Painted Poetry Colour in Baudelaires Art Criticism Modern French Identities

Modern French Identities 63 Modern French Identities
63
Before becoming a poet, Charles Baudelaire was an art critic; and he Ann Kennedy Smith
Ann Kennedy Smith Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaires Art Criticism

made his literary dbut with the Salon de 1845. Its failure to find a
receptive audience led him to write the groundbreaking Salon de 1846
with its pivotal chapter on colour, in which Baudelaire challenged
fundamental critical concepts of art by insisting on colours complexity,
expressivity and modernity. Through a close reading of his critical Painted Poetry
essays on art, this book examines how Baudelaires thoughts on
colour developed throughout his life and sets them in the context of
traditional views of colour. What effect did the new scientific theories Colour in Baudelaires
of colour harmony, filtered through his conversations with Delacroix Art Criticism
and other artists, have on Baudelaire? Why did he see Daumier as a
colourist, but not Ingres? What made him turn his back on French
art in 1859 and which artist changed his mind? Baudelaires interest
in a highly personal form of colour symbolism is investigated, as well
as the part that colour plays in developing his later, central idea of a
creative and poetic imagination capable of translating all the arts.
Ann Kennedy Smith is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and wrote
Peter Lang
her doctoral thesis on Baudelaires art criticism at the University of
Cambridge. She lives in Cambridge and works as a freelance editor
and tutor for the Institute of Continuing Education at the University
of Cambridge and the Workers Educational Association.
ISBN 978-3-03911-094-0
www.peterlang.com
Modern French Identities 63 Modern French Identities
63
Before becoming a poet, Charles Baudelaire was an art critic; and he Ann Kennedy Smith
Ann Kennedy Smith Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaires Art Criticism

made his literary dbut with the Salon de 1845. Its failure to find a
receptive audience led him to write the groundbreaking Salon de 1846
with its pivotal chapter on colour, in which Baudelaire challenged
fundamental critical concepts of art by insisting on colours complexity,
expressivity and modernity. Through a close reading of his critical Painted Poetry
essays on art, this book examines how Baudelaires thoughts on
colour developed throughout his life and sets them in the context of
traditional views of colour. What effect did the new scientific theories Colour in Baudelaires
of colour harmony, filtered through his conversations with Delacroix Art Criticism
and other artists, have on Baudelaire? Why did he see Daumier as a
colourist, but not Ingres? What made him turn his back on French
art in 1859 and which artist changed his mind? Baudelaires interest
in a highly personal form of colour symbolism is investigated, as well
as the part that colour plays in developing his later, central idea of a
creative and poetic imagination capable of translating all the arts.
Ann Kennedy Smith is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and wrote
Peter Lang
her doctoral thesis on Baudelaires art criticism at the University of
Cambridge. She lives in Cambridge and works as a freelance editor
and tutor for the Institute of Continuing Education at the University
of Cambridge and the Workers Educational Association.
www.peterlang.com
Painted Poetry
M odern F rench I dentities
Edited by Peter Collier
Volume 63
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l l l l l l
Ann Kennedy Smith
Painted Poetry
Colour in Baudelaires Art Criticism
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l l l l l l
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the
Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Smith, Ann Kennedy, 1962-

Painted poetry : colour in Baudelaires art criticism / Ann Kennedy
Smith.
p. cm. -- (Modern French identities ; 63)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-03911-094-0 (alk. paper)
1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867--Knowledge--Art. 2. Baudelaire,
Charles, 1821-1867--Criticism and interpretation. 3. Art
criticism--France--History--19th century. 4. Aesthetics, French--19th
century. 5. Color in art. I. Title.
PQ2191.Z5S545 2011
841.8--dc22
2011001792
ISSN 1422-9005
ISBN 9783035301052
Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2011

Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
info@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net
All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
Printed in Germany
For Sam, Rory and Eve,
with all my love
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
Colour Blindness: Perceptions of Colour before Baudelaire 7
Chapter 2
Colour Vision: The Science of Seeing 47
Chapter 3
Colour and Drawing: Resolving the Conflict? 89
Chapter 4
Colour Symbolism: Art, Poetry and Music 133
Chapter 5
Colour and Imagination: Translating the Dream 173
Conclusion 217
Bibliography 223
Index 233
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Peter Collier for his continuing interest, assistance and

encouragement, as well to Sonya Stephens, Christopher Johnson, Rosemary
Lloyd and John Gage for their helpful comments and advice at various
stages of this manuscript.
I am grateful to David Scott in Dublin for his original inspiration and
guidance, and to the late, brilliant David Kelley, who could not have been
a better introduction to Baudelaire.
I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Cambridge
Institute of Continuing Education and the librarians and staff of the
University Library, Cambridge, for their help and resources.
Lastly, thanks to my family and my friends for their encouragement,
but mostly to Charles, for, among other things, his generous practical help
and his continuing affection.
Abbreviations
OCI and OCII Baudelaire, Charles, Oeuvres compltes, texte tabli,

prsent et annot par Claude Pichois, two volumes
(Paris: Gallimard, 1975, 1976)
Corr. I and II Baudelaire, Charles, Correspondance, texte tabli, prsent
et annot par Claude Pichois avec la collaboration de
Jean Ziegler, two volumes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973)
CJL Conseils aux jeunes littrateurs

