mistakes or mocks the title Olympia] and the other hussies who are just as bad. Manet is free to paint them or flay them according to the whims of his brushes: the matter is between them.”73 In order to emphasize the brutality inherent in Manet’s act of painting, the critic suggested parallels between the artist and the butcher or anatomist peeling off skin, just as Louis Ulbach complained about Zola’s use of the écorché and blows of the pointed pen. The paintbrush becomes a knife; the figure and canvas are united as flesh. Veal in a Butcher’s Shop poses those links as the fleshiness of the thickly applied strokes allows for slippage between real and painted bodies, reinforced by the fusion of human and animal initiated by the window dressing and the sagging, breast-like belly flesh. Broad swaths of opaque red paint resemble coagulated blood, a crusty wound. The brushstrokes are like sutures building up the surface of the canvas at the same time that they cut into the depicted calf,

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as in the rose that both projects outward and appears buried within the body like its now excavated heart. The paint comes across as an organic substance, the stuff of animal and human bodies, both prone to decomposition. I am proposing that we read Veal in a Butcher’s Shop as a Modern Olympia, along the lines of Paul Cézanne’s A Modern Olympia (1873–74; fig. 28). In the first Impressionist Exhibition of 1874, Cézanne’s work exposed and interrupted the rituals of paid sex that were more implicitly displayed in its source painting but had been made obvious in the critical reception in 1865. Cézanne clarified the context of the brothel by including a clothed male customer watching as the transposed attendant unveils a naked female figure who seems an unwilling participant in the activity. Through an overly ornate setting and theatrical presentation, A Modern Olympia denaturalizes the practices of prostitution and implicates the viewer who, like the male client (and artist, for this figure is a self-portrait of Cézanne), watches as the woman is exposed. Veal in a Butcher’s Shop is also elaborately staged, with an overrefined presentation of its subject, making the practices of butchery and its conventions for display seem suddenly strange. Mimicking the processes through which animals and women alike were commodified and dressed to be tasty draws the act of consumption, alimentary or sexual, into question and conflict. In the Cézanne, a pet dog looks past the client in our direction, further invoking the viewer’s presence and complicity in the uncomfortable scene. In the Caillebotte, the fact that the gruesome spectacle has been arranged for the audience’s viewing, purchasing, and dining plea-

sure is equally impossible to ignore, for without any figures depicted in the painting, there is nobody but us to confront it. Veal in a Butcher’s Shop openly displays the violence of the flesh market and the operations that reduce bodies to meat, whether literal or metaphorical. In it, the progression of those critics who denigrated Manet’s (or Renoir’s or Degas’s) female ­figures has been reversed, and in the process, the dynamics strained. Rather than the established, if crude, conversion of sexually coded female flesh into an animal carcass, a carcass has come to resemble human form, and as the rhetorical connection between sexualized femininity and raw meat is turned inside out it is pushed to its breaking point. Twenty-first-century interpretations of Veal in a Butcher’s Shop rely heavily on the concept of flânerie and of the flâneur as a sophisticated male aesthete who traverses and surveys the city with interested detachment. An affluent bachelor free to spend his time in this way, ­ Caillebotte has sometimes personified the ­flâneur-artist par excellence. In his analysis of Veal in a Butcher’s Shop, Michael Marrinan argues that the perspective implied in the painting is one of “cool detachment.”74 This assessment, which responds to the matter-offact presentation of the subject, has been well established in relation to this work. In an earlier discussion of Veal in a Butcher’s Shop, Druick argues that the painting “suggests the ironic detachment of the ­Baudelairian flâneur” as well as a certain empathy with the shopkeeper who, like the artist, produced the veal for visual consumption.75 Reprising this language, but emphasizing instead ­Caillebotte’s “absence

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Fig. 28

Paul Cézanne, A Modern Olympia, 1873–74. Oil on canvas, 46 × 55 cm.

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of irony or empathy” (here, for the butchered animal), Stephen Eisenman agrees that Veal in a Butcher’s Shop manifests “detachment from the lives of animals and the circumstances of their deaths.”76 Ruth Iskin equally employs the concept of detached optical experience when she interprets the painting as a “cool visual analys[i]s” and argues that the “detached viewpoint connotes the anonymity of the metropolis.”77 Also presenting Caillebotte as a coolheaded observer, this time with the peripatetic perspective of a snapshot photographer, the curators of his 2015–16 retrospective, significantly titled Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, cast the artist as “recording his amusement at the fastidious adornment of the dead meat . . . respond[ing] to the humor of the found scene, most likely unintended by the vendor, much as snapshot photographic artists would when similarly provoked in the twentieth century.”78 Finally, in the most sustained analysis of the painting to date, Paula Young Lee makes the case that “Caillebotte has not painted meat but the conventions of public display, conventions that neutralized these raw parts of all meaning except their viability inside a capitalist economy.”79 Conventions for display are indeed intended to downplay the brutal realities of butchery and carnivorism, but, when translated into oil paint, do they really have the effect of reducing the calf to an interchangeable commodity, or else redirecting attention to broader questions of the regulation of prostituted human bodies, as Lee goes on to argue? All of these accounts place Veal in a Butcher’s Shop in the context of the modern city and debate Caillebotte’s perspective on it. They ask whether the

painting’s tone is ironic or playful, whether it critiques or celebrates modern commerce and modern life. Without agreeing on the answers, all basically depend on the idea that Caillebotte painted a scene as he found it, relatively free from artistic intervention. That assumption is difficult to sustain upon close study of the painting, with its dense interweave of strokes and projecting impasto that is insistently painterly and everywhere provides evidence of the artist’s hand in addition to his analytic eye, laboring over a prolonged period. Grounding the work instead in the context of painting, considering it not just as a reaction to contemporary Paris but also as a reaction to contemporary art, directs us back to its material qualities and, in fact, reveals the limits of this established interpretation and the breakdown of a detached gaze. Instead of the “unstable, fleeting, momentary” perspective of the mobile flâneur who cavalierly glimpses curiosities, as one exhibition catalogue characterizes Caille­ botte’s work in the still life genre, Veal in a Butcher’s Shop is painted at a uniform resolution that implies an extended look that moves slowly across the depicted body.80 Without conventional pictorial solutions that would make hierarchies within the scene apparent, including varying degrees of focus and a deeper space arranged according to the standards of linear perspective, there is no clear path through the painting for the eye to take, nor is there any narrative relief of background activity.81 The eye has nowhere to rest beyond the foregrounded body that immobilizes the viewer standing before it, who requires time to decipher the identity of that body when it is wrested from its context in

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the shop and (re)presented in an art ­exhibition, studio, or home. The orientation is at first difficult to fix. The calf appears as an upright crucified corpse as well as an upended carcass. As it oscillates between animal and human, it also seems to display both male and female sex organs. While the sagging underbelly and flowers suggest a woman’s breasts and ornamentation, the tail is penile, and, indeed, the calf shown here is likely male, for females were typically kept for reproduction and milking.82 The result of the unstable orientation and slippages between bodies is dizzying, an effect intensified by the multicolored strokes of paint, applied in all directions, that cause the entire composition to vibrate. The thick impasto endows the painting with a heightened presence as a material object and not as a window onto another, more distant world. Because of the hook’s placement at the top edge of the canvas, the carcass appears to hang from the frame itself and thereby extend into our space. The white curtain contributes to this effect. Warm colors, like the pink and red of the body, advance, while cool colors recede. Set against the white cloth with its icy blue and purple shadows, the calf projects outward. Together with the matte finish—instead of a thick layer of glassy varnish that would simulate a vitrine at the level of the paint surface—the effect does not suggest a shop window that creates a reassuring barrier separating the viewer from this carcass seen at close range. Caillebotte offers no such filter to divide the viewer from the physicality of his tacky paint or depicted veal. He does, however, mimic the conventions through which raw meat or mannequins might be con-

structed as appetizing in a display, clothed in contemporary fashion. In this way, the painting raises the embodied aspects of erotic, desirous vision that are captured in the French term for window-shopping, faire du lèche-vitrines, that is, to lick the windows.83 The concept of licking the window defies any sense of looking as cerebral or detached. It connects seeing with tasting, distanced assessment with intimate possession. Through the display, a site intended to awaken the appetite, Veal in a Butcher’s Shop raises the analogous hunger for other kinds of bodily contact, and viewing becomes a form of penetration. This is ensured by the thickness of the paint, which requires deep scrutiny and a type of vision that is quasi-tactile. The central painted rose is rendered with the thickest impasto, and its dark center recedes like an orifice into the swirling, built-up, pink strokes around it. Located between the “breasts” of the creature and in the animal’s nether regions, the rose may be read as a displaced depiction of a vagina or anus, the slang name for which was rosette.84 In rethinking Veal in a Butcher’s Shop in the context of the critical connection between female bodies and meat so commonly used to denigrate Impressionist paintings of women, my intention is not to argue that Caillebotte consciously responded to that criticism, to Cézanne, or to Olympia. (If the painting can be said to respond to any criticism, it is most likely as a riposte to the scorn that greeted his own painting of a living calf shown in the 1879 Impressionist Exhibition, which the artist probably destroyed as a result.) Instead, I have raised these juxtapositions to suggest that in their comparisons of artworks to rotting flesh in 1865 and

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beyond, critics expressed a visceral reaction to paintings that Veal in a Butcher’s Shop distinctly calls for, and thus can help us to understand and recognize. Meat metaphors described brushstrokes that were perceived as too visible but also more than just visible, strokes that festered and crusted over, attesting not just to the vulnerability of exposed painted bodies but also to the vulnerability of the spectator enduring the nausea and anxiety that paintings as material objects could produce. Caillebotte’s viscous paint insists on the physicality of the carcass as well as of the paint itself. The heavily worked canvas surface becomes a kind of flesh, and the painting takes on its own assertive embodiment. We are reminded of Zola’s description of Manet’s painting as flesh and blood sweating out subjectivity, which animates the work apart from any creatures or figures depicted. Veal in a Butcher’s Shop asks not for the nonchalance of a flâneur’s roving eye but for an audience that feels a connection to the painted body, a connection staged across a carcass that will become food in a more literal merging of human and animal form.85 With its subject matter and meaty materiality, Veal in a Butcher’s Shop offers ingestion as a theme just as Zola proposed it as a metaphor for viewing, and spectatorship is refigured

as ocular consumption. Sexual consumption is never far away in this depiction of a penetrated body bearing signs of male and female sex organs and attributes of gendered display. In this context of ambiguity and reversibility between bodies, across sexes and species, all represented by paint material that shifts identities, Veal in a Butcher’s Shop upsets the enduring connection between Impressionism and optical experience that has so informed existing interpretations of the painting. Metaphors of decomposing human-turned-­ animal flesh appeared in the reception of ­Olympia through to Impressionism. Applied foremost to represented female bodies, and linked to the feminizing of the canvas surface and the unruly material of paint, the language of putrefaction signified the resistance of painting to categories of the aesthetic and, as the next chapter will continue to explore, the cerebral. As in Ulbach’s critique of Zola’s fiction, the paintings were understood to address the body and often to threaten it. Critics described proximate sensations, visceral reactions, and corporeal contingency, and Caillebotte’s painting of anthropomorphized raw meat can help us to recover some of the reasons why.

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chapter three

The Confected Canvas

as we have seen, Zola set his meat metaphor off against another metaphor, that of painting as confectionery. He was just one of many critics who described the Salon as a candy store full of “sugar-candy trees and pastry houses, gingerbread gentlemen and ladies made of vanilla cream,” an array of appealing treats associated with the women and children assumed to crave them.1 If the comparison to meat was routinely used to sexualize depicted female figures, judged analogous to dismembered, diseased, and decaying flesh, metaphors of paint as pastry or confectionery are best explored in relation to another figuration of femininity, the so-called Parisienne. Avatar of French female fashion­ ability, the Parisienne was understood in terms very different from the venal body. While this broad category included sex workers of a certain youth and income, the Parisienne was not broken down in description but instead built

up, confected, and subsumed into discussions surrounding confectionery that had been formulated with “her” in mind. I first examine this metaphor as it was used to gently mock popular artists for their saccharine subject matter and slick surface finish.2 Jean Béraud’s La Pâtisserie Gloppe (1889; see fig. 29) provides a case study to be interpreted alongside a series of images by two of the period’s leading art caricaturists, Bertall and Stop. Next, I demonstrate that, surprisingly, this language was also appropriated in discussions of Impressionist paintings, but for very different purposes. Allusions to dessert—fruit, cream, ice cream, mousse, cheese, and more—were often used to describe the materiality of Impressionist paint and its effects on viewers, whether to imply the sensual appeal of the works or the disgust that they provoked. These metaphors were developed not just in relation to figure painting but

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also, notably, in relation to landscape, and they offer new insight into the wider feminizing of Impressionism as a movement. I then consider more closely how the parallels between artist and chef, paint and food, were figured in paint. In works by Caillebotte and Monet, the metaphor of artist as maker of confected goods did not necessarily reinforce the hierarchies of arts or the established constructions of gender that typically motivated the trope when it appeared in art criticism. Finally, I continue to probe the connection between food and femininity through an analysis of Caillebotte’s Langouste à la Parisienne (1880–82; see fig. 42), which, while not a dessert, represents a complex con­ fection that signifies in relation to the wider construction of the Parisienne in art and culture. Confectionery in Caricature

In Jean Béraud’s La Pâtisserie Gloppe (fig. 29), women, children, and one elderly man select and nibble on cakes, are served alcoholic bev­ erages, and converse. Young and old, they are elegantly and expensively attired, from towering hats to gloves so expendable that butter and cream soak inconsequentially into their soft surfaces. An obedient black poodle sporting a jeweled collar forms a coordinated accessory to its owner, whose black velvet jacket and dress with tufted trimming resemble her pet’s coiffure. The ruffled pink fabric of the figure’s hat rhymes visually with a row of strawberries lining a tart behind her, creating an analogy between the tiny figures in La Pâtisserie Gloppe and the displays of bite-size sweets that they sample. Across the table a friend wears a biscuit-colored skirt painted in broad strokes, the sweep of Béraud’s

paintbrush functioning like a butter-saturated pastry brush upon the canvas. The hard edge of the skirt appears to have been incised with a knife and stands out in sharp focus, as though the figure herself could have been cut out of dough. For the most part, Béraud’s painting depicts a scene of female sociability peopled with Parisiennes, an iconic figure or type invented in the early decades of the nineteenth century. A Parisienne necessarily lived in Paris, where she collected those clothes, accessories, and cosmetics that French industry excelled in, and where she could be seen to best advantage soaking up the magnificence of her surroundings while also contributing to their glamour. Attracting admiring and desiring gazes, she was the ultimate accessory for a male companion and a favorite subject of painters.3 A Parisienne was not necessarily of the haute bourgeoisie—in fact, many writers expressed anxiety that social class was difficult to discern through fashionable dress—because the apotheosis of Parisian femininity as a cipher of sophistication coincided with the invention and promotion of department stores and the “confected” goods they sold: ready-to-wear (confectionné) apparel. Stores like Le Bon Marché, established in 1852, continually expanded and put the latest fashions within reach of a greater proportion of the population. The invention of the Parisienne in visual culture was closely related to department store advertising, as department store catalogues joined the trade in fashion plates and magazines that circulated images of the chic Parisienne into the provinces and abroad and allowed for clothing and accessories to be ordered from the capital.

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Fig. 29

Jean Béraud, La Pâtisserie Gloppe, 1889. Oil on canvas, 38 × 53 cm.

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For the English speaker, the rhetorical richness of considering Béraud’s figures wearing confections at the same time that they dine on them is manifest; indeed, either sort of confection was deeply connected to the construction of the Parisienne as a consumer of luxury goods. The feminization of friandise, or the taste for sweets, was well established in nineteenthcentury Paris. An abundant literature on diet and health upheld the conviction of founding gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: “La gourmandise is a passionate, reasoned, consistent preference for delicious things . . . la friandise is nothing but the same preference applied to light, delicate, airy foods, to jellies, to pastries, etc. It is a modification introduced for women and men who resemble them.”4 Women could be expected to prefer foods that were “light [and] delicate,” also privileged adjectives for the ideal bourgeois woman, whose predilection for “airy” foods mirrored the perceived superficiality of her person and pursuits. But while such taste suited a woman, it was toxic for masculinity. In 1881, an etiquette guide for young adults warns its readers that “friandise makes a man sensual, difficult and dishonest,” leading the unfortunate fellow to “prefer what pleases him to what is useful” and to “choose with affectation, against all the rules of decency and politeness.”5 In other words, a man who ate sweets would become more like women, identified with sensuality, caprice, pretension, and the frivolous pursuit of pleasure. “Tell me what you eat,” Brillat-Savarin writes in the Physiologie du goût, “and I will tell you what you are.”6 Zola’s denigration of the 1866 Salon as home to the sweets of artistic confectioners is apposite

in relation to Béraud’s painting, a work that in a variety of ways imitates the treats represented within it. The artist depicts the shimmering surfaces of mirrors, polished floors, and gilded decorations through glinting white highlights covered in a thick layer of varnish that makes the canvas surface shine like a glazed pastry. The painting’s intimate scale contributes to its status as a precious object, to be handled and possessed like the miniature desserts lifted gently by the figures within. With its sharp relief and consistent overall focus, the work is designed to suggest that its surface acts as a window through which a real environment is viewed. Like the gilded glass case on the counter that the little boy reaches toward—a reliquary for culinary consumption—the painting itself is like a little jewel box, offering a glimpse of diminutive treats through its glassy surface. Béraud’s crystalline articulation of contemporary urban scenes achieved a compromise between the modern-life subjects of artists whom he admired, including Manet, Caillebotte, and Degas, and the stylistic standards of Academic instruction. Béraud’s paintings were widely popular, leading Henry Houssaye to remark: “Impressionism receives every form of sarcasm when it takes the names Manet, Monet, Renoir, Caillebotte, Degas; every honor when it is called BastienLepage, Duez, Gervex . . . Jean Béraud or Dagnan-Bouveret.”7 Conceiving of a painting’s reception as the result of a voracious appetite was not unique to Zola. Charles Albert d’Arnoux, or Bertall, was especially drawn to the possibilities of aligning food and art in his caricature; he had also illustrated the 1848 edition of Brillat-Savarin’s

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Fig. 30

Bertall, Le Jeu de loto, 1865. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 27, 1865, 4.

Physiologie du goût. While Zola and Bertall had opposing taste in painting, both used comparisons to confectionery to accuse artists of pandering to the female masses through idealized subject matter. The year before Zola’s article “M. Manet” appeared in L’Événement, with its discussion of crowds stuffing themselves with sweets, Bertall depicted a family group at the 1865 Salon standing before Le Jeu de loto by

Charles Chaplin, a painter widely acclaimed for his representations of women and children (fig. 30). The female spectator, whose elite ­status is assured by her elaborate costume and her companions, an equally fashionably dressed child and a top-hatted husband, exclaims favorably: “To see Chaplin after Courbet is delicious. I feel as though I am leaving the tripe seller to enter into my confectioner’s shop.” Chaplin’s painting Le Jeu de loto shows three girls playing a game with precocious focus in spotless pastel pink, blue, and cream dresses. It is easy to

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understand why the viewer caricatured would comment on the sweetness of the perfectly behaved girls, especially when the subject is compared to Courbet’s reputation for using rough realism to represent unsavory models in paintings that could be considered analogous to offal, the cheap entrails and intestines of animals. Bertall commonly poked fun at Chaplin in these terms, as a woman’s preferred portraitist whose work was cooked up with delectable pistachio pigment, and he continually ridiculed female Salon visitors with the stereotype that they were impulsively and uncontrollably drawn to sweets.8 He repeatedly represented their response to painting as physical hunger. In 1869, a weary woman holding a catalogue betrays her disinterest in painting in a complaint to her male companion: “As for me, Monsieur Arthur, all this tires me out, it makes me want a bite to eat [ça me donne envie de casser une croûte]. Should we go to the buffet?” (fig. 31). Here Bertall plays off the derogatory term croûte to name a painting that had darkened, dulled, or dried out over time.9 “Arthur” was often used as a generic nickname for a courtesan’s male admirer; its appearance here conspicuously connects this female figure to bodily impulses. A woman’s appetite for food was a privileged nineteenth-century strategy for implicating her desires for material goods in general as well as for sex.10 Once in the Salon buffet, Bertall’s women continue to confuse painting and food, namely dessert. In Au Buffet, the waiter asks a woman for her order (fig. 32). Her unexpected reply: “I only want one thing, the strawberry tart and Madame Muraton’s

cakes.” When the server reminds her that “that will be a bit expensive,” she responds: “It makes no difference to me, it’s Monsieur who pays.” This Parisienne craves the strawberry tart and a still life painting by Euphémie Muraton, and for her they are just “one thing” to be ordered in the same venue and purchased by her escort. These clichéd aspects of female desire signifying the erratic and impetuous appetites of women are not realized in Béraud’s painting. The demeanor of the figures represented—respectably dressed in somber colors and surrounded by peers of the haute bourgeoisie—is beyond reproach. Not even the servers engage in the seductive outward address that had become standard in depictions of modern commercial exchange. But while they do not “stuff themselves like famished people,” Zola’s 1866 description of painted figures made of

Fig. 31

Bertall, Promenade au Salon de 1869. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 15, 1869, 5.

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Fig. 32

Bertall, Au Buffet, 1869. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, June 5, 1869, 3.

gingerbread, spun sugar, and pastry still pertains to them. Painted in sharp relief, the miniature figures appear wooden and doll-like despite the transitory gestures of eating, which were highly unconventional poses in painting. Béraud was sometimes criticized as “a painter of dolls—that is, of Parisiennes,” so much so that, four years before painting La Pâtisserie Gloppe, he proclaimed: “Enough of women coming out of

the Opera, walking into a brasserie, listening to a monologue in a drawing room or watching a play from their stage box. . . . I think I have depicted every aspect of woman. There is nothing left for me to do in that respect.”11 Impatient with the constrained conventions for picturing fashionable female society, Béraud knew that he risked building a reputation as a specialist in an arena that made concessions to vulgarized

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­ ublic taste, where paintings could be underp stood as commodities especially appealing to bourgeois women. His works would then be no better than other attributes of the Parisienne on display, including her meal or even her dress. The unflattering connection of painting to clothing was introduced into art criticism to the same end as the comparison to food, to denigrate painting by aligning it with an art that targeted female consumers and that was perceived as lower in a hierarchy of value. The connection was often made through the same technique of pretending to market a painting as though it were a delectable treat or a new fashion. In 1869, Bertall mocked Eugène Villain’s Un dessert, nature morte by altering the composition to privilege one towering brioche and renaming

the painting À la Renommée de la brioche, the name of a famous pastry shop (fig. 33). The text describing Villain’s concoction reads as a newspaper advertisement for the patisserie: “Villain’s brioche is a monument of high artistic pastry. What dough [pâte], what butter, what crust [croûte]!!! This painter’s brioches are always fresh, always warm in tone, and yet his talent is stale.” Crafting “haute pâtisserie artistique,” the reader well knew, was not the same as possessing skill in painting, and Bertall relied on the shared languages of painting and cooking to accentuate the point. In addition to croûte, slang for a bad painting with a dried-out appearance, we have seen that pâte, the word for dough, described a thick mass of colors in a painting. This same strategy of caricature mimicking advertisements emerged in relation to women’s clothing, for, like patisseries, department stores placed promotions in the press. Louis Morel-Retz, known by his pseudonym Stop, transformed the painting Portrait of Mme —— by Jean Hippolyte Lazerges in the 1872 Salon into merely the presentation of a dress and a hat on display stands (fig. 34), in the same manner that Bertall condensed Villain’s still life to just one synecdochic element. Imitating a department store catalogue offering mail order delivery, Stop gave the altered painting the endorsing title: “Maison Lazerges (fashion and clothing [modes et confections]).—Seasonal styles, trimmings [garniture], linen—Assorted hats.—Moderate prices.—Provide the stamps for delivery.” Like Bertall, Stop positioned the artist as a maker of moderately priced, garnished confections that could even be sent directly to the home sight unseen, therefore at a great remove from the precious and unique

Fig. 33

Bertall, À la Renommée de la brioche, 1869. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 22, 1869, 7.

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Fig. 34

Stop, Le Salon de 1872. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, June 8, 1872, 2.

status of an art object. Each critic compared painting to cuisine or couture to imply that paintings, particularly those depicting sumptuous still life or fashionable society, were also marketable commercial goods that catered to female tastes. Despite the boredom with painting Parisiennes that he professed in 1885, Béraud did not conceal the gendered nature of the ornate

Pâtisserie Gloppe, although his painting of the shop was not exhibited until forty years after its completion. The luxurious setting of the Champs-Élysées establishment provides a feast for the eyes. Gilded chandeliers, columns, and archways are reflected in the grand, golden-framed mirrors that cover the walls to enlarge the space. The mirror also reflects the shop’s vitrine, large panes of glass with lettering advertising the patisserie, underscoring the commercial setting in which figures take their refreshment while on display to the viewer, to each other, and to those outside the privileged space. The French term for window-shopping, we recall, is faire du lèche-vitrines, to lick the windows. Here the licked window revealing the interior of the Pâtisserie Gloppe coincides with the surface of the painting itself, in this case a “licked” canvas displaying a slick surface sheen of varnish covering tiny strokes. At stake in this overlapping vocabulary is the full-bodied, erotic potential of looking at luxury goods, whether at the painting as an object or at the sweets seen through its glassy surface, both the mouthwatering pastries and the appetizing young women. Eroticized looking indicates a facet of the painting-pastry alliance that implicates the male viewer and consumer. While Bertall references female appetite most explicitly in his caricatures of the pleasures provoked by painting, male desire is ever-present in the margins. Eating provides a link between the consumption of paintings and of bodies, an aspect of delicious art that is made clearer in caricature that ridicules the male spectator in addition to his female counterpart. In his caricature of Jules Lefebvre’s Rêve (Dream), shown in the 1875 Salon, Stop

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that in eating his dessert he finds a woman to devour already within his grasp, or better, between his teeth. These are the basic workings of the artistconfectioner analogy as it was used to target widely popular artists. But the trope could be pushed further and in another direction, by critics and artists alike, toward the materiality of paint. Connections between paint and sweet foods were appropriated in discussions of works of art that commentators such as Zola, Bertall, and Stop expressly meant them not to characterize, by artists whose paintings were by no means understood as easily digestible: Impressionists.12 Impressionist Tongue Lickings

Fig. 35

Stop, Rêve, 1875. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 22, 1875, 4.

transformed the cloud or wave upon which an idealized nude reclines in the original painting into a serving dish in the print, and the frothy substance supporting her becomes a meringue (fig. 35). The caption explains: “A man dreams that in eating oeufs à la neige [meringue with a custard sauce] he finds under his tooth a small woman to eat up.” Lefebvre’s nude, Stop jokes, is excessively tasty, suggesting a too-obvious sexuality. While the painting’s title presumably refers to the woman’s sleep, the caricature implies that it actually relates to a man’s sexual fantasy, the dream of intimate contact with and possession of such a body. A man dreams

Louis Leroy’s review of the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, especially his discussion of Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (see fig. 3), is among the best-known pieces of Impressionist criticism. In it, Leroy coined the term “tongue licking” to characterize the loaded Impressionist brushstroke. The review is written as an imagined exchange between Leroy and a prominent landscape artist bewildered by the art on display. Upon viewing Monet’s painting of the crowded boulevard seen from a high window, the artist companion asks Leroy: “Only, tell me what these innumerable black tongue lickings in the bottom of the canvas represent?”13 The visitor referred, of course, to the many figures on the street that Monet indicated by just a few strokes of paint each. For Leroy, the seemingly clumsy way in which paint was dragged along the canvas to make these short, vertical streaks suggested that the tongue, with its limited dexterity, had been responsible for the mark-making.

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The invocation of oral sensation and comparison of Monet’s paint to ingestible substances continued in the reception of his work through the next decade. Charles Canivet, writing under the name Jean de Nivelle, objects in his 1882 review to the setting sun in Sunset on the Seine, Winter Effect (1880): “One thinks simply of a slice of tomato stuck onto the sky and is quite astonished by the violet light it casts on the water and the riverbanks.” Canivet responded to the sun’s jarring effect, its bright orange color standing out against the more subdued tones of the sky, as well as the impasto of its surface, projecting like a soft and juicy vegetable. The review argues: “M. Claude Monet is foremost a marine painter. He has all sorts of them. I recommend two in particular, Une Marée basse, of the cliffs of Fécamp, and the Mer du haut des falaises. This one is especially sweet. It looks like whipped cream, but cream of a greenish purple. With a bit more whipping, only a few turns of the hand, it will overflow into colored mousse.”14 Mousse colorée is a pun on the double meaning of mousse in French as foam, here relating to the frothy sea, or as a whipped-up culinary preparation, likely a sweet dessert. Canivet was not alone in using these terms for Monet’s Normandy coast marine paintings. Gaston Pérodeaud, writing under the name Fichtre, had used similar language two days prior in Le Réveil: “Monet, whose talent as a colorist is indisputable, has painted some cliffs made out of raspberry and currant ice cream, whose realistic melting is thoroughly impressive. You want to take a spoon to them. At the bottom, there is another green ice cream that turns out to be a raging ocean.”15 Like Canivet,

Pérodeaud found that the consistency of the bright paint resembled cream, here a scoop of ice cream softening in the sun and pooling at the bottom into the ocean where colors blend. The mockery is equivocal in both cases. It suggests visual and, by extension, visceral pleasure in looking at mouthwatering pigment, reflected in the not entirely sarcastic observation that Monet’s “talent as a colorist is indisputable.”16 In Cliffs of the Petites Dalles, one of the paintings to which Pérodeaud most likely referred, this commentary fits (fig. 36). The rock face is painted in streaks of creamy red and pink that run into the ocean as if melting or being pulled down by the weight of their heavy application, an erosion of cliff and paint. The sea, particularly in the breaking waves in the right foreground, is represented through twirls of the brush, a circular whipping movement of the hand that is captured in Canivet’s comparison of paint to greenish whipped cream that, with a few more turns of the hand, will overflow. These waves stream over the wooden barrier built into the beach, making the position of the figures precarious, situated as they are within the sweep of thickening foam that seems poised between liquid and solid states like half-finished whipped cream. Another critic describes the thickness of that ocean: “We are not as enthusiastic about his seascapes. The sea has a rather solid look. If it was on that sea that Our Lord Jesus Christ was supported, the materialists have nothing to say, there was no miracle.”17 The human figures, roughly indicated in gray paint, are barely more developed than the wooden posts in the foreground, half-devoured by the swirling painted sea.

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Fig. 36

Claude Monet, Cliffs of the Petites Dalles, 1880. Oil on canvas, 60.6 × 80.3 cm. Photo © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Canivet’s and Pérodeaud’s language recalls that of Zola and others who denigrated Academic practice as confectionery in the 1860s and 1870s, and which was still current in the 1880s—for example, Joris-Karl Huysmans writes disparagingly of Alexandre Cabanel’s “Vénus à la crème” in 1881.18 But that critique, as we have seen, related foremost to subject matter, usually female nudes (as in the Huysmans) or representations of women and children, or to surface finish. In a caricature of the 1872 Salon, Stop turns Jean-Baptiste Chatigny’s The Child and the Lamb into a culinary dish with the title “The Child and the Lamb, plate of cream which only asks to be whipped up” (fig. 37). He implies that the sentimentality of the subject makes it sweet, a painting for women’s taste. Its potential to be whipped up also suggests that such works were easily executed for a ready market. But in Canivet’s and Péro­deaud’s reviews, paint itself is compared to sweet cream, applied in thick strokes that resemble tongue lickings themselves. Pérodeaud’s review becomes more critical, continuing: “There is also a Woman in a thicket [Femme dans un bosquet, a mockery of the actual title, Femme lisant dans un jardin]. One can tell that the unfortunate model has been dead for some time, because she has begun to decay. Upsetting effect [Effet navrant].”19 Following directly after the comparison of Monet’s landscape to melting raspberry and currant ice cream, the identification of a female figure with decay is unsettling. Liquefying ice cream gives way to a decomposing figure, in a progression from bright pink hues to the morbid tones of

Fig. 37

Stop, Chatigny, 1872. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, June 1, 1872, 5.

rot. The eventual decomposition of ice cream, already changing its shape and disintegrating into formless green puddles at the bottom of the canvas, is close at hand. The final phrase, Effet navrant, evokes the title of Monet’s Sunset on the Seine, Winter Effect (Soleil couchant sur la Seine à Lavacourt, effet d’hiver), also shown that year. Mocking what was perceived as a quintessentially Impressionist tendency to include impression or effet in a painting’s title, Péro­deaud suggests that Effet navrant was in fact part of the title and thereby a statement of intent from an artist who was actually seeking the impression of deliquescence in his painting of

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a woman in a garden. In this way, P ­ érodeaud’s critique is linked to the assertion that the artists appropriated colors and models from the Morgue and even attempted to capture the smell of rotting subjects (see fig. 24). Another assessment of Monet’s 1882 marine paintings further demonstrates how the potential decomposition of Impressionist paint material and the queasiness it could produce were enmeshed in comparisons to food. Achille de Lauzières de Thémines describes “these supposed landscapes that throw the visitor most off balance. It is a debauchery of rocks in the color of the most intense raspberry, emeraldgreen skies, and waves of ripe cherry [C’est une débauche de rochers d’un ton de framboise exaspérée, de ciels émeraude, et de vagues cerise-tournée]” (emphasis in original).20 For this reviewer, the colors caused seasickness and disturbed balance. Cerise-tournée may translate better as “overripe cherry.” Tournée names food that has turned, or begun to decay, and is characteristically applied to souring dairy products.21 Designating the painted waves as fruity or creamy introduces the possibility of putrefaction, and the coloration of the painting, pushed to the extreme, d’un ton de framboise exaspérée, is ­overripe and sickeningly sweet. The comparison of paint to fruit or cream also suggests another source of nausea, that of eating too much of either. The pseudonymous Bariolette combines that discomfort with motion sickness to explain the destabilizing effects of the paintings exhibited at the 1877 Impressionist Exhibition: “It is impossible to stand more than ten minutes in front of some of the most sensa-

tional of these paintings without straightaway evoking the memory of seasickness. One involuntarily thinks of a certain lunch eaten before embarking on a beautiful spring afternoon, a lunch composed of raspberries and cream cheese, which could not stand up to the whims of the waves.”22 The critic brings up food to summon the experience of nausea in viewing as he goes on to complain of the “purées” of “winered” color and mocks Monet’s “dindons à la crème,” referring to the frothy masses of feathers making up the animals in The Turkeys. Written several years before the comparison of Monet’s pitching waves to pools of cream became common, the review unites the queasiness experienced upon encountering surprising patches of vibrant color—matter out of place that did not seem to accurately depict a stable landscape— and the discomfort of overindulging in dessert at lunch. Henry Havard would make a similar claim in 1881: “It is always the same collection of mysterious and troubling works, enclosed in frames with unbelievable shapes and shades, which range from pistachio green to sickening creamy pink.”23 At stake in all of these allusions to food are the visceral effects of viewing paint material that takes on an animate life of its own in obtrusive colors and projecting swirls. The result might well end up as aversion, but the fruity and creamy colors also possess seductive qualities that make visitors “want to take a spoon to them,” as Pérodeaud quips. The ambivalence expressed in these culinary metaphors is best captured in journalist and playwright Albert Millaud’s assessment, written under the pseudonym Baron Grimm, of

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the 1877 Impressionist Exhibition for Le Figaro. It embraces the connections between paint, cream, and even cheese to striking effect. As a whole, the exhibition is a collection of canvases freshly painted, on which one had spilled waves of cream in pistachio, vanilla, and currant flavors. Such is the first impression experienced by the visitor. He feels swept up in a whirlwind of fresh colors in which he cannot distinguish anything. Once this sensation dissipates, the eye finally grasps the subject that is displayed before him and he is subjected to the second impression. This second impact is a great surprise and a profound discouragement. It seems to the observer that he is faced with a hoax that he is asked to take seriously. No matter how much goodwill he puts into it, seen from close or far, from the front or the side, he sees nothing in these canvases hung on the wall that speaks to his mind. If he has an impression, it is only for his eyes and it is cruel. It attracts and hits the sense of sight as the odor of a cheese shop attracts and hits the sense of smell. It is exactly the same impression. In all of these canvases, there is not a single elevated idea, not a creation, not even an inspiration or a recollection of pure art.24

In this extraordinary piece of prose, Millaud wrestles between the visual and the multisensory, the mind and the body, the profound and the profane. He sets up these value-laden binaries and strains to keep their terms separate. The visitor’s first impression is of paint material itself, fresh and colorful, evoking delicious creams. It is a sensual experience in which the eye cannot distinguish form and the senses mingle, a pleasurable albeit disorienting feeling. Then

the second impression, described as an impulsion, arrives (Cette deuxième impulsion, c’est une énorme surprise . . .). Impulsion, meaning thrust or drive, suggests that the painting exerts a powerful force on its audience, that submitting to the artists’ impressions is an intense and turbulent affair. At this second stage, the critic regains his bearings as he identifies (“grasps”) the subject of the paint material, but is disappointed that this experience is, as he says, for the eye rather than the mind. The significance of this statement that the viewer “sees nothing in these canvases that speaks to his mind” depends on what Tamar Garb and Norma Broude have established as the feminizing of Impressionism as a movement.25 In its broadest terms, Impressionism was framed as an art of immediate sensory experience. According to both critics and supporters, Impressionists aimed to capture that experience and translate it to canvas unmediated by such factors as past art or traditional training. For supporters, Impressionists were able to offer a directness of vision and originality of approach precisely because they worked to rid their perception and technique of preconceptions, focusing instead on what emerged from their personal encounter with the subject. For critics, this method made Impressionism seem passive and superficial, an art concerned merely with the transcription of surface effects. For them, Impressionism lacked intellectual or imaginative content and entailed simply copying nature in sketchy, underdeveloped form. Critics complained that the canvases were too quickly produced. “There is one artist who has hung about thirty ‘paintings’!,” exclaims

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Thémines with reference to Monet, before claiming that those so-called paintings destabilize the viewer with their tones of framboise exaspérée and cérise-tournée.26 These commentators argued that such perceived speed of e­ xecution and volume of output were evidence of a disregard for rigorous training and hard work. Bringing these criticisms together, one characteristic review from 1877 understood Impressionism as recording “the lively, sincere and clear impression of nature seen spontaneously, without concern for examination or analysis. In this new school, laborious and patient study is abolished. There is no need for drawing, imagination, poetry, or style. The sensation takes priority over all of that.”27 For all of these reasons, Philippe Burty was able to confidently claim in 1879 that “women triumph in what one calls ‘Impressionism.’ ”28 From a range of scientific, medical, and social scientific perspectives, in nineteenth-century France women were thought to be naturally physiologically and emotionally sensitive, endowing them with greater responsiveness to the fleeting impressions that were positioned by both Impressionism’s champions and its discontents as crucial to the practice. Furthermore, women were believed to be better at imitating than inventing and to lack the capacity for abstract thought and demanding work. Impressionism therefore seemed the ideal style for a woman painter. It could be reduced to a certain recipe: “According to the impressionist method, a painting is very quickly made; a dozen brushstrokes, colors spread with a broomstick, some lead white, some bottle green, salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, and you’re done.”29 As when Léon

