THE LATE ETCHINGS

The only etchings of any importance that Meryon produced after his release from confinement are some of the last views of Paris, done at the time when he was retouching his old plates of Paris and making the, not very judicious, alterations which distinguish their latest states. The new ones are: Rue Pirouette (1860, plate 36), Tourelle de la rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine (1861), which shows the house in which Marat was assassinated (plates 25, 26), Rue des Chantres (1862, plates 27, 28), Collège Henri IV (1864, plate 29), Bain-froid Chevrier (1864, plate 30), Le Ministère de la Marine (1866, plates 31, 32) and L’ancien Louvre, vers 1650 (1866, plate 38), in which, fulfilling a commission from the Chalcographie du Louvre, he returned to the study of his old love, Renier Zeeman. The Rue des Chantres is incomparably the finest of these, but it can only be seen to real advantage in the very rare early states, one of which the British Museum possesses (plate 27), in which the spire, a recent addition to Notre-Dame designed by Viollet-le-Duc, soars into an empty sky, which was afterwards disfigured by the incongruous insertion of two bells and a device with the initials J. B. (plate 28). The streets of all the etchings of the sixties are filled with excited crowds or little groups of tall, unnatural looking people, and all kinds of curious monsters and allegorical figures hover in the sky or swoop in rapid flight across it. The Collège Henri IV (plate 29) in some of its states, has for background a sea with sails and whales and sea-gods, and the figures in the foreground are the most extraordinary that Meryon ever drew.

It is of no use to dwell at length on these symptoms of mental decline. The lonely artist, subject to hallucinations, thinking that Jesuits were watching him in every street, quarrelling with his best friends, who found it impossible to help him, almost starving because he thought it wrong to eat when others were in need, was no longer capable of the concentrated effort that had produced the masterpieces of the first half of the fifties. On October 12th, 1866, he was shut up again at Charenton, where he died on February 4th, 1868, and where a friend of his sailor days, De Salicis, pronounced an oration over his grave. Bracquemond etched, with a few symbolical ornaments, a copper plate to be laid on the slab of black Breton stone, resting on cubes on white stone, which covered his tomb.

His life had been a failure; he was himself only too ready to proclaim it. He regarded art as something so mysterious, so sacred, as to be quite out of reach. “L’art pour lui n’existait qu’ à l’état de fétiche, d’idéal,” wrote Dr. Gachet to Bouvenne, “on ne devait pas y toucher—il n’y avait pas d’artistes.” To praise him as an artist was to make of him an enemy. To such a temperament fame was denied while he lived. It remained for posterity to do homage that could meet with no rebuff. The sincerest flattery, that of imitation, has been offered to Meryon without stint by a generation of etchers that was being born while he was relaxing by degrees his imperfect grasp of life.