EPI Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages (1852)
EP2 Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses uvres (1856)
EU55 LExposition universelle (1855)
F Fuses
FM Les Fleurs du Mal
MBN Le Muse du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle
OVD Luvre et la vie de Delacroix
PA Peintres et aquafortistes
PH Le Pome du hachisch
PV Le Peintre de la vie moderne
QCF Quelques caracturistes franais
RQC Rflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains
RW Richard Wagner et Tannhuser Paris
SP Le Spleen de Paris
S45 Le Salon de 1845
VH Du vin et du hachisch
I have used the word Salon to refer to the annual exhibitions of art, and
Salon in italics to refer to the written reviews of the exhibitions.
Introduction
Although Baudelaires essays on art and artists are not exactly numerous
just four Salon and exhibition reviews, two essays on artists, one essay
on laughter and a handful of short articles on caricaturists and etchers,
they contain so many complex ideas that, as J.A. Hiddleston points out in
Baudelaire and the Art of Memory (1999), a fully comprehensive study of
the art criticism would be a vast and highly complex undertaking.1 On the
other hand, restricting the focus of this book to Baudelaires approach to
colour in art might not seem vast or complex enough. Why only colour,
when Baudelaires writings are characterized by their diversity, shifts in
emphasis, impassioned enthusiasms and fervent hatreds? Why colour in
particular, when he writes so eloquently on sculpture, caricature, etching
and photography as well as painting? And how seriously can we take his
remarks on such an intrinsic part of art anyway, when he himself admits
his susceptibility to an alluring subject matter, constantly reveals his liter-
ary and poetic allegiances, and is at different stages preoccupied by wider
concepts of modernity, beauty and the creative imagination?
Some of the varied themes and influences in Baudelaires art criticism
that have been explored in recent years include parallels with Chevreul by
Bernard Howells and Jennifer Phillips, Michle Hannoosh on the essays
on etching and caricature and Timothy Raser on the use of narrative and
citation in the Salon de 1859.2 Emily Salines and Sonya Stephens both
1 Baudelaire and the Art of Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

2 Bernard Howells, Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy ofHistory
(Oxford: Legenda, 1996), Jennifer Phillips, Relative Color: Baudelaire, Chevreul, and
the Reconsideration of Critical Methodology, Nineteenth-Century French Studies,
33/34 (SpringSummer 2005), pp.342357, Michle Hannoosh, Etching and
Modern Art: Baudelaires Peintres et aquafortistes, French Studies ( January 1989),
pp.4760 and Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity
(University Park: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1992), Timothy Raser, The Simplest
2 Introduction
have written informatively on, respectively, the metaphor of translation

and the importance of the sketch in Baudelaires aesthetic, and the works
of Rosemary Lloyd have contributed to many of these debates.3 Andr
Ferrans LEsthtique de Baudelaire (1933), Margaret Gilmans Baudelaire
the Critic (1943) and Lucie Horners Baudelaire critique de Delacroix (1956)
are still indispensable guides to the criticism as a whole, as are the exten-
sive writings ofClaude Pichois, Felix Leakey, David Kelley, Armand Moss
and Gita May.4 Almost all of these writers allude to Baudelaires interest
in colour, and indeed it would be difficult to write about Baudelaires art
criticism and not mention his interest in colour. His lifelong admiration
for Delacroix and undisguised preference for the colourist approach to
painting is a consistent theme, infiltrating even his articles on lithography
and caricature as well as the essays on literature, poetry and music. This is
not to say that the question of colour itself in Baudelaires art criticism has
been given the attention due to it. Perhaps because it is so apparent, most
critics mention it almost in passing, some even suggesting that his prefer-
ence for expressive colour might have adversely affected his judgement of
Ingres and other artists. The question remains as to how seriously we can
take the approach of a poet such as Baudelaire to such a painterly matter
in any case, and I hope this book will provide some answers to this.
To understand Baudelaires approach to the subject of colour better,
and explore its connections with his poetry and his other critical articles,
it is worth considering colours place in the wider history of aesthetic writ-
ings preceding the nineteenth century. It might appear strange to separate
of Signs: Victor Hugo and the Language of Images in France: 18501950 (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp.123150.
3 Emily Salines, Alchemy and Amalgam: Translation in the Works ofCharles Baudelaire
(Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004) and Sonya Stephens, Painting in the
Studio: Artful Unfinishedness? in Stephens (ed.), Esquisses/bauches: Projects and
Pre-Texts in Nineteenth-Century French Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2007),
pp.4255. Rosemary Lloyds works include The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire
edited by Rosemary Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and
Charles Baudelaire (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).
4 See bibliography for a full list of works by these authors.
Introduction 3
one element of painting from the rest, but this was common practice in
much of the critical discourse on art in France for many years. In Chapter
1, Colour Blindness: Perceptions ofColour before Baudelaire, I consider
some of the statements made about the part that colour should play in art,
from the establishment of the Acadmie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture
in the seventeenth century with its theoretical treatises on art, through the
lofty arguments about ut pictura poesis in the eighteenth century up until
the Salon reviews of Baudelaires time. I trace some of the reasons why,
even by the mid-nineteenth century, the element of colour still possessed
a low status in the eyes of many. The Acadmies purpose, to promote the
arts of painting and sculpture to the same status as that of literature, placed
an early theoretical emphasis on the narrative function of painting, and
this, along with the lengthy process of acquiring the desired level of skill in
draughtsmanship, meant that colour was frequently assigned a decorative or
symbolic role. Roger de Piless arguments for a more serious consideration
of colour contributed to the shift in the political balance of power within
the Academy, although the writings ofWinckelmann, in whose concept of
Beauty colour had little part to play, were arguably more influential in the
neo-classical tradition by the end of the eighteenth century. However, by
this time a new form of writing on art had emerged which was markedly
different from the academic treatises that had gone before, and this took
the form of reviews of art exhibited in the increasingly popular biannual
Salons. Diderots essays giving his personal views on the art on display meant
that a new literary genre, the Salon, was born, and although his understand-
ing of colour and championing of Chardin went some way to redress the
balance in favour of colour techniques, traditional views on colour were
still prevalent by the nineteenth century. Salon writers tended to range
themselves on one side or the other, depending on whether they took the
coloriste- or dessinateur-based approach. Thor and Gautier were just two
of the unlikely allies in this dispute; for different reasons, both argued for
the particular power of colour and suggested that colour technique was
based on a complex set of skills that had barely been acknowledged up until
then. Their views and those of other contemporary critics are examined
more closely in the first chapter.
4 Introduction
Baudelaires first Salon review appeared in 1845, and was far from
achieving the success that he had hoped for. This may have encouraged
him to try a new, bolder approach the following year, when he moved away
from being a conventional salonnier to making serious statements about
modern art, Romanticism and why Delacroix was the nineteenth centurys
greatest artist. One of the most remarkable features of Baudelaires Salon
de 1846 is the groundbreaking chapter on colour early in the essay which
sets out the reasons why colour must be taken seriously as an essential
component of modern art. In Chapter 2, Colour Vision: The Science of
Seeing I consider this in the light of new scientific theories of colour at
the time. Did Chevreuls chemistry-based research on complementary col-
ours have as much influence on him as his personal contact with Delacroix
and Deroy? I consider the evidence, and ask whether even in the 1840s
Baudelaire was less interested in exploring systems of colour tones than in
identifying how certain colour combinations provided a stimulus to his
own imagination. In any case, by emphasizing the complexity of the prin-
ciples that govern the harmony of colour, Baudelaire showed how this part
of painting should be given the intellectual respectability long associated
with draughtsmanship. His insistence that a harmonious colour was an
essential requirement of a painting was closely connected to his conviction
that the modern painting should express the artists temperament in a way
that unites all of paintings components.
The need for harmony is also central to Chapter 3, Colour and Line:
Resolving the Conflict? which considers how the tensions between colour
and line developed for Baudelaire from the early Salons, when he praised
Ingres as a genius along with Delacroix and Daumier, to the searing indict-
ment of a line-based art in the essay Exposition universelle (1855) and after.
This marks a shift in emphasis in Baudelaires approach to art from an
apparent willingness to embrace different styles of art in his early essays
to insisting that only a method and approach to art that was based on the
colourist approach was acceptable, though colour itself did not have to be
present. One reason that I suggest for this change of heart is that unless
Baudelaire tackled directly the inherent flaws of the line-based approach,
with its frequent assumption that colour had to be controlled and sub-
ordinated to a linear structure, he could not assert colours position at
Introduction 5
the heart of artistic creation. So in his early Salons Baudelaire was able to
admire Ingres style of painting because of his skills in drawing and ability
to capture physiognomy, and overlook an approach to colour that was far
from the Delacroix-influenced aesthetic. By 1855, however, Baudelaire had
come to believe that only the line that works harmoniously with colour,
such as Delacroixs, or is based on what he perceives to be colourist princi-
ples, as in the art ofDaumier and, later, Guys, can be accepted. In the 1850s
Daumiers lithographs provided a bridge across what were for Baudelaire
widening differences between colour- and line-based approaches to art,
because he insisted that the lithographs evoked ideas of colour and there-
fore appealed directly to the imagination. At a time when he begins to turn
away from French art in favour of poetry and Wagners music, he discovers
Guys, and with him re-discovers his pleasure in art. For Baudelaire, Guys
was not only the accurate painter of modern life but also the master of the
sketch, and his method of creating bauches parfaites gives Baudelaire a new
understanding how line and colour can be equally expressive.
Chapter 4, Colour Symbolism: Art, Poetry and Music, considers in
more detail Baudelaires approach to colours expressive powers and how
this develops through his criticism and poetry. Despite an early fascination
with Fourierism, Baudelaire rejected a systematic approach to colour sym-
bolism in favour of a strongly individual response to particular colours and
combinations of colour. His assertion that colour is a particularly expressive
form of communication, capable of thinking for itself and directly affect-
ing the spectator by means that are not always understandable, is central
to the articles written about the Exposition universelle (1855). I consider
whether there is a connection between the colours he found particularly
affecting in art and his poetry, and ifBaudelaire was suggesting a particu-
lar affinity with colour and music. In his article on Wagner, Baudelaire
considers the ability of music to translate ideas and, simultaneously, other
arts, and treats it and Hugos poetry as imaginative forms of painting at a
time when he has begun to lose hope in Salon art.
Colours ability to suggest establishes it within a network of connec-
tions which include music, poetry and literature, and Chapter 5, Colour
and Imagination: Translating the Dream considers what links Baudelaires
concept of the creative imagination in the Salon de 1859 with his concept
6 Introduction
of colour. The imaginative involvement on the part of the spectator was

