I am thin, short, with spindly limbs, all topped off with a head of which the front part must seem funny for lots of people
Charles Meryon, letter to the father, 1850.
Charles Meryon was born in Paris the 23 November 1821.
Meryon was the offspring of a brief relationship between his mother Pierre-Narcisse Chaspoux, a dancer, and an English physician Charles Lewis Meryon who was also an amateurs draughtsman and a writer. The two met in London where Pierre-Narcisse worked for a short time.
You say that I have brought him up in the French way; I couldn’t bring him up in the Chinese manner, since I was in Paris. But the proof that my intention was to make him an Englishman rather than a Frenchman is that I had him baptised as a protestant.
Letter of Pierre-Narcisse to Charles Lewis Pierre-Narcisse, September 1834.
Meryon met his father only a few times throughout his life, however father and son maintained a regular epistolary exchange.
In 1837, Meryon enters the Naval School and moves to Brest.
He takes topographical drawing classes required in the education of naval
officers. In 1839 Meryon moves to Toulon, a important military
post during the French colonial expansion. He travels to Algiers, Athens and
Smyrna. In the late 1830s Meyon becomes painfully aware of his illegitimacy
and resents the father’s distance:
I
was born to be unhappy, always to blush because of my illegitimate birth.
We have no connection in society’s eyes … I have no name.
Letter to the father, December 1840.
In Toulon, Meryon takes drawing lessons from the watercolor painter Vincent Courdouan.
From August 1842 to August 1846, Meryon is embarked on the Rhine and travels in the Southern hemisphere. Among other places he visits Tenerife, Bahia, Tasmania, New Zealand, the Marquesas Islands and Australia. Referring to his voyage in the Pacific Ocean he writes to a friend:
In September 1846,
Meryon returns to Paris where he no longer has close family ties.
In November of the same year he writes to the father:
I have just taken a major decision… to give myself completely to the study of Art.
He approaches Charles-François Phélippe, a pupil of David, and begins a classical training drawing from the ancient and anatomical models.
In 1848
Meryon comes to terms with his flawed perception that prevents him from distinguishing
certain colors and decides to turn to etching. He studies etching with Eugène
Bléry and is especially influenced by the 17th century Dutch printer
Zeeman who realized several views of Paris and its region.
Meryon witnesses the riots of 1848. He has a membership in the citizens militia
and has strong republican sympathies, however the extent of his political
commitment in this heated period is still unknown.
Meryon, The symbolical arms of Paris, 1854, etching
In 1857 Meryon is invited by the Duc d’Arenberg to visit him at Enghien, near Brussels, to etch his castle and land. But Meryon is not able to work and returns to Paris in a spiraling mental state. One day his friend Bracquemond visits while Meryon is out. Rather than leaving a visiting card, Bracquemond draws on a wall a sparrow pursing a fly. The scene strikes Meryon not for its wit but as a premonition of his own fate:
I read on the wall my fate. I can no more avoid what is coming upon me than that fly can that bird.
In this period, Meryon
refuses to leave his bed and allegedly threatens visitors with a pistol. The
portrait by Léopold Flameng captures the artist’s “face,
with features sharp and emaciated by the fasting that he voluntarily imposed
on himself, but also with marks of sadness and irony”
Meryon did not appreaciate the drawing and tried to destroy it. Flameng could
save it only by fleeing.
In 1858 Meryon agrees to be taken to the Charenton Clinic,
a psychiatric hospital at the edge of Paris where he remains until September
1859. The diagnosis upon arrival states that the patient suffers of “deep
melancholia, ideas of persecution which he considers to be deserved, depressive
ideas. He considers himself deeply guilty towards Society.”
As soon as he is discharged, Meryon modifies Le Pont Au Change. The balloon Speranza (Hope) is replaced with flight of birds.
In 1860 Meryon meets with an admirer of his, Charles Baudelaire
who an year earlier
had bought three sets of the Parisian views. Baudelaire proposes Meryon to
write poems
for a new edition of Meryon’s plates but the two cannot find an agreement
because of
Meryon’s insistence that the texts be scholarly and antiquarian.
M. Meryon has rejected with a kind of horror
the idea of a text of twelve short poems or
sonnets; he has refused the idea of poetic
meditations in prose. In order not to
exacerbate his mood, I promised to collaborate
with him and compose a sort of guidebook or
manual, unsigned. [Charles
Baudelaire]
Walter Benjamin writes on the relationship between Baudelaire and Meryon:
The two men had an elective
affinity to each other. It was Meryon's engraved views of Paris. No one was
more impressed with them than Baudelaire. To him the archaeological view of
the catastrophe, the basis of Hugo's dreams, was not the really moving one.
For him antiquity was to spring suddenly like an Athena from the head of an
unhurt Zeus, from an intact modernism. Meryon brought out the ancient face
of the city without abandoning one cobblestone. It was this view of the matter
that Baudelaire had unceasingly pursued in the idea of modernism.
Dealing with Meryon, it is a homage to modernism, but it is also a homage
to the antique aspects of Meryon. For in Meryon, too, there is an interpenetration
of classical antiquity and modernism, and in him the form of this superimposition,
the allegory, appears unmistakably. The captions under his etchings are of
importance. If the texts are touched by mildness, their obscurity only underlines
the 'meaning'.
Between 1864-66 Meryon
insistently writes to the Administration des Beaux-Arts to obtain
financial support for the project he had in mind since the late 1840s: the
publication of a collection of prints documenting the voyage of the Rhin in
the South Pacific.
His requests are regularly dismissed.
Meanwhile, his mental
illness is getting worse and a second hospitalization is orchestrated by his
friends. In1866, a friend wrote a letter to Meryon’s father to alert
him:
“I only went there yesterday and I found matters in a deplorable state
and requiring that instant steps should be taken to avert a catastrophe. [Meryon]
is a greater recluse than ever: he is in extreme distress, his privations
beyond questions. He is literally nothing but skin and bones. He is indebted
two or three quarters’ rent” Miranda, 24 September 1866
Meryon dies at Charenton on 11 February 1868.
He is buried in the cemetery at Saint Maurice. Bracquemond designs an allegorical commemorative plaque incorporating the symbols of Meryon’s life on earth and sea: laurel branches intertwined with the etcher’s tools, Meryon’s monogram, Meryon’s design of the vessel of the arms of Paris.