Lagrange accused modern artists of following the La Cuisinière bourgeoise cookbook like housewives, Impressionism seemed no more than an easily followed formula that consisted in recording the subtleties of nature quickly and without reflection, making a woman’s perceived tendency toward heightened nervous states an asset.30 One critic imagines the response of a male visitor to the 1877 Impressionist Exhibition: “He thus attributed to these artists—passionate, a little nervous, febrile even—a feminine temperament; he was looking for the male and did not find it.”31 Georges Rivière’s review of Berthe Morisot’s work the same year combines claims for women’s increased sensitivity and tendency toward imitation: “She copies M. Manet, but her delicate nature has allowed her to transform the male style that makes that master a great painter into a light touch, delicate, feminine, which creates a kind of originality despite its origin. Her eye is very sensitive, more sensitive even than M. Manet’s, who, carried away by the power of his strokes, neglects the tones.”32 Whereas Manet has greatness and power, in other words, “elevated idea[s] . . . creation . . . inspiration,” as in Millaud’s description of what Impressionism lacks, Morisot’s light touch and responsiveness to color variation is framed as feminine. For Rivière, Manet’s masculinity keeps him from noticing the subtleties of tone in the same way that she can. Rivière’s emphasis on Morisot’s aptitude for color is another key component of the feminization of Impressionism. The bright colors and broad strokes seen to characterize Impressionist practice were understood in gendered terms. Many critics saw drawing and compositional

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planning—associated with the masculine side of art and the values of order and control—sacrificed to an “orgy” of the palette or “debauchery” of tones. Rivière himself noted that calling Impressionist paintings debaucheries of color had become standard practice by 1877.33 We need only revisit the terms of Thémines’s description of Monet’s marine paintings: “It is these supposed landscapes that throw the visitor most off balance. It is a debauchery [débauche, a term frequently used to describe an overabundance of and overindulgence in food and drink] of rocks in the color of the most intense raspberry, emerald-green skies, and waves of ripe cherry.” Color had long been theorized as the female side of art, associated with excess and unruliness, its seductive qualities in need of discipline through a rigorous pictorial structure.34 The Impressionist tache could be seen as the ultimate manifestation of color without line, freed from drawing and independent of form, disrupting the order of a picture. The tendency to refer to Impressionist color as a débauche was underwritten by the connection between color and the sensual, decadent feminine in art theory, and was also tied to the many descriptions of paint as ripe food with its own gendered aspects: “a debauchery of rocks in the color of the most intense raspberry, emerald-green skies, and waves of ripe cherry.” As we know, women were associated with “cream in pistachio, vanilla, and currant flavors,” as Millaud describes the first impression of the canvases displayed in 1877. The gendering of these foodstuffs was made more explicit in that same year by Louis Leroy, who compares Renoir’s Portrait of Jeanne Samary leaning over to expose an

expanse of décolletage to “vanilla, red currant and pistachio: a portrait to eat with a spoon!”35 Renoir’s delectable tones, dominated by vibrant pink, compose a delicious figure. But even when used in relation to a landscape, the comparison of paint to melting, fruity cream retained the connection between that food, female taste, and even female bodies, so often described in terms of creamy smoothness, fruity freshness, or abhorrent decay. We are not so far from Zola’s insistence that a painting was itself flesh, here female flesh, a construction that, as we have seen, related to a long tradition of feminizing the canvas surface and suggesting the male viewer’s or artist’s vulnerability in the face of a work that could itself be understood as embodied—Claude Lantier’s suicide before his adored canvas is the ultimate demonstration. As Thémines writes, the paintings in 1877 are just “supposed” landscapes, as he places “paintings” in quotation marks (“[Monet] has hung about thirty ‘paintings’! . . . It is these supposed landscapes that throw the visitor most off balance”). Who could know what the orgies of intense tones really were as they disturbed the viewer with their raspberry and cherry tones that appealed to the entire body and distracted from the proper function and experience of painting? When Millaud explains that the Impressionist Exhibition of 1877 does not address the mind but is only for the eye, he expresses the understanding of Impressionism as a lightweight art of appearances and surface effects. But this sits strangely alongside the first impression he describes, in which the eye is baffled amid somatic confusion (“He feels swept up in a whirlwind of fresh colors in which he cannot

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distinguish anything”), as well as the description of visual penetration as grasping the subject, a tactile metaphor, and the final experience of paintings capturing and overpowering the gaze in “exactly the same” manner that the sharp odor of ripe cheese acts upon the nose. Whether it is the first or second impression, the encounter that Millaud describes allows for no separation between the eye and the other organs of perception. Admitting first to the sensual allure of the canvases, Millaud then attempts to contain and control that aspect, as the eye orients itself and the mind regains the power to assess the work in relation to concepts such as the elevated idea, creation, inspiration, or pure art, all of which he deems sorely absent. But even at this stage, when reason and aesthetic judgment appear to triumph, the senses are attacked by paintings with the stench of decaying organic material, paintings that Millaud calls “unhealthy” earlier in the review. The vortex of colors seems not to represent anything at all, “from close or far, from the front or the side.” The paintings turn from fresh to fermenting and demand to be smelled as well as seen by a visitor forced to move around them rather than being able to maintain one privileged position for contemplation. They threaten the body and the very concept of “l’art pur.” What is so destabilizing here is the feminine, invoked at every stage of the passage as that against which the male viewer (le visiteur) struggles. Millaud’s account of these works— painted with sweet cream, attracting the body only to abuse it—is linked to the feminizing of Impressionism as a movement that was sensually decadent to the point of being dangerous,

its paintings composed of undisciplined piles of creamy and pungent color run riot that called for an embodied viewer at the expense of a calm and collected one. The appearance of shared materiality between paintings and foodstuffs invited responses that precluded the aesthetic detachment that supplied a corrective to the first section’s critical descriptions of the preponderantly female confusion between paintings and food. Here, no such detachment is possible, and that is the risk that Impressionist paintings pose. Not only do they feminize the artists who made them—those “feminine temperaments” who “had spilled waves of cream in pistachio, vanilla, and currant flavors”—but also they force the viewer to relate to the paintings as a woman would, with the entire body, as friandise.36 As we know, “friandise makes a man sensual, difficult and dishonest”; it is “for women and men who resemble them.”37 Through these culinary metaphors, reviewers betrayed their attraction toward or repulsion from paint material and attempted to channel it into productive categories for art criticism. These metaphors help us better understand how Impressionism disrupted critical practice. They allow us to challenge both those nineteenth-­ century assessments like Millaud’s, which claimed that Impressionism was solely for the eye (“If he has an impression, it is only for his eyes”), as well as art-historical interpretations that have focused on those assertions of opticality without attending to the broader context of multisensory engagement within which they were often embedded, as is the case in Millaud’s piece. Addressing these comparisons between Impressionism and food also extends inquiry into

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the gendering of the movement. The feminizing of Impressionism was linked not only to the judgment that the art was merely for the eye (and not the mind), but that it was for the entire body. The painting did not just jeopardize the male artist, whose perception and practice veered into women’s rightful territory, but also imperiled male viewers surrounded by the seductive but sickening stuff of feminized raw ingredients. Pastry in Paint

We have seen that to call a male artist a pastry chef was to tauntingly align his works with vulgarized female taste and aesthetic superficiality and that this conflation achieves another level of significance in terms of painting. Oil paint proved rich in its ability to move from a highly finished, “lickable” surface, easily analogized to a glazed pastry, to a more insistent physicality that could stimulate the appetite with creamy textures and fruity colors or provoke disgust through the same qualities. Certain Impressionist works stage the connections between painting and cooking at the level of the paint, outside of explicit critical attention. Three still lifes, Caillebotte’s Cakes (1881) and Langouste à la Parisienne (1880–82; see fig. 42) and Monet’s The Galettes (1882; see fig. 40), suggest that the metaphor of artist as confectioner could in fact be productive for painters, thereby undermining the gendered hierarchies upon which Zola relied for his polemics and so many critics and caricaturists depended for their humor. Cakes (fig. 38) returns us to a setting like Béraud’s La Pâtisserie Gloppe (see fig. 29), but to a different, more proximate view of pastries shown just under life-size. A Saint-Honoré cake

is front and center, while éclairs with coffee and chocolate icing, fruit tartelettes, and more rest on silver racks atop porcelain plates edged in gold. The variety, presentation, and long marble counter situate the display in an upscale patisserie; the label on the leftmost cake, with gold script too vague to decipher, confirms that it was baked commercially. But unlike in La Pâtisserie Gloppe, none of Caillebotte’s cakes has been sampled, and no knives or cutlery suggest their imminent consumption. They are shown from above to communicate the most information about the decorated surfaces, and the viewer is in a position to scrutinize the eye-grabbing window display or interior presentation. Without any indication of social life or details of the space to distract from the undisturbed organization of the cakes, yet unmarred by bites or missing slices, time stands still, allowing for a protracted contemplation of pattern and rhyming forms. Shapes are repeated in the circles of tarts, plates, and cream puffs lining the Saint-Honoré, set off by the long rectangular counter, ovular éclairs, and pointed tips of the diamond-shaped tarts and triangulated wrapper. The pastries are shown at a uniform resolution, requiring the eye to move slowly and deliberately across a canvas in a size twenty paysage format, typically used for landscape painting.38 Peculiar aspects emerge in the composition. Caillebotte has tilted the marble counter upward, which throws off the angle between its surface and side and produces the impression that the cakes and fragile porcelain could slide off the slippery, ice-blue surface. The empty background has surprising gravitas. Its dark gray tonalities, shared by the plates, contribute to a

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chilly austerity at odds with the sumptuousness and easy pleasure that such a subject would seem to promise. Without signifiers of social life or further context, we occupy the same type of ambiguous, temporally suspended space of Veal in a Butcher’s Shop (see fig. 25), where the viewer is confronted with objects to be possessed and consumed but which remain ever out of reach. Despite the shop setting and the attendant connotations of a flâneur’s roving eye, Cakes challenges the expectation of a world of “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”— the description of modernity from Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” that has become synonymous with Impressionism and runs through to a recent catalogue maintaining that Caillebotte’s still life paintings “seem unstable, fleeting, momentary, disjointed, and therefore apparently authentic” (emphasis in original).39 If this display appears unstable with its uptilted perspective, that instability catapults the cakes into a space other than or exceeding the shop window. Rather than seeming disjointed, the forms are painstakingly arranged. Far from “apparently authentic” cakes, they announce themselves as painted objects. The crusts and plates become borders to the play of pigment within. The interiors of the tarts are no more than collections of short strokes of deep orange and purple. The top of the brioche in the upper left is a burnt shade that blends into the background as if to advertise that both surfaces are made of the same substance, oil paint. If that paint is not used to produce flawless optical illusionism, its materiality is mobilized to imitate the haptic qualities of the subjects. White paint is thick and pasty where it repre-

sents the mixture of pastry cream and whipped cream in the center of the Saint-Honoré. The impasto appears smoothed down with a palette knife, just as icing could have been applied. One critic of the 1882 Impressionist Exhibition proposed the analogy—if not directly in relation to Cakes, which like most of Caillebotte’s still lifes was never shown—writing that Impressionists painted with dessert knives rather than brushes.40 The paint appears powdery and chalky, with affinities to the surface of a meringue. This is also true of the marble counter, where white paint is mixed with blue and purple to create a dry surface. Critics noticed that this paint constitution and handling imparted a fine, powdery veil over the subject. For example, an evocative assessment of Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877; fig. 39) in the upmarket journal L’Art explains that, despite the open umbrellas, “rain is no longer falling. What did fall is not rain, it is something white like flour or powdered sugar [quelque chose de blanc comme de la farine ou du sucre en poudre] that was sprinkled all over the pavement, umbrellas, everything, with equal and regular perfection.”41 Farineux, which translates imperfectly as “floury,” was used as a term in painting to describe a dull gray tone.42 The assertion that the artist powdered his canvas “with equal and regular perfection” relates to the carefully ordered forms depicted in the picture, like the synchronized geometry of the architecture and the matching umbrellas. Another critic felt that Caillebotte had painted snow, not rain, thereby sharing the impression that the scene was “frosted.”43 Both critics were responding to the generous amount of white paint mixed

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Fig. 38

Gustave Caillebotte, Cakes, 1881. Oil on canvas, 54 × 73 cm.

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Fig. 39

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. Oil on canvas, 212.2 × 276.2 cm.

into the gray of the umbrellas, the beige of the paving stones, and the green of the sidewalk. Supporters and detractors alike commented on an overall dullness of color and atmosphere resulting from this practice, and Caillebotte’s paintings were repeatedly compared to slate or chalkboards.44 While the majority of Impressionist works have been varnished at some point in their histories, whether by the artist or as they passed through the hands of dealers, collectors, and museums, Cakes has a matte finish, indicat-

ing that little if any surface coating has been applied to it. The pasty paint suggests raw dough (pâte), its chalky aspect a dusting of powdered sugar, and its rough surface the flaky texture of puff pastry. Caillebotte’s decision to angle the marble counter upward, despite its disjunctive effect, seems designed to heighten these analogies between paint and pastry. Spatial overlap is created between tabletop and canvas, both decorated with cakes, and the marble comes to stand in for that canvas. Contributing to this effect, Cakes is painted on a gray primed canvas

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that peeks through the strokes at the lower edge, and so Caillebotte’s choice to represent a gray marble table covered in loose veining heightens the equivalence between the table and the canvas as the latter may have looked in its beginning stages, flecked with exploratory marks. The shape of the table, too, is that of a canvas stretched over beams and ready for painting. The opaque paint material and lack of spatial recession throughout stop the eye at the surface, emphasizing both the manual activity of painting as a craft and the painting as a handmade object, showing cakes that are an arm’s length away, the same distance from the painter as his canvas would have been while painting them. The viewer is confronted with the raw ingredients of paint and the textures that it shares with the substances that it represents. Together with Caillebotte’s choice to privilege the rigid pictorial structure of repeating patterns and shapes of cakes to the exclusion of figures or other context, this allows the artist’s confection to overlap with the baker’s, suggesting a comparison between the materials and processes of painter and pâtissier and the possibilities of paint to suggest the latter’s work. Monet’s The Galettes (fig. 40) is a more casual arrangement, but one that bears striking similarities to Cakes. Monet admired Caille­ botte’s still lifes, contending that they were “worthy of the greatest successes of Manet and Renoir.”45 In 1882, when The Galettes was painted, the two artists shared a Paris studio while Monet was mainly based outside the capital in Poissy. That year, Monet traveled to the Norman coast to paint landscapes, the same landscapes that we have seen critics compare to

whipped cream and ice cream. Disappointed by bad weather in Dieppe, he moved on to Pourville and stayed at the inn and restaurant À la Renommée des Galettes. The name referred to the culinary specialty of Paul Graff, who ran the hotel with his wife, Eugénie Lavergne. While there, Monet worked on portraits of each proprietor and a still life of the celebrated galettes, all of which remained with Graff and Lavergne directly after their completion. Monet borrowed the Portrait of Père Paul (see fig. 41), as Graff was known, and The Galettes for his solo show at Paul Durand-Ruel’s Paris gallery in 1883. Galettes are circular puff pastries covered in a layer of fruit slices and baked. Those depicted by Monet feature apple slices, the Norman regional specialty, which are carefully laid out in a pinwheel arrangement with the pastry crust turned up around the edges and imprinted with similar patterning. The galettes rest on wicker racks and, like Caillebotte’s Cakes, their surfaces are shown in full, thanks to an exaggerated uptilted perspective. A knife occupies the foreground, and a vial of orange liquid, identified as cider by Monet’s friend and biographer Gustave Geffroy, also suggests a sauce to be served with the dish.46 The setting is less formal and commercial than in Cakes. This was a preparation more easily made at home, and, without the extensive assortment or long marble counter, the scene appears to be staged in a domestic context. The wicker trays provide a more unassuming presentation than Caillebotte’s gold-edged porcelain, and they are differently sized, contributing to the impression that, like the galettes, the trays were also handmade. The perspective in The Galettes, however, is similar to Cakes: a downward view at

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Fig. 40

Claude Monet, The Galettes, 1882. Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm.

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the surface of the tarts and the worked materiality of paint. The effect equally facilitates reflection on the overlapping materials and processes of making pastries and paintings. The tablecloth is composed of thick, frothy white strokes set off by pink, yellow, blue, and violet patches. It rises around the knife that sinks into it, like a sea upon which the galettes float on their wicker rafts, inflected by the marine paintings that were Monet’s main focus in Pourville and which we have seen compared to the stuff of pastry. Even more than in Cakes, the table takes up nearly the entire canvas and comes to stand in for it, covered in pasty streaks. Warm amber, caramel, chocolate, and burnt orange tones echo through the carafe, the tarts, the racks, and even the signature. Geffroy calls the pastries “well cooked, golden, crusty [très cuite, dorée, croustillante],” pointing out a radiant warmth of tone reminiscent of the heat given off by tarts taken straight from the oven to cool, a process metaphorically figured in a painting’s drying time, when the surface structure of tart or painting sets.47 Georges Grappe, another early critic of the work, describes “this ‘puff pastry’ in cooked and browned tones [ce ‘feuilleté’ aux tons rissolés],” eliding the materials of paint and pastry by referencing Monet’s cooked color.48 Even the tablecloth picks up these golden hues, as in the shadow of the curved glass. With such color resonance, that vial of dense orange material doubles as a pot of viscous paint into which a brush could be dipped to create the galettes and trays, just as it might represent a sauce to coat the tarts; sauce, it bears noting, was atelier jargon for the early stages of paint preparation or the dilute reddish-brown color used to establish

tone on a canvas.49 Compositional elements contribute to the analogy between chef and painter. The knife, which draws such attention with its abrupt coloration, exceeds its role and suggests the paintbrush or, especially, the palette knife, placed as it is next to the circular wicker trays that also invoke wooden palettes. The structure of consecutive circles, pastries upon trays upon table, suggests that each culinary turned painterly confection is framed. The facture, too, evokes the products represented. The caramelized surfaces of the apples, the brittle wicker, or the crust of puff pastry are proposed in the rough, caked surface of dried oil paint with its matte finish. Similar to the term croûte (crust) in beaux-arts vocabulary, pâte feuilletée, or puff pastry, is a compelling analogue for a painting, composed of layers from the support, to the glue size and priming preparations, to the many strokes of paint, and finally to any surface coating. In The Galettes, layers of impasto (pâte) create a richly textured crust comparable to the strata of puff pastry, layers of dough held together by butter, making one critic’s accusation that Impressionism seemed to be peinture au beurre rather than peinture à l’huile seem apposite. Jules Vidal opens his review of the Impressionist Exhibition in 1886: “We have seen Salon painters whose contempt for this art manifested from the first steps up the stairs; at the entry door these men experienced nausea. Eternal argument between those whose cuisine is à l’huile or au beurre, who impose the arbitrary theory of their tastes.”50 Vidal compares all painters to chefs who prefer different ingredients, punning off of the fat-suspended medium of oil paint. The Salon artists who paint à l’huile

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use conventional supplies, while Impressionists innovate with materials of different consistency that cause the revulsion that Vidal discerned in the body language of non-Impressionist artists. Unlike oil, butter—that most crucial of ingredients in French cooking in general and pastry in particular—quickly turns rancid, making it easy to imagine viewers who “experienced nausea” when confronted by canvas surfaces prone to, or in the process of, decomposition. But peinture au beurre need not be a bad thing. Grappe admires Les Galettes as “ce ‘feuilleté’ aux tons rissolés,” marking out feuilleté with quotation marks, perhaps using the term self-consciously not only to identify the confection but also to linger on the flaky qualities of the dish as well as the encrusted paint representing it, following it up with his metaphor of paint that is cooked and browned as a pastry is baked. Monet painted the Portrait of Père Paul (fig. 41) alongside the portrait of Paul Graff ’s confections. In it, Graff is shown from the bust up wearing a chef ’s hat and jacket. He looks away, appearing wistful or weary. This work is far less finished than The Galettes. Monet describes it in a letter to Durand-Ruel as a “curious esquisse,” a term for a smaller-scale oil sketch.51 Its sections are painted to widely diverging degrees. At the bottom, the body dissolves into grand sweeps of thick white and putty-colored paint indicating rough outlines of the jacket, sometimes projecting off the canvas. Those loose, smeared streaks manifest paint’s full potential to congeal and coagulate on the surface of the canvas. The swirling pigment is applied like the flipping of whipping cream, recalling Canivet’s comparison of Monet’s method to whipping with “a few

turns of the hand.” The canvas conjures up the working surface of a pastry chef after the dough has been rolled out, with lines of flour and bands of paste left from sticky fingers, in the unfinished state before the counter is cleaned or a picture has been brought to completion. In common practice, Graff would have worked his dough on a length of canvas patted down with flour to provide a clean surface for his pâte, the same type of surface upon which Monet’s pâte would depict the chef ’s pastry in The Galettes.52 In that still life, the handmade tarts and highly wrought background share common materiality and handling, suggesting and even celebrating a continuity between the making of pastries and paintings that was more often derided in Impressionist criticism. For example, mocking the art collector Eugène Murer, a pastry chef whom Monet and others would eventually accuse of taking advantage of their precarious financial positions to acquire art at unfair prices, the pseudonymous Tout-Paris jokes in 1880: Since we are talking about the amateurs of this interesting painting, we cannot overlook the existence of a pastry chef on the boulevard Voltaire, who, having made his fortune, all of a sudden felt a rather unusual admiration for the new school a few years ago; so the purchases began. . . . Nothing is funnier than seeing this man in his white apron, with a baker’s cap, leaving his shop and merrily heading toward the atelier of one of these chefs of Impressionism, from whence he never leaves without carrying a more or less sizable ­canvas. “I make the dough [pâte],” this young cook told us recently, “and the patron buys the crusts [croûtes].”53

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Fig. 41

Claude Monet, Portrait of Père Paul, 1882. Oil on canvas, 64.5 × 52.1 cm.

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It is amusing for this reviewer to visualize the pastry chef carrying paintings under his arm like analogous loaves of bread. Chef drifts in ­meaning to name the leader of a school of painting or a kitchen. The Impressionist atelier becomes a bakery and vice versa as the caricatured Murer brings together the identities of pastry chef, art collector, and Impressionist painter—in fact, in reality Murer did practice painting—all working with pâte to make croûtes. The review mocks Murer as much as the painters, all of whom overestimate their status. But in The Galettes as well as in Cakes, such a connection between chef de cuisine and chef de l’impressionnisme is not posed as ridiculous. Monet was a passionate gourmand who kept cooking journals and recorded recipes based on his preferences.54 Rather than signifiers of frivolity or superficiality, Monet’s galettes are unexpectedly monumental, their physical weight intimated by the dense strokes of impasto through which they bulge like the swollen carafe or the bloated strokes of the tablecloth. Though not dessert, Caillebotte’s Langouste à la Parisienne (fig. 42) is an elaborate confection similar in composition to The Galettes. In both, a creased tablecloth covers an uptilted table. A boat of sauce in the upper left corner is balanced by cutlery in the lower right, and a round platter rests between them. Douglas Druick first identified the dish in Caillebotte’s painting as the recipe langouste à la Parisienne, which requires removing the meat from the tail of a langouste, a shellfish resembling a small, spiny lobster. The meat is then sliced, dressed with salt, pepper, oil, and vinegar, decorated with vegetables and truffles, reassembled atop

the animal’s empty shell, and typically mounted, sometimes on a diagonally cut piece of bread, so that it rises at an angle.55 Langouste à la Parisienne was so elevated a dish that, while touring the 1867 Universal Exhibition, Kaiser Wilhelm I, Tsar Alexander II, and Minister President Otto von Bismarck dined on a version of it (homard à la Parisienne) at the elegant Café Anglais. Their meal became known as the Three Emperors Dinner and remains famous for its exorbitant tab and surviving menu.56 The preparation of langouste à la Parisienne was considered so sophisticated that it frequently featured in culinary exhibitions. A popular attraction at the 1910 Exposition de cuisine was a competition to honor the chef who could prepare a langouste à la Parisienne the fastest in front of the crowd.57 From its appearance at the Café Anglais dinner to the culinary exhibition, the recipe was an icon of national cooking for more than forty years. Unlike Monet’s country speciality, the suffix à la Parisienne anchors it in the urban center, where it was one of the preparations upon which France built its reputation as the leader in culinary art. With characteristic interest in geometric patterning, Caillebotte draws attention to the skill required in the painstaking assembly of the meal’s architecture. He shows each overlapping round of shellfish with its spot of truffle flanked by alternating touches of red or green, suggesting an herb or vegetable garnish. The dish is ready to be eaten but lacks a server to slice and distribute pieces among the still neatly stacked plates. The viewer is not invited to imagine participating in its consumption, which would disturb the chef ’s transformation of the

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Fig. 42

Gustave Caillebotte, Langouste à la Parisienne, 1880–82. Oil on canvas, 58 × 72 cm.

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l­angouste, framed by golden edges like a painting and isolated as a finished artistic product. It sits on a dense white tablecloth that once again shares affinities with the canvas upon which Caillebotte’s own artistic rendering is composed. Infused with complementary blue and orange, purple and yellow, the tablecloth is unabashedly a painterly surface, and its linen material is elided with that of the canvas itself, the grain of which is visible at the bottom edge of the work. Draped over rectangular beams, starched and resilient as it retains ironed peaks, the cloth is like a coarse canvas waiting to be stretched, reinforcing the impression that the langouste on it parallels the work of art on a canvas, its pale flesh painted with sauces and taches of colored food. These slices are represented through a thick application of creamy paint with the consistency of the mayonnaise that would coat them in reality, and the paint doubles as the food it represents.58 Alimentary and painterly material become connected as substances that change over time, and imagining Caillebotte painting a real langouste à la Parisienne before it decays, or is eaten for dinner, evokes the competition to literally assemble the dish in the 1910 concours. One long antenna cuts diagonally across the picture plane, revealing the identity of the shellfish while also making it strange, for where is the second antenna? Exaggerated in scale, reduced to one instead of two, seeming not to belong to the body from which its connection is obscured, the antenna emerges from the painting like a paintbrush, the feathery end of which coincides with the profusion of soft lettuce leaves. The multiplied stacks of plates, spoons, and slices emphasize repetition, and the recurring work

of the painter applying strokes, visible one by one along the bottom edge of the tablecloth, becomes analogous to the chef ’s continuing confection of short-lived chefs-d’œuvre. Modernizing the lobster of seventeenth-­century Dutch still life to the new trends in contemporary French cooking and painting, Caillebotte highlights the artistry of the chef ’s hand as well as his own. Langouste à la Parisienne: Food and the Feminine

In paint, the damning association between painting and confecting, which had been used to equate paintings with frivolous, feminized objects of crass commercialism and artistic conventionalism, could be reclaimed. From Caillebotte’s still life of cakes severed from the women who reach out to taste Béraud’s sweets at the Pâtisserie Gloppe to Monet’s sympathetic rendering of a male pastry chef paired with a portrait of his art, we are not confronted with the suggestion that these foods or their production are linked to concepts of the feminine. That is, until Langouste à la Parisienne, which, like Veal in a Butcher’s Shop, asks to be placed in the wider context of the gendering of foodstuffs and the conflation of female bodies with alimentary substances in French culture and art criticism. The name “langouste à la Parisienne” invokes not just the geographical origin of the dish, but also the mythic figure of the Parisienne, symbol of the successes of modern Paris and its culture—including its cooking. The Parisienne was so versatile and profitable a figure that the culinary press seized on its potential as a mar­ keting tool, comparing confected women to

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culinary creations in order to assert that both were national products unique in the world. This is the subtext of a bombastic 1883 claim from the trade journal L’Art culinaire, directed at professional male chefs. Woman in France is recognized among all the other women from civilized regions; it is impossible to mix her up. The game in France has a taste, an aroma of superior quality to the game of the Rhine and of other nations. In each region France has local dishes worthy of making an incomparable gastronomic map; obliging the tourist to take up residence to enjoy the renowned food. France is the blessed country, the holy land of liberty and the grave of every kind of barbarity. Succulent fruit, delicious vegetables, delicate butcher’s meat and the artistic cradle of the culinary arts.59

This passage is a prelude to the author’s plea to protect national food products and recipes from the supposedly adulterating influences of other cuisines. The opening statement about French women seems incongruous with what is otherwise an elaboration of the merits of French cooking. It makes the assumption that French women symbolize French culture as does its cuisine. Universal Exhibitions glorified the food industry, and its products and practices were exported through cookbooks as well as by French chefs who worked in hotels, clubs, restaurants, ocean liners, and wealthy households abroad. Tied to the capital, langouste à la Parisienne was an icon of French cooking just as the Parisienne was regarded as a similar national symbol. The two were even more closely aligned, for the name of the dish, though likely coinciden-

tal, proposes a resemblance between the dressed lobster and a dressed Parisienne, who, as the personification of French style, was inseparable from her attire. The overlapping rounds of langouste create semicircles that bring to mind the fripperies of fashion, those pleats, ruffles, and buttons familiar from fashion plates as well as paintings. We can compare Caillebotte’s langouste with the dress that Renoir chose for the female figure in his painting The Swing, which Caillebotte owned (fig. 43). This is a princessstyle dress, a fashionable cut with no waist seam to interrupt its long, slender line, embellished by a row of bows down the front. These forms find resonance in the slim, elongated shape of the prepared shellfish, punctuated by dots of truffle like the garniture on a dress or buttons trailing down its back. The descending rounds of flesh imitate flounced layers that often extended into tail-like trains, or the crinoline cages of hoops that kept a skirt expanded. Tenuous though this connection between shellfish and apparel may seem, it was reinforced in nineteenth-century fashion terminology and in the press. By the 1870s, the crinoline was giving way to other types of bustles, including one called the queue d’écrevisse, usually translated as “lobster-tail bustle,” which was also constructed of fabric mounted on hoops. The écrevisse, or crayfish, closely resembles a langouste. This bustle was so named because it shaped a woman’s body to resemble a curving shell. Seen from the back, its pleats bear a similarity to the animal’s tail fin (fig. 44). In this context, the dish langouste à la Parisienne suggests another aspect of a woman’s lingerie, the corset. The dress represented in Renoir’s

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Fig. 43

Fig. 44

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Swing, 1876.

“Lobster Tail” Bustle, c. 1885.

Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm.

Cotton, wool, and blue velvet ribbon.

painting requires a cuirass corset, a long style creating a tall, slim shape to fit inside an outfit that conforms tightly down the hips. Langouste à la Parisienne, designed with architectural support to stand up on its plate, has a rigid structure like the upright posture demanded of tightly laced stays. The shell is an exoskeleton and the corset functions as one, molding a woman within its rigid brace. Expensive models made of whalebone, sometimes known as whalebone

bodies, provided a more literal link between the corseted body and aquatic life that was not lost on contemporary commentators.60 The affinities presented in the lobster-tail bustle, a documented vogue for “lobster-red” dresses, and the shell-like corset were the subject of humor in the English satirical magazine Punch, or the London Charivari. In an 1876 print, a woman wearing a gigantic lobster-shell dress, complete with a fork in her hairpiece, stands with her

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back to a mirror in an elegant domestic setting (fig. 45). The caption reads: “Mr. Punch’s Dress Designs (After Nature). Costume du Soir—Robe en Homard [A Suggestion for Tight Dresses].” The dress name, given in French in this English journal, implies that the dress is, or is inspired by, French couture, which in this case is synonymous with French cuisine. The “Suggestion for Tight Dresses” parodies the trend for close-fitting skirts hugging a woman’s legs, confining and masking her body like a rigid shell. That the dress is designed “After Nature” connects dressmaking and, by extension, cooking, with painting, in which the phrase d’après nature names the practice of representing a scene or model as directly observed. Mr. Punch, the pun goes, literally draws from nature, constructing his dress not from textiles but from members of the natural world. More metaphorically, in the Punch caricature attention is drawn to the “shell” of the Parisienne, her carefully arranged, seductive surface appearance functioning analogously to aquatic armor. In the words of eminent writer and publisher Octave Uzanne, whose passion for female fashion and the figure of the Parisienne resulted in several publications on these topics: “Dress for women is the first of the arts, the one that contains all the others. It is her offensive armor, her harmonious palette.”61 Attire, arranged as a painter composes colors and forms, attracts the gaze. However, its tight laces and intricate packaging could be seen to rebuff touch. The worldly physicality of flesh is transformed into an unyielding sculptural casing that appeals to the eye above all, even if the phallic gaze that it inspires invites the bodily desires of the

one looking. In the 1858 essay “De la mode” published in the journal L’Artiste, writer and art critic Théophile Gautier describes how contemporary fashion had altered the perception of human bodies both male and female: “Clothing, in modern times, has become for man a kind of skin which does not separate by

Fig. 45

Mr. Punch’s Dress Designs (After Nature), 1876. Caricature from Punch, or the London Charivari, March 11, 1876, 90.

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any c­ ircumstance and which sticks to him like the coat of an animal, to the extent that the real shape of the body has been completely forgotten. Anyone who has some acquaintance with painters, and happens to enter a studio when a model is posing, has a half-unconscious feeling of surprise mingled with disgust at the sight of this unknown creature, the male or female amphibian posing on the table.”62 Without devices to shape it, the human body would appear as grotesque as a sea creature.63 But dressed up à la Parisienne, a woman or even a lobster could become a seductive spectacle. This subtext informs the comic story of a political gathering published in the upmarket magazine Revue illustrée in 1893. When the male company is served a langouste à la Parisienne, one member of the party exclaims: “We admire the clever architecture of this dish, the art with which the slices of lobster overlap, gently stretched out on a bed of Russian salad and bathed in unctuous waves of blonde mayonnaise . . . and champagne continues to flow, and eyes shine, and faces flush, and the interview becomes more animated. The citizen mayor no longer thinks of defending himself, he embarks on his theories, he exposes his campaign plan, he reveals his projects, his large projects, which would make Saint-Denis the leading city in France . . .”64 This is a remarkably sexualized description, and the sets of ellipses, both original, give the reader opportunities to linger on the exhibition of the dish and its effects on the audience. The langouste stretches across a bed, bathing in creamy, blonde, semen-like sauce. The men at the table are aroused and seduced in step with the nineteenth-century

designation of shellfish and truffles as aphrodisiacs. As heat rises to their faces, the onceguarded mayor exposes himself, along with his “large” projects, in the well-trodden narrative of powerful men compromising professional secrets in the bedroom. As the corporeal urges and agitation underlying the company’s visual delectation are made explicit, the reciprocity between alimentary and sexual consumption, and the relationship of both of these to vision, is raised. Feminized food stands for the most accessible form of the female, readily available for possession by eye and mouth. Visual, oral, and sexual pleasure are united across the terrain of a langouste turned Parisienne spread out and bathing before the party. In the context of these connections between food and the feminine, culinary and sexual consumption, visual and visceral pleasure, Caillebotte’s Langouste à la Parisienne signifies as more than a flâneur’s detached transcription of an elite meal. Instead it is invested in raising just those connections. Like Veal in a Butcher’s Shop (see fig. 25), the painting can be read as commentary on a culture of display, where a calf or a langouste must be dressed for dinner like the men, but particularly, these paintings suggest, like the women who eat them. Just as the recipe langouste à la Parisienne denatures a shellfish through the practices of haute cuisine, Caillebotte’s Langouste à la Parisienne denaturalizes the culture that dines upon it. Because the subject matter of Langouste à la Parisienne, like Veal in a Butcher’s Shop, is initially difficult to decipher, both paintings ask what lies beneath the disguise, how the physicality of bodies, whether of shellfish, calf, or woman, is

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revealed and concealed. As in Veal in a Butcher’s Shop, Langouste à la Parisienne proposes, only to interrupt, the seamless transition at work in a description like the one in the Revue illustrée that moves from viewing to physical appetite and between alimentary and sexual consumption. The longer the viewer looks, the more the painting’s material qualities manifest, and the stranger the subject appears. The mass of thick green and yellow strokes representing the mayonnaise in the silver dish do not blend and, leaping off the canvas, they announce their identity as oil paint and introduce the impression that perhaps this sauce has gone off. The viscous, acidic yellow and green condiment is far from the “unctuous waves of blonde mayonnaise” in the journal’s description. The langouste bathes instead in a swamp where the rising curves of boiled eggs around its base are ready to burst like bubbles in the muck, floating like disembodied eyes, raising the connection between vision and appetite only to refuse it. The sole known contemporary assessment of Langouste à la Parisienne was penned on the occasion of its first exhibition in Brussels in 1888. The anonymous reviewer calls the painting “an unstable but violent still life in which silver flames extraordinarily, blinding like a monstrance.”65 The critic felt that the alarming painting challenged vision, blinding audiences. Nor is there any easy or stable equivalence between delectable meal and desirable femininity. The stubborn antenna hovers threateningly over the cutlery to betray the animal’s creaturely identity, and its skinny, curled legs emerge from the platter to throw the studied elegance of the dish into question. The physicality of the body, like the frankly displayed materiality of the paint,

is uncontained. Despite the rigorous geometry of the dish, with its towering rounds of shellfish disciplined and locked into place like the tightly corseted flesh of the Parisienne, the unruly strokes projecting outward in the mayonnaise and the base of the dish reveal the potential of organic material to resist those boundaries. Impressionist paintings display materiality that was sometimes perceived as appealing, as suggested by critical comparisons to powdered sugar, fruit-flavored mousse, or ice cream. Those metaphors propose pleasure and appetite even when used to poke fun at Impressionist (or Academic) practice and, by extension, raise the parallel discussions of the confected Parisienne in all her mouthwatering, desire-inducing glory. Yet, particularly as these metaphors were used to describe Impressionist canvases, they retained the possibility of the repulsive. Creamy paint could easily transform into decomposing matter, or that which lay beneath the Parisienne’s seductive exterior or inside the lobster’s rigid shell—the amorphous animal without the skeleton of fashion or the scaffolding of masculine reason to hold it in place, little more than a succulent, spineless mass. The historical feminization of paint material ensured that the ways it was described related to how female bodies were described, in a dichotomy between freshness and decay, flawless surface and the substance beneath that threatened to break out of its boundaries and change over time. Whether compared to rotting meat or raspberry cream, the paintings took on a feminized presence as they became not just flesh, but female flesh, set free from the carapace of a corset or painterly form.