an element that became increasingly important to Baudelaire in his later
criticism, and this is reflected in the 1859 Salon for which he drew a form of
inspiration from the absence of imagination in French art, and by extension,
its cultural life. By 1859 Baudelaires growing confidence as a poet, despite
or even because of the banning ofLes Fleurs du Mal, leads him to seek what
he considered to be poetry in the other arts, and the idea of translation is
central to this in his later critical writings on art, literature and music. He
employs the term both in the sense of arts imaginative ability, translat-
ing the imagination, and how readily it seems to evoke the properties of
another art. The ideal translator is also the poet/critic who brings about
another essential act of translation by possessing both the most receptive
nature and the most expressive form of language.
This book explores how Baudelaires writings on colour reflect and
inform many of his critical preoccupations throughout his life, from the
painting of Delacroix to the music of Wagner. The wish to connect the
art criticism and the poetry has resulted in an emphasis on the subjects of
the works of art that Baudelaire discusses, and much has been written on
his transposition dart poetry, but this tends to overlook Baudelaires own
emphasis on the medium of painting itself. Why did he, as a poet and
writer, place such value on this quintessentially non-verbal artistic lan-
guage, perhaps the most difficult area of painting to describe and express
adequately in words? The subject of colour presented Baudelaire with a
set of unique challenges that would spur him on to greater heights of crea-
tive expression in the critical form, and his interest in what he saw as the
colourist approach to art led him to find connections in the arts that went
beyond the particular medium and played a vital role in his conception of
a distinctly modern art.
Chapter 1
Colour Blindness:
Perceptions of Colour before Baudelaire
Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion) (Mon
cur mis a nu, I, 701)
[] car, trs jeunes, mes yeux remplis dimages peintes ou graves navaient jamais
pu se rassasier, et je crois que les mondes pourraient finir, impavidum ferient, avant
que je devienne iconoclaste. (Salon de 1859, II, 624)
Beginnings
With an artist for a father and living in an apartment full of paintings and
engravings, art certainly formed a large part of Baudelaires world during
his earliest years. In later life he would mock his fathers limited artistic
abilities, but he always respected Franois Baudelaires taste and love of art
and it is significant that in the final Salon that Baudelaire wrote, when he
feels so disaffected with modern French artists and the popular tastes of the
day, that he acknowledges the debt he owes for his love of art to this early
pre-verbal influence of images all around him. Baudelaires first recorded
writings on art, on the other hand, show his debt to a poet as much as to a
painter. While still a schoolboy in 1838, Baudelaire was taken on a school
trip to Versailles, and afterwards wrote to his stepfather about his delight in
the art that he had seen. One exciting moment was seeing for the first time
several works by Delacroix, an artist Baudelaire had recently read about in
newspaper reviews of the 1838 Salon exhibition. At Versailles he admires
most of the paintings on display, including works by Vernet and Scheffer,
8 Chapter 1
artists who had long enjoyed official approval and no doubt would have
appealed to his stepfather too; Baudelaire himself later would come to
despise their popular historical style. But the painting that struck him most
was Delacroixs Bataille de Taillebourg, a dramatic scene which, as Baudelaire
wrote, eclipsed all the other historical paintings on display. As he explained
to General Aupick, his immediate love of Delacroix might have been due
to the enthusiasm of one particular Salon reviewer for the painting:
Je ne sais si jai raison, puisque je ne sais rien en fait de peinture, mais il ma sembl
que les bons tableaux se comptaient; je dis peut-tre une btise, mais la reserve de
quelques tableaux de Horace Vernet, de deux ou trois tableaux de Scheffer, et de la
Bataille de Taillebourg de Delacroix je nai gard souvenir de rien [] je parle peut-
tre tort et travers; mais je ne rends compte que de mes impressions: peut-tre
est-ce l le fruit des lectures de la Presse qui porte aux nues Delacroix?1
The reviewer was none other than Thophile Gautier, the influential poet
and art critic to whom the Fleurs du Mal would be dedicated almost twenty
years later, and who championed Delacroix throughout his life. In the Salon
article on Delacroix that appeared in La Presse on 23 March 1838 Gautier did
not limit himself to the paintings on display alone, including the Bataille de
Taillebourg, but also wrote about the Mort de Sardanapale, the Massacres de
Scio and the Femmes dAlger so that the review took the form of a retrospec-
tive overview of the artists achievements. So it is all the more significant
that even before Baudelaire had seen any painting by Delacroix he had seen
many of his works through the words of a poet. Gautiers descriptions are
certainly stirring stuff. The evocation of Delacroixs Mede Furieuse, for
instance, must have struck the young Baudelaires imagination strongly: le
contraste du vermillon insouciant qui spanouit sur les joues rebondies et
satines des pauvres victimes, avec la verdtre et criminelle pleur de leur
mre forcene, est de la plus grande posie.2 In a few dense lines Gautier
1 Correspondance, texte tabli, prsent et annot par Claude Pichois avec la collabora-
tion de Jean Ziegler, 2vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); 17juillet 1838, pp.5759. Further
references to this work will be included in the text.
2 Gautier, Salon de 1838, La Presse, 2, 16, 22, 23, 26, 31mars, 13avril, 1er mai 1838;
22mars.
Colour Blindness: Perceptions of Colour Before Baudelaire 9
has evoked the drama, beauty and violence of Delacroixs colour, linking
its expressive power to the subject of the painting, and likened the effect
to that of great poetry. It is notable that it is the contrast of red and green
that for Gautier embodies the particular drama of this painting, as it will
in many different forms for Baudelaire throughout his life.
Was it an impulse towards his own future mtier that led Baudelaire to
connect the insights of the poet-critic Gautier with his own first impressions
ofDelacroix? As Claude Pichois notes, lart tait pour lui un destin3 and
so, of course, was poetry; the ability to write sensitively and expressively
about art is closely linked to Baudelaires poetic use of language. Before
seeing the art of his own day, the young Baudelaire had encountered it
through words, and rightly sensed that the writers he most admired were
also attuned to the painters he would admire as soon as he got the chance.
He probably also knew that Delacroix was an artist who provoked strong
reactions in almost everyone who saw his work. Could that be why he
writes of Delacroix to General Aupick? Yet his wish to explain the power
of Delacroixs art even to those who might be least receptive never leaves
him, and even when Delacroix is widely praised, as in 1855, Baudelaire
insists on pointing out that the radical nature of his art has still not been
properly understood. From the beginning, Baudelaires wish was to use his
words to make others see what was uniquely expressive about Delacroixs
colour and the role it played in his art as a whole. When, at the age of
twenty-four, Baudelaire embarked on his career as an art critic he would
soon realize, if he had not already done so already, that most people did
not share his enthusiasm for and understanding of this essential medium
of painting. Centuries of looking at art in certain ways had influenced
how colour was perceived and in this chapter I will look at the history of
writing about colour and consider why it was often considered as a poor
relation in art as a whole.
3 Claude Pichois, Notices, notes et variants in Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres compltes,

