OTHER ETCHINGS OF THE ’FIFTIES

The Paris set had almost entirely absorbed his energies during the years of its production, but he made one or two other good etchings during the same period. Two of the Bourges etchings belong to this time, the third being much later. The only etching of 1851 was Porte d’un ancien Couvent, Bourges (plate 39), a lightly etched plate, parts of which were only drawn in outline. Meryon printed very few copies of it, and intended to complete it later, but it is a very beautiful piece of work in its present condition. Meryon projected the publication of a Bourges set, but it always remained in abeyance. Two draughts exist in his handwriting, dated 1852, for the lettering of a title page to such a set, and M. Delteil prints a letter addressed by him in 1854 to the Ministry of the Interior, in which he sends a proof of the first plate etched of the proposed Bourges set (meaning, no doubt, Rue des Toiles, Bourges) and begs for a subscription for fifty copies of a set of ten etchings at fifteen francs a set. The set was to consist of four etchings of the same dimensions as the specimen submitted and six etchings of details of buildings. The etchings were to represent private houses, which were in more danger of demolition than public monuments. He sent Porte d’un ancien Couvent (plate 39) as a specimen of the less important etchings that he projected. In the same letter he recalls that the Ministry had subscribed for fifty copies of the Paris set, which had been originally intended to consist of ten etchings (he counts only the important subjects which ultimately received numbers); he had now decided to add two more (La Morgue and L’Abside) and begged the Minister to subscribe for fifty copies of these additional plates at two francs each, adding that such help as he would get from the Ministry was almost his only assistance in view of the indifference of the public. Rue des Toiles à Bourges (plate 40) is a very fine etching, comparable to some of the rather similar subjects in the Paris set, notably Tourelle, Rue de la Tixéranderie. The early impressions of it are very beautifully printed. The British Museum has recently acquired a probably unique first state, earlier than any described by M. Delteil, printed before the plate had been reduced to its ultimate dimensions. The third Bourges etching, Ancienne habitation à Bourges (plate 41) was added much later, in 1860, and is in the style of some of the late Paris etchings, but not so good. The only other etchings that date from the period of the “Eaux-Fortes sur Paris” are the Verses to Eugène Bléry (two different plates with the same contents, D. 88, 89) and the fine Entrée du Couvent des Capucins à Athènes (plate 42), both etched in 1854. Though Meryon had drawn in early youth the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates which was then partly embedded in the buildings of the French Capuchins at Athens, though it was afterwards detached from the wall, his etching is copied from one of the plates by J. P. Le Bas in J. D. Le Roy’s “Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce,” Paris, 1758.

It was about this time that Meryon began to etch plates of antiquarian interest from old drawings or prints. Though they were commissioned for illustrations, it is evident, among other things from a letter of Baudelaire’s written in 1860, that Meryon himself developed a rather tiresome habit of research, both pedantic and eccentric in its methods. One of the best of these derivative etchings, the Salle des Pas-Perdus (plate 35), after Ducerceau, dates from 1855, and Le Pont-Neuf et la Samaritaine (plate 33) and Le Pont-au-Change vers 1784 (plate 34) were also etched in the same year. They are fine etchings, but do not arouse the same interest as Meryon’s first-hand impressions of the Paris of his own day. Le Château de Chenonceau, also after Ducerceau, and etched in a very dry manner, is a plate of 1856, and in the same year he etched, from photographs, the large panoramic view of San Francisco. More typical Meryons are the two queer etchings of 1855 and 1856 called La Loi Solaire and La Loi Lunaire, in which he propounded very crazy views on morality, one of them being that an upright posture is the proper attitude for sleep, a theory which he himself carried into practice in later years, by passing the night between two upright boards with his arms supported by loops of rope to keep him from falling. Le Pilote de Tonga, a prose poem in a frame, etched in 1856, is the first of what grew, in the sixties, into a long series of etchings founded on his sketches and reminiscences of his early voyage to the South Seas. These filled an even larger place in his thoughts in his last years, but it is to be feared that the etchings of these subjects, of which a few specimens are here reproduced (plates 43-46), leave posterity rather cold.