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chapter four

Impressionist Market Gardener

so far i have been dealing with typologies of specifically Parisian femininity. Sex workers were imagined in relation to the deplorable morality festering in the city streets, and Paris was a famous capital of the trade. Fashionable Parisiennes were defined by their city par excellence. This chapter considers another broad figuration of the feminine, the paysanne, or the agricultural worker outside the capital, who was frequently compared not to rotting meat or confectionery, but to vegetables. If Manet was accused of butchering flesh and Monet of confecting landscapes, Camille Pissarro was given another title in his critical reception, “Impressionist market gardener, specializing in cabbages [Maraîcher impressionniste. Spécialité de choux].”1 Pissarro did not actually paint many cabbages, but paysannes in French fields and towns were his preferred subject by the early 1880s. The nickname “cabbage painter”

depended on a shared critical vocabulary used to describe those figures, the wares they cultivated and brought to market, and the particu­ larities of the artist’s technique and facture. My first task is to explore the vegetal painting trope in the reception of Impressionism, particularly in relation to Pissarro. His unfavorable critics connected his paintings with vegetables in order to argue that his work was meager and insubstantial as well as bitter and sharp, potentially dangerous to the viewing eye and body. By contrast, when supportive critics described paintings as vegetables, whether explicitly comparing them to cabbages or using adjectives such as “fresh” and “raw,” they set up a model of viewing analogous to eating a healthy meal and relied on the nourishing potential of the landscape, its products, and, most of all, the female figures inhabiting it. The next section turns to Pissarro’s female figures. In his market paintings,

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figures and foodstuffs are most often represented together, where they might easily be understood to complement one another. Through an analysis of Pissarro’s most highly finished watercolor of the vegetable market at Les Halles, I explore why his champions characterized his work and his figures in terms of salubrity and freshness. Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris, set at Les Halles, features strongly, because in that novel Zola examined the symbolic potential of food, its gendering, and the interactions between the senses, all of which bear on my discussion of P ­ issarro’s painting and reception. Finally, the question of health and robustness that was adopted to describe Pissarro’s figures and paintings also inflected discussions of the artist himself, who was consistently equated with the laborers in his works—an “Impressionist market gardener.” Comparisons between the materials of art and those of agricultural landscapes, and the shared gestures of painter and peasant, provide insight into how Pissarro’s works were understood to challenge vision. Vegetal Painting

Pissarro’s early biographer Adolphe Tabarant recounts a story about the artist, who struggled financially during much of his long career. In 1877, the pastry chef Eugène Murer, one of Pissarro’s patrons (whom we saw caricatured in the last chapter for his pretensions as an art collector), devised a plan to raise money for the artist by organizing a raffle for one of Pissarro’s paintings in his patisserie. Tabarant tells us that a young working woman won the draw, but, when she rushed into the shop to see her painting, she was so disappointed with it that

she asked for a Saint-Honoré cake instead, ­leaving Murer to keep the work.2 Fact or fable, the story illustrates a wider trend in Pissarro’s reception. Far from calling him a fashionable artistic pâtissier, by 1886 the prominent critic and editor Félix Fénéon and his co-authors could confidently name Pissarro a “Maraîcher impressionniste. Spécialité de choux” in the anonymously published Petit Bottin des lettres et des arts. They left their assessment of the artist and his work at that. These men were not the first to describe ­Pissarro in such terms, which had been consistent in his reception since 1874. In Louis Leroy’s review of the first Impressionist Exhibition— the same review that objects to Monet’s “tongue lickings”—his exchange between himself and an artist companion includes this description of his friend’s astonishment in front of Pissarro’s submissions: . . . the Cabbages of M. Pisarro [sic] stopped him in the passage, and he turned scarlet red. —They are cabbages, I told him in a gently persuasive tone. —Oh! The unfortunate things are so caricatured! . . . I swear to never eat them again in my life! —But it’s not their fault if the painter . . . —Shut up!3

With heat rising to his face, the angry visitor purports to feel such physical revulsion that he pledges a lifelong loss of appetite before the unlucky subject, cabbages. The same year, the sympathetic Jules-Antoine Castagnary writes in an otherwise encouraging review that Pissarro “has a deplorable liking for market gardens,

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and does not shrink from depicting cabbages or other household vegetables. But these faults of logic or these vulgarities of taste do not alter his fine skills in execution.”4 What is striking here is that, as Françoise Cachin notes in her discussion of Pissarro’s nickname as a cabbage painter, none of Pissarro’s five landscapes shown in 1874 includes cabbages.5 When the vegetables appear in later exhibited works, they are only ever minor elements in agricultural landscapes, more prominent in the titles than the pictures—largely because Pissarro frequently painted in a location called Le Chou. Yet in 1881, Louis Énault could remark again on Pissarro’s “great love for cabbages,” and in 1886 Marcel Fouquier would claim that Pissarro began his career painting only “patches of cabbages in a beam of light,” denigrating the artist’s spotlight on such undeserving subject matter.6 Clearly the cabbage was an important symbol in art criticism. Théodore Duret articulates its meaning in his lengthy defense of Les peintres impressionnistes in 1878. It is true that you will be told that Pissarro has committed unforgivable attacks against taste. Imagine that he has lowered himself to painting cabbages and lettuce, I think even artichokes. Yes, when painting the houses of some villages, he painted the vegetable gardens they depend on, and in these gardens there were cabbages and lettuce and, like the rest, he reproduced them on the canvas. Now, for the partisans of “grand art,” there is in such a case something degrading, an attempt against the dignity of painting, something which shows that the artist has vulgar tastes, a complete oversight of the ideal, an absolute lack

of high aspirations, and so on. . . . When the cabbages and lettuce of Pissarro’s kitchen gardens have grown up, they will discover style and poetry in them.7

According to Duret, Pissarro was accused of painting cabbages to mock his neglect of the ideal and lack of elevated aspirations. The cabbage, quintessential food of the peasantry, stood for boorishness of subject matter, poor taste, and low value. This made comparisons between paintings and vegetables a powerful critique of Impressionism as impoverished painting. In Le Magasin des demoiselles, a journal targeting a female readership, a review of the 1879 Impressionist Exhibition begins: “My goodness, it is an economy that the poor have long discovered! Those who cannot buy meat are forced to be vegetarians [légumistes]. But I doubt that those with a better-lined purse would stand under the banner of this little phalanx.”8 The critic goes on to denigrate the tones of café au lait and egg yolk that seem not to represent anything at all, as though Impressionists were so short on cash that they resorted to putting their breakfast toward art making. We are told that those without the resources, whether funds or talent, to exhibit elsewhere became Impressionists. The word légumiste was chosen to sound bizarre. The term for vegetarian was végétarien, an established category if not a popular one. For this reviewer, the exhibition was a poor showing. The reference to vegetarianism related to the quantity of landscape painting exhibited, and allusions to vegetables most often appear in discussions of Pissarro and Monet, linked as landscapists. Decades earlier, Baudelaire had criticized contemporary landscape painters in

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his Salon de 1859 as “trop herbivores,” associating a meat-free diet with artistic weakness.9 In Baudelaire’s case and beyond, such commentary bespoke misgivings about the genre, still not overcome by the time of the Impressionist Exhibitions, that it was fragmentary and partial, deficient in “the essential quality of art,” as art historian and theorist Charles Blanc put it.10 Like a dinner of salad, landscape lacked the substance to satisfy the viewer-turned-diner. Henry Havard relied on the same idea when he sums up the 1881 Impressionist Exhibition as an assembly of art that is “not robust, rather badly nourished.”11 The painting is scrawny and weak. Another critic deems the following year’s show “nothing but an exhibition of Lent:—Lean, lean, very lean!”12 Puny painting turns to paltry food. In contrast, for supporters like Duret, the cabbage was a symbol of the sincerity of Impressionism, evidence of the painter’s commitment to depicting reality in its many forms. Zola exploited this potential through the character Claude Lantier in Le Ventre de Paris and later in L’Oeuvre, in which vegetables are emblematic of artistic revolution. In L’Oeuvre, Claude declares that modern art both embodies and represents a humble carrot in opposition to the École’s confections: “Is not a bunch of carrots, yes, a bunch of carrots studied directly and painted naively, in the personal manner in which it was seen, worth as much as the timeless confections of the École, that tobacco juice painting shamefully cooked according to recipes? The day is coming when a single original carrot will be pregnant with revolution.”13 Modernism is the carrot to academicism’s cake.

Zola was among Pissarro’s earliest supporters and described the painter in terms similar to Claude’s aspirations, as a revolutionary whose work could be characterized by its naïveté, straightforwardness, and simplicity.14 Already in Le Ventre in 1873, Zola had established Claude as an aspiring painter of vegetables, most notably of cabbages, which are mentioned thirty-six times in the novel, far more than any other vegetable. Le Ventre opens at dawn in Les Halles, when suppliers from outside the city arrive to sell their products to shopkeepers and stallholders. The starving ex-convict Florent, who escaped the penal colony to return to a Paris Haussmannized beyond his recognition, is lost amid the tall piles of vegetables when Claude appears. The painter exclaims: “Ah, what beautiful vegetables this morning! I came down very early this morning, suspecting that there would be a superb sunrise on these devilish cabbages.” As the young painter expounds upon the still lifes of vegetables—“Claude set off against romanticism; he preferred his piles of cabbages to the rags of the Middle Ages”— lingering on cabbages, the humblest of them all, Zola suggests that self-consciously modern painters and naturalist authors alike find beauty in those scenes of contemporary life that may be as unassuming as a pile of cabbages. In the first pages of the novel, Zola also implies that the bustling marketplace bursting with food cannot be represented to the eye alone. Claude takes Florent for a walk through the market, where he quickly comes across what he judges another excellent subject for a painting, a vendor of steaming cabbage soup.

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And the delighted painter blinked his eyes, looking for the best point of view, seeking out the ideal composition. But the damn cabbage soup had an impressive smell. Florent turned his head, disturbed by the full cups, which customers emptied without saying a word, with sidelong glances like suspicious animals. Then, as the woman served a newcomer, Claude himself was overwhelmed by the pungent steam rising from a spoonful that struck him in the face. He tightened his belt, smiling but angry, and started to walk away. Alluding to the glass of punch Alexander had just offered them, he said to Florent in a low voice: “It’s funny, have you noticed? . . . You can always find someone to buy you a drink, but you never find anyone who will pay for your meal.”15

Friction is set up between eye and gut, and the painter ends in an annoyed admission of appetite. He walks away irritated by the appealing smell emanating from the erstwhile model. Claude’s aesthetic vision will always be connected to, and ultimately foiled by, his rumbling stomach, as Zola insists on the embodied nature of artistic vision. As we know, the self-­ proclaimed best piece of art that Claude ever makes is his takeover of a meat display in a ­charcuterie window, a visual spectacle that not only concedes but celebrates the connection between eye and body, for it was intended to cause nausea through the sense of sight. In Le Ventre, cabbage soup or piles of raw cabbages repeatedly symbolize Claude’s commitment to naturalism, but, more than just symbols, cabbages retain their identity as food with the potential to evoke a range of responses and desires in even the most detached aesthete.

Analogies between paintings and vegetables in Impressionist criticism hold similar potential. Vegetables like cabbages could be symbols for the Impressionist commitment to depicting unexalted subjects of all kinds, or they could move beyond that symbolic potential to introduce the embodied nature of vision. In the latter respect, vegetable metaphors related to the coloration, materiality, and technique of the work shown, and they provided critics with vocabulary to explore the effects produced by those qualities. Critics commonly described Impressionist paintings as “raw,” whether they referred to colors perceived as unmixed—as opposed to “the cooking of colors, the trick of mixtures and melts” more often associated with Academic practice—or to pictures that seemed to be unfinished, and thus uncooked.16 In order to complain that Monet’s landscapes shown in 1877 were composed of haphazard daubs of unblended colors, Bertall calls them “raw like the leaves of young lettuce,”17 bringing to mind Duret’s defense the following year that when “the cabbages and lettuce of Pissarro’s kitchen gardens have grown up, they will discover style and poetry in them.” At stake in Duret’s review eliding subject matter and paintings as objects is the progressive development of Pissarro’s work as well as the softening of public opinion over time. Taking Bertall’s critique a step further in the same year, 1877, Louis Leroy changed the title of Monet’s Femme dans la prairie (1876) to Femme dans la salade, which he names “a spectacle as refreshing as watercress to the body’s health.” He especially recommends the painting to pregnant visitors

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to the exhibition, to benefit their health, while warning them away from Cézanne’s portraits, which, he claims, could give their unborn babies diseases. Facetious though Leroy’s critique may be, it relies on the idea that bodies might be powerfully affected through the visual. This is the same review in which Leroy compares the coloration of Renoir’s Portrait of Jeanne Samary to “vanilla, red currant and pistachio: a portrait to eat with a spoon!,” contrasting Renoir’s confectionery tones composing the delicious figure to the more salubrious salad offered by the landscapists, Monet and Pissarro foremost among them.18 Unsurprisingly, just as it is Renoir’s portrait of a coiffed actress that Leroy presents as appetizing, it is a female figure in a landscape that warrants the title Woman in the Salad, with the same undertones of female figures being available for possession and consumption. Such comparisons between paintings and vegetable meals continued in references by other critics to “onion-green” colors thrown together into “a bitter salad” and “landscapes as acidic as plates of sorrel” that resemble “spinach, before and after cooking.”19 These metaphors were often part of an ­allegation that Impressionism could damage the eye. An anonymous reviewer declares in 1877: “The Impressionist Exhibition is open—to give you vertigo! The pale white and green blind visitors. When you enter into the room, you blink, and begin to tear up as if you were peeling onions.”20 White and green, the color of young onions, not only make visitors blink with their harsh tones but also give off a chemical irritant like alliums that causes the eye to protect itself by producing tears that obscure its ability to

see. The paintings sting and create vertigo and they end in being sensed rather than seen. For this reviewer, at least the painters were resisting conformity to popular taste and tradition, which deserved a certain respect even if it produced an unpleasant result. Along the same lines, another critic complains in 1881 of Pissarro’s “violent coloration, where the most discordant tones collide and make you squint.”21 Like a blinding sun, the colors are aggressive and attack the eye, which then cannot do its proper job of looking. The Impressionists “have forced the dose, and served us indigestible things, this garish assembly of tones in collision that shock our vision,” admonishes a critic of the 1879 exhibition in related terms.22 Raw tones that threaten the eye are compared to inedible food. The language of a dose raises the broader accusation that Impressionism was not healthy, although such criticism mostly applied to paintings compared to rotting flesh or overly sweet or fatty desserts rather than fresh vegetables. “Their figures resemble pensioners of the Morgue. . . . It is not healthy to see such things,” protests Marius Vachon characteristically in 1876.23 Before these “unhealthy curiosities,” remarks Bariolette in his memorable 1877 assessment, it was impossible not to experience “the memory of seasickness” and a lunch of strawberries and cream cheese that had not stayed down during the voyage.24 Such critiques, as I have argued throughout this book, related to the subject matter as well as the organic facticity of paint that evoked the slimy surfaces of decomposing meat or the clumps of clotting cream. Pissarro was not exempt from this, for when paint or paintings were compared to any type of food, the

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threshold between freshness and decay could never be stabilized. Albert Wolff urges in 1876: “Try to make M. Pissarro understand that trees are not violet, that the sky is not the color of fresh butter. . . . Try to explain to M. Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with purplish-green spots that denote the state of complete putrefaction in a corpse!”25 On the one hand, Wolff emphasizes here the freshness of butter, associated with the country setting in which it was produced, not unlike the perennial reference to cabbages. On the other hand, even insisting on its freshness implies the possibility of the opposite, which is quickly mobilized as the discussion shifts from Pissarro to Renoir. Bertall would exploit the same transition from freshness to decay the following year in his review comparing Monet’s landscapes to bitter young lettuce leaves: “His landscapes, and they are numerous, are uneven, raw like the leaves of young lettuce; his tones seem picked [cueillis, the word for picking fruit and vegetables] without any preparation on the palette and set down a bit randomly on the canvas, without much regard for design, distance, or perspective.” Bertall goes on to charge all Impressionists, but Pissarro in particular, of being dedicated to a sickening combination of bluish green: The impression imposed on the spectator when entering these galleries is of a certain uniform blue mixed with a raw green, the look of which is painful for the eyes and which calls to mind the worm-eaten coloration of Roquefort cheese. Most of the canvases are flooded with this lovat green, which drowns contours, when they exist, and viewpoints, when you can find them. A room

particularly furnished with the work of M. Pezzaro [sic], a primitive landscapist, is especially dedicated to this particular blue, which hangs over the rest of the exhibition like a flag and a Masonic symbol.26

This prose positions Pissarro’s material-laden canvases as pungent, creamy, and full of wormeaten craters; another critic complains that Pissarro invented “painting in relief ” with its mountains and valleys.27 This description causes distaste, for nobody savoring Roquefort would want to imagine it as infested with worms. Pissarro frequently left his paintings unvarnished, and, without this expected protective layer to preserve the material, the soft, lumpy paint threatened to change over time. These references to butter, cheese, and vegetables connect the materiality and coloration of paint to the country settings depicted and the materials made and grown there. But they do not cement Pissarro’s status as a naturalist artist attending faithfully to the quotidian, which has been understood as the implied meaning when Pissarro was called a painter of cabbages.28 Descriptions of raw colors show critics reacting not to the truth and authenticity of the landscapes, but just the opposite, to a palette overprivileging blue and green and a technique of juxtaposing colors that appear garish and unmixed, and that in these ways actually denaturalize the subject represented. “Try to make M. Pissarro understand . . . that the sky is not the color of fresh butter,” Albert Wolff had advised, and that, as his text continues, “the things he paints exist in no country, and no intellect can accept such errors.”29 In 1886, another critic puts it in these characteristic terms: “He knows

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Nature and the beings that inhabit it; but how to share with him his strange sense for color? How to admit that all of existence appears to man as though through a rainbow? We have never seen like this, nothing of the kind offers itself to the view, certainly. M. Pissarro possesses some magical glasses whose virtue is to denature objects and make them appear under conditions inaccessible to other eyes.”30 The critic struggles with a paradox. Pissarro’s paintings evince deep knowledge of the landscape and the work of cultivating it—this is implicit in the claim that Pissarro was an “Impressionist market gardener” belonging seamlessly to his country settings. But the artist can see neither landscape nor inhabitants clearly—it is as though he looks through filtered glasses that color the setting as otherworldly. Tension emerges between Pissarro’s self-consciously modern practice and the construction of the artist as a member of the communities that he pictures, which were widely construed as outside of time and disconnected from modernity. Pissarro at Les Halles

If by 1877 it was already a well-established trope that Impressionism jeopardized the viewing body and provoked nausea with its literal and metaphorical bad taste, then Pissarro was selected by his supporters as the antidote to any perceived problem, the breath of fresh country air that would restore health to audiences.31 His paintings were positioned as having tangible benefits to embodied viewers. Enthusiasts claimed this potential by focusing on his female figures, which, like the landscapes they worked and the cabbages they brought to

market, offered sustenance to the world-weary Parisian. It is to those female figures that this section turns, specifically to paintings of women working in markets in Paris and Pontoise, in the context of the construction of city and country in Pissarro’s reception. These paintings suggest why contemporary commentators associated ­Pissarro’s figures with a fantasy of hospitable nature and robust figures belonging to it. In his review of the Impressionist Exhibition in 1882, the year that Pissarro showed a series of large-scale paintings of women in country settings, Alexandre Hepp gives this glowing assessment: Impressionism is no longer given over to a prejudice for greens and yellows, to raspberry-colored horizons, to waves of vanilla ice cream. . . . Pissarro is the most independent of the group. He is about sixty: his face shows only two gentle brown eyes and a long, multicolored beard, which he uses to wipe his brushes. His submission is superb. Gray weather, effects of the setting sun, tall grasses, vast meadows, and in these settings, paysannes with health blooming on their cheeks and grace in their robustness; true women of Millet, women of the fields who do not take from the sleepy landscape the melancholies of the Parisienne, rustic without awkwardness, vigorous without coarseness. . . . This walk through Impressionism gives you nostalgia for plein air, the seductive and picturesque sights; the landscapes that unfold along the walls have adorable freshness. The Impressionists have found their way—the open sky. One breathes with them by mouthfuls; they make an idyll of work and seize the completely raw poetry in reality . . . Pissarro and Sisley are the masters—clumsy men who do not know how to sell and whom I like.32

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Hepp sets up two related dichotomies, between vanilla ice cream and fresh mouthfuls of open air, and between melancholy Parisiennes and healthy peasant women. As opposed to the frivolity of the excessive colorism that Hepp associates with raspberries or ice cream (the latter a luxury item, requiring ice and imported flavor, associated with upper-class Parisian femininity), Pissarro provides raw French fraîcheur, evoking vegetables grown in the countryside and air so refreshing as to be inhaled by the mouthful. Unattuned to the acculturated woes of Parisiennes, he paints women of the fields whose health blooms spontaneously like the vegetation surrounding them, offering the raw poetry of reality. In Hepp’s review, the exhibition space transforms into a wholesome landscape that revives the viewer walking through it. The paintings bring on nostalgia, the longing for an idealized setting produced through the filter of memory, reverie, popular culture, art, and literature. We are told that the masters of these effects are Sisley and Pissarro, whose connection to these landscapes is so strong that they cannot succeed in the urban art market’s institutional circuits or systems of financial exchange. Hepp describes those painters as humble laborers like “rustic,” “robust” peasants, to the point where Pissarro purportedly adopted the unrefined habit of wiping his brushes on his beard. As is well known, such constructions of nature were reactions to contemporary Paris. The fabrication of a redeeming countryside functioned as an antidote to the perception of the capital as the locus of disease, overcrowding, dubious morality, jaded sophistication, and

psychic alienation.33 The female agricultural worker could be a screen onto which intellectuals, authors, and artists projected a diverse range of fantasies about femininity set amid a countryside that was itself feminized and rendered maternal.34 We find this theme in Le Ventre. Zola sets off the character Madame François— a thirty-five-year-old widow and gardener from Nanterre, who finds Florent near death along the road into Paris and transports him to the city in her vegetable cart, and to whom Florent is instinctively drawn throughout the novel— against the Parisian charcutière Lisa and the fishmonger called “the Norman,” both of whom repel Florent. Claiming that she is not “made of sugar,” and thus no delicate Parisienne in danger of melting in the rainy conditions of her work, Madame François instead appears to Florent like “a robust healthy plant that had grown the same way as her vegetables in the garden, while he remembered the Lisas, the Normans, the beautiful women of Les Halles like dubious meat that had been dressed for the window.” Zola sets up a division between the tainted female flesh of the city, compared to raw meat, and the fresh and hearty bodies of the countryside, compared to vegetables. Madame François invites Florent and Claude to her cottage outside Paris, where the men are refreshed. “Look,” exclaims Claude while surveying the garden, “there’s a stump of cabbage I recognize. This is at least the tenth time it has sprouted back in that corner by the apricot tree.” Florent is described in relation to the same cabbage stalk, “resuscitated in the countryside like the cabbage that Claude said kept sprouting back from the ground.”35

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Reactions to the female figures painted by Pissarro and his colleagues in Impressionist exhibitions unfolded along these lines, distinguishing between the women of the countryside, associated with the natural, and sickly and sordid Parisian women, corrupted by the artifice of modern urban life. We recall this review by Georges Nazim in 1879: Visit to the impressionists, alias independents. ­Mixture of the excellent and grotesque. This impression gathers before a canvas representing a green woman, literally green, the green of rotten meat: —Hum! Extremely advanced, this particular woman! —It must be the portrait of an oratrice for the women’s congress.36

The feminist has turned rotten from Parisian culture and education, making her the opposite of the healthy women of the countryside. ­Pissarro’s paintings “leave a comforting impression, the opposite of that left by Degas,” asserts Alfred Paulet in 1886,37 the year that Degas showed a group of pastels titled “a series of female nudes bathing, washing and drying themselves, wiping themselves down, combing their hair or having their hair combed” that were also compared to rotting meat—“M. Degas reveals to us, with the fine and powerful shamelessness of an artist, the swollen, pasty, modern meat of the public female”38—and identified as the modern, urban bodies of sex workers. Pissarro paints the healthy side of nature, Paulet continues, refreshing the eye by focusing on the robust peasant. The same year, Jean Ajalbert praises Pissarro’s depiction of “paysanne types” with “the red, full cheeks and moist lips of

healthy woman . . . these women of the country, the breadth of their shoulders, the ample size of their hips! They are not from the Batignolles, their sweat is of the soil! Rustic beauties, whose health exults. . . .”39 We are far from rancid Olympia, “coal woman of the Batignolles.”40 Zola’s juxtaposition of female figures in Le Ventre, the gardener Madame François versus the Parisian shopkeeper Lisa or the Les Halles stallholder the Norman, depended on the status of Les Halles as a juncture between city and country, Paris and its environs, that allowed for an exemplary mixing of social types. On the one hand, Les Halles was a quintessentially modern space, constructed out of iron between 1854 and 1874 to answer Napoleon III’s desire for architecture that resembled “vast umbrellas, that’s what I want, nothing more.”41 On the other, the structure was transformed each day by mounds of products from far afield, such that when he first arrives there the delirious Florent “for an instant thought himself in the middle of the country, sitting on some hillside.”42 Sixteen years after the novel was published, Pissarro completed a watercolor of a covered passageway between the pavilions of Les Halles that is now titled Le Marché (The Market, 1889; fig. 46). Pissarro painted food markets for more than twenty years, mainly in the towns of Pontoise and Gisors near to where he lived, but at least three finished paintings of the central Paris market exist from 1889: Le Marché and two closely related watercolors of the fish market, Le Marché aux Halles, Paris and The Market Place (fig. 47). Like Zola, Pissarro presents the market as a space where city and country come together, along with the figures that could be seen to belong to each ­construction.43 Unlike

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Fig. 46

Camille Pissarro, Le Marché, 1889. Watercolor on paper, 29.3 × 22.7 cm.

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Fig. 47

Camille Pissarro, The Market Place, 1889. Watercolor, gouache, black and brown ink, and black chalk on off-white wove paper, 29.5 × 22.8 cm.

Zola, Pissarro does not present a clash between those constructions or their protagonists. Instead, he refigures established representations of Les Halles and its vendors, suggesting the extent to which the perceived dangers of city life might be ameliorated by a vision of the countryside, which is in keeping with his anarchist politics.44 As a painting that shows the happy reconciliation of urban and rural figural types and products, Le Marché demonstrates why Pissarro’s paintings could be subsumed into discussions of the redemptive powers of nature. Le Marché is organized around a vendor arranging loosely painted leeks and cauliflower

on a table, framed by the towering ceiling of the market shed that Pissarro has pried open, flattened out, and exaggerated in height. We might compare it to the shed as represented on the left side of Jean Béraud’s Les Halles (1879; fig. 48). Pissarro’s vertical format accentuates the scale of the structure, resisting the more panoramic perspectives typically preferred by Béraud and others, including Victor Gilbert, whose horizontal scenes of the vegetable market and detailed realist technique emphasize the narrative vignettes taking place among figures (fig. 49). Pissarro’s composition has more in common with Monet’s paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare, such as

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The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train, which is also set at the far end of a shed that peaks at the top of the image and opens out onto apartment buildings (fig. 50). Both the Gare SaintLazare and Les Halles were built from materials manufactured at the Joly foundry at Argenteuil and shared structural qualities based on their common circulatory function. The open spaces and permeable walls facilitated and signified the

Fig. 48

fluidity of people and things traveling through them. At Les Halles, streams of products from the country, often transported by rail, arrived each morning to be dispersed by the end of the day. Pissarro made changes to the structure and operation of Les Halles that encourage the comparison between market and railway shed, highlighting the status of Les Halles as a similar juncture between city and country. His scene takes place under the pitched roof at one end of the covered boulevards connecting the twelve

Jean Béraud, Les Halles, 1879. Oil on canvas, 65.7 × 81.3 cm.

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Fig. 49

Victor Gabriel Gilbert, Le Carreau des Halles, 1880. Oil on wood, 53.7 × 73.7 cm.

pavilions, a space where food was not actually sold. Nor did the market structure include the thin, freestanding columns at the end of this covered corridor, which are central to Pissarro’s image, but such columns are visible at the far right of Monet’s painting. Pissarro’s vision of exchange appears more optimistic than Monet’s. Both the train station and Les Halles are cavernous and obviously modern, but Monet’s figures are smaller, often subsumed into the columns around them, and dwarfed by the structure to a greater extent than any of the figures in Pissarro’s three finished representations of Les Halles. By contrast, the vendors and shoppers in Le Marché are complemented by their surroundings, and a large crowd offsets the dehumanizing effect of the metalwork.45 The architecture corresponds to the figures within, which are rendered with caricatural simplification and amplification of social difference.46 The bourgeois woman across

the vegetable counter is visually associated with the structure. Her soaring hat, with its frothy protrusion of tulle, seems about to lift off her head; it is erect with an architectural construction analogous to the ironwork and painted in the same dark blue color. Her scaffolded form, with harsh angles of waist, shoulders, and neck, and her spindly arms positioned directly below a thin column, support the affinity between this modern woman and the modern space. The vendor, framed by the rounded central arch that echoes the curves of her body and painted in a similar blue color scheme, is also complemented by the structure, but she is more easily associated with the display than the environment. Her floppy white headscarf suggests the softer, organic shapes of the leaves covering the cauliflowers, with which her hand merges in the watercolor, a hand set amid the rounded orange forms of other loosely defined vegetables to which it corresponds.

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Media also create divergent effects. In Monet’s painting of the station, the steam-filled atmosphere is represented by a heavy application of dense paint. One critic complains that “a thick smoke escaping from the canvas prevented us from seeing the six paintings dedicated to the study [of the station].”47 Clouds of steam supplant the role of real clouds within the painting, a manifestation of technology displacing nature only to recreate it in industry’s

image. It is an ambiguous view of modernity, majestic but also intimidating. By contrast, in Le Marché, the clear spring day painted in transparent washes of watercolor gives an impression of greater clarity and ease that is reflected in the attitudes of the figures within. When Zola introduces the vegetable market at Les Halles in the opening passages of Le Ventre, he too relies on watercolor in his painterly visual analysis: “It was a sea [of vegetables]. It stretched from

Fig. 50

Claude Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train, 1877. Oil on canvas, 83 × 101.3 cm.

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pointe ­Saint-Eustache to rue des Halles, between the two sets of pavilions. At the two intersections, at either end, the seas grew higher, and the vegetables flooded the pavement. Dawn rose slowly in soft gray, coloring everything with a pale wash of watercolors.”48 Zola emphasizes the softness and light touch that are possible in watercolor, a medium well suited to representing the gentle first rays of sunlight as they gather strength. Nothing could be further from the harshness of gas or electric light, the light of modernity that illuminates the pleasures and perils of its nightlife, than the soft natural light of dawn, the hour linked to new beginnings

and innocence that is also invoked in the sea of vegetables fresh from the soil. Through a medium allied to water and a palette of earth tones tied to the organic, Les Halles, despite the clear urban modernity of its architecture, emerges in ­Pissarro’s Le Marché as connected to a country setting. This connection is secured by Pissarro’s depiction of the vendors, who depart dramatically from established stereotypes about the women known as dames de la Halle who worked in the pavilions. Unlike most areas of commerce in nineteenth-century Paris, Les Halles was identified as a female-dominated arena, where women were registered as independent merchants and frequently were the breadwinners for a family. City authorities historically were invested in their approval, granting them privileges and accepting them as representatives of the people of Paris.49 The dames de la Halle were characterized in popular culture by their quick wits and tempers, disheveled appearances, and foul mouths, and representations of them tended to take two forms. The figure could be masculinized as a result of the power she wielded. When Stop caricatured Aristide Bourel’s painting of an aged woman skinning rays, titled L’Écorcheuse de raie and shown at the 1875 Salon, the illustrator turned the woman into a grotesque male figure wielding a blade and appended a subtitle, “L’Écorcheuse des Halles centrales, or The Death of M. Alphonse, tragedy in a painting,” suggesting that this murderous dame de la Halle threatens not just fish, but men (fig. 51). In Le Ventre, the Norman, with her coarse manners and powerful body, communicated to the reader through

Fig. 51

Stop, L’Écorcheuse des Halles centrales, 1875. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 15, 1875, 4.

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­ escriptions of her pungent odor that intimid dates and nauseates the sensitive Florent, falls into this category. So, too, does the character Lisa, the true head of her household, who manipulates her husband with ease. Alternatively, the dame de la Halle could function as a hypersexualized cipher of unruly femininity, most likely a fruit or flower seller whose succulent and intoxicating products stand for her own body. Zola’s impassioned description of the young fruit vendor La Sarriette is exemplary; its several pages are abridged here. Her curly hair fell over her forehead like wild grass. . . . She had playfully hung cherries from her ears. . . . She had a red mouth made up with fresh redcurrant juice as though painted and perfumed with some seraglio cosmetic. . . . The apples and pears were piled up with the regularity of architecture, making pyramids and displaying the flushed tones of developing breasts. . . . La Sarriette lived there, as though in an orchard. . . . It was she, it was her arms and her neck, that brought amorous life to the fruit. . . . Her lips had placed the cherries one by one with kisses; she dropped the silky peaches from her bodice . . . she had let her own blood run into the veins of the redcurrants. The ardor of a beautiful woman put the fruit of the earth into heat, a love affair on a bed of leaves . . .50

La Sarriette, named for the herb savory, is so closely identified with her fruit that there is no distinction between them. Her stall becomes an orchard in which the attributes of nature are more delicious and appealing than those of culture. She has her own cosmetic of viscous crimson juice, jewelry of ruby-red cherries, coiffure of wild grass, and bodice of peaches. But even as she

is subsumed into an idyllic natural setting, her representation there depends on the processes that constitute the Parisienne, the rituals of costuming and making up. The end of the passage is the most overtly sexual, as La Sarriette’s heat arouses the fruits, and she is aroused by them in return. Such characterizations of alluring young dames de la Halle, thought to be difficult to contain and control, contributed to the urgency surrounding architectural renovation and legislative reform of the market in the nineteenth century. Fear of prostitution among market women, as well as the tendency to associate all forms of female commerce with the sex trade, informed the perceived moral emergency of the area around mid-century. Racolage, the sales practice of calling out to potential customers with flattering remarks, suggested sex work to concerned commentators. Stereotypes of violent rows among the women included other fears about female passions. Building plans were meant to change the character of the market and were bolstered by new legislation to mitigate the social threat of independent working women, including restrictions on solicitation practices and the gradual suppression of the outdoor market.51 This context demonstrates the crucial ways in which Pissarro’s representation is different. To contemporaries, his working figures in Le Marché would have belonged not to Les Halles but to a country setting, to the cultural construction of Hepp’s “paysannes with health blooming on their cheeks and grace in their robustness,” peasant types associated with an unsophisticated manner and costume, wholesomeness, and hearty good health. Diligently engaged in the tasks at hand, their bodies are depicted

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as ­simplified masses, and all working women resemble one another, suggesting an interchangeability reflected in the repeating heads of cauliflower. They are not rendered as sexually appealing or aggressive. Silence reigns in the space, where there is no visible display of buying and selling. In popular culture, the defining characteristics of this marketplace were riotous sounds and crudity—as indicated by the many open mouths in the paintings by Béraud and Gilbert. In front of the secondary vendor, four other identical working-class figures bow their heads respectfully, even reverentially, given how the space suggests aspects of the nearby church of Saint Eustache. Pissarro transformed the arches of Les Halles from rounded to pointed, creating what resembles a gothic-style clerestory level. Pissarro had been raised as a Jew and avoided religious imagery in his work, part of his antipathy to art that he described as “sentimental.” However, critics frequently referred to a sense of religiosity in his figures, which is a fitting response to Le Marché with its setting and central vendor, whose counter is positioned like an altar at which the shoppers convene.52 The space is filled with light and air, providing model working conditions in which classes meet but no unsavory confrontation occurs.53 The two vendors behind the table reflect each other in a manner that evokes the composition of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, with its mirror reflection of the saleswoman behind a counter and a male figure on the right, also present in Pissarro’s watercolor (see fig. 6). If Pissarro perceived himself as responding to the theme of the saleswoman as imagined by an artist he admired, he offered a more redemptive version that replaced the alienation of urban labor sug-

gested by Manet’s bartender’s blank stare with communal work in solidarity. These qualities are the result of Pissarro’s wider engagement with markets outside of Paris, where he developed the figural types that appear in Le Marché to bring together signs of urban modernity with the often-competing image of small-scale industry. The Pork Butcher from 1883 is one of Pissarro’s earliest market scenes and is among his first large-scale figural compositions (fig. 52). It is also one of only five oils that he made of markets, which he usually painted in gouache, tempera, or watercolor. In it, a young woman, whom Pissarro made progressively younger through the stages of painting, wears a white apron and oversleeves and leans forward over her charcuterie table at the Pontoise market in a pose similar to the one Pissarro would reprise for his central figure in Le Marché. She is framed through the wooden beams of her stall but unaware of a viewer’s presence. As she carves a piece of meat, the top of her right hand resembles its flat, mottled red and beige surface. In fact, all across the painting, working women are reflected in the market wares. On the left, ribs of red meat hang from the foreground crossbeam and overlap with the striped dress of another woman. Echoing the textile’s pattern, the ribs become part of her back in a painterly fusion of human and animal flesh and bone. Other hanging pieces of meat are positioned to rhyme with the curves of female bodies. The doe-eyed figure at the right stands before a large side of an animal that parallels the size and shape of her triangulated form, calling to mind the slang term vache, or cow, to ­denigrate lowerclass women perceived to be useful but unintelligent, simple and slow. The ­rosy-cheeked

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Fig. 52

Camille Pissarro, The Pork Butcher [La Charcutière], 1883. Oil on canvas, 65.1 × 54.3 cm.