texte tabli, prsent et annot par Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p.1252.
Further references to this work will be included in the text.
10 Chapter 1
The Establishment of the Academy and the

Beginnings of Art Criticism
In 1648 the Acadmie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture came into being, the
successful result of several years of petitioning of the young Louis XIV by
a group of court painters led by Charles LeBrun. This new Royal Academy
of art had a twofold aim: to enable royally favoured artists to be free of the
restrictive guild system, or Matrise, and to establish painting as the sister
art of literature, for which the Acadmie Franaise had been established
thirteen years earlier. After 1661 the influential minister Colbert formed a
string ofAcademies so that all of the arts would come under royal control,
reflecting the centralizing power of the young Louis XIV and providing
a higher social status for ambitious artists. In practice, the power of the
Academy was such that what was considered to be arts emancipation from
the institutionalism of the guild soon became another form of imprison-
ment: that of strict doctrine and an inflexible hierarchy within art itself.
As the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner puts it: while apparently combat-
ing the medieval conception of the guild, a system was substituted which
left less of the really decisive freedom to the painter and sculptor than he
had enjoyed under the rule of the guild, and infinitely less than had been
his under the privileges of the previous French kings.4 This shift in status
was to have a momentous effect on painting. Artists were now expected
to conform to the precepts laid down by the Academicians or risk losing
4 Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1940), p.83. Pevsner provides one of the clearest expositions of the
establishment and early years of the Acadmie; see also Andr Fontaine, Les Doctrines
dArt en France; Peintres, Amateurs, Critiques de Poussin Diderot (Paris: H. Laurens,
1909), Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 15001700 (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), pp.192222 and Annie Becqs extensive work Gense de lesthtique
franaise moderne 16801814, 2vols (Pisa: Pacini, 1984). Richard Wrigleys The Origins
of French Art Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) also offers a very informa-
tive history of the period.
status and patronage. The historian Rocheblave describes how this changed
artists fundamental relationship with each other:
De ce jour, lart est devenu, en France, chose de gouvernement. De ce jour, par le

