jaune ,’ he writes in his Paris journal – ‘To write I need yellow satin.’
I realise that I am trying to police Charles’s taste. I am worried by gold and by Moreau. And even more so by the work of Paul Baudry, the decorator of the ceilings of the Paris Opéra, adept at working in the baroque cartouches of the new Belle Époque buildings of Paris. Baudry’s work was reviled by the Impressionists as meretricious pap – an academic painter like the hated William-Adolphe Bouguereau. He was particularly successful with his nudes. He still is. There is a hugely popular poster of a Baudry with a wave about to break over a stretched-out girl, called Pearl and the Wave , that you can find in the racks of museum shops and on fridge magnets. And Baudry was Charles’s closest painter friend, their letters laced with endearments. Charles was his biographer and was named as his executor.
Perhaps I should continue to hunt down every picture that was in Charles’s room with the netsuke. I start to list all the museums in which his pictures now hang and to trace how they got there. I consider how long it would take to go from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Musée de la Ville de Gérardmer to put Manet’s Races at Longchamp alongside Degas’s double portrait of the General and the Rabbi. I wonder if I should take my white netsuke of the hare with amber eyes in my pocket to reunite object and image. For the span of a cup of coffee I mull this over as a real possibility, a way of keeping moving.
My timetable has disappeared. My other life as a potter is on hold. A museum needs a response. I am away, my assistants say when people ring, and cannot be reached. Yes, a big project. He will return your call.
Instead I make the familiar trip to Paris and stand beneath Baudry’s ceilings in the Opéra and then rush over to the Musée d’Orsay to look at Charles’s single asparagus stem by Manet and the pair of Moreau pictures they now own, to see if it all coheres, if it all sings, if I can see what his eye saw. And, of course, I cannot, for the simple reason that Charles buys what he likes. He is not buying art for the sake of coherence, or to fill gaps in his collection. He is buying pictures from his friends, with all the complexities that brings with it.
Charles has many friendships beyond the studios of painters. Saturday evenings would be spent at the Louvre with colleagues, each collector or writer bringing a sketch or an object, or a problem of attribution for discussion: ‘anything could be brought to the table, save for pedantry! What we would learn there, and never need to doubt! What tireless voyages we made in those beautiful chairs in the Louvre, across all the museums of Europe!’ remembered the art historian Clément de Ris. Charles had stimulating colleagues working at the Gazette . He had friends for neighbours, the Camondo brothers and Cernuschi, men to whom you could happily show an acquisition.
Charles was becoming a public figure. In 1885 he had become the proprietor of the Gazette . He helped raise money for the purchase of a Botticelli for the Louvre. He had his writing. There was his curatorial work: he helped to organise exhibitions of Old Master drawings in 1879, and two of portraits in 1882 and 1885. It was one thing to be a covetous, vagabonding young man and quite another to have these responsibilities and this scrutiny. He had just received the Légion d’honneur for his contribution to the arts.
Most parts of this busy life were lived in the public view of colleagues, neighbours, friends, his young secretaries, his lover and his family.
Proust, a neophyte if not yet quite a friend, had become a regular visitor to the apartment, drinking in Charles’s empyrean conversation, the way he arranged his new treasures, his span across society. Charles knows the socially ravenous Proust well enough to tell him that it is time to leave a dinner after midnight, as the hosts are desperate for bed.
I realise that I am trying to police Charles’s taste. I am worried by gold and by Moreau. And even more so by the work of Paul Baudry, the decorator of the ceilings of the Paris Opéra, adept at working in the baroque cartouches of the new Belle Époque buildings of Paris. Baudry’s work was reviled by the Impressionists as meretricious pap – an academic painter like the hated William-Adolphe Bouguereau. He was particularly successful with his nudes. He still is. There is a hugely popular poster of a Baudry with a wave about to break over a stretched-out girl, called Pearl and the Wave , that you can find in the racks of museum shops and on fridge magnets. And Baudry was Charles’s closest painter friend, their letters laced with endearments. Charles was his biographer and was named as his executor.
Perhaps I should continue to hunt down every picture that was in Charles’s room with the netsuke. I start to list all the museums in which his pictures now hang and to trace how they got there. I consider how long it would take to go from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Musée de la Ville de Gérardmer to put Manet’s Races at Longchamp alongside Degas’s double portrait of the General and the Rabbi. I wonder if I should take my white netsuke of the hare with amber eyes in my pocket to reunite object and image. For the span of a cup of coffee I mull this over as a real possibility, a way of keeping moving.
My timetable has disappeared. My other life as a potter is on hold. A museum needs a response. I am away, my assistants say when people ring, and cannot be reached. Yes, a big project. He will return your call.
Instead I make the familiar trip to Paris and stand beneath Baudry’s ceilings in the Opéra and then rush over to the Musée d’Orsay to look at Charles’s single asparagus stem by Manet and the pair of Moreau pictures they now own, to see if it all coheres, if it all sings, if I can see what his eye saw. And, of course, I cannot, for the simple reason that Charles buys what he likes. He is not buying art for the sake of coherence, or to fill gaps in his collection. He is buying pictures from his friends, with all the complexities that brings with it.
Charles has many friendships beyond the studios of painters. Saturday evenings would be spent at the Louvre with colleagues, each collector or writer bringing a sketch or an object, or a problem of attribution for discussion: ‘anything could be brought to the table, save for pedantry! What we would learn there, and never need to doubt! What tireless voyages we made in those beautiful chairs in the Louvre, across all the museums of Europe!’ remembered the art historian Clément de Ris. Charles had stimulating colleagues working at the Gazette . He had friends for neighbours, the Camondo brothers and Cernuschi, men to whom you could happily show an acquisition.
Charles was becoming a public figure. In 1885 he had become the proprietor of the Gazette . He helped raise money for the purchase of a Botticelli for the Louvre. He had his writing. There was his curatorial work: he helped to organise exhibitions of Old Master drawings in 1879, and two of portraits in 1882 and 1885. It was one thing to be a covetous, vagabonding young man and quite another to have these responsibilities and this scrutiny. He had just received the Légion d’honneur for his contribution to the arts.
Most parts of this busy life were lived in the public view of colleagues, neighbours, friends, his young secretaries, his lover and his family.
Proust, a neophyte if not yet quite a friend, had become a regular visitor to the apartment, drinking in Charles’s empyrean conversation, the way he arranged his new treasures, his span across society. Charles knows the socially ravenous Proust well enough to tell him that it is time to leave a dinner after midnight, as the hosts are desperate for bed.
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