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central charcutière stands before pieces of meat that correspond to her red-dressed body, continuing the shape of her arm or the line of her back, and the term veau, or calf, to name a younger woman is closer at hand.54 In a letter from 1883, Pissarro sums up his progress on The Pork Butcher to his son Lucien: “I had Nini [Pissarro’s niece] pose as a butcher’s girl at the Place du Grand Martoy; the painting will have, I hope, a certain naïve freshness. The background, that’s the difficulty. We shall see.”55 Naïve freshness is a telling phrase that suggests distance from the market activities, from which Pissarro was largely separated by class and gender, and echoes the terms that contemporary critics so often used to characterize Pissarro’s working figures. Supporters depended on the concept of naïve freshness to describe the scenes and the represented female figures alike as refreshing and wholesome. Degas called Pissarro’s vendors “these angels who go to market,” which was also the consensus among critics who contrasted Pissarro’s figures with Degas’s paintings of working women in the 1880s, paintings that informed Pissarro’s own growing interest in large-scale figure painting.56 We have seen Alfred Paulet’s 1886 assertion that Pissarro’s paintings of country life “leave a comforting impression, the opposite of that left by M. Degas. This poet sees nature in its robustness. . . . M. Pissarro notes a healthier side, more restorative to the sight. . . . He makes us see the robust peasant, solid at work, in the middle of the day, surrounded by sunshine and light. And this by instinct, without the effort of reason, in poetry.”57 The terms are familiar. Robust peasants are in their element at work and provide a soothing sight for the exhibition-

goer, and the artist, with a practice that does not require advanced skills or reasoning but rather “natural” intuition, is at home among them. Pissarro is linked to constructions of the natural and naïve freshness that his subject matter was seen to embody. Against Degas’s nudes shown in 1886, which were compared in the press to raw meat and seized upon as examples of degraded female flesh, Pissarro’s supporters eagerly set off his “healthier” example, both in his choice of female figures—which in The Pork Butcher might also be likened to raw meat, but fresh rather than rancid—as well as in his technique, to which Pissarro principally referred when expressing his desire for naïve freshness. Through direct observation of the market during the sketching phase and a slowly built-up application of paint in the studio, Pissarro hoped his process allowed for truth to the scene and his “sensation” in experiencing it, a concept signifying his personal perception of nature.58 It is common in feminist art-historical discussion of Pissarro’s market scenes to argue that the artist endows his vendors with self-possession, autonomy, and stature that distinguish them from the demeaning representations of female peasants circulating in wider culture, as anonymous figures subjugated to the timeless routines of nature.59 Linda Nochlin first suggested that in market paintings, Pissarro displays solidarity with the models who are shown as particularized actors in contemporary economic life. Nochlin proposes a relationship between Pissarro as artist and the represented figures peddling their wares to customers just as Pissarro exhibited his own merchandise, hoping to sell it in the Paris art market. Her account, and others that have followed it, suggest the

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Fig. 53

Camille Pissarro, The Market Stall, 1884. Pastel and watercolor over black chalk on board, 61 × 48.3 cm.

same analogy that this ­chapter has followed in nineteenth-century ­criticism, between the market goods—the products of these particular landscapes—and the paintings themselves, drawn from the motifs of those settings and seeming to carry their materials.60 Without denying that Pissarro may have identified with working women or that this sentiment can come through in his paintings of them, especially when we compare his works to those of certain contemporaries which are decidedly less sympathetic—Griselda Pollock’s discussion of Vincent van Gogh’s peasant women is instructive in this regard—the criti-

cism I have traced here suggests that we should hesitate to overstate that identification.61 As the next section will continue to show, in the nineteenth century, critical assessments linking Pissarro to agricultural labor depended on often demeaning and usually distorted depictions of rural work, country life, and peasant figures that we cannot divorce entirely from ­Pissarro’s paintings. This is even true when those ­paintings show formidable market women, such as the vendor in The Market Stall, a pastel representation of the same market and model as The Pork Butcher that Pissarro completed the following year (fig. 53). More

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assertive than in the previous year’s image, this stallholder confronts a middle-class customer and her daughter or maid. The charcutière leans over her display and dominates the picture. The viewer is located on her side of the counter and thus can more easily identify with her subject position. The older woman looks ghostly in comparison to the health of the vendor, as signified by her pink cheeks and robust figure as she plants her fists on the display, asserting her property and standing her ground in a debate with the open-mouthed customer. The emptiness of the quickly receding background draws attention to the strong contour line of the butcher’s erect back, and the palette, dark and subdued for Pissarro, contributes to the gravity of the exchange. But even here, where the charcutière is individuated by the purposeful pose, her crimson hand, pressed down on the table with the weight of a hefty quadruped, is contorted into a position that associates it visually with the forms and colors of the pieces of meat on the surface around it. Just as she is strong and healthy, so too is her meat, red like her uncovered hair and skirt, and flushed with blood like her cheeks. A saw on the table indicates the strength required to cut the flesh that she sells. Its prominent red handle invokes the act of gripping, next to a hand endowed with the animal power of the meat around it, which is accentuated by its proximity to the idle, gloved hands of the customers. However strong the hands of the butcher, they are represented as ham-fisted, endowed with a sort of power that is secondary to the painter’s dexterity in the context of the image. Not that critics agreed on this point—in fact, Pissarro’s

manual gestures as artist were insistently compared to those of his represented peasant figures in order to denigrate what critics saw as a shared clumsiness and heavy-handedness. But if Pissarro sought to reclaim that derogatory connection in paint, I will argue, it is not primarily to his market paintings that we should look for evidence. The Painter as Peasant

The link between Pissarro and a market gardener, and between his paintings and harvested vegetables, did not arise just from “raw” coloration or subject matter. It also related to ­Pissarro’s facture and technique, points of consistent interest among critics who used a number of analogies to describe Pissarro’s thick application of frequently unvarnished paint. From the first Impressionist exhibition, his canvases were identified as dirty and gritty, as though he had used soil and sand to create belabored images. Recurring adjectives for the works include dirty, rough, dull, and monotonous, qualities evoked by comparing the works to tapestry, cotton or wool, plastered walls, pastels, or, significantly, soil.62 Many such reviews drew parallels between Pissarro’s process and agricultural as well as artisan labor, implying or explicitly stating an association between the painter and his peasant figures as well as between the materials of painting and the materials of a country landscape, its soil and sand, vegetation (cabbages, lettuce), and animal products (butter, cheese). In 1880, George Japy wonders: “If it were not an indiscretion, I would ask him what he paints with. A trowel, undoubtedly? . . . It [his paint] is thickened and grainy as though he added sand to his color.”63 By 1886 another critic was able to assert erroneously

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that “[Pissarro] lives in the heart of Normandy, on a farm that he cultivates himself and which nourishes him with the products of the ground that he tills. When the harvest has been good and the work of the fields leaves him free, Pissaro [sic] takes up his brushes, looks around him and sets down on the canvas the coarse existence of those rustic beings and things that he raises himself.”64 Despite periods of financial insecurity, the Pissarros led a bourgeois life. Characterizing Pissarro as both farmer and painter was intended to guarantee the authenticity of his work by attesting to his intimate knowledge of his subjects—human, animal, and vegetable. The identification arose from and contributed to the phenomenon whereby Pissarro was widely described by supporters in the same terms as his depicted figures, as “a robust and healthy artist,” humble and sincere.65 Pissarro was not the first artist to be characterized in this way. Anthea Callen has followed the history of the connection between worker and painter, troweler and realist, earth and pigment from Jean-François Millet and Courbet through to Pissarro and Cézanne.66 We have already witnessed Alexandre Hepp exploit a link from Millet to Pissarro, praising Pissarro’s “paysannes with health blooming on their cheeks and grace in their robustness; true women of Millet.” This link also appears in an especially pertinent alignment of Pissarro’s practice with agricultural labor penned by a prominent critic and collector of Impressionist work, Charles Ephrussi. In his 1881 review of the Impressionist exhibition, his comparison between painter and laborer shows considerable strain when combined with another metaphor that we have seen recur in

enthusiastic accounts of self-consciously modern painting, that of the artist as a scientific analyst. After a description of Pissarro’s subjects, Ephrussi explains, . . . this is Pissaro’s [sic] domain, a domain that he exploits as the heir of the great Millet, steeped like him in the poetry of the earth, and like him soaking his brush in the sap of country life, but without reaching the serene harmonies of the incomparable master. M. Pissaro sees the peasant as he is, massive, heavy, thick, dazed and stupid, a real beast of burden, not without some nobility, however, because the earth that he turns over unceasingly has communicated to him some of its eternal beauty. Heat and light pulsate in these landscapes. The painter looks directly at the sun, intoxicated by its light, and produces all of its effects in detail, in fragments so to speak, with an analysis that breaks down solar rays into a multitude of secondary tones. Each reflection of this luminous globe on the landscape is rendered with small strokes of the brush; all the colors of the prism appear one after the other and become entangled; but synthesis never arrives. So this division of light makes the facture painful, stiff, cottony. There is in these paintings of country life an echo, as it were, of the hardships and travails of toiling in the fields; M. Pissaro’s brush is like a spade painfully turning the earth. The expression is strong and intense, but the craftsmanship of a bitter monotony and excessive uniformity. No skill, little freedom in handling, but vigor and sentiment.67

Ephrussi’s review is underwritten by a core tension. Pissarro’s importance lies not only in his close relationship to the timeless “poetry of the earth” but also in a modern technique

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aligned with concepts of scientific progress that cannot easily be reconciled with the former. ­Pissarro is so connected to the country landscapes in which he lives and works that his paint can be figured as sap and his brush as a spade. His materials, sticky and unwieldy, are manipulated clumsily as though with a gardening tool. His practice shows the sort of strain that makes of his figures “dazed and stupid” beasts of burden, but there is a certain nobility in this. A Parisian view of agricultural work as dignified and difficult, but also tedious and mindless, manifests. The peasant’s work, and Pissarro’s by extension, is at first located outside of modernity in a ceaseless and cyclical return to the “eternal beauty” of the land. Simultaneously, however, Ephrussi is up to date on a strategy used to defend Impressionists against the claim that their coloration was unnatural and attested to some derangement in the painter’s eye. That defense was that the Impressionist treatment of light and color was actually in line with developments in optical science, and that therefore Impressionists represented the operations of the eye more accurately than practitioners before them. This argument had been forcefully articulated by novelist Louis-Edmond Duranty in his 1876 booklet The New Painting: Concerning the Group of Artists Exhibiting at the Durand-Ruel Galleries and would be reprised by other critics, including Zola in his review of the Impressionist Exhibition in 1876. That Zola would adopt and develop the argument is not surprising, for it follows seamlessly from his descriptions in the previous decade of the special powers of Manet’s empirical eye.68 It is also worth noting

that in 1880 Ephrussi hired Jules Laforgue, who would further advance the connection between Impressionism and optics in his 1883 essay “L’Impressionnisme,” as his assistant. The key section from Duranty’s The New Painting reads: They [Impressionists] are not merely preoccupied by the refined and supple play of color that emerges when they observe the way the most delicate ranges of tone either contrast or intermingle with each other. Rather, the real discovery of these painters lies in their realization that strong light mitigates color, and that sunlight reflected by objects tends, by its very brightness, to restore that luminous unity that merges all seven prismatic rays into one single colorless beam—light itself. Proceeding by intuition, they little by little succeeded in splitting sunlight into its rays, and then reestablishing its unity in the general harmony of the iridescent color that they scatter over their canvases. With regard to visual subtleties and delicate blending of colors, the result is utterly extraordinary. Even the most learned physicist could find nothing to criticize in these painters’ analysis of light. . . . Moreover, for the first time painters understand and reproduce these phenomena, or try to. In certain canvases you feel the vibration and palpitation of light and heat. You feel an intoxication of light, which is something of no merit or importance for those painters trained outside of nature and in opposition to it.69

For Duranty, what detractors perceived as the crudity of overbright tones was actually evidence of the Impressionists’ fidelity to optics, specifically to the Newtonian concept of the prismatic decomposition of light rays. In 1881 Ephrussi refers to the same “vibration and ­palpitation

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of light and heat” that Duranty describes (Ephrussi: “Heat and light pulsate in these landscapes”), the same “intoxication of light” (Ephrussi: “The painter looks directly at the sun, intoxicated by its light”), the same “splitting [of] sunlight into its rays” (Ephrussi: “an analysis that breaks down solar rays into a multitude of secondary tones”). But according to Ephrussi, Pissarro does not succeed in reestablishing the unity and harmony of color, which is Duranty’s claim. Instead, for Ephrussi, each fragment of light is “rendered with small strokes of the brush . . . but synthesis never arrives. So this division of light makes the facture painful, stiff, cottony. There is in these paintings of country life an echo, as it were, of the hardships and travails of toiling in the fields.”70 The painterly mode through which Pissarro attempts to represent the decomposition and recomposition of light remains stubbornly tied to an awkward handling of viscous paint. However advanced the artist’s eye, the hand can only render what it sees in a bumbling fashion, and Pissarro ends not as physicist but as farmer. That connection between Pissarro and market gardener, so common among critics who compared the materials of his paintings to the matter of agricultural landscapes—dirt, soil, and sap, but also cabbages, butter, and cheese—challenged any characterization of Pissarro as an advanced painter whose canvases could be aligned with optical science. These metaphors insisted that the materiality of his canvases could not be channeled into purely visual terms because the paint returned persistently to the stuff of the earth as manipulated by the hand. Critics went so far as to advance the

idea that air itself was lacking in Pissarro’s paintings, that optical phenomena like sunlight or the intangible substances of air and atmosphere were emphatically transformed into dense material that could be everywhere felt, but that obstructed vision—along lines similar to comparing colors to acidic, bitter, and sharp flavors that irritated or endangered the eye.71 A common argument for this tactility was that a layer of fog seemed to sit on top of the pictures, a heaviness of atmosphere that was both represented within the paintings and appeared external to them, as an opaque screen through which the depicted subject was surprisingly difficult to see. In 1876, Émile Blémont notes that Pissarro “has a manner that pleases us much less; he planned to make a painting of fog where one sees nothing but fog,” and Émile Porcheron objects to his compositions “lost in fog.” For Nina de Villard in 1881, “a sort of pink fog floats on the panel, so that nothing projects prominently enough.” “His paintings have the appearance of being enveloped in a colored fog that clings tightly to them and from which they cannot escape. In looking at them, you find yourself instinctively wiping your eyes,” protests Henry Trianon in 1880.72 The viewer wants to wipe his or her eyes, as in the anonymous review comparing the sight of paintings to that of chopped onions in 1877 (“The pale white and green blind visitors. When you enter into the room, you blink, and begin to tear up as if you were peeling onions”), which also invokes a screen of water in the eye that disrupts vision, draws attention to the viewer’s embodiment, and endows the painting with the capacity to act upon audiences.73 By the 1880s, references

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to Pissarro’s paintings as “without air, without light, without the possibility of breathing” became commonplace.74 The solidity of the thick paint seemed to stifle the scene depicted in a way that privileged the tactile over the visual, material density over opacity. One painting does more than any of ­ Pissarro’s market scenes to suggest an identification with depicted figures and to thematize shared gestures. It is tempting to see in that painting a response to the criticism this chapter has followed, criticism that so often compared the materials worked by painter and peasant and commented on Pissarro’s “great love for cabbages.”75 In 1883, Pissarro began a large-scale representation of a male gardener, past middle age, sorting cabbages in Pontoise (fig. 54). He continued to work on this rare representation of a male agricultural worker, now titled The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage, in at least two phases for the next twelve years, and finally signed it “C. Pissarro/1883–95.” The painting shows the figure against a backdrop of cabbages, the most pronounced display of cabbages that Pissarro ever painted, that have been picked over and stacked to form a veritable architecture circumscribing his position. The tiny, tangled strokes fortified over more than a decade are well suited to those discussions of Pissarro’s paint surface as a masonry or plaster wall that blocks the viewer’s eye at the surface of the canvas. For example, in 1881 JorisKarl Huysmans describes Pissarro’s La Sente de Choux in March, showing two figures in a country landscape in the hamlet of Le Chou: “From close up, [the painting] is a masonry, a coarse and bizarre tapping of strokes, a salmis

[type of meat stew] of tones in all colors covering the canvas in lilac, Naples yellow, red and green; at a distance, it is air that circulates, it is the sky that extends boundlessly, it is nature itself panting . . . !”76 There are no cabbages visible in La Sente de Choux, despite the name of the hamlet, but in The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage, the wall of cabbages acts as a barrier, blocking spatial recession in the painting and focusing attention on the coarse tapestry or thick medley of strokes. For Huysmans, at a distance those strokes transform into “a vibration of air” and nature itself seems to stretch out, animate, before the viewer.77 While arguing in opposition to those critics who called Pissarro’s landscapes airless or foggy, Huysmans points out the same material density of the painting’s configuration of tapped-out strokes that stand for particles of sunlight quivering. We can see what the debate was about in the top section of The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage, where the pulsating construction of multicolored paint might equally represent an expanse of sky or a plane of soil, confusing the sense of perspective in the painting and enabling multiple interpretations, depending on a critic’s priorities. Spatial cues are also fudged in the space in the lower left quadrant of the canvas, where cabbages are painted in thick brushstrokes and seem excessively large. In defining the back wall of cabbages in more detail than the broadly painted vegetables closer to the foreground— defying the usual strategies of perspective in which clarity diminishes with distance—Pissarro presents a challenge to the eye that at the same time suggests the workings of peripheral vision. When the eye focuses on objects in the distance,

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Fig. 54

Camille Pissarro, The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage, 1883–95. Oil on canvas, 81.5 × 65 cm.

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like the cabbages at the back, those in closer proximity become blurred. The effect draws attention to the processes of vision, through which the picture slowly takes shape as objects emerge and recede into textures.78 References to the fogged-up surfaces of Pissarro’s canvases testified to the time necessary for the details of paintings to appear out of the thick skin of accrued paint, which was originally unvarnished in the case of The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage. Here, the knife that the gardener holds in his right hand to cut away the outer leaves of the cabbage might easily go unnoticed by the hasty viewer.79 As Rachael DeLue has argued of Pissarro’s landscapes of the 1860s and 1870s, the viewing experience becomes tactile as light, air, and objects share the solidity of tiny woven strokes—or, in the case of these middleground cabbages, thickly brushed streaks—that audiences must struggle to make out, and which attest to the artist’s hand in the painting’s formation and his investment in the physical world translated to canvas in material traces.80 Manual gestures are also central to the subject of this painting, a gardener whose hands are buried deep in the cabbage leaves to pull or cut off the floppy outer layers. The hands, painted in a tightly knit accumulation of strokes, blend into the thick surface just as they disappear into the wrinkled leaves of a cabbage. They lose their shape in a frenzy of back-and-forth marks, becoming bulky, rounded forms comparable to the cabbage itself, suggesting a hardiness, rough texture, and veined appearance shared between the cabbage and the callused, cracked hands of a lifelong gardener. The peasant plunges his hands into the vegetable while gripping a knife,

analogous to the painter holding a palette knife, an instrument that Japy and Ephrussi mocked as Pissarro’s trowel or spade, respectively, and which Pissarro used often in his early career. The artist’s hands would be dirtied with paint smeared across the rough surface of canvas as the gardener’s would be coated with soil from the cabbage leaves.81 In 1891, when the Symbolist critique of Impressionism as excessively naturalistic—that is, overly dependent on an external reality to be faithfully recorded—was well established, Pissarro joked about Symbolist subject matter in a letter to his friend, the writer Octave Mirbeau, in terms that show his keen awareness of his nickname maraîcher impressionniste: “Ah! Yes, the symbolists are really very surprising, when you come down to it, maybe they don’t like cabbage because it is not so easy to make a succulent dish from it, not everyone is capable of making a good cabbage soup with salt pork . . . Splendid, isn’t it, when it’s steaming.”82 In this letter and others from the same year, Pissarro criticized the Symbolists for departing too much from observation of the natural world, deriving their subjects from “religious, mystic, mysterious ideas” rather than reality.83 He suggested that making a good-quality painting meant transforming raw ingredients, or motifs directly witnessed, into an appealing dish. The challenge would be greater when the ingredients were cabbages, Pissarro wrote cleverly, defending himself against those Symbolists “who attacked my painting on the grounds that I liked nothing but cabbages” by suggesting that “not everyone” could compose a succulent dish or successful painting from such simple, bland components.84

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Cabbages carry political weight here, for Pissarro saw “mysticism” as reactionary and opposed to social equality, while the cabbage, associated with the poor, served as a social leveler and was an appropriate anarchist vegetable.85 The pruning of cabbages was also a compelling symbol for what Pissarro believed to be the objective of his practice, the progressive peeling away of the layers of experience, those fleeting, distracting, or superficially appealing aspects, in order to arrive at an essence or core. In his letters, Pissarro set out his aesthetic goal of capturing the sensation, the moment of direct experience in the context of plein air, and then, in the studio, distilling it into its essential characteristics in order to give the final painting greater coherence, solidity, and harmony than could be witnessed in nature. He called this process a search for “unity,” an intellectual ordering and integration of sensations, and wrote that the conceptual development of his idea of unity took place over twenty years. “I began to understand my sensations and to know what I wanted around age forty, but only vaguely; at fifty, in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, but did not have the power to convey it; at sixty I began to see the possibility of achieving it,” he explains in an 1890 letter to his niece Esther Isaacson.86 The period during which Pissarro was painting The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage spans the years that he was working toward this goal. What better metaphor for the practice of the so-called painter of cabbages than an aging male gardener alone among his cabbages, peeling away their outer layers to expose their core? As though jesting about his title maraîcher impressionniste, spécialité de choux, Pissarro turned the entire

pictorial surface into a stack of cabbages. The figure standing before this vertical vegetable wall in the process of adding to it, upon whose smock Pissarro signed his name, functions analogously to the painter adding cabbages to the upright surface of the canvas. The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage was not a public manifesto. It was never shown in Pissarro’s lifetime. Upon completion, it remained with the artist and his family for nearly thirty years. It departs from Pissarro’s series of related portraits of peasant women made in the early 1880s, the majority of which show younger women at rest from work, or the market scenes so far discussed, in which vendors tend to be youthful, generalized, and associated with their wares. Such is the case in The Market on the Grande-Rue, Gisors, one of only two oil paintings that Pissarro made of the Gisors market (1885; fig. 55). The painting is crowded with figures, tented stall coverings, and compressed apartment blocks with their forest of red chimneys. Framed by the triangle of one of the stall roofs, a standing woman in a white bonnet rests her chin in her hand. She stands before a large basket that repeats the form of her sturdy skirt and looks for customers for cabbages, two large examples of which protrude from the top of her basket. The cabbages emerging from the skirtlike basket overlap suggestively with the posterior of a woman leaning over behind them, and are visually associated with the bending woman’s buttocks. Front and center, the cabbages are the only product that can be seen for sale in a painting otherwise filled with human types. They stand metonymically for the other goods sold, as well as, in the pictorial terms of the conflation

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Fig. 55

Camille Pissarro, The Market on the Grande-Rue, Gisors, 1885. Oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm.

between vendor and cabbages, for the female figures who display them, with their solid bodies and cheeks flushed with fresh country air. The male figure in The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage is less easily subsumed into reductive connections between human and vegetable, both as a result of Pissarro’s pictorial choices as well as the absence of a cultural and artistic tradition like the one linking women with the fertile earth and the forms of their bodies with its produce. Certainly, the paysan is associated with the cabbages that he holds against his body but, shown close up, advanced

in years, and physiologically individuated, he is especially psychologically compelling. The painting brings to mind Monet’s Portrait of Père Paul, the aged and ruminative cook painted in swirls of clotted color that evoke the pastry craft and suggest that the derogatory metaphor of artist as confectioner could be reclaimed in paint (see fig. 41). The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage best supports any argument that the painter identified with peasant labor, as the gardener comes to stand in for the artist, and even for the viewer. As the figure gazes intently at the cabbage that he grasps, the viewer likewise

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must scrutinize the many-layered surface of the canvas to make out the wall of cabbages that are painted with a thickness that suggests their swelling density, in bright green colors that invoke the coolness of their leaves, even the bitterness of their taste. And yet, as we have seen, for supportive or critical reviewers, the connection between painter and peasant could not be sustained for long. Pissarro’s modernism was incompatible with an understanding of the timeless routines of rural labor, or of this artist as their privileged chronicler. When critics detailed Pissarro’s raw vegetal colors, sandy textures, and awkward handling, they were typically not commenting on his accurate or authentic depiction of landscapes and figures, but referring to a palette and technique that distorted its subjects. The significance of the “Impressionist market gardener, specializing in cabbages” metaphor moved beyond shorthand for a naturalist practice. It also stood for the shifting identity of Pissarro’s paintings and his materials, and the confusion that they provoked with their unexpected color and thickened paint. In this way, such criticism exceeded and contradicted what was often its intention, to argue that Pissarro was the rightful painter of the countryside because he understood it instinctively. “He knows Nature and the beings that inhabit it; but how to share with him his strange sense for color?,” as one critic asks in 1886.87 Painter of the natural or the unnatural, the fresh, robust, and healthy or the pungent, paltry, and dangerous, a bumbling hand or an advanced scientific eye, at home in the countryside and unable to navigate the Paris

art world or the most dedicated member of a modern art movement—these are the tensions that emerge from a close reading of the most common metaphors used to describe Pissarro and his painting. In the criticism I have followed, paintings were encountered by an embodied viewer just as they were understood to embody the peasant, the landscape, and its produce. As we have come to expect, these metaphors frequently emerged in moments of discomfort when categories were transgressed, when paint went unsublimated to representation and the status of art and the stability of its materials seemed in flux and at risk. The salads served by the Impressionists were discussed as inducing indigestion and pain through acidic landscapes and onion-green colors. The critics who compared Pissarro’s practice to agricultural labor and his paint to vegetation, soil and sap, or butter and cheese insisted on the material qualities of the works that interrupted their ability to communicate visually. Best described through reference to what is eaten or touched, the paintings upset the eye as well as the established understanding of what Impressionists hoped to achieve with their landscapes, namely, the faithful representation of varying conditions of nature directly observed. Supporters focused instead on how the paintings could grant ruddy good health and centered their approving assessments on the figure of the represented paysanne, a figure that so often emerged in enthusiastic or critical reviews as analogous to “a robust healthy plant that had grown the same way as her vegetables in the garden.”88

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Conclusion

bertall’s full-page, front-cover print summing up the 1865 Salon for Le Journal amusant brings together unlikely protagonists (fig. 56). A Parisienne in evening dress sits before a mirror stroking her cheek, as though posing for a portrait that materializes in the glass as she gazes at her reflected representation. Indeed, she is being painted in various ways across the caricature, in which she functions as the canvas itself, the subject of painting, and the figuration of Art. While the vessels resting before the mirror presumably contain cosmetics, she holds a painter’s loaded palette as makeup is conflated with oil paint. Two figures apply paintbrushes directly to her skin and hair, dipped in pots of blanc de perle, a cosmetic used to lighten the skin, and rouge Vénitien, a hair dye.1 The male figure stands for any popular Salon painter, while the older female figure takes up the role of family member or maid commonly represented at

toilette scenes assisting the younger charge. Here there is little distinction between them as they adorn the Parisienne, whose profuse dress transforms like her skin into a canvas upon which miniature paintings are already framed, just as within the frame of the mirror her artistic transformation is reflected back to her as nearly complete. Disturbing the air of calm preparation while participating in the reverential treatment of the central figure, Olympia’s attendant enters from the left with the alarmed cat, offering a bouquet so large as to echo the ample skirt spreading across the bottom half of the image. Reduced by racist stereotype to a grotesque grinning face, she is presented as the opposite of the Parisienne, whose creamy white flesh is being painted with blanc de perle. This maid figure appears in similar form in Bertall’s better-known caricature of Olympia as a cabinet-maker’s wife, which

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appears on the second page of the same issue of Le Journal amusant (see fig. 16). As she presents the bouquet to the Parisienne rather than the demimondaine, the elegant seated figure comes to stand for what Olympia should have been, had she been both “cleaned up” (as is promised in Bertall’s caption on the page-two caricature, “Manet’s painting is the bouquet of the Exhibition. . . . The moment chosen by the great colorist is when this woman is about to take a bath, which seems to us urgently required”) and made up (along the lines of Zola’s ironic statement that “if, at least, M. Manet had borrowed M. Cabanel’s rice powder puff and made up the cheeks and breasts of Olympia a bit, the young girl would have been presentable”).2 In the background of the cover caricature, we can decipher the upper body of a painter seen from behind, working on a nude that already appears more admissible than Olympia; and, provocatively, Bertall’s caricature of Olympia from page two bleeds through the paper so that it is visible as a ghostly, shadow image just above this frontcover nude. The outline of this sketchy female nude in progress on the cover indicates a head that turns demurely away, a hand that supports the head rather than shielding the genitalia, and a body that is fleshier, with more rounded contours. The effect is that this nude whose shoulder is being painted rhymes with the Parisienne placed directly below, whose shoulder also provides the supple material for the makeup artist’s brush. Here are two versions of acceptable femininity, in contrast to the distasteful one represented on the very next page. But perhaps, Bertall suggests, they are too acceptable. Below the caricature a caption

reads: “Fortunate trend in painting and the arts: they increasingly take on the industrial, commercial character that they had sadly lacked before.” This text is expressed in the collective production of the feminine by the artists who paint directly on skin and hair, and by the painter in the background who dashes off a nude without even looking at a model. Popular Salon painting is here conceived as synonymous with the Parisienne, packaged in ready-made garb and factory-produced powders and pigments, and operating as the preferred drawing room decoration. Both emerge as collectable commodities like the bibelots resting on the floor, trinkets that simultaneously denote parlor figurines and miniature atelier aids. With overtones of the salon and boudoir, this caricature represents both the state of the Salon de Paris as well as a new sort of “artist’s studio,” the antithesis of Courbet’s monumental painting of that name. The Artist’s Studio was shown in the Pavilion of Realism that Courbet organized as a one-man show near the Universal Exhibition in 1855, from which several of his works had been rejected (1854–55; fig. 57). His self-styled, coarse country mannerisms associated with the landscape that he paints in that artistic manifesto “summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life” give way to the refined society lady settled before her mirror who also holds the artist’s tool. The adoring nude model and potential allegory of Truth in the Courbet becomes the admiring cosmetician and agent of artifice and deception in the Second Empire. A peasant boy turns into a chubby putto as realism decidedly loses out to idealism in the industrialized and commercialized artist’s studio, in which

Fig. 56 (facing)

Bertall, Promenade au Salon de 1865. Caricature from Le Journal amusant, May 27, 1865, 1.

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Fig. 57

Gustave Courbet, The Artist’s Studio, A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, 1854–55. Oil on canvas, 361 × 598 cm.

any aura of muscular male artistic creation has surrendered to the mesmerizing mirage of the female figure’s carefully crafted presentation, which casts a spell on those attending her. Within a dream-like setting where angels form part of the company, art has become superficial, analogous to the cosmetics and fabrics that transform a body into a phantasm, the corporeality of a woman into a captivating visual spectacle that may well be an optical i­llusion.

The Parisienne is here the antithesis both of Manet’s figure of Olympia depicted on the following page with a cloud rising from her dirty feet to imply a noxious stench, and of the painting Olympia, which Bertall also suggests gives off an odor, the “bouquet” of the exhibition. When Gabriel Liquier, working under the pseudonym Trock, caricatured the Impressionist painter’s studio in 1881, he used a related strategy aligning painting with industrial production to denigrate the work of those artists exhibiting at 35 boulevard des Capucines—but this time, in order to ally Impressionism with smelly Olympia. Instead of proposing that painting had

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become synonymous with seductive surfaces, in Chez un impressionniste Impressionist work appeals directly to the viewer’s body (fig. 58). Eight male and female figures of varying ages work together on a monumental painting. Straddling the apex of a housepainter’s ladder, a man rises above the rest and attacks the canvas with the energetic forward thrust of his entire body. We assume that it is he who also insists in the caption: “It’s getting tight, my children! Hurry! . . . or else my Odors of Paris will never be ready for the show!” Once again, the arts have taken on an “industrial, commercial character.” Like

Bertall’s transformation of a maternal figure at the toilette into a painter putting the finishing artistic touches on a younger woman, Trock turns the artist’s entire family into an army of brush-wielding painters at work, so that the title Chez un impressionniste signifies literally as the artist at home. As on Bertall’s cover, the status of the work of art is at stake, and again is undergoing a process of redefinition. Along with the ladder indicating craft over creativity, this Impressionist production lacks even any professionalism distinguished by sex and age, as the artist solicits the help of his small children and

Fig. 58

Trock, Chez un impressionniste, 1881. Caricature from La Caricature, April 23, 1881.

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his wife or mother. But here, unlike in Bertall’s terms sixteen years earlier, painters are devalued not for their collusion in the apotheosis of the imagined Parisienne and her questionable taste—which we have seen Bertall equate with a desire for luxury consumer goods like cakes— but for a different vulgarization of painting: the representation of the smells of modernity, the making of a canvas that could capture and emit odors. Such a painting would be more like a microcosm of Paris than a representation of it, to be experienced viscerally rather than visually. In the directive to “Hurry!,” Trock sums up what was widely perceived as the ambition of Impressionism, a race to capture fleeting effects. But these effects are not reducible to the flux of optically perceived phenomena, changes in light and atmosphere, which has been a core tenet of Impressionist scholarship.3 Instead, Impressionism makes claims for and upon the body. We are shown that it requires neither careful training nor a discerning eye, but above all, sensate flesh, with the implication that even aged women and children can be Impressionists. The eight painters work on an urban or industrial landscape complete with a steaming smokestack, a subject that raises mutually inflecting possibilities for what the painting named Odeurs de Paris is meant to reference. Iconographically, as a painting of modern technology, it brings certain works to mind, like the series of railway sheds that Monet displayed in 1877, which commentators consistently argued provided a multisensory, immersive experience of the bustling station (see fig. 50). “The brush renders not only the movement, the color, the activity, but the noise, it is unbelievable;

and yet this station is full of noise, creaking, whistling, which can be made out through the intense smoke, whose azure and gray clouds collide. It’s a pictorial symphony,” according to one critic. Another asserts: “One hears the cries of the employees, the sharp whistles of the machines throwing off their cry of alarm, the incessant clanking noise and the tremendous panting breathing of the steam. We see the grandiose and crazed movement of a station where the ground trembles with every turn of the wheels. The sidewalks are wet with soot, and the atmosphere is charged with that pungent odor that emanates from burning coal.”4 The title Odeurs de Paris may also refer to ultramontane Louis Veuillot’s controversial and hugely successful book of the same name, Les Odeurs de Paris (1866), which denounces Paris as a carnal city and uses the metaphorical potential of foul smell to describe the degeneration and corruption of French politics, institutions, art, and culture. Like Louis Ulbach’s denigration of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin as putrid literature infecting the reading public, the reference to Veuillot’s critique of French modernity as a cesspool accuses Impressionists of privileging all that is debased in contemporary culture. And, finally, Odeurs de Paris recalls the title of Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris at a time when Impressionism’s critics consistently linked Zola to those painters as an “impressionist of the pen.”5 In Le Ventre, Zola narrates the odors of the marketplace to a degree perceived as shocking, and even configures the flânerie of Claude Lantier and his friends in olfactory terms. “They inhaled the odors of Paris, noses in the air. They could have recognized every corner with closed eyes, just

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by the scent of alcohol leaving the wine merchants, the warm breath of bakeries and patisseries, or the bland impression of fruit stands.”6 Trock portrays the Impressionist as akin to Zola, capturing the smell of modern life issuing forth from the canvas like smoke from the depicted chimney, as in one of Zola’s descriptions of “the poultry market releasing hot air through its ventilation turret, a stench that poured out like soot from a factory.”7 Trock’s invocation of smell brings us back to Cham’s 1877 caricature of the quintessential Impressionist, in which the artist stands beside a gentleman who holds his canvas, staging his bodily relationship to the work of art, as the animated painter expresses his consternation that while he could capture decomposing tones, he failed to communicate their odor (see fig. 24). Also in that year, Albert Millaud suggests in Le Figaro that colors could indeed smell: “[Impressionism] attracts and hits the sense of sight as the odor of a cheese shop attracts and hits the sense of smell. It is exactly the same impression.” With the phrase “exactly the same impression,” Millaud insists on the continuity of sensory responses beyond the metaphorical and moves from a description of the exhibition as “a collection of canvases freshly painted, on which one had spilled waves of cream in pistachio, vanilla, and currant flavors” to an accusation of fermenting painting that addresses the nose and stomach but that baffles the eye. The visitor “feels swept up in a whirlwind of fresh colors in which he cannot distinguish anything.”8 Culinary metaphors provide an entry point into a critical discourse in which Impressionism was perceived as anything but an exclu-

sively visual art. Its materials seemed dubious, feminized substances that appealed to the body while confusing or abusing the eye. When Armand Silvestre criticizes Berthe Morisot in 1882 for a lack of solid drawing, characterizing her paintings as “nothing more than delicious ragouts of colors,” he relies, like so many others, on the problematic blending of disorderly color, whether the result ends up as tasty—Silvestre was pleased with the “delicate freshness” of the colors—or revolting.9 Given the wider cultural connections between food and femininity that this book has explored, we might expect Mori­ sot’s materials and processes to be most often described in terms relating to the kitchen. Instead, all Impressionists were accused of producing unfinished stews, often in the same reviews that called their color a debauchery of tones laid down on canvas by artists in states of extreme sensual arousal. Henry Havard describes Impressionist works in general in 1882: “They are always the same famous blue, pink, purple, green and lilac taches, a debauchery of the palette that, without becoming a feast for the eyes, only leaves the faintest glimpse of what the artist wanted to represent. With talent, knowledge, practice, these ‘preparations’ [term signifying a culinary mix] could become excellent paintings; but, it must be admitted, these are only ‘preparations.’ The hare has been killed; to make the stew, one must complete the sauce.”10 Color, that most optical of phenomena, is far from purely optical here as tones rub up against each other and combine into edible, pungent mush. For most critics, these canvases were not painted from the perspective of a highly sensitive eye functioning as a prism,

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applying and advancing developments in optical science, as champions of the New Painting like Duranty, Zola, and Laforgue argued. We recall Duranty’s claim that Impressionists “succeeded in splitting sunlight into its rays” such that a “learned physicist could find nothing to criticize in their analysis of light,” and Laforgue’s insistence that the Impressionist eye functioned in its “prismatic sensibility” to decompose and recompose light rays. Duranty, like Zola before him, maintained that it was the artists produced by the École des beaux-arts who “serve up a strange ragout, meager and fermented, a salad of impoverished lines, angular and jolting. It is a dish of clashing colors, too faded or too acid . . . [a] muddled art.”11 Not so for the majority of Impressionism’s critics. For them, Impressionism attested not to scientific accuracy but to the irrational vision of a mental patient. “Impressionism is no longer biased toward greenish yellow, to raspberry horizons, to clouds in vanilla ice cream; the last representative of this hysteria of color is M. Paul Gauguin,” explains Alexandre Hepp in 1882.12 Uneasy with blended (verts-jaunes), excessively bright colors and with melting, creamy paint material, Hepp positions it all within the perceptual experience of the subject rather than the practitioner of scientific analysis. Feminized foods (raspberry horizons, vanilla ice cream) together with a feminized illness (hysteria) precluded not only Gauguin in 1882 but all the Impressionists before then from possessing cerebral and detached eyes, as did the flood of other descriptions of Impressionists working in states of drunkenness, hallucination, and malady, conditions in which the

body asserts its primacy over the mind. The painters’ sensory intoxication became “contagious” as critics displayed their own ambivalent responses to the “exceptional flavor” of orgies of whipped-up red-currant tones that knocked them off balance, in paintings that were so often described as threatening their bodies and their eyes and disrupting their claims to cool analysis.13 These paintings looked like nothing so much as tongue lickings and asked to be tasted and smelled, even heard, a “cacophony of sour, piercing, discordant tones,” but that challenged vision with “blinding chaos!”14 “One must look at them while closing the eyes a bit” became the paradoxical understanding of how to make sense of the work, but “one can never close them enough” jests one critic, exploiting the irony of visual representation that requires vision to be veiled or distanced.15 Another introduces Monet and Pissarro as “the school of the Shattered Eye” (emphasis in original) while praising Morisot for her delicate tones of fresh butter, invoking the smooth, fatty substance as a mild and soothing balm, with its address to taste and touch, to counter the aggressions of her colleagues against vision.16 Charles Bigot declares that the painting shown in 1882 “screeches and screams from these handsome golden frames. . . . To damage and exhaust the eyes, would this be the formula for independent painting?”17 Bigot uses noise to characterize the violent tonalities, like another commentator who protests in the same year that visitors need to plug their ears within the exhibition’s deafening “uproar of raw and shrill tones [tons, which describe color as well as sound].”18 As the paintings were said to damage vision, the other senses were poised as a crucial part

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of the encounter with them, even serving as surrogates for visual experience. This was the context out of which Jules Laforgue formulated his defense of the Impressionist eye as divorced from other sensory modes, and it is now easier to recognize that argument as constructing a certain version of Impressionism rather than summing up a widely accepted description of it. In the period addressed in this book, claims for the hypersensitive vision of self-consciously modern artists were developed to challenge the importance that other critics placed on the bodies of those artists and on the ways that paintings bore the material traces of their painter’s attempts to capture even smell. Further scholarship is required to assess the more broadly multisensory reception of Manet and the Impressionists, but the metaphors of taste and ingestion followed here have given us one way to fissure the alignment of their painting with purely visual experience. That alignment has been overestimated since the nineteenth century by a range of commentators with radically different aims. This includes supporters in the 1860s through the 1880s who stressed the painters’ advanced optical perception and its representation as a mode of defense. It includes critics in the 1890s who affirmed the connection between Impressionism and the visual, but in order to belittle Impressionists as feminized receptors and copyists of sense impressions who neglected loftier ambitions, namely the expression of intellectual, imaginative, and emotional inner states. It includes art historians in the mid-twentieth century who accepted the connection between this art and opticality but reasserted its value as the reason

why Manet and the Impressionists should be considered inaugural figures in a modernist trajectory. Finally, it includes art historians from the 1970s into the present whose revisionist histories of nineteenth-century French painting and critiques of twentieth-century histories of modernism continue to take as given the ocular basis of Impressionism as understood in its time by its practitioners and publics. While it has been beyond the scope of the current study to interrogate those writings after 1890, I hope to have shown both the limitations of their shared emphasis on the visual and what we might gain by undermining it. When nineteenth-century criticism is read through a lens attuned to the optical above all, we miss the ways that critics lingered on their own full-bodied responses as well as those of the artist and thereby theorized art and its effects more expansively than has been appreciated since. We also fail to fully recognize the social politics of those debates that adopted the deeply gendered metaphorics of sense and sensation. The pervasive use of culinary language to describe work by Manet and the Impressionists, even when embedded in texts like Zola’s that have been taken as founding documents for associating self-consciously modern painting with the singularity of the artist’s eye, demonstrates that it was not just disgruntled audiences that drew attention to the bodies of the painters, the organic materiality of their brushstrokes, and the sensory complexity of the encounter with art. This side of nineteenth-century critical discourse offers new histories for familiar paintings, and fresh possibilities for experiencing and interpreting them.

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notes

Except where indicated in the citations, the translations from French in the text and notes are my own. Introduction

1. For a discussion of culinary journals, exhibitions, and the attempt to maintain a professional culinary academy, see Trubek, Haute Cuisine. Key writers on French food history in this period include Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Stephen Mennell, Sidney Mintz, Susan Pinkard, Rachel Rich, Rebecca Spang, and ­Barbara Ketcham Wheaton. 2. The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds a large collection of nineteenth-century menus. Resources also include Léon Maillard, Menus et programmes illustrés and Mordacq, Le Menu. 3. Un Vieux Parisien, “L’Indiscret,” 1877, 1. I would like to acknowledge the two volumes of documentation assembled by Ruth Berson, following research for the 1986 exhibition The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886, that bring together all known contemporary reviews of the Impressionist exhibitions and reproductions of known paintings displayed. These volumes are indispensable resources and I have relied on them throughout. 4. Zola, “Le Jury,” 264–65; Zola, “M. Manet,” ­version in Mon Salon, 1866, 46–47.