contrat sign entre un roi de dix ans et quelques artistes ambitieux de tenir une place
releve dans ltat, prit fin la communication qui malgr tout navait cess de lier
jusque-l les parties suprieures de lart aux parties infrieures. Une hirarchie allait
sensuivre. Une distinction fondamentale simposait, ds labord, entre ce qui dans
lart est reput noble, et ce qui ne lest pas.5
It is accurate to say that a fundamental distinction would be made, for over

two centuries of Academy rule, between the sort of art considered to be
worthy of serious consideration, and that which was not. One of the great-
est distinctions between the Academy and the guild was the Academys
theoretical basis, as in order to consolidate its position it had to distance
itself from the trappings of mtier still associated with the guild system.
Accordingly, Colbert was to ensure that the focus of painting would shift
from technical expertise to a demonstration of the artists spirituality, so
that when it came to teaching the aspiring artist, theory would become at
least as essential as practical instruction. The most important theoretical
lessons for all aspiring artists were to be found in the Discours, introduced
by Colbert and LeBrun in 1666. These took the form of a detailed discus-
sion each month of a work of art selected by the members of the Academy,
with their words being transcribed for the instruction of others by Andr
Flibien. Each aspect of the painting was separately judged on the basis of
whether or not it conformed to the requirements for great art, and only if
it satisfied all the given criteria would the painting be considered worth-
while. As Pevsner observes, nobody seems to have had any objection to this
dissecting method, and consequently no one can have had any feeling for
5 Simon Rocheblave, Le got en France de 1600 1900 (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin,
1914), p.56. As Annie Becq puts it, soucieux de ntre pas confondus avec de sim-
ples artisans, peintres et sculpteurs ont cherch proclamer leur dignit dartiste, en
affirmant la primaut des oprations intellectuelles sur la pratique dans lexercice
de leur art (Gense I, p.43).
12 Chapter 1
the spiritual oneness of the artists creative activity, or of its product.6 This
type of systematic dissection and analysis of a painting had its influence
well into the nineteenth century.
There are two important aspects to the Academy-influenced attempts
to organize the production and judgement of art. The first and more exten-
sively discussed of these is the dominance of the verbal over the visual.
As Norman Bryson has pointed out in his book Word and Image: French
Painting of the Ancien Rgime, the emphasis on the importance of subject
matter marked the major schism in French painting between those whose
work was based on a written source and those who painted without one:
[] while the history painters were in the Acadmie, the little masters remained
within the old framework The final ascendancy of the Acadmie over the Matrise
marks the institutionally sanctified supremacy of those who painted by text over
those who painted without it.7
The Academicians were convinced that a regular discourse on artistic would

improve an aspiring and ambitious artists work in ways that a practical
mastery of painting techniques never could. The word would be important
in other ways too. For painting to dissociate itself once and for all from its
links with humble craftsmanship, it was agreed that the best sort of paint-
ing was the history painting, a large and imposing commissioned work
used to decorate palaces and churches and that took its inspiration from
the Bible, legend or historical account. Flibien states that for an artist to
attain paintings highest peaks il faut traiter lhistoire et la fable; il faut
reprsenter de grandes actions comme les Historiens, ou des sujets agra-
bles comme des Potes8 and he drew up the famous hierarchy of subject
6 Pevsner, p.94.
7 Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Rgime (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), p.30.
8 Andr Flibien, Confrences de lAcadmie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in
Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes
(Paris: D. Mariette, 1696), V, p.311. In this and subsequent quotations I have retained
the original erratic spelling and punctuation. Further references to this work will be
included in the text.
matter. History painting, the most valued sort of painting, was at the top,
followed by the portrait, the depiction of animals, landscape, and at the
bottom, the still life. This hierarchy of subject matter would affect how
art was perceived for many years to come and its influence can be seen in
all ofBaudelaires Salons, especially his Salon de 1845 with its conventional
ranking of paintings from Tableaux dHistoire to Paysages.
There were of course other types of painting, as mentioned above, but
they were considered to be less important than the accurate and painstak-
ing renderings of what were essentially literary subjects, and so were rarely
acknowledged. The discussions in the Academy about the merits of a paint-
ing instead centred on the artists fidelity to the text from which the picture
derived, and generally Poussin was held up as an example for all artists to
follow. The lengthy discussions on whether or not Poussin was correct in
omitting the biblical camels from his Eliezer et Rebecca are well-known,
and far from untypical (Entretiens, V, 402405). In one Discourse, certain
disagreements on the textual veracity of Poussins Les Isralites recueillant
la manne are soon resolved and Flibien triumphantly announces the art-
ists consummate devotion to the rules not, as we might have expected, of
painting, but of poetry, in this case theatrical unity:
Pour ce qui est davoir represent des personnes, dont les unes sont dans la misre
cependant que les autres reoivent du soulagement; cest en quoi ce savant Peintre
a montr quil toit un vritable Pote, ayant compos son ouvrage dans les rgles
que lArt de la Posie veut quon observe aux pices de Thatre. (Entretiens, V,
427428)
The greatest praise a painter could receive at this time was to be judged
as having surpassed the physical limitations of his art, enabling him to be
classed as an honorary poet. Although, as R.W. Lee suggests in Ut Pictura
Poesis: The Humanistic Theory ofPainting, the learned painter was more
an admired concept than an actual figure in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries,9 the necessity of a liberal education in order to make painting
9 See R.W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory ofPainting (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1967) pp.4148.
14 Chapter 1
a respectable art was accepted by most artists who aspired to, and in the
eighteenth century eventually achieved, the social standing enjoyed by
men of letters.
The second aspect of the early Academys approach to painting has been
discussed less frequently, and yet it had perhaps an even greater influence
on the generations of art critics that followed. This was the implicit hier-
archy of drawing and colour that was implied in the ranking of painting by
subject matter. It was not the case that the Academicians did not mention
colour, but its role was circumscribed to the decorative and the discreet.
If the picture represents a theatrical tableau, it is scarcely surprising that
colour is perceived to function only as costume or dcor. Flibien might
eulogize in vague terms cette merveilleuse harmonie qui fait la beaut du
tableau (Entretiens, V, 442) but by this he in fact means the manner in
which that paintings colour serves to reinforce the paintings discursive
meaning by the simple expedient of signalling the relative importance of
the characters depicted. Of a painting by Raphal he notes that: la figure
du petit Jsus tant la principale de son Tableau, toutes les autres lui cedent
dans la beaut du coloris, dont la fracheur & la vivacit fait quon sy atta-
che tout dun coup comme au principal objet (Entretiens, V, 372). Colour
serves only to highlight in a fairly unsubtle way where the spectator should
be looking, and has no other merit in itself.
Draughtsmanship, on the other hand, enjoyed quite a different status.
Perraults poem La Peinture, which was much praised by the Academicians,
culminates in the anecdote of Corinthia, who, according to myth, was
supposed to have invented painting by tracing the outline of her lovers
shadow on the wall. She did not need colour to invent painting: as Bernard
Teyssdre observes, cest assez lui prouver comme il lui est peu essentiel.10
Instead, drawing was seen as embodying the most important aspects of
painting: expression, subject, organization and perspective as well as reason
and spirituality. Of all of paintings practical aspects, the Academy believed
draughtsmanship to be the most intellectual in nature and for centuries
10 Bernard Teyssdre, Roger de Piles et les dbats sur le coloris au sicle de Louis XIV
(Paris: la Bibliothque des arts, 1957), p.101.
it formed the core of artistic instruction. Students were forbidden to use

