EARLY LIFE

The story of Meryon’s life has often been told, but those who do not know it may welcome a brief recapitulation of it here, and indeed some such narrative is needed for the comprehension of his work, which becomes much more interesting when something is known of the period and circumstances in which it was produced. Meryon was born in Paris on November 23rd, 1821, as the natural son of Dr. Charles Lewis Meryon, an English doctor, formerly physician and secretary to Lady Hester Stanhope, and an opera dancer, Pierre-Narcisse Chaspoux, aged twenty-eight, known as Mme. Gentil, who already had a daughter by an English peer. It was not till August 9th, 1824, that Dr. Meryon made a formal recognition of paternity and left a sum of money, on leaving France, for his son’s education. His mother brought him up with tender care, but he inherited from her apparently the mental disease with which he was afterwards afflicted; she died, out of her mind, in 1837 or 1838. At the age of five, under the name of Charles Gentil, he went to school at Passy, where he received some elementary lessons in drawing. A very childish drawing of houses, trees and a well, in red and black chalk, of which at a later period some one made a woodcut, is in the British Museum; by internal evidence one may judge it to be earlier than the elementary lessons. He went to Marseilles, Hyères, and to Italy, as far as Pisa and Leghorn; then returned to Paris till he made up his mind to go into the Navy, and, in 1837, entered the naval school at Brest. It was then that he adopted his father’s name of Meryon. Leaving the naval school in 1839, he sailed from Toulon in October in the Alger for the Levant, and was transferred at Smyrna, as a first-class cadet, to the Montebello. He visited Argos, the tomb of Agamemnon and the lion gate at Mycenae, and at Athens made drawings of the frieze of the Temple of Theseus and of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates which appears in his etching of the Convent of the French Capuchins at Athens, 1854 (plate 42). On his return to Toulon he had further lessons in drawing. In 1842 he went to sea again, being gazetted as “enseigne de vaisseau” to the corvette Le Rhin, which cruised about New Zealand, New Caledonia, and the islands of the Pacific. The fruits of these years of travel in Oceania may be seen in a number of etchings which he made in later life (Delteil 63-74). A multitude of pencil sketches made on his travels remained in his family’s possession till 1904, when they were given to the British Museum by Mr. Lewis Meryon. They include drawings of his shipmates, of native houses, fetishes and boats, palm trees and other vegetation, studies of skies and sunsets, with notes of colour, sketches of the flight of the albatross, drawings of fish and other fauna of the Pacific, and last, but not least, the original drawings for Le malingre Cryptogame (D. 66) and Tête de chien de la Nouvelle-Hollande (D. 65), the ship’s pet whose queer habits and tragic death by falling overboard before Meryon’s eyes are graphically described in one of his letters quoted at length in Burty’s memoir. Long afterwards, in conversations with Burty, Meryon used to say how his thoughts dwelt on the rocky coast of New Caledonia, where “he had met a race of savages, handsome, heroic, intelligent, where he had breathed an air overladen with balm, where, if he could, he should like one day to return to finish life free and happy.” On the return of Le Rhin in 1846 Meryon received six months’ leave and returned to Paris. He had scruples about his constitution being strong enough for the profession of a sailor; he neglected to ask for an extension of his leave, and in the end his resignation was accepted and he left the Service on September 17th, 1846. He was then in possession of a sum of 20,000 francs left to him by his mother. He took a studio and had lessons from a painter named Philippe. He has recorded his enthusiasm at this time for the pictures of Delacroix, Decamps and Hogarth, whose work he had seen during a short visit to England. After some experiments in allegory, inspired by the proclamation of the republic at the February revolution, he abandoned painting for engraving, and entered the studio of the etcher, Eugène Bléry, in 1848. A circumstance which affected this decision was the discovery that his eyesight suffered from the defect known as Daltonism, a partial colour-blindness.