5. Desbuissons, “The Studio and the Kitchen.” In addition to the articles by Desbuissons cited in these pages, there are two other exceptions to this neglect of culinary art criticism in the nineteenth century. Philippa Lewis, in “Stomaching the Salon,” explores the language of food in Baudelaire’s Salon de 1846 and the 1840s “Boulangerie du Louvre” series from the journal Le Tintamarre; and Aileen Tsui, in “ ‘A Harmony in Eggs and Milk,’ ” examines culinary language in the critical reception of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. 6. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg, 4:85–93. 7. Leroy, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1874, 79–80. 8. Fichtre [Gaston Pérodeaud], “L’Actualité,” 1882, 1. 9. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 87–91. See also Greenberg’s “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Clement Greenberg, 1:23–38, especially 28–31; and “Sculpture in Our Time,” in Clement Greenberg, 4:55–61, especially 59–60. 10. For challenges to Greenbergian opticality, see especially Krauss, The Optical Unconscious; Jones, Eyesight Alone, and Jones, “The Mediated Sensorium.” 11. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 18–19. See especially the chapter “Between Realisms,” 365–98, and the conclusion of the “Coda: Manet’s Modernism,” 407–16.

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Fried includes caveats in his designation of Impressionism in these terms on 394 and 607–9n31, but these cautions reinforce the broader generalization. The construction of Impressionism as an optical art is maintained in Fried’s Menzel’s Realism, his book most concerned with embodiment in nineteenth-century painting. 12. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 395. 13. Laforgue, “L’Impressionnisme,” [1883] 1902. The key sections from 133–36 read: “Étant admis que, si l’œuvre picturale relève du cerveau, de l’âme, elle ne le fait qu’au moyen de l’œil et que l’œil est donc d’abord tout comme l’oreille en musique, l’Impressionniste est un peintre moderniste qui, doué d’une sensibilité d’œil hors du commun, oubliant les tableaux amassés par les siècles dans les musées, oubliant l’éducation optique de l’école (dessin et perspective, coloris), à force de vivre et de voir franchement et primitivement dans les spectacles lumineux en plein air, c’est-à-dire hors de l’atelier éclairé à 45°, que ce soit la rue, la campagne, les intérieurs, est parvenu à se refaire un œil naturel, à voir naturellement et à peindre naïvement comme il voit. Je m’explique: “[. . .] Le dessin est un vieux et vivace préjugé dont l’origine doit être cherchée dans les premières expériences des sensations humaines. Primitivement l’œil, ne connaissant que la lumière blanche, avec ses ombres indécomposées, par conséquent, point aidé dans ses expériences par la ressource des colorations discernantes, s’aida des expériences tactiles. Alors, par des associations habituelles d’aide mutuel et ensuite par hérédité des modifications acquises entre la faculté des organes tactiles et celle de l’organe visuel, le sens des formes a passé des doigts dans l’œil. Les formes arrêtées ne relèvent pas primitivement de l’œil et l’œil par succession et raffinement en a tiré pour la commodité de son expérience le sens des contours nets; et de là cette illusion enfantine de la traduction de la réalité vivante et sans plans par le dessin-contour et de la perspective dessinée. “Essentiellement l’œil ne doit connaître que les vibrations lumineuses, comme le nerf acoustique ne connaît que les vibrations sonores. C’est parce que l’œil, après avoir commencé par s’approprier, raffiner et systématiser les facultés tactiles a vécu et s’est instruit, s’est entretenu dans l’illusion par les siècles d’œuvres dessinées que son évolution comme organe des vibrations lumineuses s’est si retardée relativement à celle de

l’oreille par exemple, et est encore dans la couleur une intelligence rudimentaire, et que tandis que l’oreille en général analyse aisément les harmoniques, comme un prisme auditif, l’œil voit synthétiquement et grossièrement seulement la lumière et n’a que de vagues pouvoirs de la décomposer dans les spectacles de la nature malgré ses trois fibrilles de Young qui sont les facettes du prisme. Donc un œil naturel (ou raffiné puisque, pour cet organe, avant d’aller, il faut redevenir primitif en se débarrassant des illusions tactiles), un œil naturel oublie les illusions tactiles et sa commode langue morte: le dessin-contour et n’agit que dans sa faculté de sensibilité prismatique. Il arrive à voir la réalité dans l’atmosphère vivante des formes, décomposée, réfractée, réfléchie par les êtres et les choses, en incessantes variations. Telle est cette première ­caractéristique de l’œil impressionniste.” 14. Ibid., 143–44: “L’œil commun du public et de la critique non artiste, élevé à voir la réalité dans des harmonies établies et fixées par la foule de ses peintres médiocres comme œil, cet œil n’a aucun droit contre ces yeux aigus d’artistes qui, plus sensibles aux variations lumineuses en noteront naturellement sur leur toile des nuances, des rapports de nuances rares, imprévus, inconnus qui feront crier les aveugles à l’excentricité voulue, et même dût-on faire la part de l’incohérence d’un œil naturellement, volontairement si l’on veut, exaspéré dans la hâte de ces œuvres d’impressions notées dans la toute première ivresse sensorielle d’une réalité déjà choisie rare et imprévue, tout cela, la langue de la ­palette par rapport à la réalité étant une langue conventionnelle et susceptible d’assaisonnements nouveaux, tout cela n’est-il pas plus artiste, plus vivant et par conséquent plus fécond pour l’avenir que les tristes et immuables recettes des coloris académiques?” 15. Tamar Garb established the feminization of Impressionism in the 1880s and 1890s in “Berthe Morisot and the Feminizing of Impressionism.” Norma Broude’s Impressionism, a Feminist Reading addresses this feminization and follows its legacy, showing how art critics and art historians in the mid-twentieth century masculinized Impressionism by insisting on its science-based optical realism, the same argument that Symbolists had used in the 1890s to denigrate Impressionism as a passive, unimaginative, and thereby “feminine” style. 16. For a discussion of the philosophical prejudice toward gustatory taste in seventeenth- and eighteenth-

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century aesthetic discourse, see Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste. The history of the privileging of the visual in European culture is set out in the opening chapters of Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes, a survey of philosophical attitudes toward vision that posits an “apotheosis” of vision in the nineteenth century culminating in a “crisis” of vision at the end of that century, and a deep suspicion of vision in twentieth-century French thought. 17. The sensory turn in history and anthropology dates to the 1980s, and the scholarship of historian Alain Corbin is of particular importance with respect to nineteenth-century studies. The genealogy of the sensory turn has been traced by anthropologist David Howes, who is credited with coining the term, in “Expanding Field of Sensory Studies”; see also Howes, Sensual Relations, Howes, “Charting the Sensorial Revolution,” and the volume edited by Howes, Empire of the Senses. The sensory turn seeks to redress the perceived logocentrism and ocularcentrism of the linguistic and pictorial turns respectively, though the critique of “visual media” is not unique to scholarship tied to this sensory turn. W. J. T. Mitchell, associated with the pictorial turn—a term that he coined in Picture Theory—has consistently argued that there are no purely visual media; see, for example, Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” and Mitchell, “Showing Seeing.” 18. The gendering of sensation has been at the heart of feminist phenomenology, including in critiques and extensions of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose philosophy of lived experience and the interaction of sensory modes lies behind much of my thinking in this book. In Merleau-Ponty’s writings the embodied human remains sexless. Feminists have challenged this stance in order to explore how a theory of perception as embodied can challenge the gendered hierarchies separating the eye from the other senses and the body from the mind. Luce Irigaray’s theorization of the mastering impulse of the gaze and the historical devaluation of senses other than vision is foundational, as in Speculum of the Other Woman, This Sex Which Is Not One, and An Ethics of Sexual Difference. The feminist literature generated in response to this critique of ocularcentrism is extensive and diverse. Sources of particular importance for my thinking include Allen and Young, Thinking Muse; Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh,” and Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion; Olkowski and Weiss, Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

19. Lynda Nead has argued that the prevailing notion of the city as a visual spectacle, inherited from twentieth-century scholarship centered on the flâneur, distorts our understanding of how embodied men and women experienced city space by marginalizing the role of touch and speech. See “ ‘Many little harmless and interesting adventures . . .’ ” 20. Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” reprinted in Mayne, Painter of Modern Life, 9, 11. 21. Most recently, see Balducci, Gender, Space, and the Gaze. The field of feminist critique of the flâneur opened with two critical interventions: Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference, 50–90; and Janet Wolff, “Invisible Flaneuse.” 22. Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” reprinted in Mayne, The Painter of Modern Life, 8–9. 23. Zola, Le Ventre, 213: “Ils humaient les odeurs de Paris, le nez en l’air. Ils auraient reconnu chaque coin, les yeux fermés, rien qu’aux haleines liquoreuses sortant des marchands de vin, aux souffles chauds des boulangeries et des pâtisseries, aux étalages fades des fruitières.” Zola was far from the only author to describe flânerie as a multisensory experience. For similar portrayals in Balzac, Dickens, and Charlotte Brontë, see Murail, “A Body Passes By.” On multisensory flânerie, see the special issue of Dix-Neuf edited by Aimée Boutin titled “Rethinking the Flâneur: Flânerie and the Senses,” especially Boutin’s introductory essay of the same title (124–32). 24. The foundational text theorizing the gaze is ­Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.” For a concise discussion of how feminists might interrogate the sexual politics of looking, see Garb, “Gender and Representation.” 25. Pollock, Vision and Difference, 67. 26. See, for example, the essays in D’Souza and McDonough, Invisible Flâneuse? On rethinking flânerie beyond the visual, see Boutin, “Rethinking the Flâneur”; and Murail, “A Body Passes By.” 27. Of particular importance is Crary’s Techniques of the Observer, which demonstrates that, in the early nineteenth century, developments in optical science embedded vision squarely in an individual’s physical makeup. As vision was increasingly understood not to reflect stable external realities but to be dependent on each unique observer, perception came to be recognized as deeply subjective and embodied. Tracing the sense of taste as it emerged in metaphors for visual consump-

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tion offers a way to explore this wider appreciation of corporealized vision in the nineteenth century, as well as to question its consequences. In terms of those consequences, my interpretations often depart significantly from Crary’s, without disputing his overarching thesis about the transformation in the basic understanding of vision in the period preceding the painting under consideration here. 28. Broude, Impressionism, a Feminist Reading, 159–65. Broude is less interested in challenging the conception of Impressionist painters as “only an eye” than she is in stressing that Impressionist opticality did not imply that the movement was “emotion-free, objective, and scientifically motivated” (13). 29. Laura Marks’s The Skin of the Film is a foundational discussion of how “visual media” affect entire bodies. It is also indicative of a wider privileging of twentieth-century and contemporary practice in scholarship on the multisensory reception of art, which is not surprising, given how work in multimedia and installation formats can directly stimulate senses other than vision. Jenni Lauwrens’s “Welcome to the Revolution” provides an overview of how the sensory turn has impacted art history while characteristically using a contemporary installation, Margaret Moore’s Still Sounds (2012), to illustrate her points. Responding to the premise that art history has been dominated by the visual and has marginalized the other senses, Patrizia Di Bello and Gabriel Koureas edited the volume Art, History and the Senses, with chapters focusing on art and art movements that promote notions of synesthesia and the multisensorial, from 1830 to today. See also Bacci and Melcher’s wide-ranging edited volume Art and the Senses. 30. The same is not true in literary studies. See the book chapter by Colette Becker, “Zola, un critic gourmet.” Becker traces Zola’s use of this language in the 1860s to describe literature, painting, and theater, arguing that he intended to shock readers with its perceived vulgarity. Chapter 1. Metaphor and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Art Criticism

Portions of chapter 1 appeared in the article “Good Taste: Metaphor and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Art Criticism” in Object 17 (December 2015): 9–32. 1. For example, see the link to Manet in Ferragus [Louis Ulbach], “La Littérature putride,” 1868, 1. This

became de rigueur in criticism of Impressionist exhibitions that connected exhibiting artists to Zola; for example, Bariolette, “Notes parisiennes,” 1877, 2; Lafenestre, “Le Jour et la nuit,” 1877, 2; Véron, “Cronique parisienne,” 1877, 2; Un Vieux Parisien, “L’Indiscret,” 1877, 1; Anonymous, “Exposition des impressionnistes,” Le Soir, 1879, 1; Fournel, “Les Oeuvres et les hommes,” 1879, 729–30; de la Leude, “Les Ratés de la peinture,” 1879, 65–66; Goetschy, “Indépendants et impressionnistes,” 1880, 2; Trianon, “Cinquième Exposition,” 1880, 2–3; Palette, “Les Expositions particulières,” 1881, 71–72; Trianon, “Sixième Exposition,” 1881, 2–3; André, “Les Petits Salons,” 1882, 3; Hermel, “L’Exposition de peinture,” 1886, 1–2. 2. There has been no record of La Palette au bock since 1935. See de Charnage, “Expositions,” 1935, 4. The palette remained with Manet after its completion. After Édouard’s death, Suzanne Manet gave the palette to Henri Guérard. Manet produced at least one other painted palette, with a pink rose and an inscription dedicating it “to my dear Madame Henri Guérard,” his former student Eva Gonzalès. This second palette is discussed in Mathey, Bulletin de la Société d’études. 3. Tabarant, Manet et ses œuvres, 212. 4. In “À l’enseigne du Bon Bock,” Frédérique Desbuissons notes this palette as one among a constellation of objects that make reference to Le Bon Bock within her broader exploration of the social and political meaning of that painting and its afterlife in the 1870s. She also points out the dialogue between the signifier and the signified, the beer foam and the leftover scraps of paint scattered across the tool. 5. For a discussion of still life elements as signatory inscriptions in Manet’s work, see Armstrong, Manet Manette, 274; Garb, Painted Face, 66; and Rubin, Manet’s Silence, 20, 168–74, 194. 6. Desbuissons, “Des Moos et des mots,” and Desbuissons, “Courbet’s Materialism.” 7. The album is discussed in Lepage, Dîners artistiques, 1884, 261–66. The link between Manet’s painting and the supper club is posed in Bazire, Manet, 82; Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 64; and more recently in Desbuissons, “À l’enseigne du Bon Bock.” 8. Cachin et al., Manet, 1832−1883, 247. 9. Tabarant, Manet et ses œuvres, 212. 10. Duvergier de Hauranne, “Le Salon de 1873,” 637. On the brasserie sign, see Bazire, Manet, 82. See

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also Desbuissons’s more figurative discussion of signage in relation to the painting Le Bon Bock in “À l’enseigne du Bon Bock.” Debuissons argues that the painting Le Bon Bock functioned as a sign for the values in art and politics that Manet and his colleagues had espoused in brasseries like the Café Guerbois under the Second Empire, and around which they would again rally in the 1870s. 11. For a discussion of the “sensory onslaught” (65) in Zola’s Le Ventre, see Fredric Jameson’s “Zola, or, the Codification of Affect,” in Antinomies of Realism, 45−77. For Jameson, the “excess of the sensory” (50) in Zola’s descriptions of foodstuffs in Le Ventre becomes an overwhelming force of its own in the novel; in Jameson’s terms it becomes “autonomous,” operating independently of the plot and even independently of language, so that in Zola’s descriptions, despite the accumulation of names of objects that would seem to organize perceptual experience, the sensations produced in the reader cannot be disciplined by such categories or by the imposition of narrative meaning. For Jameson, the novel therefore opens new possibilities for the sensorium, training its reader in new forms of perception. 12. Zola was not the first to use such culinary language. For other critics who used culinary vocabulary and who shared some of his basic aesthetic commitments, see the discussion of Baudelaire’s Salon de 1846 in Lewis, “Stomaching the Salon,” and the section on Champfleury’s alimentary metaphors in Desbuissons, “Yeux ouverts et bouche affamée,” 50–57. 13. Zola, “Le Jury,” 1866, 264–65: “Imaginez que le Salon est un immense ragoût artistique, qui nous est servi tous les ans. Chaque peintre, chaque sculpteur envoie son morceau. Or, comme nous avons l’estomac délicat, on a cru prudent de nommer toute une troupe de cuisiniers pour accommoder ces victuailles de goûts et d’aspects si divers. On a craint les indigestions, et on a dit aux gardiens de la santé publique: “ ‘Voici les éléments d’un mets excellent; ménagez le poivre, car le poivre échauffe; mettez de l’eau dans le vin, car la France est une grande nation qui ne peut perdre la tête.’ “Il me semble, dès lors, que les cuisiniers jouent le grand rôle. Puisqu’on nous assaisonne notre admiration et qu’on nous mâche nos opinions, nous avons le droit de nous occuper avant tout de ces hommes complaisants

qui veulent bien veiller à ce que nous ne nous gorgions pas comme des gloutons d’une nourriture de mauvaise qualité. Quand vous mangez un beefsteak, est-ce que vous vous inquiétez du bœuf? Vous ne songez qu’à remercier ou à maudire le marmiton qui vous le sert trop ou pas assez saignant. “Il est donc bien entendu que le Salon n’est pas l’expression entière et complète de l’art français en l’an de grâce 1866, mais qu’il est à coup sûr une sorte de ragoût préparé et fricassé par vingt-huit cuisiniers nommés tout exprès pour cette besogne délicate. “Un salon, de nos jours, n’est pas l’œuvre des artistes, il est l’œuvre d’un jury. Donc, je m’occupe avant tout du jury, l’auteur de ces longues salles froides et blafardes dans lesquelles s’étalent, sous la lumière crue, toutes les médiocrités timides et toutes les réputations volées. “Naguère, c’était l’Académie des beaux-arts qui passait le tablier blanc et qui mettait la main à la pâte. A cette époque, le Salon était un mets gras et solide, toujours le même. On savait à l’avance quel courage il fallait apporter pour avaler ces morceaux classiques, ces boulettes épaisses, mollement arrondies, et qui vous étouffaient lentement et sûrement. “La vieille Académie, cuisinière de fondation, avait ses recettes à elle, dont elle ne s’écartait jamais; elle s’arrangeait de façon, quels que fussent les tem­ péraments et les époques, à servir le même plat au public [. . .]. “[. . .] Le public qui n’est pas à l’office, qui n’assiste pas à la cuisson, acceptera ces divers Salons, comme les expressions exactes des moments artistiques. Il ne saura pas que c’est uniquement tel peintre qui a fait l’Exposition entière; il ira là de bonne foi et avalera la bouchée, croyant s’ingurgiter tout l’art de l’année.” 14. On the distinction between morceau and tableau, see Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 267–80. 15. Littré, Dictionnaire, 3:1002. 16. Further discussion of the term ragoût in art criticism can be found in Abramovici, “Du ragoût en peinture,” which highlights the positive associations of the term in eighteenth-century criticism; and Desbuissons’s “Les Couleurs de l’alimentation,” “The Studio and the Kitchen,” and “Yeux ouverts et bouche affamée,” which stress its more derogatory side in the nineteenth century. 17. Zola, “Nos Peintres au Champ de Mars,” 1867, 113.

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18. Voltaire, “Taste.” 19. See Carolyn Korsmeyer’s discussion of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) and Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1835) in Making Sense of Taste, in which Korsmeyer tracks the philosophical understanding of, and prejudice toward, gustatory taste in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse. 20. On the emergence of a culinary field in nineteenth-century France, see the work of Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, especially “A Cultural Field in the Making” and Accounting for Taste. 21. Fourier, “Chap. XXVII: De la Gastrosophie,” in Œuvres complètes, 302– 9. 22. For example, in Painting of Modern Life, Timothy J. Clark suggests that while Haussmannization turned Paris into a sight and spectacle, other common metaphors for the transformed city as a dream, mirage, or masquerade instilled doubt about the powers of vision and its claims to truth (66–67). 23. Ruth Iskin discusses Manet’s proposed project in Modern Women, 179 –80. Manet’s letter went unanswered, although, ironically, in 1890 the government commissioned Léon Augustin Lhermitte to paint a large canvas for the space titled Les Halles. 24. Zola, Le Ventre, 242: “Alors je fis une véritable œuvre d’art. Je pris les plats, les assiettes, les terrines, les bocaux; je posai les tons, je dressai une nature morte étonnante, où éclataient des pétards de couleur, soutenus par des gammes savantes. Les langues rouges s’allongeaient avec des gourmandises de flamme, et les boudins noirs, dans le chant clair des saucisses, mettaient les ténèbres d’une indigestion formidable. J’avais peint, n’est-ce pas? la gloutonnerie du réveillon, l’heure de minuit donnée à la mangeaille, la goinfrerie des estomacs vidés par les cantiques. En haut, une grande dinde montrait sa poitrine blanche, marbrée, sous la peau, des taches noires des truffes. C’était barbare et superbe, quelque chose comme un ventre aperçu dans une gloire, mais avec une cruauté de touche, un emportement de raillerie tels, que la foule s’attroupa devant la vitrine, inquiétée par cet étalage qui flambait si rudement . . .” 25. Zola, “M. Manet,” version in Mon Salon, 1866, 46–47: “Vous savez quel effet produisent les toiles de M. Manet au Salon. Elles crèvent le mur, tout simplement. Tout autour d’elles s’étalent les douceurs des con-

fiseurs artistiques à la mode, les arbres en sucre candi et les maisons en croûte de pâté, les bons hommes en pain d’épices et les bonnes femmes faites de crème à la vanille. La boutique de bonbons devient plus rose et plus douce, et les toiles vivantes de l’artiste semblent prendre une certaine amertume au milieu de ce fleuve de lait. Aussi, faut-il voir les grimaces des grands enfants qui passent dans la salle. Jamais vous ne leur ferez avaler pour deux sous de véritable viande crue; mais ils se gorgent comme des malheureux de toutes les sucreries écœurantes qu’on leur sert.” Note that the phrase “véritable viande crue” in this version published in Mon Salon, 1866 would be printed as “véritable chair” in Mes haines in 1893, 296. This slippage is central to chapter 2. 26. Zola, “Nos Peintres au Champ de Mars,” 1867, 111: “La déesse, noyée dans un fleuve de lait, a l’air d’une délicieuse lorette, non pas en chair et en os—cela serait indécent—mais en une sorte de pâte d’amande blanche et rose.” That Cabanel painted with almond oil or paste was a well-established trope, as noted by Claretie, “Echos de Paris,” 1865, 6. 27. Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, 134–35: “Chacun a son rôle, dites-vous. La grande peinture n’est point faite pour tout le monde. Un beau dîner contient des pièces de résistance et des hors-d’œuvre. Oserez-vous être ingrat envers les saucissons d’Arles, les piments, les anchois, l’aïoli, etc.?—Hors-d’œuvre appétissants, dites-vous?—Non pas, mais bonbons et sucreries écœu­rantes.—Qui voudrait se nourrir de dessert? C’est à peine si on l’effleure, quand on est content de son dîner.” 28. Zola, “Une Nouvelle Manière,” 1867, 369–70: “Chaque artiste a tiré la foule à lui, la flattant, lui donnant les jouets qu’elle aime, dorés et ornés de faveurs roses. L’art est ainsi devenu chez nous une vaste boutique de confiserie, où il y a des bonbons pour tous les goûts. Les peintres n’ont plus été que des décorateurs mesquins qui travaillent à l’ornementation de nos affreux appartements modernes [. . .].” 29. It was actually a common practice in the early nineteenth century to cover a newly finished painting with egg white, which could later be removed when the painting was varnished. See Callen, Art of Impressionism, 209–10. 30. Zola, “Les Naturalistes,” 1868, 128: “Je finirai par penser que vous parlez de règles, par ouï-dire, pour nous

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faire accroire qu’il y a un parfait cuisinier de l’art où l’on apprend la recette des sauces auxquelles vous accommodez l’idéal. Mais vous ne voyez donc pas que, lorsque l’on veut retrouver les véritables règles, les traditions, les maîtres, il faut aller les chercher dans les œuvres de ces artistes que vous accusez d’ignorance et de ­ rébellion.” 31. Zola, “Les Chutes,” 1866, 310: “Un tableau est d’autant plus goûté qu’il est moins personnel”; Zola, “Les Paysagistes,” 1868, 134: “Le Salon, chaque année, est plein de copies fausses ou vulgaires. Certains paysagistes ont créé une nature au goût du jour, qui a un aspect suffisant de vérité, et qui possède en même temps les grâces piquantes du mensonge. La foule adore ces petits plats-là.” 32. Zola, “Une Nouvelle Manière,” 1867, 354–55: “Les taches sont grasses et énergiques, elles s’enlèvent sur le fond avec toutes les brusqueries de la nature.” 33. From a range of scientific, medical, and social scientific perspectives, diet was deemed constitutive of normative class and gender roles. The belief that meat was necessary for men’s health but could overstimulate women to violence and passion drew upon a history of French medicine in which associations were commonly made between “deviant” behavior and diet. For a strong later nineteenth-century proponent of this view, see Michelet, La Femme, 52, and Michelet, L’Amour, 96–97. See also Williams, “Neurosis of the Stomach.” 34. Zola, “Les Réalistes au Salon,” 1866, 299–302: “Je me moque du réalisme, en ce sens que ce mot ne représente rien de bien précis pour moi. Si vous entendez par ce terme la nécessité où sont les peintres d’étudier et de rendre la nature vraie, il est hors de doute que tous les artistes doivent être des réalistes. Peindre des rêves est un jeu d’enfant et de femme; les hommes ont charge de peindre des réalités. [. . .] Je ne connais pas M. Monet, je crois même que jamais auparavant je n’avais regardé attentivement une de ses toiles. Il me semble cependant que je suis un de ses vieux amis. Et cela parce que son tableau me conte toute une histoire d’énergie et de vérité. Eh oui! voilà un tempérament, voilà un homme dans la foule de ces eunuques.” 35. Zola, “Adieux d’un critique d’art,” 1866, 318; Zola, “Les Réalistes au Salon,” 1866, 304. 36. Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, 153–54. 37. Clark, Painting of Modern Life, 79–146. The resistance of Manet’s paintings to the established vocab-

ulary of art criticism is also a major theme of Rubin, Manet’s Silence, especially 28–29, 93–101. 38. Zola, “Une Nouvelle Manière,” 1867: “Je vois en lui un peintre analyste. Tous les problèmes ont été remis en question, la science a voulu avoir des bases solides, et elle en est revenue à l’observation exacte des faits. Et ce mouvement ne s’est pas seulement produit dans l’ordre scientifique; toutes les connaissances, toutes les œuvres humaines tendent à chercher dans la réalité des principes fermes et définitifs [. . .]. Édouard Manet applique la même méthode à chacune de ses œuvres; tandis que d’autres se creusent la tête pour inventer une nouvelle Mort de César ou un nouveau Socrate buvant la ciguë, il place tranquillement dans un coin de son atelier quelques objets et quelques personnes, et se met à peindre, en analysant le tout avec soin. Je le répète, c’est un simple analyste (346–47) [. . .]. Les peintres, surtout Édouard Manet, qui est un peintre analyste, n’ont pas cette préoccupation du sujet qui tourmente la foule avant tout; le sujet pour eux est un prétexte à peindre, tandis que pour la foule le sujet seul existe” (355–56). 39. For discussions of parallels in Taine and Zola, see Armstrong, Manet Manette, 38–44; and Marrinan, Gustave Caillebotte, 30–33. 40. Much of the vast literature concerning the privileged status of the visual and its connection to concepts of detachment is surveyed in Jay, Downcast Eyes. 41. Crary, Techniques of the Observer. In Patterns of Intention, Michael Baxandall shows that even in the eighteenth century, with the writings of John Locke and Isaac Newton, vision was increasingly understood as inseparable from other sensory modes and dependent on how individual eyes perceive light rays. As it relates to the critical reception of early modernism, Richard Shiff’s essay “The End of Impressionism” challenged the connection between Impressionism and objectivity that had dominated Impressionist scholarship until its publication in 1978, explaining that nineteenth-century theorists of sensation were establishing the essential subjectivity of knowledge based on sensory experience. 42. For a selection, see Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4th ed., 1762; Féraud, Dictionnaire critique de la langue française, 1787–1788; Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1835; Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 1872–1877. All are available through the “Dictionnaires d’autrefois” public access collection

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of the ARTFL Project at https://artfl-project.uchicago .edu/content/dictionnaires-dautrefois. 43. Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Clement Greenberg, 1:29–30; the final quote is from “Modernist Painting,” version published in Art and ­Literature, 1965. Greenberg argues that Courbet initiated this “new flatness” and emphasis on subjects directly witnessed. 44. Reed, Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism, 2. Even those accounts that set out to nuance and complicate the connections between Zola, positivism, and opticality tend to demonstrate the enduring power of those connections in their selection of Zola’s writings. Richard Shiff, who problematizes the connection between Manet and other naturalist artists and philosophical positivism, focuses on Zola’s descriptions of Manet’s eye and vision in “The End of Impressionism.” The same is true of Rubin, Manet’s Silence, 109–25. While Carol Armstrong’s discussion of “Une Nouvelle Manière” is especially sensitive to the ambiguities in Zola’s description of Manet and his painting, she nonetheless emphasizes how positivist criticism from Taine to Zola strove toward “a purely optical visuality structured around the tache” (Manet Manette, 44). 45. Mantz, “Salon de 1869,” 13. 46. Zola, “Une Nouvelle Manière,” 1867, 346: “Il nous faut, je ne saurais trop le répéter, oublier mille choses pour comprendre et goûter ce talent. Il ne s’agit plus ici d’une recherche de la beauté absolue; l’artiste ne peint ni l’histoire ni l’âme; ce qu’on appelle composition n’existe pas pour lui, et la tâche qu’il s’impose n’est point de représenter telle pensée ou tel acte historique. Et c’est pour cela qu’on ne doit le juger ni en moraliste ni en littérateur; on doit le juger en peintre. Il traite les tableaux de figures comme il est permis, dans les écoles, de traiter les tableaux de nature morte; je veux dire qu’il groupe les figures devant lui, un peu au hasard, et qu’il n’a ensuite souci que de les fixer sur la toile telles qu’il les voit, avec les vives oppositions qu’elles font en se détachant les unes sur les autres.” 47. Ibid., 343: “Ce qui me frappe ensuite, c’est une conséquence nécessaire de l’observation exacte de la loi des valeurs. L’artiste, placé en face d’un sujet quelconque, se laisse guider par ses yeux qui aperçoivent ce sujet en larges teintes se commandant les unes les autres. Une tête posée contre un mur n’est plus qu’une tache plus ou moins blanche sur un fond plus ou moins

gris; et le vêtement juxtaposé à la figure devient par exemple une tache plus ou moins bleue mise à côté de la tache plus ou moins blanche. De là une grande simplicité, presque point de détails, un ensemble de taches justes et délicates qui, à quelques pas, donne au tableau un relief saisissant.” 48. For one influential formulation, see Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin, 637–39. Jeannene Marie Przyblyski’s unpublished PhD dissertation, “Le Parti pris des choses,” is a key resource on still life and attitudes toward the genre in this period. 49. Lagrange, “Salon de 1864,” 528: “M. Ribot fait des noirs, comme M. Viry fait un blanc, comme M. Manet fait un jaune ou un rose. Le mot d’ordre est donné, et une petite école, croyant avoir trouvé la pierre philosophale de l’art, supprime du même coup, en haine du sujet, la pensée, le sentiment, la composition, la ligne, le dessin, la couleur, le charme et la beauté, la beauté surtout. Faire un noir, faire un blanc, c’est tout le secret des maîtres.—‘Faites un roux,’ dit la Cuisinière bourgeoise.—Mais un Vatel qui se respecte méprise ces recettes vulgaires et ne sert sur table que des mets savamment préparés. Un artiste digne de ce nom fait sa cuisine chez lui, garde les études pour l’atelier, et n’apporte au public que des tableaux sérieux.” 50. Littré, Dictionnaire, 4:2126. See also the subsidiary discussion of tache d’huile. For one illustration of the connection between the tache of the kitchen and the tache of oil painting, see the anonymous article “Paris-Restaurant: Crémeries du quartier Bréda” in the culinary journal La Salle à manger in 1865. The author describes the proprietress of a low-rung restaurant as a painting by Courbet. She is so stained by the taches of grease around her that she actually transforms into one large tache herself, the equivalent of one of Courbet’s paintings, an oily chef d’œuvre of filth and indecency. 51. Zola, “Correspondance littéraire,” 1866: “MM. Adrien Robert et Jules Cauvain ont suivi exactement la recette, comme les dames qui jouent en grand à la dînette et qui tiennent la cuillèr à ragoût d’une main, La Cuisinière bourgeoise de l’autre.” 52. Manet wrote to Martinet that he intended to exhibit the painting under the title “Poissons, etc. Nature Morte” in February 1865. It is unknown whether the work was in fact shown at Martinet’s. It is likely that it was shown at Cadart’s gallery in the spring of that year, based on a review published on May 16 in

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Le Constitutionnel where Théophile Thoré notes “still lifes in which the artist arranged fruit and fish on a dazzling white tablecloth.” Thoré is quoted in Cachin et al., Manet, 1832–1883, 214–15, which also suggests the link to Chardin’s The Silver Tureen. 53. On Chardin’s process and materials, see LajerBurcharth, Chardin Material. 54. Diderot, “Le Salon de 1767,” in Oeuvres de Denis Diderot, 4:248: “On dit de celui-ci, qu’il a un technique qui lui est propre, et qu’il se sert autant de son pouce que de son pinceau. Je ne sais ce qui en est. Ce qu’il y a de sûr, c’est que je n’ai jamais connu personne qui l’ait vu travailler; quoi qu’il en soit, ses compositions appellent indistinctement l’ignorant et le connaisseur. C’est une vigueur de couleur incroyable, une harmonie générale, un effet piquant et vrai, des belles masses, une magie de faire à désespérer, un ragoût dans l’assortiment et l’ordonnance.” 55. Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 69. See also Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 57–62. 56. Jean Louis Schefer also notes the presence of culinary vocabulary in the Goncourts’ descriptions; Chardin, 41–44, 50–52. 57. De Goncourt and de Goncourt, L’Art du XVIIIe siècle, 1:127–28: “Rappelons ce bonnet, ce casaquin blanc, cette serviette, ce tablier bleu montant jusqu’au cou, ce fichu moucheté de fleurettes, ces bas d’un rose violet, cette femme rayonnante, des souliers au bonnet, dans une clarté blanche, et pour ainsi dire crémeuse: tout sortait victorieusement et harmonieusement de la toile, du contour à la fois gras et cerné, des égrenures raboteuses du pinceau, des grumelots de la couleur, d’une sorte de cristallisation de la pâte. Des tons légers, tendres et riants, jetés partout et revenant sans cesse, jusque dans le blanc du casaquin, se levait, comme une trame de jour, une brume gorge de pigeon, une poussière de chaleur, une vapeur flottante enveloppant cette femme, tout son costume, le buffet, les miches sur le buffet, la muraille, l’arrière-pièce du fond.” 58. Ibid., 117, 126, 129, 134. For references to raw colors, freshness, and richness, see 145, 129, and 111 respectively. 59. Ibid., 155: “Ils s’interrogeaient et essayaient de se renseigner sur la trituration de sa pâte, ses mélanges de couleur, sa cuisine de peinture. Ils se demandaient les recettes du coloriste, les dessous de son talent. Ils se plaignaient de ne connaître personne qui l’eût

vu peindre. Ils acceptaient la légende que Chardin se servait, pour peindre, plus souvent de son pouce que de son pinceau. Il leur semblait impossible que cet homme peignît comme il peignait, en peignant avec les moyens matériels de tous les peintres.” 60. Rancière, Future of the Image, 80–83. 61. Norman Bryson describes Chardin’s paint in Word and Image, 118: “it dribbles, it is applied like creamcheese, is buttery, is an almost comestible substance which announces unequivocally that it has been worked, consecrated by the same operation of body on matter which Chardin’s subjects take as their theme.” This forms part of Bryson’s argument that “the eye is almost secondary to the hand” both in the subjects of Chardin’s paintings, which so often show figures in absorbed manual work, and in Chardin’s tendency to represent all objects in a painting at the same degree of relative unfocus, which emphasizes the materiality of paint and its application. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has focused on Chardin’s materiality, a “materiality that produces its own discourse,” in Chardin Material and Painter’s Touch, 87–175 (quote on 90). Going beyond assertions that Chardin “was, emphatically, a haptic painter producing tactile surfaces” (Painter’s Touch, 95), her analysis of The Ray suggests that Chardin’s “painterly performance may be called oral, rather than visual” (99). She writes that in the Chardin, the ray appears as a giant mouth that has also been viciously bitten into, making ingestion as well as disgorgement central themes. These themes are heightened because the paint appears in places to have been applied manually, embedding Chardin’s own body into the bodies depicted and thereby furthering the dissolution between bodies that ingestion or incorporation (which Lajer-Burcharth reads as a psychic as well as a physical operation) requires. For Lajer-Burcharth, this indicates Chardin’s anxious struggle to define and delimit a self in relation to painted objects, evidence of the psychic challenges that Chardin faced in establishing himself as man and professional at this early stage of his career, before his acceptance into the Academy and in the context of his parental home where he lived and worked in the absence of the means necessary to set up his own household. Manet’s Fish (Still Life) comes out of this tradition, and with its thick, oily, seemingly licked-on strokes, goes further in its analogies between brush and tongue and conflation of visual with oral sensation. 62. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 62.

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63. Ibid., quotations from previous two sentences on 19, 136, and 150 respectively. 64. My thinking in this area is indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on painting: “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), and “Eye and Mind” (1960), all reprinted in Johnson, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. For Merleau-Ponty, painting could reveal the operations of perception, and he turned to the encounter with it to test the interaction between senses and the ways that embodied humans connect with objects in their environment. For another discussion that finds Crary’s claims for the “autonomization of sight” wanting as a framework for interpreting nineteenth-century painting—in this case, the work of German realist Adolph Menzel—see Fried, Menzel’s Realism, 59–73. 65. Armstrong, Manet Manette, 270–73, is an important exploration of Manet’s seafood still lifes in the context of the artist’s painterly “cuisine.” The discussion in Kessler, “Antoine Vollon,” of how the materiality of paint and of represented butter in Vollon’s Mound of Butter (1875–85) mutually inflect as well as over-signify has also impacted my thinking about the reactions that still lifes, particularly those that manipulate scale and display their facture frankly, might produce in audiences. 66. See also Lajer-Burcharth’s discussion of the sexual dimension of the ray in Chardin’s The Ray, which in addition to resembling a mouth also resembles sex organs; Painter’s Touch, 99–101. 67. Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, 1–2. 68. For example, Audot, Bréviaire du gastronome, 46; and Clerc, Manuel de l’amateur d’huîtres, 58. Manet painted oysters on other occasions. In Oysters and Champagne Bucket (c. 1878), their erotic potential is emphasized by the bottle of champagne, the woman’s fan, and the small table that likely locates the scene in a restaurant, even a cabinet particulier, the small private rooms infamous for harboring illicit liaisons. 69. Brettell and Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, 254. James Rubin’s analysis of Fish (Still Life) as “a vehicle for the visual delectation associated with the pictorial properties of the image, as opposed to the referent itself ” might equally be questioned here. For Rubin, the kind of pleasure that Fish (Still Life) delivers is “[a]esthetic pleasure and understanding [that] thus depend on recognizing the difference between the representation and the actual

object” (Manet’s Silence, 68). Sensitive as Rubin is to the effects of pictorial properties on the viewing body, constructions of aesthetic pleasure go back to Kant— who claimed that the senses of taste and smell could play no part in aesthetic judgment—and maintain the conception that the objects Manet depicts are relatively unimportant. Rather than “recognizing the difference between the representation and the actual object,” Fish (Still Life), I am arguing, revels in the dissolution of those boundaries. 70. The relationship between still life, formalist criticism, and Haussmannization is at the heart of Przyblyski, “Le Parti pris des choses,” and is parsed in 1–18. Chapter 2. The Flesh of Painting

Chapter 2 is derived in part from the article “The Flesh of Painting: Caillebotte’s Modern Olympia,” published in Dix-Neuf 22, nos. 1–2 (2017): 1–22, available online at http://tandfonline.com/10.1080/14787318.2017.1381371. 1. Examples include Bataille, “Salon de 1865,” 423; Claretie, “Deux heures au salon,” 1865, 226; Ego, “Courrier de Paris,” 1865, 291; Fillonneau, “Salon de 1865,” 2; Gautier, “Salon de 1865”; and de Laincel, “Salon de 1865,” 3. 2. De Jankovitz, Étude sur le Salon de 1865, 67: “L’expression du visage est celle d’un être prématuré et vicieux; le corps, d’une couleur faisandée, rappelle l’horreur de la Morgue.” 3. De Saint-Victor, “Salon de 1865,” 3: “La foule se presse, comme à la Morgue, devant l’Olympia faisandée et l’horrible l’Ecce homo de M. Manet.” 4. Geronte [Victor Fournel], “Les Excentriques et les grotesques,” 1865: “[. . .] cette Olympia de la rue Mouffetard, morte de fièvre jaune et déjà parvenue à un état de décomposition avancée [. . .].”; Lorentz, Dernier jour de l’exposition de 1865, 12–13: “[. . .] qui appelle à grands cris l’examen des inspecteurs de la salubrité publique!” 5. As, for example, by Beeny, “Christ and the Angels,” 51; Bernheimer, “Manet’s Olympia,” 256; and Clark, Painting of Modern Life, 96–97. Clark has most thoroughly addressed the critical reception of Olympia in “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia in 1865,” and Painting of Modern Life, 79–146. 6. For a discussion of the Morgue and references to it in Manet’s critical reception, see Beeny, “Christ and the Angels.”