colour until they had mastered the skills of drawing, and only drawing was
practised within the walls of the Academy itself. An engraving by C.N.
Cochin, dated 1763, shows how drawing skills were taught: the students
are depicted as firstly copying from drawings on the left, then drawing from
an antique plaster cast in the centre (the intermediate stage of their train-
ing) and finally from a live nude on the right (the most advanced stage of
instruction).11 Not until students were accomplished draughtsmen were
they permitted to acquire the skills of painting, modelling and carving,
back in their masters workshop. This style of teaching persisted well into
the nineteenth century.
The purity and simplicity of draughtsmanship suggested to
Academicians all the more refined elements of art. It did not risk any asso-
ciation with the physical connotations of craft; students were encouraged to
emulate the Classical lines of the antique; and, perhaps most importantly,
drawing could be taught according to rational precepts and was considered
to be open to intellectual analysis. Colour, on the other hand, was generally
assumed to require only basic training, or fortuitous ability, on the part of
the painter and had at best only a peripheral and decorative function in
painting. At worst, if it became too much of a presence within the paint-
ing, colour might even detract from the important business of elevating art
into the spiritual realm. Colour as an expressive force was not recognized
at all at this time. Expression in painting was understood to relate only to
the accurate delineation of human expressions and gesture, and there were
aids such as leading painter and founder of the Academy LeBruns work
on physiognomy (human and animal) for the aspiring artist to study at
length.12 The human face and gesture must be as readable as the subject-
text of the painting and for this there was no particular need for colour;
only skilful and accurate draughtsmanship were essential. LeBruns book
11 Reproduced in Pevsner, Figure 9, pp.9293.

12 Charles LeBrun, Mthode pour apprendre dessiner les passions: propose dans une
confrence sur lexpression gnrale et particulire (Amsterdam: Chez Franois van-der
Plaats, 1702).
16 Chapter 1
provides a clear indication of the Acadmies view of what was important in

painting, because, as he writes, if the aspiring artist possessed this book he
would have the means of making the expressions and gestures of his char-
acters exact and entirely legible to the spectator. In LeBruns concentration
on the face and the cataloguing of its expressions to make it comprehen-
sible in the same way that the subject-text of the painting must be readily
comprehensible, there is no particular need for colour; only skilful and
accurate draughtsmanship are essential. It is no coincidence that Poussin,
who was judged to unite all the qualities required by the Acadmie in his
paintings, was known as Poussin le Dessinateur and all young artists were
encouraged to emulate him.
While draughtsmanship was seen as capable of embodying ideas, colour
was only to be considered once the real business of constructing a paint-
ing was complete. In his book on rhetoric published in 1675 Lamy drew
comparisons between speaking and painting, writing that les peintres
ne couchent pas leurs couleurs avant quils aient form dans leur esprit
limage de ce quils veulent reprsenter.13 In other words, it was assumed
that drawing was connected to the very essence of a painting and colour
was merely an afterthought. In the seventeenth century, as Annie Becq
observes, cest au dessin qu[e les acadmiciens] demandent des vertus gales
celles des arts du langage, la transparence lide du signe linguistique.14
The expressive powers of drawing were seen as enabling art to rise above
the material form and elevate painting into the spiritual realm, and Becq
rightly summarizes the nature of the essential split that was established by
the Academy between drawing and colour:
Cette aptitude signifier semble contribuer purer et spiritualiser laspect matriel,
visible et technique, que revt forcment le dessin dans la dtermination des formes.
La supriorit quon lui proclame sur la couleur relve en effet du privilge du
13 Quoted in Annie Becq, Rhtoriques et littrature dart en France la fin du XVIIe

