on, looking for new sensations. And it was at this point that Charles’s Jewishness made him suspect.
Charles had bought two paintings by Gustave Moreau. Goncourt described his work as the ‘watercolours of a poet goldsmith, which seem to have been washed with the gleams and patina of the treasures in the Thousand and One Nights’. They were rich, highly symbolic, Parnassian paintings of Salome, Hercules, Sappho, Prometheus. Moreau’s subjects are barely clothed, except for a fall of gauze. The landscapes are classical, full of ruined temples, the details exactingly coded. It was all a very, very long way from a meadow in the wind, the currents of a river amongst ice, or a seamstress bent over her work.
Huysmans would write his scandalous novel À rebours ( Against the Grain ) about what it felt like to live with a Moreau painting. Or, to be more exact, in the atmosphere created by a Moreau painting. His hero, Des Esseintes, was based closely on the decadent Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a man dedicated to achieving a totally aestheticised existence, finessing the details of his house so that every sensory experience would immerse him totally. The apogee was a tortoise whose shell was encrusted with gemstones so that its slow passage across a room would enliven the pattern of a Persian carpet. This impressed Oscar Wilde, who noted in French in his Paris journal that ‘a friend of Ephrussi has an emerald-encrusted tortoise. I also need emeralds, living bibelots…’ This was substantially better than opening the door of a vitrine.
In Des Esseintes’s attenuated existence there was one artist ‘who most ravished him with unceasing transports of pleasure – Gustave Moreau. He had purchased his two masterpieces, and night after night he would stand dreaming in front of one of these, a picture of Salome’: he is so involved in these intensely charged paintings that he becomes one with them.
And this is close to how Charles felt about his two great pictures. He wrote to Moreau that his work had ‘the tonalities of an ideal dream’ – an ideal dream being one where you are held in a state of weightless reverie and lose the boundaries of your self.
And Renoir was absolutely furious. ‘Ah that Gustave Moreau, to think he is taken seriously, a painter who has never even learnt how to paint a foot…he knew a thing or two. It was clever of him to take in the Jews, to have thought of painting with gold colours…Even Ephrussi fell for it, who I really thought had some sense! I go and call on him one day, and I come face to face with a Gustave Moreau!’
I imagine Renoir entering the marble hall and coming up those winding stairs past Ignace’s apartment to Charles’s rooms on the second floor, and being let in and finding Moreau’s Jason in front of him: standing naked on the slaughtered dragon, holding up his broken spear and the golden fleece. Medea carries the small flask that contains the magic potion and rests her hand adoringly on his shoulder – ‘a dream, a flash of enchantment’, Laforgue’s ‘strange archaeologies of Moreau’.
Or perhaps he came face to face with Galatée , dedicated ‘ à mon ami Charles Ephrussi ’, a picture described by Huysmans as ‘a cavern illuminated by precious stones like a tabernacle, and containing that inimitable and radiant jewel, the white body, its breast and lips tinted with pink, Galatée, asleep…’ There is certainly a lot of gold here alongside the yellow armchair: Galatée is immured in a faux-Renaissance frame worthy of a Titian.
It is ‘Jew Art’, Renoir writes, galled to find his patron, the editor of the Gazette, with this goût Rothschild stuff on the walls, jewelled and mythic, contaminatingly close to his own paintings. Charles’s salon in the rue de Monceau has become ‘a cavern…like a tabernacle’. It has become a room that could anger Renoir, inspire Huysmans and even impress the sanguine Oscar Wilde: ‘ Pour écrire il me faut de satin
Charles had bought two paintings by Gustave Moreau. Goncourt described his work as the ‘watercolours of a poet goldsmith, which seem to have been washed with the gleams and patina of the treasures in the Thousand and One Nights’. They were rich, highly symbolic, Parnassian paintings of Salome, Hercules, Sappho, Prometheus. Moreau’s subjects are barely clothed, except for a fall of gauze. The landscapes are classical, full of ruined temples, the details exactingly coded. It was all a very, very long way from a meadow in the wind, the currents of a river amongst ice, or a seamstress bent over her work.
Huysmans would write his scandalous novel À rebours ( Against the Grain ) about what it felt like to live with a Moreau painting. Or, to be more exact, in the atmosphere created by a Moreau painting. His hero, Des Esseintes, was based closely on the decadent Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a man dedicated to achieving a totally aestheticised existence, finessing the details of his house so that every sensory experience would immerse him totally. The apogee was a tortoise whose shell was encrusted with gemstones so that its slow passage across a room would enliven the pattern of a Persian carpet. This impressed Oscar Wilde, who noted in French in his Paris journal that ‘a friend of Ephrussi has an emerald-encrusted tortoise. I also need emeralds, living bibelots…’ This was substantially better than opening the door of a vitrine.
In Des Esseintes’s attenuated existence there was one artist ‘who most ravished him with unceasing transports of pleasure – Gustave Moreau. He had purchased his two masterpieces, and night after night he would stand dreaming in front of one of these, a picture of Salome’: he is so involved in these intensely charged paintings that he becomes one with them.
And this is close to how Charles felt about his two great pictures. He wrote to Moreau that his work had ‘the tonalities of an ideal dream’ – an ideal dream being one where you are held in a state of weightless reverie and lose the boundaries of your self.
And Renoir was absolutely furious. ‘Ah that Gustave Moreau, to think he is taken seriously, a painter who has never even learnt how to paint a foot…he knew a thing or two. It was clever of him to take in the Jews, to have thought of painting with gold colours…Even Ephrussi fell for it, who I really thought had some sense! I go and call on him one day, and I come face to face with a Gustave Moreau!’
I imagine Renoir entering the marble hall and coming up those winding stairs past Ignace’s apartment to Charles’s rooms on the second floor, and being let in and finding Moreau’s Jason in front of him: standing naked on the slaughtered dragon, holding up his broken spear and the golden fleece. Medea carries the small flask that contains the magic potion and rests her hand adoringly on his shoulder – ‘a dream, a flash of enchantment’, Laforgue’s ‘strange archaeologies of Moreau’.
Or perhaps he came face to face with Galatée , dedicated ‘ à mon ami Charles Ephrussi ’, a picture described by Huysmans as ‘a cavern illuminated by precious stones like a tabernacle, and containing that inimitable and radiant jewel, the white body, its breast and lips tinted with pink, Galatée, asleep…’ There is certainly a lot of gold here alongside the yellow armchair: Galatée is immured in a faux-Renaissance frame worthy of a Titian.
It is ‘Jew Art’, Renoir writes, galled to find his patron, the editor of the Gazette, with this goût Rothschild stuff on the walls, jewelled and mythic, contaminatingly close to his own paintings. Charles’s salon in the rue de Monceau has become ‘a cavern…like a tabernacle’. It has become a room that could anger Renoir, inspire Huysmans and even impress the sanguine Oscar Wilde: ‘ Pour écrire il me faut de satin
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