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7. Desbuissons, “La Peinture faisandée.” Desbuissons connects these terms to rhetoric of the ugly, dirty, and scatological. 8. De Bullemont, “Salon de 1865,” 324: “Le ton général de la déesse est jaune, et sa peau est de ce jaune désagréable qu’on voit aux vieux poulets sur les étals des marchés et qui éloigne les cuisinières un peu habiles. Elle semble dans un état de décomposition presque aussi avancé que l’Olympia de M. Manet, et ce coloris n’a rien de commun avec les chairs ensoleillées de Corrège.” 9. Delvau, Dictionnaire érotique moderne, 66, 368. 10. Anonymous, Pretty Women of Paris, 61, 100, 146–47, 168. 11. Anonymous, Man of Pleasure’s Pocket Book, c. 1850, quoted in Pearsall, Worm in the Bud, 259. 12. Anonymous, Pretty Women of Paris, 61, 107–8. 13. Ibid., 160. 14. References to Olympia as a Hottentot Venus are found in Geronte [Victor Fournel], “Les Excentriques et les grotesques,” 1865; and Bouniol, “L’Amateur au Salon,” 1865, 401. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby examines colonial imagery in Olympia’s reception in “Still Thinking About Olympia’s Maid,” 436–38. Key discussions of race in the painting and its reception include: Debray et al., Le Modèle noir; Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies”; Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter?”; Murrell, Posing Modernity, and Murrell, “Seeing Laure”; O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid”; and Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 277–306. 15. Drak, “Promenade d’un flâneur parisienne,” 1865, 3: “Une main d’artiste guidée par une cervelle bourrée de paradoxes jusqu’à l’indigestion. L’indigestion a eu lieu cette année.” 16. Cantaloube, “Salon de 1865,” 2: “Constatons, en effet, des tons dérobés aux Espagnols, surtout à Goya, mais délayés dans je ne sais quelle mixture nauséabonde.” 17. De Montifaud, “Salon de 1865,” 224: “Nous savons reconnaître la touche de M. Manet au milieu des excentricités qu’il a voulu nous servir, comme son Christ insulté et sa composition d’Olympia, et cette touche dénote une vigueur qui, employée par un esprit plus sain, pourrait produire des œuvres.” 18. Julia Kristeva introduces the concept of the abject through the sense of taste and anxieties underlying ingestion. Arguing that “food loathing is perhaps the

most elementary and most archaic form of abjection,” Kristeva vividly describes the bodily reaction to the skin that forms on milk as an illustration of the concept ­(Powers of Horror, 2). Another theorization of what Kristeva names the abject is Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the visqueux, the material viscosity of the body and other objects that produces strong aversion in the human subject confronted with a manifestation of it. Sartre articulates the immediacy of the visqueux not through the sense of touch, as might be expected, but through the sense of taste, as a “sugary sliminess” and “indelible sweetness” (Being and Nothingness, 777). Recent work on disgust has also linked it foremost to the sense of taste, as in Rozin et al., “Disgust.” 19. Zola, “M. Manet,” 1866, 46–47. 20. Claretie, “Deux heures au salon,” 1865, 226: “La foule fait justice de ces transports du pinceau [referring to Manet and Whistler]; mais le malheur est qu’elle paraît confondre dans sa réprobation les tableaux de M. Ribot et ceux de ses parodistes. Il y a bien sur les cadres de M. Ribot cet avis au lecteur qui arrête les critiques: médaille; n’importe, le public résiste à ces chairs sanglantes, à cette peinture crue, violente et saignante.” 21. Geronte [Victor Fournel], “Les Excentriques et les grotesques,” 1865: “Son coloris au verjus, aigre et acide, pénètre dans l’œil comme la scie d’un chirurgien dans les chairs.” 22. Bourgeois de Paris, “Lettres d’un bourgeois de Paris,” 1863: “Son coloris aigre et agaçant entre dans les yeux comme une scie d’acier; ses personnages se découpent à l’emporte pièce, avec une crudité qu’aucun compromis n’adoucit. Il a toute l’âpreté de ces fruits verts qui ne doivent jamais mûrir.” 23. Ravanel, “Salon de 1865.” See also Deriège, “Salon de 1865”; Diguet, “Salon de 1865”; and de Jankovitz, Étude sur le Salon de 1865, 68. 24. Gille, “Salon de 1865”: “M. Manet s’est jeté, tête perdue, dans son sujet; de cette détermination, est résulté un affreux et indécent assemblage de tons crus, de lignes heurtées qui brisent les yeux, de blanc et noir étalés à la main et limités par seul caprice.” 25. Zola, “Une Nouvelle Manière,” 1867, 357–58: “Au premier regard, on ne distingue ainsi que deux teintes dans le tableau, deux teintes violentes, s’enlevant l’une sur l’autre. [. . .] Si vous voulez reconstruire la réalité, il faut que vous vous reculiez de quelques pas.”

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26. Jean Clay has written in evocative terms of the “deadness” of Manet’s materials, how the paint on his canvases seems to decompose or “turn” (“Ointments, Makeup, Pollen,” 39–41). He disagrees with Zola that the paintings take on unity from a correct distance away. 27. For a discussion of the strangeness of this hand, see Grigsby, “Still Thinking About Olympia’s Maid,” 446. 28. Respectively: Gille, “Salon de 1865”; Aubert, “Salon de 1865,” 3. 29. Deriège, “Salon de 1865,” 97–99; Jahyer, Salon de 1865, 23; Chaumelin, “Notes sur la Salon de 1865,” 177: “Le torse aplati, la tête démanchée, les membres ne se rattachant pas au corps, les chairs modelées dans des tons livides . . . Oh! la malheureuse fille!”; and de Saint-Victor, “Salon de 1865,” 3. While a comparison is outside the scope of this chapter, it is important to note that Manet’s nude was not the first to be described in these terms. In her discussion of the reception of Ingres’s female nudes, Carol Ockman raises a similar critical tendency to argue that violence was implicit in the contour lines that broke bones and stretched vertebrae, while inside them body parts seemed to flow into each other, such that the bodies seemed dead, monstrous, and deformed (Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies, 96–98). 30. Nettement, “Salon de 1865, IV.” See also Cantaloube, “Salon de 1865”; Ego, “Courrier de Paris,” 1865; Gautier, “Salon de 1865”; de Laincel, “Salon de 1865”; and Rolland, “Salon de 1865,” 154. 31. Claretie, “Echos de Paris,” 1865, 6: “On retrouvait la malheureuse, quand on la retrouvait, à des hauteurs où jamais on n’a pendu la dernière des croûtes, au-dessus de la porte gigantesque du dernier Salon, dans un coin où le jour n’arrivait plus et où l’on savait à peine si l’on voyait un paquet de chairs nues ou un paquet de linge.” 32. Ferragus [Louis Ulbach], “La Littérature putride,” 1868, 1: “Enthousiaste des crudités, il a publié déjà La Confession de Claude qui était l’idylle d’un étudiant et d’une prostituée; il voit la femme comme M. Manet la peint, couleur de boue avec des maquillages roses.” 33. Zola, “M. Manet,” 1866, 294: “Si, au moins, M. Manet avait emprunté la houppe à poudre de riz de M. Cabanel et s’il avait un peu fardé les joues et les seins d’Olympia, la jeune fille aurait été présentable.”

34. Ferragus [Louis Ulbach], “La Littérature putride,” 1868, 1: “Je ne blâme pas systématiquement les notes criardes, les coups de pinceau violents et violets; je me plains qu’ils soient seuls et sans mélange [. . .].” 35. Ibid.: “Comme ma lettre peut être lue après déjeuner, je passe sur la description de la jolie pourriture de Camille. On y sent grouiller les vers.” The last sentence translates in several ways. Sentir can be translated as to feel or to smell, and les vers means worms as well as poetic verse, suggesting that the pages of the novel are swarming with maggots. 36. Zola, “Préface de la deuxième edition,” in Thérèse Raquin, iii–v: “Je me suis trouvé dans le cas de ces peintres qui copient des nudités, sans qu’un seul désir les effleure, et qui restent profondément surpris lorsqu’un critique se déclare scandalisé par les chairs vivantes de leur œuvre [. . .]. L’humanité des modèles disparaissait comme elle disparaît aux yeux de l’artiste qui a une femme nue vautrée devant lui, et qui songe uniquement à mettre cette femme sur sa toile dans la vérité de ses formes et de ses colorations [. . .] j’en ai écrit chaque scène, même les plus fiévreuses, avec la seule curiosité du savant [. . .].” Zola refers to Manet as a naturalist in “Édouard Manet” (1868). The ambiguities and ambivalences in Zola’s conception of naturalist and naturalism are set out in Butler, “Zola’s Art Criticism (1865–1868).” 37. Zola, “Une Nouvelle Manière,” 1867, 357: “En 1865, Édouard Manet est encore reçu au Salon; il expose un Jésus insulté par les soldats, et son chef-d’œuvre, son Olympia. J’ai dit chef-d’œuvre, et je ne retire pas le mot. Je prétends que cette toile est véritablement la chair et le sang du peintre. Elle le contient tout entier et ne contient que lui. Elle restera comme l’œuvre caractéris­ tique de son talent, comme la marque la plus haute de sa puissance. J’ai lu en elle la personnalité d’Édouard Manet, et lorsque j’ai analysé le tempérament de l’artiste, j’avais uniquement devant les yeux cette toile qui renferme toutes les autres.” Other references to flesh and blood are at 337, 352, 369. 38. Zola, “Le Moment artistique,” 1866, 281–82: “Ce que je cherche avant tout dans un tableau, c’est un homme et non pas un tableau. [. . .] L’art est un produit humain, une sécrétion humaine; c’est notre corps qui sue la beauté de nos œuvres.” 39. Zola, “Une Nouvelle Manière,” 1867, 327–28: “Et il y a, pour le critique, une joie pénétrante à se dire qu’il peut disséquer un être, qu’il a à faire l’anatomie

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d’un organisme, et qu’il reconstruira ensuite, dans sa réalité vivante, un homme avec tous ses membres, tous ses nerfs et tout son cœur, toutes ses rêveries et toute sa chair.” 40. Zola, “Causeries littéraires,” 1866, 3: “Le romancier analyste, par exemple M. Hector Malot, fils indépendant de Balzac, passe le tablier blanc de l’anatomiste et dissèque fibre par fibre là bête humaine étendue toute nue sur la dalle de l’amphithéâtre”; Zola, “Le Jury,” 1866, 265. 41. Ferragus [Louis Ulbach], “La Littérature putride,” 1868, 1: “Je ne prétends pas restreindre le domaine de l’écrivain. Tout, jusqu’à l’épiderme, lui appartient: arracher la peau, ce n’est plus de l’observation, c’est de la chirurgie; et si une fois par hasard un écorché peut être indispensable à la démonstration psychologique, l’écorché mis en système n’est plus que de la folie et de la dépravation.” 42. Ibid.: “Une tempête sous un crane est un spectacle sublime: Une tempête dans les reins est un spectacle ignoble.” He similarly asserts: “Ce qui fait la puissance et le triomphe du bien, c’est que même la chair assouvie, la passion satisfaite, il s’éveille et brûle dans le cerveau.” 43. Zola refers to Manet’s painting as “véritable viande crue” in “M. Manet,” published in Mon Salon, 1866, 47, but the same passage is reprinted as “véritable chair” in Mes haines in 1893, 296. 44. The phrase “conditions of creaturality” is from Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 13. 45. The feminization of the surface of the canvas, sexual metaphors for the male painter’s process, and the equation between artistic creativity and male heterosexual virility have been founding themes of feminist art history and its critique of modernism. Carol Duncan’s “Virility and Male Domination” and “The Esthetics of Power” are critical early interventions. For discussions especially relevant to this subject matter, see Nead, “Seductive Canvases”; and Garb, Bodies of Modernity, 160–95. 46. Zola, “M. Manet,” 1866, 294. The trope of paint as cosmetics is explored in Garb, Bodies of Modernity, 114–43, and Garb, Painted Face, 1–17; Hyde, Making Up the Rococo; and Lichtenstein, “Making Up Representation.” 47. Zola, “Une Nouvelle Manière,” 1867, 357–58: “Au premier regard, on ne distingue ainsi que deux teintes dans le tableau, deux teintes violentes, s’enlevant

l’une sur l’autre [. . .]. Il y a d’ailleurs des partis-pris; l’art ne vit que de fanatisme. Et ces partis-pris sont justement cette sécheresse élégante, cette violence des transitions que j’ai signalées. C’est l’accent personnel, la saveur particulière de l’œuvre.” 48. My thinking here has been enriched by reading Merleau-Ponty’s writings about painting—through which he explores the intertwining of eye, body, and mind—alongside Zola’s. In the essay “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty describes painting as a transubstantiation of bodily experience into paint: “It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body” (123–24). There are certain synergies here with Zola’s understanding of artworks as partaking of the flesh and blood of their artist, the product of blending Manet’s body with the world: “A work of art is never other than the combination of a man, the variable element, and nature, the fixed element” (Zola, “Le Moment artistique,” 1866, 281). In his last, unfinished work, Le Visible et l’invisible, MerleauPonty developed the concept of “flesh” to describe the material density of space as a tactile tissue in which all objects are enmeshed, and the resulting reversibility of sensation. As Elizabeth Grosz and others have argued, this concept of flesh is productive for feminism because it challenges the distinctions between subject and world, analyst and object of investigation, animate and inanimate, that position one term over the other (“MerleauPonty and Irigaray in the Flesh,” 54). Zola’s notion of flesh, which puts pressure on such distinctions despite itself, can be similarly subjected to feminist reinterpretation in these terms. 49. Armstrong, Manet Manette, 38–47. Armstrong also discusses the “flesh and blood” metaphor, arguing that through it, Zola characterized Manet the person in the same way as his paintings; both man and works are described with overlapping adjectives, such as “blond” and “sharp” (âpre). While for Armstrong, this operates according to established norms of positivist criticism, with its emphasis on advanced opticality, I have wanted to emphasize the ambivalence of the corporeal metaphor and its potential to exceed and undermine Zola’s descriptions elsewhere of “a purely optical visuality structured around the tache,” as Armstrong puts it (44). 50. Delaville, “Chronique parisienne,” 1880, 1–2: “Depuis la Belle Olympe, de Manet, nous avons vu tant

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de couleurs collées sur des toiles à coup de pied et à coup de poings, tant de bras non attachés aux corps, tant de figures sans équilibre, tant de prairies vert paon, tant de fleuves indigo, tant de braves gens campés dans leurs cadres comme des bonshommes d’Epinal, que nous en sommes un peu écœurés.” 51. Anonymous, “Exposition de peinture par un groupe d’artistes dissidents,” 1879, 2–3: “Qu’ils rient tant qu’ils voudront, nous ne sommes pas tout à fait de leur avis, car il est évident que, pour tout amateur aimant et comprenant la peinture, il y a dans cette ­exhibition des œuvres d’une réelle valeur et d’une saveur exceptionnelle. Si les quatorze artistes qui figurent dans le catalogue, au lieu d’étaler aux yeux du public toute leur cargaison de marchandises fraîches et avariées, avait été bien inspirés pour faire un triage sévère dans leurs productions, l’exposition de l’avenue de l’Opéra obtenait un succès mérité et mettait un terme aux lazzis faciles de certains aristarques bien plus préoccupés de voir le mauvais côté des choses que d’en constater le bon.” 52. Énault, “Mouvement artistique,” 1876, 2: “[. . .] une grande étude de femme nue, et à laquelle certes, on aurait mieux fait de laisser passer une robe, nous attriste par ses tons violacés de chair faisandée.” 53. Albert Wolff, “Le Calendrier parisien,” 1876, 1: “Essayez-donc d’expliquer à M. Renoir que le torse d’une femme n’est pas un amas de chairs en décomposition avec des taches vertes violacées qui dénotent l’état de complète putréfaction dans un cadavre!” 54. For a reading of Torso, Effect of Sunlight in relation to concepts of nature and culture, a discussion of the fusion of figure and ground in Renoir’s paintings of women outdoors, and the metaphorical potential of that fusion, which for Renoir made painting a form of caress, see Garb, Bodies of Modernity, 145–77. 55. Leroy, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877, 2: “Ah! Quelles magnifiques chairs vertes M. Renoir nous montre dans le n. 194, Une femme décolletée. Que d’études faites à la Morgue pour arriver à un pareil résultat!” See also Parfait, “Chronique du jour,” 1879, 2: “Le public réclamera certainement, si étrange que puisse être ce spectacle, de contempler des arbres violets sur des ciels malpropres, des messieurs de coton passés au bleu et des dames dont les doigts ressemblent à des saucisses malades.” 56. Littré, Dictionnaire, 4:2126.

57. Respectively: Havard, “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1882; Chaumelin, “Actualités,” 1876. 58. Mancino [Léon Gauchez], “La Descente de la Courtille,” 1877, 68–71, quoting P. Noel: “La seule pure tache existe [. . .]. De la lumière, du soleil, c’est là tout, le reste n’est rien, et comment font-ils de la lumière et du soleil? Avec des taches, des taches, toujours des taches . . . et vive la pure tache!” 59. See, for example, the caricature by PIF [Henri Maigrot] in the March 12, 1882, issue of Le Charivari, in which two visitors debate about whether a painting shows a landscape or a portrait. 60. Anthea Callen has published widely on the varnishing practices of the Impressionists, including “Unvarnished Truth” and Art of Impressionism. 61. Henry Fouquier, “Chronique,” 1879, 3: “Ce n’est pas qu’il n’y ait encore quelques bons morceaux de haute saveur chez les artistes ‘indépendants.’ Je vous recommande certaines ‘danseuses’ verdâtres, qui nous donnent assez l’impression de ce que peut être une expérience d’électricité sur des cadavres.” 62. Anonymous, “Exposition de peinture par un groupe d’artistes dissidents,” 1879, 2–3. 63. Nazim, “La Semaine à la main,” 1879, 2: “lundi.—Il pleut. Serait-ce un second déluge? Visite aux impressionnistes, alias indépendants. Mélange d’excellentes et de grotesques choses. Recueilli cette impression devant une toile représentant une femme verte, littéralement verte, d’un vert de viandes corrompues:—Hum! rudement avancée, cette particulière!— C’est sans doute le portrait d’une oratrice du congrès féminine.” 64. Respectively: Havard, “L’Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 2; Fèvre, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1886, 148–56. 65. For example, Mantz, “L’Exposition des peintres impressionnistes,” 1877. 66. Druick, “Caillebotte’s Still Lifes,” 212. 67. Claflin, “La Villette.” 68. Druick, “Caillebotte’s Still Lifes”; Eisenman, Cry of Nature, 68–70; Lee, “Stripped.” 69. Lee, “Stripped,” 273–75. 70. In addition to those accounts linking the figure to aged meat, the nude was also compared to a gorilla or monkey in Cantaloube, “Salon de 1865”; and Pierrot, “Une Première Visite,” 1865, 10–11 (Pierrot was probably the same author as Cantaloube, as noted by Clark,

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Painting of Modern Life, 288n60). Ernest Chesneau likened the nude’s hand to a toad in his “Salon de 1865,” 1–2. 71. Pierrot, “Une Première Visite,” 1865. 72. Delvau, Dictionnaire érotique moderne, 92; see also Choux, Le Petit Citateur, 46, 249. 73. Flavio, “La Fantasie au Salon,” 1865, 57: “Après tout, peu m’importent Mlle Impéria et les autres drôlesses de la même farine. Libre à M. Manet de les peindre ou de les écorcher au gré de ses pinceaux: c’est affaire à lui et à elle.” 74. Marrinan, Gustave Caillebotte, 309. Marrinan departs from most art-historical analyses of the painting to argue that Caillebotte celebrates, rather than critiques, commerce in the modern city. The identification of Caillebotte as a quintessential flâneur is central to Marrinan’s account of Caillebotte’s oeuvre as a whole. 75. Druick, “Caillebotte’s Still Lifes,” 220. 76. Eisenman, Cry of Nature, 168–71. 77. Iskin, Modern Women, 177. 78. Morton and Shackelford, Gustave Caillebotte, 188. 79. Lee, “Stripped,” 287. 80. Shackelford, “Impressionism and the Still-Life Tradition,” 26. 81. Critics commonly complained about this tendency toward uniform resolution in Caillebotte’s work. For example, Paul Mantz writes that Caillebotte’s “aversion to hierarchy leads to singular results,” and directs the artist toward a portrait by Eugène Vidal in which a beer glass “stays discreetly in the background with the modesty befitting accessories. What a lesson for M. Caillebotte!”; “Exposition des œuvres des artistes indépendants,” 1880, 3. See also Bernadille [Victor Fournel], “Chronique parisienne,” 1877, 2; and Lepelletier, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1877. 82. Lee identifies the sex of the animal in “Stripped,” 273. 83. My argument is informed by Tamar Garb’s discussion of the term lèche-vitrine and its implications for eroticized looking in relation to James Tissot’s The Shop Girl (1883–85). Garb argues that the griffon carved into the wooden table in that painting, with its long, curled tongue hanging out of its mouth, symbolizes the embodied pleasure of looking at objects of desire, whether com­ mercial goods, packaged femininity, or a glass-covered painting; Bodies of Modernity, 105–9. Adrian Rifkin also explores the productive parallels between vitrine and picture plane in Ingres Then, and Now, 43–86.

84. Lee notes this slang in “Stripped,” 291, and argues that the painted rose adds a level of signification for viewers aware of same-sex prostitution practices. For male prostitutes, often underage, who dressed as women, a single rose could serve to signal sexual availability under the disguise. For the vernacular “rosette,” see Delvau, Dictionnaire érotique moderne, 333–34; and Choux, Le Petit Citateur, 85, 293. 85. This is finally the place to acknowledge Michael Fried’s article “Caillebotte’s Impressionism.” Fried argues that a paradigm shift occurred from the “corporeal realism” associated with Courbet to the “ocular realism” practiced by the Impressionists, and that Caillebotte attempted to synthesize the two, looking back to Courbet to initiate a materialist Impressionism that would represent bodily sensation. Fried’s understanding of Caillebotte as a painter dedicated to representing the effects of embodiment leads him to one similar conclusion to what I am arguing, but in ­relation to another of Caillebotte’s butcher shop still lifes, Calf ’s Head and Ox Tongue: “In fact the artist’s point would seem to be that the viewer cannot not make the connection with his or her own body” (34). I propose that what Fried sees as the eccentricity of Caillebotte’s work in the context of Impressionism can actually allow us to reassess the extent to which Impressionists in general were committed to exclusively optical experience and its representation, or what Fried names “ocular realism.” Chapter 3. The Confected Canvas

1. Zola, “M. Manet,” 1866, 46–47. 2. For another discussion of the comparison between l’art pompier (a mocking title for Academic work) and confectionery in Salon criticism, focused on the seductive but deceptive qualities of color, see Desbuissons, “Les Couleurs de l’alimentation,” 191–94. 3. Key sources on the Parisienne in French modernlife painting include Garb, Bodies of Modernity, 80–113; Groom, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity; Iskin, Modern Women; and Simon, Fashion in Art. 4. Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, 121: “La gourmandise est une préférence passionnée, raisonnée et habituelle pour les objets qui flattent le goût. [. . .] La gourmandise comprend aussi la friandise, qui n’est autre que la même préférence appliquée aux mets légers, délicats, de peu de volume, aux confitures, aux

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pâtisse­ries, etc. C’est une modification introduite en faveur des femmes et des hommes qui leur ressemblent.” 5. Anonymous, Le Miroir des enfants, 103: “Elle [la friandise] rend l’homme sensuel, difficile et ­malhonnête. Le friand préfère ce qui lui plaît à ce qui lui est utile. C’est un convive incommode qu’on a bien de la peine à servir selon son goût. Il choisit avec affectation, contre toutes les règles de la décence et de la politesse.” 6. Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, aphorism 4: “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.” 7. Houssaye, L’Art français depuis dix ans, 1882, 35. 8. For example, see Bertall, “Promenade au Salon de 1870,” 1. 9. For the definition of croûte, see Littré, Dictionnaire, 1:917. 10. For example, Alphonse Esquiros argued that women turned to prostitution because of insatiable gustatory appetites. “Natural born” prostitutes, he declared, could consume enough in one sitting to feed fifteen adults and could only sate themselves at the “ample tables” of brothels. See Les Vierges folles, 51–53, as ­discussed in Lee, “Stripped,” 279. 11. Péladin, La Décadence esthétique, 1888, 96; Béraud, “Explication des ouvrages exposés,” 1885, 366: “Assez de femmes qui sortent de l’Opéra, qui entrent dans une brasserie, qui écoutent un monologue dans un salon ou une pièce dans leur avant-scène, qui dansent dans un bal public, qui relèvent leurs jupons pour traverser une rue, ou qui quêtent à la porte d’une église. Je crois avoir représenté la femme sous tous ses aspects. Il ne me reste rien à faire dans ce côté-là.” 12. It would be interesting—though outside the scope of this book—to compare the culinary language used in relation to Impressionism targeting its unruly materiality, formlessness, and expressive color with that used in the reception of painting by J. M. W. Turner and James Abbott McNeill Whistler across the Channel, which, as Aileen Tsui argues, emerged in relation to those same qualities. Tsui provides an overview of these metaphors in Whistler’s critical reception in “ ‘A Harmony in Eggs and Milk.’ ” 13. Leroy, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1874, 79–80: “Seulement veuillez me dire ce que représentent ces innombrables lichettes noires dans le bas du tableau?” 14. De Nivelle [Charles-Alfred Canivet], “Les Peintres indépendants,” 1882, 2: “M. Claude Monet

est surtout un peintre des marines. Il en a de toutes les sortes. J’en recommande principalement deux, Une marée basse, pris des falaises de Fécamp et la Mer du haut des falaises. Celle-ci est principalement adorable. On dirait de la crème fouettée, mais de la crème d’un violet-vert. Encore un peu de fouettage, quelques tours de main seulement, et elle passera par dessus, en mousse colorée [. . .]. Quant au Soleil couchant sur la Seine, on dirait tout simplement d’un rond de tomate collé sur le ciel, et très étonné de voir qu’il produit, dans le fleuve, et sur ses bords, des reflets violets.” See also the comparison between the sun and an orange in La Fare [Armand Chaulieu], “Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1882, 2. Une Marée basse refers to Une Marée basse, vue prise sur les falaises de Fécamp, now known as Temps Calme, Fécamp, listed as belonging to the Rudolf Staechelin Foundation, Kunstmuseum Basel, in Berson, The New Painting: Documentation, 2:205. The present location of Mer du haut des falaises is unknown, but a small reproduction can be found in Moffett et al., The New Painting, 385. 15. Fichtre [Gaston Pérodeaud], “L’Actualité,” 1882, 1: “M. Monet, dont les qualités de coloriste sont indiscutables, a peint des falaises en bombe glacée, framboise et groseille, qui fondent avec un réalisme tout à fait saisissant. On a envie d’y porter la cuiller. Au bas, il y a une autre glace verte qui n’est autre que l’Océan et ses colères.” 16. A similar strategy had been used by the caricaturist Stock to poke fun at Courbet’s La Vague as a slice of cake on a serving knife. See the discussion of this image, and its equally attendant ambivalence, in Desbuissons, “The Studio and the Kitchen,” 119–20, and Desbuissons, “Courbet’s Materialism,” 257. 17. De Charry, “Beaux-Arts,” 1882, 3: “Nous ne serons pas aussi enthousiastes de ses marines. La mer a l’air bien compacte, et si c’est sur celle-là que Notre-­ Seigneur Jésus-Christ s’est maintenu, les matérialistes n’ont rien à dire, il n’y avait pas miracle.” 18. Huysmans, “L’Exposition des indépendants en 1881.” 19. Fichtre, “L’Actualité,” 1882, 1: “Il y a aussi une Femme dans un bosquet. On comprend que la malheureuse est morte depuis longtemps, car elle tombe en déliquescence. Effet navrant.” 20. De Thémines, “Beaux-Arts,” 1882, 2–3: “Ce sont des prétendus paysages qui déroutent le plus le visiteur.

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C’est une débauche de rochers d’un ton de framboise exaspérée, de ciels émeraude, et de vagues cerisetournée.” Monet is not named but is clearly implied. 21. Littré, Dictionnaire, 4:2277. 22. Bariolette, “Notes parisiennes,” 1877, 2: “Il est impossible de stationner plus de dix minutes devant quelques-unes des toiles les plus à sensation de cette galerie, sans évoquer aussitôt le souvenir de mal de mer. On pense involontairement à certain déjeuner que l’on a fait avant de s’embarquer par une belle matinée de prin­ temps, déjeuner composé de fraises et de fromage à la crème, et qui n’a pas supporté les caprices du tangage.” 23. Havard, “L’Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 2: “C’est toujours la même ensemble réunion d’ouvrages mystérieux et troublants, enfermés dans des cadres aux formes et aux nuances invraisemblables, allant du vert pistache au rose pommade écœurant.” 24. Baron Grimm [Albert Millaud], “Lettres anecdotiques du Baron Grimm,” 1877, 1: “Vue dans son ensemble, l’exposition impressionniste ressemble à une collection de toiles fraîchement peintes, sur lesquelles on aurait répandu des flots de crème à la pistache, à la vanille et à la groseille. Tel est le premier sentiment qu’éprouve le visiteur. Il se sent entraîné dans un tourbillon de couleurs fraîches, où il ne distingue rien. Une fois cette sensation dissipée, l’œil finit par saisir le sujet qu’on expose devant lui et il subit la deuxième impression. Cette deuxième impulsion, c’est une énorme surprise et un profond découragement. Il semble à l’observateur qu’il se trouve en face d’une mystification qu’on veut lui faire prendre au sérieux. Il a beau y mettre de la bonne volonté, regarder de près, ou de loin, de face ou de côté, il ne voit dans les toiles accrochées au mur rien qui parle à sa pensée. Si impression il y a, elle est toute pour les yeux et elle est cruelle. Elle attire et frappe la vue, comme l’odeur d’une boutique de fromages attire et frappe l’odorat. C’est exactement la même impression. Dans tous ces tableaux, il n’y a pas une idée élevée, pas une création, pas même une inspiration, une réminiscence de l’art pur.” 25. Garb, “Berthe Morisot and the Feminizing of Impressionism,” and Garb, “Gender and Representation,” 280–89; Broude, Impressionism, a Feminist ­Reading. 26. De Thémines, “Beaux-Arts,” 1882, 2–3: “Cette année, au nombre déjà trop réduit des ‘fidèles,’ a sup-

plée la quantité des ‘œuvres’ exposées par chacun d’eux. Il y en a un qui en a accroché une trentaine!” 27. Anonymous, “Exposition des impressionnistes: 6, rue Le Peletier; 6,” 1877, 2: “C’est-à-dire que cet organe essentiel doit refléter fidèlement, crûment, brutalement même, pour la reproduire sur la toile ou sur le papier, l’impression vive, sincère et nette de la nature vue spontanément, sans préoccupation d’examen ou d’analyse. Dans cette nouvelle école, l’étude laborieuse et patiente est supprimée. Pas n’est besoin de dessin, d’imagination, de poésie, ni de style. La sensation prime tout cela.” 28. Burty [Ph.B.], “L’Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1879, 3. 29. Bernard, “Chronique parisienne,” 1879, 450–51: “Selon la méthode impressionniste, un tableau est très vite fabriqué; une douzaine de coups de pinceau, des couleurs étalées avec un manche à balai, du blanc de céruse, du vert bouteille, du sel, du poivre, de l’huile, du vinaigre, et le tour est joué.” 30. Lagrange, “Salon de 1864,” 528. 31. Dolent, “Visite de Madame Pastoudret,” 1877, 109–12: “Il prêtait ainsi à ces artistes passionnés, un peu nerveux, fébriles même, un tempérament féminin; il cherchait le mâle et ne le trouvait pas.” 32. Rivière, “Les Intransigeants et les impressionnistes,” 1877, 298–302: “Elle copie M. Manet, mais sa nature délicate lui a fait transformer la facture mâle qui fait du maître un grand peintre en une touche fine, délicate, féminine, qui lui crée une sorte d’originalité malgré son origine. Son œil est très-sensible, plus sensible même que celui de M. Manet, qui entraîné souvent par la puissance de sa touche, néglige les tons.” Rivière goes on to praise Morisot’s canvases in deeply gendered terms for their charming spontaneity and lack of pretension. 33. Rivière, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877, 1–4, 6. A sample of references to debaucheries of colors in Impressionist painting includes Blémont, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1876, 2–3; Sir Frac, “Chronique,” 1876, 3; Baron Schop [Théodore Banville], “La Semaine parisienne,” 1876, 2–3; Anonymous, “Exposition des impressionnistes: 6, rue le Peletier; 6,” 1877, 2; Georges Maillard, “Chronique,” 1877, 203; Anonymous, “Deux Expositions,” 1879, 2; Énault, “Chronique: XVII,” 1880, 1; Havard, “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1882, 2; and de Nivelle [Charles-Alfred Canivet], “Les Peintres indépendants,” 1882, 1–2.

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34. Jacqueline Lichtenstein has published widely on the feminization of color, including in “Making Up Representation” and Eloquence of Color, 185–95. In relation to the feminizing of Impressionism, Tamar Garb describes the gendering of color versus drawing in art theory, notably in Charles Blanc’s textbook Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867); see Garb, “Berthe Morisot and the Feminizing of Impressionism.” 35. Leroy, “Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877, 2: “Cette coloration impressionnante tient à la fois de la vanille, de la groseille et de la pistache: un portrait à manger à la cuiller!” See also the similar assessment by Charles Bigot the previous year in “Causerie artistique,” 1876, 349–52: “M. Renoir paints with a kind of cream in which he dilutes pink, yellow, blue, purple.” 36. And indeed, commentators remarked on the presence of many women admirers at Impressionist exhibitions. See, for example, Bertall, “Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877; Anonymous, “Echos,” 1886, 2. 37. Quotes respectively from Anonymous, Le Miroir des enfants, 103; and Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, 121. 38. Anthea Callen includes a table outlining ­standard canvas sizes in Art of Impressionism, 15. 39. Shackelford, “Impressionism and the Still-Life Tradition,” 26. 40. Flor, “Deux expositions,” 1882, 2. 41. Mancino [Léon Gauchez], “La Descente de la Courtille,” 1877, 68–71: “Tous les parapluies sont ouverts; il ne tombe plus rien cependant, et ce qui est tombé n’est point de la pluie, c’est quelque chose de blanc comme de la farine ou du sucre en poudre, qui a tout saupoudré, pavés, parapluies, avec une égalité et une régularité parfaite.” 42. Littré, Dictionnaire, 2:1621. 43. Grimm [Pierre Véron], “Les Impressionnistes,” 1877, 1. 44. For a selection of these comparisons, see Ballu, “L’Exposition des peintres impressionnistes,” 1877, 147–48; Mantz, “L’Exposition des peintres impressionnistes,” 1877, 3; and Ephrussi, “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1880, 485–88. 45. Cited in Thiébault-Sisson, “Autour de Claude Monet,” 3: “ ‘Il [Caillebotte] a réalisé, dans la nature morte, des morceaux qui valent les meilleures réussites de Manet ou de Renoir, et il a peint des portraits de femmes remarquables. Il avait autant de dons naturels

que de conscience, et il n’était encore, quand nous l’avons perdu, qu’au débout de sa carrière.’ ” 46. Geffroy, Claude Monet, 1924, 305–6. 47. Geffroy, “Chronique,” 1883, 2: “[. . .] la galette très cuite, dorée, croustillante, fait songer à l’immortelle brioche de Chardin.” 48. Grappe, Claude Monet, 1911, 66: “Les fruits, des pommes gonflées et savoureuses, lui suggèrent d’admirables incarnats et des verts acides. Il s’éprend de la banne elle-même où on les a posés, et la claie qui porte cette tarte normande, ce ,,feuilleté“ [sic] aux tons rissolés, l’intéresse aussi bien. Depuis Chardin, on n’avait pas exécuté plus belles natures mortes.” 49. Callen, Art of Impressionism, 219. 50. Vidal, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1886, 1: “Nous y avons vu des peintres du Salon dont le mépris pour cet art se manifestait dès les premières marches de l’escalier; au tourniquet de la porte d’entrée ces messieurs avaient des nausées. Éternelle querelle des gens dont la cuisine est à l’huile ou au beurre qui imposent la théorie arbitraire de leurs goûts.” 51. Claude Monet, letter to Paul DurandRuel, February 9, 1883, in Venturi, Les Archives de l’impressionnisme, 246–47. 52. Conversely, the glue size on a painting canvas sometimes included flour to produce a smoother surface. Certain grounds, the layer applied over the size, also included flour and eggs. See Callen, Art of Impressionism, 51–54. 53. Tout-Paris, “La Journée parisienne,” 1880, 2: “Puisque nous parlons d’amateurs de cette intéressante peinture, nous ne pouvons passer sous silence l’existence d’un pâtissier du boulevard Voltaire, qui, après avoir faire fortune, sentit tout à coup, il y a quelques années, surgir en lui en admiration peu commune pour la nouvelle école; alors les achats commencèrent [. . .]. Et rien n’est plus drôle que de voir cet homme en tablier blanc, le bonnet du mitron sur la tête, quitter sa boutique et se diriger allègrement vers l’atelier d’un des chefs de l’impressionnisme, d’où il ne sort jamais sans emporter une toile plus ou moins grande.—C’est moi qui fais la pâte, et c’est le patron qui achète les croûtes, nous disait dernièrement le gâte-sauce de maison.” 54. Joyes and Naudin, Monet’s Table. 55. Druick, “Caillebotte’s Still Lifes,” 207. See also Michael Marrinan’s chapter addressing Caillebotte’s still lifes, “Commerce,” in Gustave Caillebotte, 285–319.