sicle: le concept de couleur, Cahiers de lAssociation Internationale des Etudes
Franaises, 24 (1972), pp.215232, p.228.
14 Becq, Rhtoriques, p.228.
spirituel sur le matriel, de la conception sur lexcution, de limage dans lesprit sur
la reprsentation visible.15
Drawing, which was spelt as dessein or dessin well into the eighteenth
century, also benefited from the double meaning implied in the word.
The linguistic historian Brunot has traced the history of the two spell-
ings and their sources, and points out that, in the long period where the
two words were confused, on ne soccupe pas si dessin a en mme temps
le sens de plan daction, de conduite, etc.16 In fact, it is more than likely
that the Academicians chose to exploit the sense of the word and to see
drawing as synonymous with the central, organizing idea of the painting,
and accordingly they instructed their pupils to concentrate their efforts
on the perfection of draughtsmanship above all if they wished their art to
aspire to poetry.
De Piles: Putting the Argument for Colour
There was, however, one group of artists and writers who took issue with
the Academicians restrictive views at this time, in particular those on
colour. Their dispute with the Academy became known as the querelle des
anciens et des modernes, popularly referred to as the quarrel between the
Poussinistes and the Rubnistes. On one side were those who believed that
there was only one valid view to be held on art, which was the one that
was enshrined in the Academys teaching and best exemplified by the art
ofPoussin. On the other side of the divide were those who wished to allow
for a more diverse conception of what was good in art, one wide enough to
embrace the supposedly lower forms of subject matter such as the landscape
and still life, and able to acknowledge the genius of Rubens non-linear
15 Becq, Gense, p.68.

16 F. Brunot, Histoire de la langue franaise des origines nos jours, 8vols (Paris: Librairie
Armand Colin, 1966), VI, p.729.
18 Chapter 1
style and superlative colour. Bernard Teyssdre, writing of the querelle,

makes the important point that at this time nul ne contestait le charme
du coloris, ni la suprmatie vnitienne en cette partie. Tout le dbat portait
sur son importance relativement au dessin.17 The quarrel was to last from
1671 until the end of the century, when, with LeBruns fall from political
favour and de Piles instalment as an honorary member of the Academy,
the Rubniste champions of anti-academic taste are held to have won the
quarrel. It is nevertheless clear, as will be seen in the second part of this
chapter, that many of LeBruns ideas on the potential perniciousness of
colour survived intact well into the nineteenth century.
At the head of the Rubniste camp was writer and art-collector Roger
de Piles who, from his earliest theoretical pamphlet Dialogue sur le coloris of
1673 took issue with the tenets which the members of the Academy strove
to lay down on matters of painting. De Piles was the first to challenge the
supremacy of drawing in cogent terms. Although he, like most of his con-
temporaries, spells the word as Dessein, he firmly rejects the wider mean-
ings of this word as too vast to be meaningful, insisting that it should be
restricted to meaning only la circonscription des formes extrieures.18 His
writings show that for de Piles it is colour, not draughtsmanship, which
holds the key to a better understanding of painting:
Les oreilles & les yeux sont les portes par lesquelles entrent nos jugemens sur les con-
certs du Musique & sur les ouvrages de Peinture. Le premier soin du Peintre aussi-bien
que du Musicien, doit donc tre de rendre lentre de ces portes libre et agrable par
la force de leur harmonie, lun dans le Coloris accompagn de son Clair-obscur, et
lautre dans ses accords. (Cours, p.9)
De Piles envisages painting as un Tout harmonieux (Cours, p.111) and to

this end colour, and the disposition which orders it, must take precedence.
He places much emphasis on colours imitative qualities and its capacity
to create illusion and uses this aspect to emphasize colours advantages
17 Teyssdre, p.144.
18 Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris: chez Jacques Estienne, 1708),
p.126. Further references to this work will be included in the text.
over drawing. Nature nest visible que parce quelle est colore (Cours,
p.312), he maintains, and argues against the negative aspects attached
to the idea of tromperie by simultaneously stressing that the picture is,
of necessity, une superficie plate which only lartifice que la science du
coloris enseigne can supplement (Cours, p.306). This emphasis on paint-
ings pictorial qualities is in direct contrast to Flibiens praise for Poussin
because his paintings conformed to theatrical convention. De Piles explic-
itly rejects the Academys subject-centred notion of painting; the painter
nest Historien que par accident (Cours, p.9). However, de Piles did not
consider himself to be an opponent of the Acadmie (and LeBrun scores
highly in his Balance des Peintres of 1708) but he did question many of its
values and its absolutist rule. Moreover, he did not simply see colour as a
force of opposition to drawing; he was the first, and for a long time the
only, writer to explore the structure of the painters colour per se. From his
earliest writings he established an important distinction to be made within
the different manifestations of colour:
il y a grande diffrence entre couleur et coloris et je vous ai fait voir que le coloris
ntait point, ni le blanc ni le noir, ni le jaune, ni le bleu, ni aucune autre couleur
semblable, mais que ctait lintelligence de ces mmes couleurs dont le peintre se
sert pour imiter les objects naturels: ce que nont pas les teinturiers.19
De Piles differentiates between couleur (the seductive colours to be found

in nature or the dyers cloth) and the painterly term coloris and argues that
as the artists coloris is based on both science and skill it is therefore as spir-
itual in character as drawing was reputed to be. One of the problems with
colours status, de Piles pointed out, is how little was known about it:
Le Dessin a des rgles fondes sur les proportions, sur lanatomie et sur une expri-
ence continuelle; au lieu que le coloris na point encore de rgles bien connues, et que
lexprience quon y fait tant quasi toujours diffrente, cause des diffrentes sujets
que lon traite, na pu encore en tablir de bien prcises. (Dialogue, pp.45)
19 Dialogue sur le coloris (Paris: N. Langlois, 1673), p.30.

20 Chapter 1
This distinction between natural colour and the colour created by the artist
will be a significant factor in Baudelaires analysis of colour in his chapter
De la couleur of 1846. De Piles points out that in his time colours rules
were not generally understood in the way that drawings were; and a proper
vocabulary to discuss it did not yet exist. The Academys tendency to com-
pare painting to poetry and to argue for the superiority of draughtsmanship
above all else were both missing the point where painting was concerned,
de Piles argues. In a striking phrase, he writes that il me semble donc quon
peut regarder le coloris comme la diffrence de la Peinture; & le Dessein,
comme son genre (Cours, p.312). The essential argument for de Piles was
not about Poussin and Rubens, or, for that matter, drawing and colour.
What is important about painting is its essential diffrence, the thing that
makes it painting, and de Piles understood that attitudes to painting could
not change unless it could be defined in its diffrence, not in its relation to
literature. As Thomas Puttfarken puts it:
The basic theoretical difference between Flibien and de Piles is not so much about
the respective status of dessin and couleur, or of Poussin and Rubens, but about the
fundamental question as to what constitutes a proper theory of painting. While
Flibien stresses the similarities between painting and poetry, de Piles sets out to
investigate those parts which are proper to painting only. He wants to define painting
not according to its genre, its genus, but according to its diffrence, its species.20
Colours function within painting could not afford to be understated.