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For a langouste à la Parisienne recipe, see Hélie, Traité général de la cuisine maigre, 1897, 78. 56. This meal is addressed in Lair, “Ceremony of Dining,” 164. 57. Anonymous, “Chronique parisienne,” 1910, 5. Also of interest is a woodcut engraving by Tézier of a langouste à la Parisienne from the 1889 concours culinaire by chef M. F. Lamaestre, in L’Art culinaire 16–17, August 31–September 15, 1889. 58. Michael Marrinan has recently made a similar suggestion about Langouste à la Parisienne, which is not further developed: “[Caillebotte] evacuates personal expression with a dense and sometimes thick handling of paint that mimics the surface of things or is guided by imagining the chef ’s hand movements while making the dish” (Gustave Caillebotte, 295). 59. Berte aîné, “La France et l’art culinaire,” 1883, 143: “La femme en France est reconnue parmi toutes les autres femmes des contrées civilisées; il est impossible de la confondre. Le gibier de France à un goût, un fumet d’une qualité supérieure au gibier d’outre Rhin et autres nations. La France possède dans chaque département un mets de sa composition, digne de faire une carte gastronomique incomparable; force le touriste à élire domicile pour y savourer le mets en renom. La France est la contrée bénie, la terre sainte de liberté et le tombeau du toutes les barbaries. Les fruits succulents, les légumes délicieux, la viande de boucherie délicate et le berceau artistique de l’art culinaire.” 60. I have relied on the discussion of nineteenthcentury corsetry and of the dress in Renoir’s The Swing in Groom, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, 98–99 and 126–27. 61. Uzanne, La Femme à Paris, 31. Ruth Iskin considers the Parisienne’s social armor in relation to paintings by Manet in Modern Women, 211–22. For an important counter-narrative to the male perspective on women’s fashion that I am following here, see Lynda Nead’s discussion of the embodied pleasures that fashion could offer women, as well as the haptic visual pleasure that paintings of sumptuous textiles could produce for spectators, in “The Layering of Pleasure.” 62. Gautier, De la mode, 1858, 5–7: “Le vêtement, à l’époque moderne, est devenu pour l’homme une sorte de peau dont il ne se sépare sous aucun prétexte et qui lui adhère comme le pelage à un animal, à ce point que la forme réelle du corps est de nos jours tout

à fait tombée en oubli. Toute personne un peu liée avec des peintres, et que le hasard a fait entrer dans l’atelier à l’heure de la pose, a éprouvé, sans trop s’en rendre compte, une surprise mêlée d’un léger dégoût, à l’aspect de la bête inconnue, du batracien mâle ou femelle posé sur la table.” 63. This accusation was leveled by several critics at Degas’s series of pastel female nudes shown in the Impressionist Exhibition of 1886, featuring bodies seen as shockingly unidealized and unposed. For r­eferences to the bathers as batraciens, the same word used by Gautier, see Geffroy, “Salon de 1886: VIII,” 102; Hermel, “L’Exposition de peinture,” 1886, 1–2; Maus [largely quoting Geffroy], “Les Vingtistes parisiens,” 1886, 201–4. 64. Brisson, “La Quinzain,” 1893, 26: “L’apparition d’une langouste à la parisienne interrompt cette apologie de la liberté de conscience. Nous admirons la savante architecture de ce plat, l’art avec lequel les tranches de langouste se superposent, mollement étendues sur un canapé de salade russe et baignées des flots onctueux d’une blonde mayonnaise. . . . Et le champagne continue de ruisseler, et les yeux brillent, et les teints se colorent, et l’entretien s’anime. Et le citoyen maire ne songe plus à se défendre, il se lance dans les théories, il expose son plan de campagne, il dévoile ses projets, ses grands projets, qui doivent faire de SaintDenis la première ville de France . . .” 65. L., “Correspondance de Belgique,” 1888, 68: “M. Caillebotte, il est vrai, se rattrape dans une instable mais truculente nature morte où flambe très extraordinairement le maillechor [assumed misspelling of maillechort], éblouissant comme un ostensoir.” Chapter 4. Impressionist Market Gardener

1. Fénéon et al., Petit Bottin, 1886, 109. 2. Tabarant, Pissarro, 40. 3. Leroy, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1874, 79–80: “[. . .] les Choux de M. Pisarro [sic] l’arrêtèrent au passage, et de rouge il devint écarlate. —Ce sont des choux, lui dis-je d’une voix doucement persuasive. —Ah! Les malheureux, sont-ils assez caricaturés! . . . Je jure de n’en plus manger de ma vie! —Pourtant, ce n’est pas leur faute si le peintre . . . —Taisez-vous!” 4. Castagnary, “L’Exposition du boulevard des Capucines,” 1874, 3: “Il a un penchant déplorable pour les terres maraîchères (Le Verger), et ne recule devant

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aucune représentation de choux ni de légumes domestiques. Mais ces fautes de logique ou ces vulgarités de goût n’altèrent pas ses belles qualités d’exécutant.” 5. Cachin, “Some Notes on Pissarro and Symbolism.” Cachin argues that the cabbage stood as a symbol of Pissarro’s naturalism and fidelity to immediate visual sensation, which was rejected by Symbolist artists and critics in the 1880s. In this chapter I argue that the cabbage was more than a “merely oft-repeated journalistic tag” (97) that was shorthand for naturalist practice. 6. Énault, “Chronique,” 1881, 1: “A travers l’imperfection même du rendu, je reconnais chez M. CAMILLE PISSARO [sic] un sentiment vrai de la nature . . . et un grand amour des choux”; Marcel Fouquier, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1886, 2: “M. C. Pissarro expose des études de paysannes et des paysages. Il fut en temps où, comme M. Lambert peignait des chats, M. Pissarro peignait des carrés de choux dans un coup de lumière, avec les violets les plus violents de toute l’école.” 7. Duret, Les Peintres impressionnistes, 1878, 24–25: “Il est vrai qu’on vous dira que Pissarro a commis contre le goût d’impardonnables attentats. Imaginez-vous qu’il s’est abaissé à peindre des choux et des salades, je crois même aussi des artichauts. Oui, en peignant les maisons de certains villages il a peint les jardins potagers qui en dépendaient, dans ces jardins il y avait des choux et des salades et il les a, comme le reste, reproduits sur la toile. Or, pour les partisans du ‘grand art,’ il y a dans un pareil fait quelque chose de dégradant, d’attentatoire à la dignité de la peinture, quelque chose qui montre dans l’artiste des goûts vulgaires, un oubli complet de l’idéal, un manque absolu d’aspirations élevées, et patati, et patata [. . .]. Lorsque les choux et les salades des pota­ gers de Pissarro auront vieilli, on leur découvrira du style et de la poésie.” 8. De Saint-Leu, “Causerie,” 1879, 40: “Eh mon Dieu, c’est là une économie que les pauvres ont depuis longtemps découverte! Ceux qui ne peuvent pas acheter de viande sont bien forcés d’être légumistes. Mais je doute que ceux dont la bourse est un peu mieux garnie aillent se ranger sous la bannière de cette petite phalange . . . tout à fait inoffensive d’ailleurs.” 9. Baudelaire, Salon de 1859, 336: “Nos paysagistes sont des animaux beaucoup trop herbivores.” 10. Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin, 640. For a discussion of these debates about landscape’s deficien-

cies, including this citation of Blanc, see DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and Tradition,” 727. 11. Havard, “L’Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 2: “Les notes délicates, tendres, fraîches du pastel semblent, du reste, avoir séduit les adeptes de l’impressionnisme, art nouveau assez peu robuste, assez mal nourri, qui cherche sa voie non seulement en découvrant des principes, mais surtout en inventant des procédés.” 12. Meurville, “Exposition des indépendants,” 1882, 2: “Aussi, faut-il se dire qu’après tout, ce n’est qu’une exposition de carême:—Maigre, maigre, très maigre!” 13. Zola, L’Oeuvre, 46–47: “Est-ce qu’une botte de carottes, oui, une botte de carottes étudiée directement, peinte naïvement, dans la note personnelle où on la voit, ne valait pas les éternelles tartines de l’École, cette peinture au jus de chique, honteusement cuisinée d’après des recettes? Le jour venait où une seule carotte originale serait grosse d’une révolution.” 14. For example, see Zola, “Deux expositions,” 1876: “Pissarro est un révolutionnaire plus farouche encore que Monet. Son pinceau est encore plus simple et plus naïf.” 15. Quotes from this paragraph: Zola, Le Ventre: “Hein! les beaux légumes, ce matin. Je suis descendu de bonne heure, me doutant qu’il y aurait un lever de soleil superbe sur ces gredins de choux” (18–19); “Puis, Claude déblatéra contre le romantisme; il préférait ses tas de choux aux guenilles du moyen âge” (26–27); “Et le peintre ravi clignait les yeux, cherchait le point de vue, afin de composer le tableau dans un bon ensemble. Mais cette diablesse de soupe aux choux avait une odeur terrible. Florent tournait la tête, gêné par ces tasses pleines, que les consommateurs vidaient sans mot dire, avec un regard de côté d’animaux méfiants. Alors, comme la femme servait un nouvel arrivé, Claude lui-même fut attendri par la vapeur forte d’une cuillerée qu’il reçut en plein visage. Il serra sa ceinture, souriant, fâché; puis, se remettant à marcher, faisant allusion au verre de punch d’Alexandre, il dit à Florent d’une voix un peu basse: —C’est drôle, vous avez dû remarquer cela, vous? . . . On trouve toujours quelqu’un pour vous payer à boire, on ne rencontre jamais personne qui vous paye à manger” (27–28). 16. Adam, “Peintres impressionnistes,” 1886, 541–51: “Le coloris des impressionnistes les plus avancés devient tout scientifique. Méprisant le cuisinage des couleurs, le

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truc des mélanges et des fondues, ils obtiennent la teinte par une simple juxtaposition des tons, vu à une certaine distance, compose la valeur cherchée, leur résultante.” 17. Bertall, “Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877, 1–2: “Ses paysages, ils sont nombreux, sont bavocheux, crûs comme les feuilles de jeunes laitues; ses tons semblent, cueillis sans préparation sur la palette et posés un peu au hasard sur la toile, sans beaucoup de souci des plans et des distances de la perspective.” 18. Leroy, “Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877, 2: “Cette coloration impressionnante tient à la fois de la vanille, de la groseille et de la pistache: un portrait à manger à la cuiller! [. . .] Montrez-lui plutôt la Femme dans la salade de M. Monet, n. 94. C’est un spectacle rafraîchissant comme le cresson, la santé du corps.” 19. Huysmans, “Appendice,” 1882, 261–77: “M. Monet a longtemps bafouillé, lâchant de courtes improvisations, bâclant des bouts de paysages, d’aigres salades d’écorces d’orange, de vertes ciboules et de rubans bleu-perruquier [. . .] il nous a servi, cette fois, de très beaux et de très complets paysages.” Arthur Hustin describes the method in “L’Exposition des peintres indépendants,” 1882, 3: “De la palette, vous exclurez une bonne partie des couleurs pour ne prendre que le vert cru, le bleu intense, le violet dans sa quintessence, les rouges violacés et le blanc. Avec tout cela, vous ferez une salade plus ou moins bien remuée et vous poserez des touches au hasard.” Quoting Philippe Burty’s account in La République français (April 16, 1879), Victor Champier perceives progress in the 1879 exhibition: “On y chercherait en vain des portraits en flammes de punch et des paysages acides comme des plats d’oseille”; “Chronique de l’année,” 176–78. Caillebotte’s landscapes are described in X., “Choses et autres,” 1879, 275–76: “Que dire de l’Allée de potager et de la Prairie?—Épinards avant et après la cuisson.” 20. Anonymous, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1877, 2: “L’exposition des impressionnistes est ouverte—c’est à donner le vertige! le blanc et le vert pâle aveuglent les visiteurs. Quand on entre dans la salle, on clignote des yeux, et l’on se met à pleurer comme si l’on était en train d’éplucher des oignons.” 21. Enjoiras, “Causeries artistique,” 1881, 3: “Quant à M. Pissarro, il a multiplié ses Études; mais je ne puis admettre ses colorations violentes, où les tons les plus discordants se heurtent et font cligner l’œil.”

22. De la Leude, “Les Ratés de la peinture,” 1879, 65–66: “En partant de ce point départ contestable les indépendants pouvaient encore faire des œuvres dignes de discussion; Corot qui était un grand peintre avait fait sans doute des chefs-d’œuvre; mais à l’instar des disciples de Zola en littérature, ses imitateurs ont forcé la dose, et nous ont servi ces choses indigestes, ces assemblages criards de tonalités heurtées qui choquent notre vision.” 23. [Marius Vachon], “Carnet de la journée,” 1876, 2: “Leurs personnages ressemblent à des pensionnaires de la Morgue, et, quand il leur en prend la fantaisie, ils mettent sans sourciller la charrue devant les bœufs. Ce n’est pas sain de voir de pareilles choses.” 24. Bariolette, “Notes parisiennes,” 1877, 2. 25. Albert Wolff, “Le Calendrier parisien,” 1876, 1: “Faites donc comprendre à M. Pissarro que les arbres ne sont pas violets, que le ciel n’est pas d’un ton beurre frais, que dans aucun pays on ne voit les choses qu’il peint et qu’aucune intelligence ne peut adopter de pareils égarements! [. . .] Essayez-donc d’expliquer à M. Renoir que le torse d’une femme n’est pas un amas de chairs en décomposition avec des taches vertes violacées qui dénotent l’état de complète putréfaction dans un cadavre!” 26. Bertall, “Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877, 1–2: “Ses paysages, ils sont nombreux, sont bavocheux, crûs comme les feuilles de jeunes laitues; ses tons semblent, cueillis sans préparation sur la palette et posés un peu au hasard sur la toile, sans beaucoup de souci des plans et des distances de la perspective. [. . .] L’impression produite sur le spectateur quand on entre dans ces galeries, est celle d’un certain bleu uniforme mêlé d’un vert crû dont l’aspect est douloureux pour le regard et qui rappelle la coloration vermoulue du fro­ mage de Roquefort. La plupart des toiles sont inondées de cette sort de vert-de-gris sous lequel se noient les contours quand il y en a, et les perspectives, quand il s’en trouve. Une salle particulièrement meublée des œuvres de M. Pezzaro, un paysagiste primitif, est tout spécialement vouée à ce bleu particulier, qui plane, du reste, sur tout le reste de l’exposition, comme un drapeau et un signe maçonnique.” 27. Michel, “Exposition de peintures,” 1882, 3. 28. This is the argument proposed by Cachin in “Some Notes on Pissarro and Symbolism.”

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29. Albert Wolff, “Le Calendrier parisien,” 1876, 1. 30. X., “Les Artistes indépendants,” 1886, 1–2: “Il connaît la Nature et les êtres qui l’animent; mais comment partager avec lui l’étrange sentiment qu’il a de la couleur? Comment admettre que tout ce qui existe n’arrivait à l’homme qu’à travers un arc-en-ciel? On a beau regarder, rien de pareil ne s’offre nulle part à la vue, et très certainement. M. Pissarro garde en sa pos­ session quelque lunettes magiques, dont la vertu est de lui dénaturer les objets et les lui montrant sous un jour inaccessible aux autres yeux.” For a similar assessment of Pissarro’s “lunettes décolorantes,” claiming that Pissarro must have some ocular disease, see Énault, “Mouvement artistique,” 1876, 2. 31. Two particularly good examples of critics des­ cribing how the canvases materialize to transport the viewer into their settings are Huysmans, “L’Exposition des indépendants en 1881”; and the later assessment in 1892 by Geffroy, “Chronique artistique,” 1. 32. Hepp, “Impressionisme,” 1882, 1: “L’impressio­ n­isme n’en est plus aux verts-jaunes de parti pris, aux horizons framboisés, aux nuages en bombe glacée à la vanilla [. . .]. Pissarro est le plus indépendant du groupe. Il frise la soixantaine: dans sa figure il n’y a que deux yeux d’un brun caressant et une longue barbe multicolore, qui lui sert à essuyer ses pinceaux. Son envoi est superbe. Temps gris, effets de soleil couchant, hautes herbes, vastes prairies et dans ces décors, des paysannes qui ont la santé fleurie sur les joues, et la grâce dans la robustesse; vraies femmes de Millet, femmes des champs, qui ne prennent pas aux paysages ensommeillés des mélancolies de Parisienne, rustiques sans gaucherie, vigoureuses sans grossièreté. [. . .] Cette promenade à travers l’Impressionnisme vous donne des nostalgies de plein air, des visions séduisantes et pittoresques; ces paysages qui se déroulent le long des murs ont des fraîcheurs adorables. Les impressionnistes ont trouvé leur voie—le grand ciel. On respire avec eux par bouffées; ils font l’idylle du travail et prennent la poésie toute crue dans la réalité . . . Pissarro et Sisley sont des maîtres—des maladroits qui ne savent pas vendre et que j’aime.” 33. See, for example, Green, Spectacle of Nature; and Herbert, “City vs. Country.” 34. The connection between women and nature has been a central theme of feminist art history. For

accounts particularly relevant to this subject matter, see Garb, Bodies of Modernity, 145–77, and Garb, “Renoir and the Natural Woman”; and Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 41–63. 35. Zola, Le Ventre: “Elle se secouait comme un caniche, disait qu’elle en avait bien vu d’autres, qu’elle n’était pas en sucre, pour fondre comme ça, aux premières gouttes d’eau” (158); “Elle lui faisait l’effet d’une plante saine et robuste, grandie ainsi que les légumes dans le terreau du potager; tandis qu’il se souvenait des Lisa, des Normandes, des belles filles des Halles, comme de chairs suspectes, parées à l’étalage” (245–46; for another scene where Lisa is compared to the meat in her display, see 79–80); “Tenez, dit Claude en donnant son dernier coup de fourche, voilà un trognon de choux que je reconnais. C’est au moins la dixième fois qu’il pousse dans ce coin, là-bas, près de l’abricotier [. . .] il respira là quelques heures de bien-être absolu, délivré des odeurs de nourriture au milieu desquelles il s’affolait, renaissant dans la sève de la campagne, pareil à ce chou que Claude prétendait avoir vu pousser plus de dix fois” (243–46). 36. Nazim, “La Semaine à la main,” 1879, 2. 37. Paulet, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1886, 1–2: “Ses Paysannes au soleil, sa Cueillette de pommes, sa Gardeuse d’oies et toutes ses études sur la vie des champs sont des pages magnifiques et qui laissent une impression réconfortante, au contraire de celle de M. Degas. Ce poète voit la nature en robuste. La vision n’est plus celle des grands artistes qui ont mis de la tristesse et de l’amertume dans la placidité des choses champêtres. Les grands peintres bucoliques ont toujours décrit des aspects d’un même caractère. Il nous raconte sans cesse l’écrasement de l’homme par cette terre qui le force au travail mais qui le nourrit. Ils prenaient toujours les scènes à la chute de jour, montraient l’homme au moment de la sieste, du repos, à l’angelus, écrasé, épuisé, aspirant au repos. M. Pissarro note un côté plus sain, plus vivifiant de la vision, ni plus ni moins vrai que l’autre, mais moins triste. Il nous fait voir le paysan robuste, solide au travail, dans la pleine journée, dans le plein soleil et la pleine lumière. Et cela d’instinct, sans effort de raisonneur, en poète.” 38. Fèvre, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1886, 148–56: “M. Degas nous dénude, avec une belle et puissante impudeur d’artiste, la viande bouffie, pâteuse

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et moderne de la femelle publique.” See also Geffroy, “Salon de 1886: VIII,” 1–2: “C’est bien la femme qui est là en ces six postures [. . .] la femme considérée en femelle, exprimée dans sa seule animalité, comme s’il s’était agi d’un traité de zoologie réclamant une illustration supérieure.” Other comparisons of Degas’s figures in the series to ignoble animals can be found in Hermel, “L’Exposition de peinture,” 1886; Maus, “Les Vingtistes parisiens,” 1886; Huysmans, “Certains,” [1889] 1929. 39. Ajalbert, “Le Salon des impressionnistes,” 1886, 385–93: “Puis, M. Pissarro a dessiné des types de paysannes [. . .]. [Describing La Cueillette de pommes] elle a les joues rouges, pleines, et ces lèvres humides de femme saine! [. . .] Et ces campagnardes, leur carrure, l’ampleur des hanches! Elles ne sont pas de Bati­gnolles, elles suent la terre! Beautés rustiques: leur santé exulte . . .” 40. Bertall, La Queue du chat, ou la charbonnière des Batignolles, caricature in L’Illustration, June 3, 1865. 41. For a history of the structure of Les Halles and its social significance, see Evenson, “The Assassination of Les Halles”; Mead, Making Modern Paris; TenHoor, “Architecture and Biopolitics at Les Halles”; and Wakeman, “Fascinating Les Halles,” citation of Napoleon III on 52. 42. Zola, Le Ventre, 29: “Cette aube avait une odeur si balsamique, que Florent se crut un instant en pleine campagne, sur quelque colline.” 43. The most extensive source on Pissarro’s market paintings is the dissertation by Jo Ann Wein, “Pissarro’s Market Women.” Wein considers paintings made between 1872 and 1902 in Pontoise, Gisors, Rouen, and Dieppe, though not Paris. Wein argues that the market was frequently a juncture between city and country, an argument that might be furthered by incorporating Pissarro’s representations of Les Halles. The most sustained consideration of the Les Halles paintings to date is by Richard Thomson, who suggests these may be part of a conceived series (Camille Pissarro, 73). In the mid-1890s, Pissarro may have hoped to return to the theme, and considered renting an apartment overlooking Les Halles, based on correspondence reproduced in Wein, “Pissarro’s Market Women,” 206. 44. Late nineteenth-century French anarchists opposed large governments in favor of small-scale cooperatives that they hoped would more fully respect the rights of individuals. Rural communities were believed

to provide a model for this, an alternative to the modernization that had transformed Paris for the worse by creating sharp class polarization under capitalism. It was characteristic of the movement to idealize the potential of the countryside and the dignity and health—moral and physical—of those who worked it. On Pissarro’s politics, I have relied especially on Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 55–138; Herbert and Herbert, “Artists and ­Anarchism”; Hutton, “Camille Pissarro’s Turpitudes Sociales”; Shikes, “Pissarro’s Political Philosophy and His Art”; and Smith, “ ‘Parbleu.’ ” 45. My argument differs from those of Richard Brettell and Ruth Iskin, who contend that Pissarro shows clear hostility to Les Halles in his representations of it. For Brettell, Pissarro’s markets in Pontoise and Gisors are “the opposite of this huge, centralised (and government-controlled) urban market [Les Halles] and also the sources of many of the products sold there” (Pissarro’s People, 224). In Modern Women, Iskin argues that, with figures dwarfed by the structure and smaller crowds signifying the anonymity of the city marketplace, Pissarro’s paintings of urban markets display antipathy toward them (156–67). 46. For a discussion of Pissarro and caricature that notes the comic rapprochement that the artist sometimes set up between market women and their wares, see Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, 203–11. 47. Descubes, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877, 185–88: “Malheureusement une fumée épaisse échappant de la toile nous a empêchée de voir les six tableaux consacrés à cette étude.” 48. Zola, Le Ventre, 29–30: “C’était une mer. Elle s’étendait de la pointe Saint-Eustache à la rue des Halles, entre les deux groupes de pavillons. Et, aux deux bouts, dans les deux carrefours, le flot grandissait encore, les légumes submergeaient les pavés. Le jour se levait lentement, d’un gris très-doux, lavant toutes choses d’une teinte claire d’aquarelle.” The painterly terms of Zola’s writing have been established in literary studies. Parallels between his writing style and Impressionism are explored in Berg, Visual Novel, especially 161–78; Hamon, “À propos de l’impressionnisme de Zola”; Newton, “Emile Zola impressionniste I,” and Newton, “Emile Zola impressionniste II.” 49. On the dames de la Halle, I have relied on Marion, “Les Dames de la Halle”; and Thompson, “Urban Renovation, Moral Regeneration.”

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50. Zola, Le Ventre, 268–71: “Ses cheveux frisottants lui tombaient sur le front, comme des pampres. [. . .] Elle s’était pendu par gaminerie des guignes aux oreilles [. . .] elle avait la bouche rouge, une bouche maquillée, fraîche de jus de groseilles, comme peint et parfumée de quelque fard de sérail. [. . .] Les pommes, les poires s’empilaient, avec des régularités d’architecture, faisant des pyramides, montrant des rougeurs de seins naissants [. . .]. La Sarriette vivait là, comme dans un verger [. . .]. C’était elle, c’était ses bras, c’était son cou, qui donnaient à ses fruits cette vie amoureuse [. . .]. Ses lèvres avaient posé là une à une les cerises, des baisers rouges; elle laissait tomber de son corsage les pêches soyeuses [. . .] elle laissait couler un peu de son sang rouge dans les veines des groseilles. Ses ardeurs de belle fille mettaient en rut ces fruits de la terre, toutes ces semences, dont les amours s’achevaient sur un lit de feuilles, au fond des alcôves tendues de mousse des petits paniers.” 51. Thompson, “Urban Renovation, Moral Regeneration,” 89–104. 52. For one expression of Pissarro’s opinions on the sentimental and its link to religiosity, see a letter to Lucien Pissarro, July 8, 1891, in Rewald, Camille Pissarro, 179–80. A characteristic example of how religion might be raised in Pissarro’s critical reception is Rivière, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877. 53. This peaceful scene is particularly noteworthy given that, in the same year, Pissarro was working on the album Turpitudes sociales, twenty-eight pen-and-ink drawings given as a pedagogical gift to his English nieces to illustrate the necessity of anarchist principles. The Turpitudes show the havoc wreaked by capitalism on the urban working class, picturing urban architecture as claustrophobic, the Parisian poor as starving, and city working conditions as dehumanizing and dangerous, especially for women. As Zola does in Le Ventre, Pissarro conceptualizes the battle between rich and poor as the “war of the thin against the fat,” as he captioned one drawing. Another drawing, The Beggar, shows an impoverished man accompanied by his shrunken son begging for change in front of a charcuterie, with its display of boar’s head and hanging legs of meat, emphasizing the cruelty of poverty through the practices of butchery and carnivorism. Clearly the Les Halles vegetable market in Le Marché stands for something different from the urban charcuterie; it is linked to the more hospitable

conditions of the country and the figural types that Pissarro developed in his studies of markets outside the capital. 54. Delvau, Dictionnaire érotique moderne, 364–65. 55. Camille Pissarro, letter to Lucien Pissarro, July 22, 1883, in Rewald, Camille Pissarro, 38. 56. Degas is quoted in Shikes and Harper, Pissarro: His Life and Work, 158. For further discussion of Degas’s example, see Nochlin, Politics of Vision, 65; Thomson, Camille Pissarro, 68–69; and Wein, “Pissarro’s Market Women,” iv, 9, 51, 81–82, 120–29. 57. Paulet, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1886, 1–2: “Ses Paysannes au soleil, sa Cueillette de pommes, sa Gardeuse d’oies et toutes ses études sur la vie des champs sont des pages magnifiques et qui laissent une impression réconfortante, au contraire de celle de M. Degas. Ce poète voit la nature en robuste. [. . .] M. Pissarro note un côté plus sain, plus vivifiant de la vision [. . .]. Il nous fait voir le paysan robuste, solide au travail, dans la pleine journée, dans le plein soleil et la pleine lumière. Et cela d’instinct, sans effort de raisonneur, en poète.” 58. Pissarro explored the concept of the sensation at length in his correspondence. For discussion of what this term meant to Pissarro, see DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and Tradition,” 735; House, “Camille Pissarro’s Idea of Unity”; and Smith, “ ‘Parbleu.’ ” 59. This is a guiding theme through Wein, “Pissarro’s Market Women.” 60. Nochlin, Politics of Vision, 65–66. This analogy is reinforced in Ruth Iskin’s discussion in Modern Women, 157–58, 170. Richard Brettell also reads Pissarro’s market scenes as metaphors for his marketing of art in Pissarro’s People, 221. 61. Pollock analyzes van Gogh’s Peasant Woman Stooping, Seen from Behind (1885), with its violently classed pose, in relation to nineteenth-century strategies for representing peasant women as animalized and sexualized; Differencing the Canon, 41–63. 62. For a discussion of his “dirty” painting, see Leroy, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1874, 79–80, as well as Shiff, “Pissarro: Dirty Painter.” For descriptions of the paintings as “rough,” see especially de Montifaud, “Exposition du boulevard des Capucines,” 1874, 307–33; and Goetschy, “Indépendants et impressionnistes,” 1880, 2. For “dull,” see Bagnières, “Exposition de peinture,” 1876, 3; Japy, “Les Impressionnistes,”

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1880, 3; and Huysmans, “L’Exposition des indépendants en 1881.” For “monotonous,” see Bagnières, “Exposition de peinture,” 1876, 3; C. E. [Charles Ephrussi], “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 126–27; Geffroy, “L’Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 3; Mantz, “Exposition des œuvres des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 3; and La Fare [Armand Chaulieu], “Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1882, 1–2. For the comparison to tapestry, see Bagnières, “Exposition de peinture,” 1876, 3; Albert Wolff, “Quelques Expositions,” 1882, 1; F., “Exposition de peinture,” 1886, 2. For the connection to cotton or wool, see Ephrussi, “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1880, 485–88; C. E. [Charles Ephrussi], “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 126–27; and Huysmans, “L’Exposition des indépendants en 1881.” For the comparison to plaster, see de Mont, “L’Exposition du boulevard des Capucines,” 1881, 2; and Huysmans, “L’Exposition des indépendants en 1881.” For references to pastels, see Privat, “L’Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 2–3; de Villard [Marie Ann Gaillard], “Variétés,” 1881, 2; Burty, “Les Aquarellistes, les indépendants,” 1882, 3; Fichtre [Gaston Pérodeaud], “L’Actualité,” 1882, 1; and Sallanches, “L’Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1882, 1. 63. Japy, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1880, 3: “Si ce n’était une indiscrétion, je lui demanderais avec quoi il peint. Une truelle, sans doute? . . . C’est empâté et grenu comme s’il ajoutait du sable dans sa couleur.” 64. Anonymous, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” La République française, 1886, 3: “Il habite, tout là-bas, au fond de la Normandie, dans une ferme qu’il cultive lui-même et qui le nourrit de produit du sol qu’il laboure. Quand la récolte a été bonne et que les travaux des champs le laissent libre, Pissaro [sic] prend ses pinceaux, regarde autour de lui et fixe sur la toile cette rude existence des êtres et des choses champêtres qu’il mène lui-même.” 65. Mirbeau, “Exposition de peinture,” 1886, 1–2: “M. Pissarro est un artiste robuste et sain, pour lequel je professe une vive admiration.” 66. Callen, Work of Art, 105–57. 67. C. E. [Charles Ephrussi], “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 126–27: “[. . .] voilà le domaine de M. Pissaro [sic], domaine qu’il exploite en héritier du grand Millet, pénétré comme lui de la poésie du sol, trempant comme lui son pinceau dans le suc de la vie des champs, mais sans atteindre aux sereines harmonies

du maître incomparable. M. Pissaro [sic] voit le paysan tel qu’il est, massif, lourd, épais, hébété et stupide, vraie bête de somme, non sans quelque noblesse cependant, car la terre qu’il retourne sans cesse lui communique un peu de son éternelle beauté. “La chaleur et la clarté palpitent dans ces paysages. Le peintre regarde le soleil en face, s’enivre de sa lumière, en produit tous les effets, mais en détail, fragmentairement pour ainsi dire, avec une analyse qui décompose les rayons solaires en multitude de tons secondaires. Chaque reflet du globe lumineux sur le sol est rendu à petits coups de pinceau; toutes les couleurs du prisme se succèdent et s’emmêlent; la synthèse manque. Aussi cet émiettement de la lumière rend-il la facture pénible, empesée, cotonneuse. Il y a dans ces tableaux de la vie rustique comme l’écho des peines et des fatigues du rude labeur des champs; le pinceau de M. Pissaro [sic] semble une bêche qui remue péniblement la motte de terre. L’expression est forte et intense, mais le métier est d’une âpre monotonie et d’une uniformité excessive. Pas d’habileté, peu de franchise dans la main, mais de la vigueur et du sentiment.” 68. Zola, “Deux expositions,” 1876. 69. Duranty, La Nouvelle Peinture, 1876, 20–22: “Ils ne se sont pas seulement préoccupés de ce jeu fin et souple des colorations qui résulte de l’observation des valeurs les plus délicates dans les tons ou qui s’opposent ou qui se pénètrent l’un l’autre. La découverte de ceux d’ici consiste proprement à avoir reconnu que la grande lumière décolore les tons, que le soleil reflété par les objets tend, à force de clarté, à les ramener à cette unité lumineuse qui fond ses sept rayons prismatiques en un seul éclat incolore, qui est la lumière. D’intuition en intuition, ils en sont arrivés peu à peu à décomposer la lueur solaire en ses rayons, en ses éléments, et à recomposer son unité par l’harmonie générale des irisations qu’ils répandent sur leurs toiles. Au point de vue de la délicatesse de l’œil, de la subtile pénétration du coloris, c’est un résultat tout à fait extraordinaire. Le plus savant physicien ne pourrait rien reprocher à leurs analyses de la lumière. [. . .] Eh bien, pour la première fois des peintres ont compris et reproduit ou tenté de repro­duire ces phénomènes; dans telle de leurs toiles on sent vibrer et palpiter la lumière et la chaleur; on sent un enivrement de clarté qui, pour les peintres élevés hors et contre nature, est chose sans mérite, sans importance, beaucoup trop claire, trop nette, trop crue, trop

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formelle.” English translation taken from Moffett, The New Painting, 37–49, quotation at 42–43. On Duranty’s desire to locate Impressionism within the prerogatives of optical science, see Broude, Impressionism, a Feminist Reading, 124–27. 70. C. E. [Charles Ephrussi], “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1881, 126–27. 71. The complaint that Pissarro’s painting resisted and challenged vision is central to Rachael DeLue’s discussion of the artist’s 1860s and 1870s landscapes in “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and Tradition.” While accepting the generalization that “Impressionist paintings address themselves first and foremost to the faculty of vision” and that Impressionism was understood by contemporary critics as a “decidedly ocular art,” DeLue argues that Pissarro’s landscapes need to be understood as somewhat outside of this framework—as not being addressed merely to the sense of sight, or of problematizing the operations of sight by showing the “difficulty and duration of vision” (718). Her argument is supported by the contemporary criticism that this chapter follows, with its many references to the full-bodied encounter with paintings and even the threat that they pose to the eye. DeLue’s interpretation of Pissarro’s paintings as exploring the relationship between sight and embodiment is highly convincing, but need not position Pissarro’s paintings as exceptional, when the methodology that she develops can serve to challenge the foundations of how Impressionism has been framed in terms of opticality. 72. Blémont, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1876, 2–3: “M. Pissarro a une manière qui nous plaît beaucoup moins; il a imaginé de faire un tableau de brouillard où on ne voit que du brouillard”; Porcheron, “Promenades d’un flâneur,” 1876, 2–3: “Usant du même procédé, M. Pissarro a, peut-être, toute une composition perdue dans le brouillard; mais il fait avouer que c’est un peu bien vague”; de Villard [Marie Ann Gaillard], “Variétés,” 1881, 2: “Le tout conçu dans les tonalités pâles du pastel. Une sorte de brouillard rose flotte sur ce panneau, sans que rien s’en détache d’une manière bien saillante”; Trianon, “Cinquième Exposition,” 1880, 2–3: “Ses œuvres ont l’air d’être enveloppées d’un brouillard coloré dont les étreintes confuses semblent se resserrer encore plus à chaque tentative qu’elles font pour en sortir. En les regardant, on se surprend à s’essuyer machinalement les yeux.” 73. Anonymous, “Les Impressionnistes,” 1877.

74. Champier, “La Société des artistes indépendants,” [1881] 1882, 167–69: “Ce qui est certain, c’est que si M. Pissaro [sic] a créé un système, il en est devenu la propre victime, car ses tableaux sont des paysages fermés, sans air, sans lumière, sans respiration possible.” This statement is remarkably similar to Paul Mantz’s assessment in 1881, “Exposition des œuvres des artistes indépendants,” 3: “M. Pissarro, après avoir inventé son système, en est devenu la victime. Pas d’air, pas de lumière, pas de respiration possible dans ses paysages fermes.” For other pertinent assessments, see Michel, “Exposition de peintures,” 1882, 3: “Quant à M. Pizzarro [sic], sa peinture devient de plus en plus lourde et massive. L’air est absent”; and de Mont, “Cinquième Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1880, 2: “M. Pissarro, dont les dessins sont généralement bien indiqués, se livre à une peinture lourde, épaisse, sans aucune transparence et sans le moindre souci de la vérité.” 75. Énault, “Chronique,” 1881, 1. 76. Huysmans, “L’Exposition des indépendants en 1881”: “De près, la Sente de chou est une maçonnerie, un tapotage rugueux bizarre, un salmis de tons de toutes sortes couvrant la toile de lilas, de jaune de Naples, de garance et de vert; à distance c’est de l’air qui circule, c’est du ciel qui s’illimite, c’est de la nature qui pantelle, de l’eau qui se volatise, du soleil qui irradie, de la terre qui fermente et fume!” 77. Ibid.: “[. . .] tout cela frissonne dans une poudre de soleil, dans une vibration d’air, uniques jusqu’à ce jour, dans la peinture [. . .].” 78. My thinking has been informed by MerleauPonty’s discussion of how Cézanne represented the processes of embodied perception in “Cézanne’s Doubt.” Pissarro and Cézanne often worked together in the 1870s, and many of Merleau-Ponty’s insights with regard to Cézanne are also productive in relation to the older artist. See also Joel Isaacson’s “Pissarro’s Doubt,” in which Isaacson argues that Merleau-Ponty did not sufficiently acknowledge or explore Pissarro’s importance for Cézanne. 79. That the painting was originally unvarnished is stated in The National Gallery of Art Documentation, Examination Report by the Conservation Department. 80. DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and ­Tradition.” 81. Richard Brettell also suggests that the theme of shared work is at stake in this painting, in which

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Pissarro lavishes more attention on the already sorted cabbages (those upon which the gardener has also spent more time) than on those awaiting trimming in the foreground: “As with Père Melon, Pissarro represented a male figure working at a task appropriate to his age. He also again used the subject of physical work as the occasion for an extended—very extended—visual investigation of pictorial work. Fascinatingly, the outer leaves of the cabbages to the right of the figure are painted with comparatively crude brushstrokes, while the already sorted cabbages are defined with thousands of tiny painted marks. In this way, Pissarro’s ‘work’ is linked directly with the rural worker he paid to model” (Pissarro’s People, 169). On Pissarro’s palette knife practice, see Callen, Work of Art, 159–210. 82. Camille Pissarro, letter to Octave Mirbeau, December 17, 1891, cited in Ward, Pissarro, Neo-­ Impressionism, 24 2: “Ah! oui les symbolistes sont réellement bien étonnants, au fond, ils n’aiment peut-être pas les choux parce qu’il est peu aisé d’en faire un plat succulent, tout le monde n’est pas capable de faire une bonne soupe aux choux avec du petit salé . . . Épatant, hein, quand c’est fumant.” This letter is also discussed in Cachin, “Some Notes on Pissarro and Symbolism,” 98. 83. See, for example, Camille Pissarro, letter to ­Lucien Pissarro, April 13, 1891, cited in Thomson, “Camille Pissarro and Symbolism,” 19. In 1891 Pissarro grappled consistently with Symbolism in his letters. 84. Camille Pissarro, letter to Lucien Pissarro, October 8, 1896, in Rewald, Camille Pissarro, 297–98. 85. Wein, “Pissarro’s Market Women,” 201. 86. On the concept of unity I am indebted to John House. See Camille Pissarro, letter to Esther Isaacson, May 5, 1890, quoted and discussed in House, “Camille Pissarro’s Idea of Unity,” 16: “J’ai commencé à comprendre mes sensations à savoir ce que je voulais vers les 40 ans—mais vaguement—à 50 ans c’est en 1880, je formule l’idée d’unité, sans pouvoir la rendre à 60 ans je commence à voir la possibilité de rendre.” Especially pertinent are Pissarro’s letters to Lucien Pissarro, May 13 and 14, 1891, also discussed in House, “Camille Pissarro’s Idea of Unity,” 25. 87. X., “Les Artistes indépendants,” 1886, 1–2. 88. Zola, Le Ventre, 245–46, describing Madame François.

Conclusion

1. For a particularly relevant discussion of the con­ flation of paint and cosmetics in nineteenth-century art and culture, see Garb, Painted Face, 1–17. Other caricatures by Bertall relating to this theme include Peintures pour l’exposition (Le Journal amusant, May 18, 1867) and Promenade au Salon de 1869 (Le Journal amusant, May 15, 1869). 2. Zola, “M. Manet,” 1866, 294. 3. For example, Michael Fried writes in Manet’s Modernism, 408: “From the outset, critics recognized that the new painting was addressed to the sense of sight virtually to the exclusion of other faculties; that its basic assumptions were realist in that it sought to capture as directly and ‘naively’ as possible the truth of the painter’s instantaneous impression (an ostensibly simple but in fact ambiguous notion) [. . .].” For recent scholarship addressing the Impressionist ‘instant,’ see Dombrowski, “Instants, Moments, Minutes”; and the connection between Impressionism and instantaneity is a core premise of Marnin Young’s Realism in the Age of Impressionism. 4. Jacques [Edmond Bazire], “Menus propos,” 1877, 2: “Le pinceau rendant, non-seulement le mouvement, la couleur, l’activité, mais le bruit, c’est invraisemblable; et pourtant cette gare est pleine de tapage, de grincements, de sifflements, qu’on distingue à travers la fumée intense, dont les nuages azurés et gris se heurtent. C’est une symphonie picturale”; Rivière, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1877, 2–6: “On entend les cris des employés, les sifflets aigus des machines jetant au loin leur cri d’alarme, le bruit de ferraille incessant et la respiration formidable et haletante de la vapeur. On voit le mouvement grandiose et affolé d’une gare dont le terrain tremble à chaque tour de roues. Les trottoirs sont humides de suie, et l’atmosphère est chargée de cette odeur âcre qui émane de la houille en combustion.” 5. Un Vieux Parisien, “L’Indiscret,” 1877, 1. 6. Zola, Le Ventre, 213. For a discussion of Zola and odor, see Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 205–8. 7. Zola, Le Ventre, 325: “Et il voyait surtout, à ses pieds, le pavillon aux volailles dégager, par la tourelle de son ventilateur, un air chaud, une puanteur qui roulait comme une suie d’usine.” 8. Baron Grimm [Albert Millaud], “Lettres anecdotiques du Baron Grimm,” 1877, 1.

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9. Silvestre, “Le Monde des arts,” 1882, 150–51: “Ses toiles ne sont plus que de délicieux ragoûts de couleurs. Je citerai à ce point de vue Baby peint dans une gamme d’une fraîcheur et d’une délicatesse incomparable.” 10. Havard, “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” 1882, 2: “Ce sont toujours les mêmes fameuses ‘taches’ bleues, roses, violettes, vertes et lilas juxtaposées, orgie de la palette qui, sans être un régal pour les yeux, ne laisse que faiblement deviner ce qu’a voulu représenter l’artiste. Avec du talent, du savoir, de la pratique, ces ‘préparations’ pourriraient devenir d’excellents tableaux; mais, il faut bien le reconnaître, ce ne sont que des ‘préparations.’ Le lièvre est tué; pour faire le civet, il faut encore accommoder la sauce.” Havard ends his review with an aphorism by the famous food critic Alexandre Grimod de la Reynière, intended to mock the artists as parochial, narrow-minded in their choices of subjects and colleagues, and too easily pleased with their execution: “Grimod de la Reynière used to tell his friends: ‘There are three things to be wary of: local wine, informal dining, and music en famille.’ If the exhibitions of independent artists must continue to move in the narrow and monotonous circle to which they seem to be confined, one day or another, we should extend Grimod de la Reynière’s recommendation.” 11. Duranty, La Nouvelle Peinture, 4–5: “Ils s’efforcent d’y amalgamer toutes les manières; le ranci et le blafard des figures s’y étalent sur des colorations d’étoffes qu’on soutire maladroitement aux Vénitiens en les surchauffant jusqu’au criard, et en les amollissant jusqu’à les éteindre; on prend, il faudrait dire on chipe, à Delacroix ses fonds en les refroidissant et en les aigrissant; on bat ensemble du Carpaccio, du Rubens, et du Signol, peut-être casse-t-on dans le mélange un peu de Prudhon et du Lesueur, et l’on sert un étrange ragoût maigre et sûri, une salade de lignes pauvres, anguleuses et cahotées, de colorations détonantes trop fades ou trop acides, une confusion de formes grêles, gênées, emphatiques et maladives. Les recherches d’une

archéologie en pleine mue, mais parvenue à un certain degré d’étrangeté, donnent seules un peu d’accent à cet art négatif et embrouillé.” Reprinted in English in Moffett, The New Painting, 37–49, quotation at 38. 12. Hepp, “Impressionisme,” 1882, 1: “L’impressio­ n­isme n’en est plus aux verts-jaunes de parti pris, aux horizons framboisés, aux nuages en bombe glacée à la vanille; le dernier représentant de cette hystérie de la couleur est M. Paul Gauguin.” 13. Anonymous, “Exposition de peinture par un groupe d’artistes dissidents,” 1879, 2–3: “Il y a dans cette exhibition des œuvres d’une réelle valeur et d’une saveur exceptionnelle.” 14. Anonymous, “Exposition des impressionnistes: 6, rue le Peletier; 6,” 1877, 2: “Quelle cacophonie alors de tons aigres, criards et discordants! Quelle débauche de crudités! Quelle orgie de bleu, de vert, de jaune et de rouge! Quel chaos aveuglant! C’est à croire que ces messieurs, piqués par quelque tarentule, ont brossé frénétiquement les toiles avec des contorsions de danse de Saint-Guy.” 15. Bernadille [Victor Fournel], “Chronique ­parisienne,” 1877, 2: “Il faut regarder cela en fermant les yeux, dit un bourgeois indulgent.—On ne les fermera jamais assez.” 16. D’Olby, “Salon de 1876,” 3. 17. Bigot, “Beaux-Arts: Les Petits Salons,” 1882, 281–82: “Tout cela papillote, crie, hurle dans les beaux cadres dorés. On sert de cette exposition, après une demi-heure, les yeux plus fatigués que si l’on venait de voir au Châtelet le ballet de Cléopâtre éclairé à la lumière électrique. Abîmer, éreinter les yeux, serait-ce donc là la formule de la peinture indépendante?” 18. De Biez, “Les Petites Salons,” 1882, 2: “La philosophie de l’art intransigeant m’a été fournie par un visiteur qui faisait le tour des deux salles, les doigts enfoncés dans les oreilles. Avec son tapage de tons crus et criards, cette exposition est assourdissante. Il est prudent de la regarder en se bouchant les oreilles.”

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index Bold italic page numbers refer to illustrations.

Académie des beaux-arts, 3, 24–25, 29, 50, 57. See also Salons advertising, 78, 84–85 agricultural labor, 133, 134–36, 137, 138–40, 141, 142–43, 179–80n81. See also paysannes Ajalbert, Jean, 122 À la Renommée des Galettes, 99 Almanach manuel de la bonne cuisine et de la maîtresse de maison, 54–55, 54 anarchist politics, 124, 176n44 Armstrong, Carol, 42, 60, 165n49 Arnoux, Charles Albert d’. See Bertall L’Art, 63, 96 L’Art culinaire, 107 L’Artiste, 55, 109–10 Baartman, Saartjie, 51 Balzac, Honoré de, 58; Le Chefd’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), 59 Bar at the Folies-Bergère, A (Manet), 18, 19, 130 Bariolette, 90, 118

Baron Grimm. See Millaud, Albert Baudelaire, Charles: culinary language, 28; “The Painter of Modern Life,” 9–10, 96; Salon de 1846, 28; Salon de 1859, 115–16 Baudry, Paul: Diana, 50, 54 Baxandall, Michael, 32, 160n41 beer, 16–22 Bellot, Émile, 18–21 Béraud, Jean: Les Halles, 124, 125, 130; paintings of women, 83–84; La Pâtisserie Gloppe, ii, 77, 78–80, 79, 82–83, 85 Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux): À la Renommée de la brioche, 84, 84; Au Buffet, 82, 83; Le Jeu de loto, 81–82, 81; Manette, ou la femme de l’ébéniste, 53, 53, 70, 145–47, 148; on Monet’s landscapes, 117, 119; Physiologie du goût illustrations, 26, 80–81; Promenade au Salon de 1865, 144, 145–48, 146, 149; Promenade au Salon de 1869, 82, 82

Bigot, Charles, 152 Blanc, Charles, 4, 116 Blémont, Émile, 137 bodies: appetites, 25–26; of artists, 22; corpses, 48, 56, 61, 62, 65, 90, 118; decomposing, 48, 56, 58, 65, 89, 119, 122; dissections, 57–58, 59–60; of painters, 57, 58, 59, 60; paintings as transubstantiation of experiences, 165n48; realism and, 7; sexual organs, 43, 50, 70, 74, 163n66; of viewers, 65, 143, 149, 150, 179n71. See also flesh; illnesses; meat; sensory perception bodies, female: as blank slate, 59; confectionery metaphors, 93; of dancers, 65; decomposing, 119, 122; Degas’s depictions, 60, 65, 66, 122, 132, 172n63; of Manet’s Olympia, 47, 48–51, 52–54, 55, 59, 60–61; meat metaphors, 47, 48–51, 54–55, 58–59, 60–61, 62; nude paintings, 56, 132, 165n29; odors, 9, 128–29, 148; paintings compared to, 111; of paysannes,

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121, 143; sexual organs, 70, 74; of sex workers, 48, 122. See also clothing; women Le Bon Bock (Manet), 18–22, 20, 157n4, 157–58n10 Bonvin, François, 36, 69 boucheries. See butcher shops Boulevard des Capucines (Monet), xiv, 5, 6, 86 Bourel, Aristide: L’Écorcheuse de raie, 128 Bourgeois de Paris, 52 Brettell, Richard, 43, 176n45, 179–80n81 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 26, 43, 80–81 brothels, 50, 71. See also sex workers Broude, Norma, 8, 11, 91 Bryson, Norman, 40, 162n61 de Bullemont, A., 54 Burty, Philippe, 38, 92 butcher shops (boucheries): displays, 69–70, 71, 73, 74, 110, 117; as slang term for brothels, 50. See also Veal in a Butcher’s Shop Cabanel, Alexandre, 28, 29, 56, 89 cabbages, 114–15, 116–17, 121, 138–43, 179–80n81 Cachin, Françoise, 115 Café Anglais, 104 Caillebotte, Gustave: Cakes, 76, 95–96, 97, 98–101, 104; Calf’s Head and Ox Tongue, 168n85; critics of, 168n81; Fruit Displayed on a Stand, 66–68, 68; Langouste à la Parisienne, 95, 104–8, 105, 110–11, 172n58; Paris Street; Rainy Day, 96–98, 98; still lifes, 66–68, 96, 99; Veal in a Butcher’s Shop, 46, 48, 66–75, 67, 96, 110–11 cakes. See confectionery Cakes (Caillebotte), 76, 95–96, 97, 98–101, 104 Callen, Anthea, 135

Canivet, Charles (Jean de Nivelle), 87, 89, 102 Cantaloube, Amédée, 51 caricatures: confectionery in, 78, 81–82, 84–86, 89; culinary language in, 5; of Impressionist painters, 61–62, 63, 64–65, 148–51; of Manet, 21–23, 23; of Manet’s Olympia, 53, 70, 145–47, 148; of market vendors, 128; of Parisiennes, 145–48. See also Bertall; Cham; Stop Castagnary, Jules-Antoine, 114–15 Cézanne, Paul, 64, 118, 135, 179n77; A Modern Olympia, 71, 72 Cham (Charles Amédée de Noé): Exposition des peintres impressionnistes, 62–63, 63; Le Peintre impressionniste, 61–62, 62, 63, 64–65, 64, 151; Le Salon comique, 53, 53 Chaplin, Charles, 81–82 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 36–40, 44, 162n61; La Pourvoyeuse (The Return from the Market), 39–40; The Ray, 38, 162n61, 163n66; The Silver Tureen, 38, 38 Le Charivari, 62, 63, 64 Chatigny, Jean-Baptiste: The Child and the Lamb, 89 Chaumelin, Marius, 54 Le Chou, 115, 138 Claretie, Jules, 4, 52, 55 Clark, Timothy J., 31, 159n22 Cliffs of the Petites Dalles (Monet), 87, 88 clothing: associations with seafood, 107–9; corsets, 107–9; department store advertising, 78, 84–85; “lobster tail” bustles, 107, 108, 108; of Parisiennes, 78–80, 107–9, 110, 111 Comte, Auguste, 32 confectionery: in caricatures of popular art, 78, 81–82, 84–86, 89; femininity, 28; galettes,

99–101; paint colors, 5, 87, 89, 90, 101, 118, 152; paintings compared to, 27–28, 29, 51–52, 77–78, 80–81, 87–89, 93, 101–2; painting surfaces compared to, 29, 87, 89, 91, 95, 96–99, 101, 104; Parisiennes and, 77, 82; La Pâtisserie Gloppe (Béraud), ii, 77, 78–80, 79, 82–83, 85; still lifes, 84, 95–96, 98–101, 102, 104; taste for (friandise), 80, 94. See also pastry chefs consumption: of food and of women, 71, 110, 111; of paintings, 85; by Parisiennes, 78–80, 84; sexual, 75, 110, 111; vision as, 33, 41, 59, 75. See also eating; shopping Les Contemporains, 22, 23 cookbooks, 35–36, 54–55, 92, 107 cooking expositions, 104, 107 cooks: female, 1–3, 35; French working abroad, 107; male instructors, 1–3; Salon jury compared to, 24–25; tools, 29. See also pastry chefs Courbet, Gustave, 18, 135, 161n50; The Artist’s Studio, 147, 148; realism, 7, 81, 82; La Vague, 169n16 Crary, Jonathan, 32, 40, 44 La Cuisinière bourgeoise, 35 culinary language: disparaging, 5, 35–36, 39; eating as metaphor for viewing, 4, 9, 10, 45, 59–60, 75, 143; flavor metaphors, 30–31, 32, 39, 45, 65; gendered, 8–9; used about Chardin, 39–40; Zola’s use of, 4–5, 23–25, 27–31, 51–52, 57–58, 158n11. See also confectionery; foodstuffs; meat; paint; painting surfaces; vegetables decomposition or decay: of bodies, 48, 56, 58, 65, 89, 119, 122; faisandé as term for, 48–51, 52,

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decomposition or decay (continued) 55, 60, 61, 65, 66; of light, 136; of meat, 47, 48–51, 60–63; odors of, 65 Degas, Edgar, 60, 64, 65, 66, 122, 132, 172n63 Delaville, Camille, 60 DeLue, Rachael, 140, 179n71 Delvau, Alfred, 50 department stores, 78–80, 84–85 Deriège, Félix, 53–54 Desbuissons, Frédérique, 5, 18, 48, 157n4, 157–58n10 Diaz de la Peña, Narcisse Virgile, 28 Diderot, Denis, 38–39 Dîners du Bon Bock, 18–20, 21, 21, 22 Drak, Maurice, 51 Druick, Douglas, 69, 71, 104 Dubufe, Édouard Louis, 28, 29 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 99, 102 Duranty, Louis-Edmond, 8, 136–37 Duret, Théodore, 115, 116, 117, 152 Dutch painting, 18, 35, 106 Duvergier de Hauranne, Ernest, 21 eating: appetites, 43, 117, 169n10; artists’ dinners, 4; hunger, 117; indigestion, 51, 143; as metaphor for viewing, 4, 9, 10, 45, 59–60, 75, 143; overeating, 90; vegetarianism, 115–16. See also foodstuffs École des beaux-arts, 25, 28, 29, 34, 116, 152 Eel and Mullet (Manet), 44, 45 Eisenman, Stephen, 43, 71–73 embodiment. See bodies Énault, Louis, 61, 115 Ephrussi, Charles, 135–37, 140 Esquiros, Alphonse, 169n10 L’Événement, 24, 27–28, 81 Exposition de cuisine (1910), 104 eyes. See vision Fantin-Latour, Henri, 36 farm labor. See agricultural labor fashion. See clothing femininity: of artists, 94; in butcher shop displays, 69–70;

of foodstuffs, 28, 29, 106–9, 110, 151; of Impressionism, 8, 29, 77–78, 91, 92–93, 95, 151; of market vendors, 129; mind-body division, 58–59; of painting surface, 59, 61, 93, 111; and taste for confectionery, 80, 82. See also gender; Parisiennes; women feminism: scholarship, 10, 59, 132–33, 156n18, 165n48; women’s movement, 66 Fénéon, Félix, 114 Ferragus. See Ulbach, Louis Fichtre. See Pérodeaud, Gaston Le Figaro, 9–10, 55, 57, 90–91, 151 Fish (Still Life) (Manet), 14, 37; Chardin’s paintings and, 38, 162n61; description of, 36; exhibiting, 161–62n52; paint and surface of, 41, 42–43, 45, 162n61; viewing, 163n69 flâneurs, 9–10, 43, 71, 73, 96, 168n74 flesh: Merleau-Ponty on, 165n48; paintings as flesh and blood of painter, 29, 31, 57, 58, 59, 60, 75, 93, 165n49; paintings compared to, 52, 59, 75. See also bodies; meat food markets. See Les Halles; markets foodstuffs: aversions, 164n18; decaying, 90, 111; exchange value, 43–44; French products, 107; gendering, 28, 29, 93, 106–9, 110, 151; paint compared to, 39–40, 87, 89, 90–94, 115; pâte (dough), 25, 39–40, 84, 98, 101, 102, 104; ragout, 4, 24, 25, 39, 151, 152; as sizing for paintings, 171n52. See also confectionery; culinary language; eating; gastronomic culture; markets; meat; restaurants; seafood; vegetables Fouquier, Marcel, 115 Fourier, François Marie Charles, 26 Fournel, Victor, 52 friandise (taste for confectionery), 80, 94

Fried, Michael, 7, 168n85, 180n3 Fruit Displayed on a Stand (Caillebotte), 66–68, 68 Galettes, The (Monet), 95, 99–101, 100, 102, 104 Garb, Tamar, 8, 91, 168n83 Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage, The (Pissarro), 138–40, 139, 141, 142–43, 179–80n81 gardens. See vegetables Gare Saint-Lazare, 124–25, 126, 127 Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train, The (Monet), 124–25, 126, 127, 127 gastronomic culture, 3, 4, 15, 24, 26. See also culinary language Gauguin, Paul: female figures, 60; Study of a Nude (Suzanne Sewing), 66 Gautier, Théophile, 4, 109–10 Gazette des beaux-arts, 34, 38 Geffroy, Gustave, 99, 101 gender: in culinary language, 8–9; feminist scholarship, 10, 59, 132–33, 156n18, 165n48; food and, 93, 106–9, 110; mindbody division and, 58–59; of professions, 1–3; senses and, 9. See also femininity; masculinity Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 28, 29 Gilbert, Victor Gabriel, 69; Le Carreau des Halles, 124, 126, 130 Gisors market, 122, 141–42 Goncourt, Edmond de, 36–38, 39–40, 41 Goncourt, Jules de, 36–38, 39–40, 41 Graff, Paul, 99, 102 Grappe, Georges, 101 Greenberg, Clement, 5–7, 33, 40 Grenan, F.: La Foire aux jambons, 54–55, 54; illustrations from Almanach manuel de la bonne cuisine et de la maîtresse de maison, 54 Grimod de La Reynière, Alexandre, 24

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Les Halles: Béraud’s painting of, 124, 125, 130; in caricatures, 128, 128; construction of, 122, 125; female vendors, 122, 126, 128–30; Gilbert’s painting of, 124, 126, 130; as juncture between city and country, 122, 125, 128, 176n43; Pissarro’s paintings of, 122–28, 123, 124, 129–30, 176n43, 177n53; regulatory efforts, 129; in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris, 23, 26–27, 114, 116–17, 122, 127–29. See also markets Hals, Frans, 18 Hamilton, George Heard, 31 Havard, Henry, 90, 116, 151 health, 120–21, 122, 132, 143. See also illnesses Hepp, Alexandre, 120–21, 129, 135 Hottentot Venus, 51 Houssaye, Arsène, 4 Houssaye, Henry, 80 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 89, 138 illnesses: contagious, 56; food poisoning, 51; motion sickness, 90, 118; venereal diseases, 48, 50, 70; yellow fever, 48, 51, 56 L’Illustration, 53 Impressionism: feminization of, 8, 29, 77–78, 91, 92–93, 95, 151; and opticality, 5–8, 11, 33, 94, 136, 150, 153, 168n85; rotten paintings, 60, 65, 66, 74–75, 101–2; taches, 63–65, 93, 151; treatment of light and color, 135–37 Impressionist Exhibitions: of 1874, 5, 71, 86, 114; of 1876, 60–61, 136; of 1877, 4, 30, 61, 90–91, 92, 93, 118; of 1879, 60, 65–66, 74, 115, 122; of 1880, 60; of 1881, 116, 135; of 1882, 68, 96, 120–21, 152; of 1886, 101–2, 122, 132, 172n63 industrial production, 147–50 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 165n29 International Congress of Women’s Rights, 66

Isaacson, Esther, 141 Iskin, Ruth E., 73, 176n45 Jahyer, Félix, 54 de Jankowitz, Victor, 48, 58 Japy, George, 134, 140 Joly foundry, 125 Le Journal amusant, 53, 53, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 128, 145–48, 146 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 163n69 Kristeva, Julia, 164n18 laborers: agricultural, 133, 134–36, 137, 138–40, 141, 142–43, 179– 80n81; artists seen as, 135 Laforgue, Jules, 7–8, 136, 152, 153 Lagrange, Léon, 35–36, 92 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, 40, 162n61, 163n66 landscape painting, 115–16 Langouste à la Parisienne (Caillebotte), 95, 104–8, 105, 110–11, 172n58 Lavergne, Eugénie, 99 Lazerges, Jean Hippolyte: Portrait of Mme ——, 84 Lee, Paula Young, 70, 73 Lefebvre, Jules: Rêve (Dream), 85–86 Le Petit, Alfred: 9e Année, 104e dîner du Bon-Bock . . . invitation personnelle, 19–20, 21; Édouard Manet: Roi des Impressionnistes, 21–23, 23 Le Riverend, L.: illustrations from Le Pot-au-feu, 1–3, 2, 3 Leroy, Louis, 5, 61, 86, 93, 114, 117–18 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 39 licking: lèche-vitrine (window shopping), 74, 85, 168n83; paint strokes compared to tonguelickings, 5, 42–43, 86, 89, 152; varnished painting surfaces seen as licked, 29; while eating oysters, 42–43 light, 135–37, 138, 150, 151–52

Liquier, Gabriel. See Trock “lobster-tail” bustles, 107, 108, 108 Luncheon on the Grass (Manet), 52 Le Magasin des demoiselles, 115 Manet, Édouard: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 18, 19, 130; Le Bon Bock, 18–22, 20, 157n4, 157–58n10; caricature of, 21–23, 23; critics of, 31, 52–54, 55, 56, 59; Eel and Mullet, 44, 45; Impressionism and, 7, 60; Luncheon on the Grass, 52; mural proposal, 27, 159n23; Oysters and Champagne Bucket, 163n68; La Palette au bock, 16–18, 16, 20–21, 157n2; retrospective exhibition (1867), 36; still lifes, 18, 33–35, 36, 41–44; Still Life with Fish and Shrimp, 41, 42, 43, 44; Zola on, 4–5, 15, 27–33, 34–35, 47–48, 51–52, 75. See also Fish (Still Life); Olympia Man of Pleasure’s Pocket Book, The, 50 Mantz, Paul, 34 Le Marché (Pissarro), 122–28, 123, 129–30, 177n53 Marie, Adrien Emmanuel: 6e Année, 61e dîner du Bon-Bock . . . invitation personnelle, 22 Market on the Grande-Rue, Gisors, The (Pissarro), iv, 112, 141–42, 142 Market Place, The (Pissarro), 122, 124 markets: female vendors, 120, 121, 122, 126, 128–34, 141–42; of Gisors, 122, 141–42; odors, 150, 151; Pissarro’s paintings, 122, 130–34, 176n45; of Pontoise, 120, 122, 130, 133–34, 176n45; shoppers, 126. See also Les Halles Market Stall, The (Pissarro), 133–34, 133 Marrinan, Michael, 71, 168n74, 172n58 masculinity: of artists, 29, 147–48;

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masculinity (continued) and meat, 29, 160n33; construction of, 9; of Manet, 28–29; mind-body division, 58–59. See also gender; men meat: abattoirs, 69; butcher shop displays, 69–70, 71, 73, 74, 110, 117; compared to paintings, 27–28, 29, 31; cookbook illustrations, 54–55, 54; decomposing, 47, 48–51, 60–63; faisandé, 48–51, 60, 65, 66; and female market vendors, 130–32, 133–34; masculinity, 29, 160n33; metaphors for sex workers, 50–51, 54–55, 70; metaphors in art criticism, 47, 48–51, 60–61, 65, 75; paintings of carcasses, 69. See also Veal in a Butcher’s Shop men: chefs, 1–3, 35; dinners, 4, 18–20, 21, 110; flâneurs, 9–10, 43, 71, 73, 96, 168n74; sexual organs, 43, 74; sex workers, 168n84; as spectators, 9–10, 85–86, 93–94, 109, 110. See also gender; masculinity menu designs, 4, 17–18 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 156n18, 163n64, 165n48, 179n77 Millaud, Albert (Baron Grimm), 90–91, 93–94, 151 Millet, Jean-François, 120, 135 Minot printing house, 17–18 Mirbeau, Octave, 140 modernism, 5–7, 11, 33, 40 Le Monde illustré, 62 Monet, Claude: Boulevard des Capucines, xiv, 5, 6, 86; Cliffs of the Petites Dalles, 87, 88; critical reception, 5, 86–87, 89–90, 152; Femme dans la prairie, 117–18; Femme lisant dans un jardin, 89–90; The Galettes, 95, 99–101, 100, 102, 104; The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train, 124–25, 126, 127, 127; landscapes and marine paintings, 87, 90, 93, 99, 101, 117, 119; Portrait of Père

Paul, 99, 102, 103, 142; railway station paintings, 150; Sunset on the Seine, Winter Effect, 87, 89–90; The Turkeys, 90; and unvarnished paintings, 64 de Montifaud, Marc, 51 Morel-Retz, Louis. See Stop Morgue, Paris, 48, 55, 56, 61, 90, 118 Morisot, Berthe, 92, 151, 152 Mr. Punch’s Dress Designs (After Nature), 108–9, 109 Muraton, Euphémie, 82 Murer, Eugène, 102–4, 114 Napoleon III, 122 naturalism, 32, 140 Nazim, Georges, 65–66, 122 Nivelle, Jean de. See Canivet, Charles Nochlin, Linda, 132–33 Noé, Charles Amédée de. See Cham Normandy, 99–101 Ockman, Carol, 165n29 odors: of aging meat, 50–51; of cabbage soup, 117; captured in paintings, 149–50; of cheese, 91, 94, 151; of decomposing bodies, 65, 90; of Impressionist paintings, 148, 151; of Paris, 10, 150–51; of rotting flesh, 65; of women’s bodies, 9, 128–29, 148 L’Oeuvre (His Masterpiece, Zola), 27, 59, 116 Olympia (Manet), 49; caricatures of, 53, 53, 70, 145–47, 148; comparison to Caillebotte’s Veal, 70; critical reception of, 47, 48, 56, 59, 70; descriptions of body, 47, 48–51, 52–54, 55, 59, 60; Zola’s defense of, 47–48, 56–60, 63, 147 optics: Impressionism seen as focused on, 5–8, 11, 33, 94, 136, 150, 153, 168n85; science of, 135–36, 151–52, 156–57n27, 160n41

paint: Chardin’s mixtures, 40; colors of confectionery, 5, 87, 89, 90, 101, 118, 152; colors of flesh, 61, 65; compared to cosmetics, 59, 145; compared to foodstuffs, 39–40, 87, 89, 90–94, 115; compared to organic materials, 70–71; strokes compared to tongue-lickings, 5, 42–43, 86, 89, 152; taches, 29, 34–36, 63–65, 93, 151, 161n50; thickness of, 74, 96, 138; viscous, 42, 75, 101 paintings: compared to confectionery, 27–28, 29, 51–52, 77–78, 80–81, 87–89, 93, 101–2; as flesh and blood of painter, 29, 31, 57, 58, 59, 60, 75, 93, 165n49 painting surfaces: compared to confectionery, 29, 87, 89, 91, 95, 96–99, 101, 102, 104; compared to food, 5, 106, 111; dried-out, 84; farineux (floury), 96; glazed with egg white, 159n29; of Monet, 86–87, 89–90; of Pissarro, 134, 137, 138–40, 143; textures of, 39–40, 70–71, 75, 96, 119; unvarnished, 64, 74, 98, 119, 134, 140; varnished, 29, 64, 80, 85 palettes: menu designs, 17–18, 17; La Palette au bock (Manet), 16–18, 16, 20–21, 157n2 Paris: contrast to countryside, 121–22; Haussmann’s changes, 26–27, 69, 116, 159n22; odors of, 10, 150–51; La Villette, 69. See also Les Halles Parisiennes: caricatures, 145–48; clothing, 78–80, 107–9, 110, 111; compared to paysannes, 122; confectionery and, 77, 82; consumption by, 78–80, 84; at food markets, 126; paintings of, 78–80, 83; and social classes, 78; symbolism of, 78, 106–7 Paris Street; Rainy Day (Caillebotte), 96–98, 98 pastries. See confectionery pastry chefs: artists as, 29, 95–106;

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Murer, 102–4, 114; Portrait of Père Paul (Monet), 99, 102, 103 La Pâtisserie Gloppe (Béraud), ii, 77, 78–80, 79, 82–83, 85 Paulet, Alfred, 122, 132 paysannes: compared to Parisiennes, 122; compared to vegetables, 113; healthy bodies of, 121, 143; Pissarro’s paintings of, 113–14, 120–21, 122–28, 129–34, 135, 141–42; in Zola’s fiction, 121 peasants. See agricultural labor; paysannes Pérodeaud, Gaston (Fichtre), 5, 87, 89–90 Physiologie du goût (BrillatSavarin), 26, 43, 80–81 Pissarro, Camille: aesthetic goal of, 141; anarchist politics of, 124; The Beggar, 177n53; “cabbage painter” nickname, 113, 114–15, 119, 140–41, 173n5; critical reception, 114–15, 118–21, 132, 134–38, 140, 143, 152, 179n71; The Gardener—Old Peasant with Cabbage, 138–40, 139, 141, 142–43, 179–80n81; health benefits of paintings, 120–21, 122, 132; Le Marché (The Market), 122–28, 123, 129–30, 177n53; as market gardener, 113, 114–15, 120, 134–36, 137, 143; The Market on the Grande-Rue, Gisors, iv, 112, 141–42, 142; The Market Place, 122, 124; The Market Stall, 133–34, 133; The Pork Butcher [La Charcutière], 130–32, 131; religiosity in paintings, 130; La Sente de Choux in March, 138; on Symbolism, 140–41; technique of, 134, 136, 137, 138–40, 143; Turpitudes sociales, 177n53; and unvarnished paintings, 64 Pollock, Griselda, 10, 133, 177n61 Pontoise, 120, 122, 130, 133–34, 138–40, 176n45 Porcheron, Émile, 137

Pork Butcher, The (Pissarro), 130–32, 131 Portrait of Père Paul (Monet), 99, 102, 103, 142 positivism, 32 Le Pot-au-feu: Journal de cuisine pratique et d’économie domestique, 1–3, 2, 3 Pretty Women of Paris, The, 50–51 prostitutes. See sex workers Punch, or the London Charivari, 108–9, 109 putrefaction. See decomposition or decay Rancière, Jacques, 40 realism, 7, 18, 29, 81, 82, 168n85 red meat. See meat Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, 18; The Slaughtered Ox, 69, 69 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste: female figures, 60, 119; Portrait of Jeanne Samary, 93, 118; Study: Torso, Effect of Sunlight, 60–61, 61; The Swing, 107–8, 108 restaurants: menu designs, 4, 17–18; in nineteenth-century France, 26; Three Emperors Dinner, 104 Le Réveil, 87 La Revue du XIXe siècle, 30, 55 Revue illustrée, 110, 111 Ribot, Théodule, 36 Rivière, Georges, 92, 93 Rubin, James H., 163n69 Saint-Victor, Paul de, 48, 52, 54, 58 Salons: of 1865, 48–50, 52–54, 55, 81–82, 145–47; of 1866, 4–5, 24–25, 27–28, 29, 51–52, 80, 82–83; of 1868, 29; of 1869, 82; of 1872, 84–85, 89; of 1873, 21; of 1875, 85–86, 128; Baudelaire’s reviews, 28, 115–16; juries, 24–25; Manet’s paintings, 20, 21, 27–28, 48–54, 55 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 164n18 scientific analysis, 31–33, 56, 57, 58, 135–36. See also optics

seafood: associations with clothing, 107–9; Langouste à la Parisienne (Caillebotte), 95, 104–8, 105, 110–11, 172n58; Manet’s still lifes, 41–44, 42, 45, 163n68; oysters, 36, 41, 42–43, 163n68; The Ray (Chardin), 38, 162n61, 163n66. See also Fish (Still Life) sensory perception: gendered, 9; of paintings, 8, 9, 40, 41, 45, 65, 91, 93–94, 118, 151–53, 179n71; sexual arousal and, 43; smell, 9, 39; social construction of, 9; sounds suggested by paintings, 150, 152; synesthesia, 11; touch, 39, 74, 140; in Zola’s fiction, 23, 26–27. See also odors; taste; vision sensory turn, 9, 156n17, 157n29 sexuality: appetites, 82, 85, 169n10; food descriptions and, 110, 111; senses and, 43 sex workers: appetites, 169n10; black, 50–51; bodies, 48, 122; female market vendors associated with, 129; male, 168n84; meat metaphors, 50–51, 54–55, 70; A Modern Olympia (Cézanne), 71. See also Olympia (Manet) shopping: department stores, 78–80; window shopping (lèche-vitrine), 74, 85, 168n83. See also consumption; markets Silvestre, Armand, 151 Sisley, Alfred, 7, 64, 120, 121 smell, sense of, 9, 39. See also odors social classes: bourgeoisie, 26–27, 28, 30, 126; of Parisiennes, 78; in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris, 26–27. See also paysannes still lifes: by Caillebotte, 66–68, 96, 99; by Chardin, 36–40, 44; of confectionery, 84, 95–96, 98–101, 102, 104; Dutch, 35, 106; by Manet, 18, 33–35, 36, 41–44; position in genre hierarchy, 35; of vegetables, 116 Still Life with Fish and Shrimp (Manet), 41, 42, 43, 44

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Stop (Louis Morel-Retz): Chatigny, 89, 89; L’Écorcheuse des Halles centrales, 128, 128; Rêve, 85–86, 86; Le Salon de 1872, 84–85, 85 Sunset on the Seine, Winter Effect (Monet), 87, 89–90 Symbolism, 11, 140–41 synesthesia, 11 Tabarant, Adolphe, 16, 20, 114 taches, 29, 34–36, 63–65, 93, 151, 161n50 Taine, Hippolyte, 32 taste: aesthetic vs. gustatory, 25–26, 163n69; for confectionery (friandise), 80, 94; feminization of, 9; flavor metaphors, 30–31, 32, 39; knowledge acquired through, 39; language in art criticism, 39–40, 59, 153, 156–57n27; sexual implications, 43; subjectivity, 32. See also culinary language tavern signs: Manet’s paintings compared to, 21 de Thémines, Achille de Lauzières, 90, 91–92, 93 Thérèse Raquin (Zola), 55–56, 58, 150 Three Emperors Dinner, 104 Tissot, James: The Shop Girl, 168n83 touch, sense of, 39, 74, 140 Tout-Paris, 102–4 Trianon, Henry, 137 Trock (Gabriel Liquier): Chez un impressionniste, 148–51, 149 Tsui, Aileen, 169n12 Turner, J. M. W., 169n12 Ulbach, Louis (Ferragus), 55–56, 58, 70, 150 Universal Exhibitions, 28, 36, 66, 104, 107, 147 Uzanne, Octave, 109

Vachon, Marius, 118 van Gogh, Vincent, 133, 177n61 Vatel, François, 35 Veal in a Butcher’s Shop (Caillebotte), 46, 48, 66–75, 67, 96, 110–11 vegetables: cabbages, 114–15, 116–17, 121, 138–43, 179–80n81; carrots, 116; paintings compared to, 113, 115–16, 117–18, 119; paysannes compared to, 113; in Zola’s fiction, 116–17. See also markets vegetarianism, 115–16 venereal diseases, 48, 50, 70 Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris; Zola): characters, 10, 26–27, 59, 116, 121; descriptions of foodstuffs, 158n11; market scenes, 23, 26–27, 114, 116–17, 122, 127–29; odors, 10, 150–51 Vermeer, Jan, 18 Veuillot, Louis, 150 Vidal, Jules, 101–2 Villain, Eugène: Un dessert, nature morte, 84 de Villard, Nina, 137 La Villette, 69 vision: anatomy of eyes, 40–41; autonomy, 40–41; color perception, 64–65; connected to other senses, 74; as consumption, 33, 41, 59, 75; detached gaze, 9–10, 71–73; eyes of artists, 32–33, 153; masculinity, 9–10; objectivity, 32, 160n41; ocularcentrism, 9, 11, 39, 156nn17–18; perceptual processes, 140; physical effects of viewing paintings, 33, 111, 118, 119, 152; spectatorship, 11–12, 15, 40–41, 44, 75; Zola’s references to eyes, 32–33. See also optics Vollon, Antoine, 36, 69, 163n65 Voltaire, 25

Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 169n12 window shopping (lèche-vitrine), 74, 85, 168n83 Wolff, Albert, 61, 119 women: appetites for food, 82; black, 50–51; cooks, 35, 103; cosmetics, 59, 145; cultural stereotypes of, 92, 129; at Impressionist exhibitions, 171n36; Impressionist paintings of, 60–63, 65–66; market vendors, 120, 121, 122, 126, 128–34, 141–42; painters, 1–3, 92, 151, 152. See also bodies, female; femininity; gender; Parisiennes; paysannes; sex workers Zola, Émile: Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), 28; dinner with artists, 4; on formulaic novelists, 36; naturalism, 32; L’Oeuvre (His Masterpiece), 27, 59, 116; on scientific analysis, 31–33, 56, 57, 58, 136; on status of critics, 9; Thérèse Raquin, 55–56, 58, 150. See also Le Ventre de Paris Zola, Émile, art criticism: culinary language in, 4–5, 23–25, 27–31, 51–52; defense of Manet’s Olympia, 47–48, 56–60, 63, 147; influence, 15–16; on Manet, 4–5, 15, 27–33, 34–35, 47–48, 51–52, 75; “Une Nouvelle Manière en peinture: Édouard Manet,” 28–29, 30–33, 34–35, 54, 55, 56–58, 59–60; on Pissarro, 116; review of Impressionist Exhibition (1876), 136; reviews of 1866 Salon, 4–5, 24–25, 27–28, 29, 80, 82–83; reviews of 1868 Salon, 29; on still lifes, 43

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w ilst ed & tay lor publishing serv ices

Project manager Christine Taylor Production assistant LeRoy Wilsted Copy editor Nancy Evans Designer and compositor Nancy Koerner Proofreader Melody Lacina Indexer Mary Mortensen Printer’s devil Lillian Marie Wilsted Consuming Painting was composed in Electra with Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and Myriad display and printed in Lithuania by Balto Print.

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