De Piless writings were ground-breaking because he was convinced, as
Baudelaire would be years later, that an understanding of colour was central
to an understanding of painting in general. It was by stressing the artists
intellectual ability to choose and order the colours of nature that de Piles
was one of the first writers to establish colour as a cosa mentale, to borrow
Annie Becqs phrase, and this links the eighteenth-century aesthetician to
Baudelaire, as Becq observes:
20 Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles Theory of Art (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1985), p.42.
Il y a aussi de linvisible, pour ainsi dire, dans la couleur comme dans le dessin: elle ne
sadresse pas seulement au sens de la vue: les taches colores constituent un systme
de relations rgi par une logique perceptible lintelligence sinon rductible en rgles
exactes. Cest tout le problme de lexprience esthtique.21
In order to assign colour the respect and attention due to colour, there had
to be an understanding of its inherent logic and a vocabulary to discuss
it. De Piles and the arguments of the Rubnistes had extended languages
scope on the matter of colour considerably;22 in the following chapters I
will show how Baudelaire through his Salons sought to bring about a way
of considering colour which would allow for the complexity of its structure
and its central significance in painting.
Ut pictura poesis
Despite de Piless pioneering writings on the issue of paintings diffrence,

the hierarchy of genres survived through the eighteenth century, and was
perhaps a state of affairs that few sought to question. As Richard Wrigley
observes:
Assessing the historical significance of the hierarchy of the genres has been made more
difficult by virtue of the implicit assumption in much art-historical writing that its
maintenance corresponds to a state of reactionary inertia [] While the Acadmie
in the eighteenth century may have been the prime exponenent of the essentially
hierarchical nature of art practice, it is clear that the hierarchy was accepted as a
21 Becq, Gense, I, p.75.

22 F. Brunot writes: Il nest pas douteux que la querelle entre Poussinistes et Rubnistes
nait enrichi le vocabulaire de lart. Coloris, colorir existaient dj, mais on vit appara-
tre coloriste et colorier (VI, 737). Nevertheless, Brunot exaggerates the way in which
colour was written about at this time when he describes the later seventeenth-century
language of colour generally as un idiome abondant capable de tout exprimer
(VI, 741).
22 Chapter 1
corner-stone of aesthetic common sense by artists and critics of all persuasions, who
cannot be collectively written off as victims of institutional conformism.23
The desire to link painting to the written word and Horaces stipulation
ut pictura poesis (as in painting, so in poetry) continued to be quoted by
many aestheticians. The Academician Caylus drily remarks that les potes,
les historiens, en un mot tous les auteurs, grands et petits, ne croiraient
pas avoir fait la plus mdiocre brochure, sils navaient tir des comparai-
sons de la peinture: cest llgance du jour.24 In Les Beaux-arts rduits
un mme principe of 1746, Charles Batteux attempted to establish formal
correspondences between poetry and painting with the imitation of nature
as their common principle, and he equated desseing with fable, and
coloris with versification in order to endow the art with a borrowed
respectability.
In contrast, two eighteenth-century writers who chose to focus on
the particularly visual aspects of art, albeit with very different conclusions
from de Piles, were the critic and historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann
and the philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In 1755 Winckelmann
had written in Histoire de lart chez les anciens that the point of the classic
sculpture of Laocon attacked by a sea serpent was to depict the beauty
of a mans nobility and dignity despite great pain. In his Laokon: or, The
limits ofPoetry and Painting (1766; first published in France in 1802) Lessing
took this a stage further when he used the sculpture to define an essential
difference between art and literature: whereas the poetic account, in this
case Virgils, could express the pain and suffering undergone by Laocon,
the sculptor had no choice but to depict the beauty of the figure because
to try to emulate the poems description of his torment would be to make
something that was not beautiful and therefore not art. Lessing used this
argument to condemn most forms of historical painting in which telling
the story was paramount and physical beauty too often relegated to an
insignificant position. He insisted that expression was part of poetrys,
not paintings, domain, and in painting it only served to interfere with the
23 Wrigley, p.286.
24 Quoted in Brunot, VI, p.775.
depiction of beauty. With this assertion he rejected the long-held notion of

ut pictura poesis, but with it also the power of painting to express anything
except physical beauty.
Although the writings of Winckelmann and Lessing arose in part
from the wish to emphasize the visual qualities of art too long subju-
gated to criteria more properly associated with literature, colour did not
become any more valued during this period, but rather was accorded a
smaller role than ever. Indeed, in 1795 the serious artist was advised to
avoid its temptations in Watelet and Levesques Dictionnaire des arts de
peinture, sculpture et gravure: Peignez-vous pour parler sur-tout lil?
Que ltude du coloris soit votre principale occupation. Peignez-vous
pour parler lame? Que ltude de la couleur soit subordonne aux par-
ties dont lame est sur-tout affecte.25 The notion of le beau idal was a
subject that obsessed the French aestheticians writing in the early part
of the nineteenth century. The renaissance of interest in ancient Greek
sculpture initiated by Winckelmann in the latter half of the eighteenth
century led to two quite different concepts of beauty being promulgated
by Emric-David and Quatremre de Quincy. The title ofEmric-Davids
work of 1805 indicates something of the nature of his approach: Recherches
sur lart statuaire, considr chez les anciens et chez les modernes, ou mmoire
sur cette question propose par lInstitut national de France: Quelles ont t
les causes de la perfection de la sculpture antique et quels seroient les moyens
dy atteindre?26 In his book Emric-David maintained that the beauty of
antique statuary was due exclusively to its perfect proportions, and these
had been calculated from les canons mathmatiques as well as direct
observation. Consequently la vrit de limitation (Recherches, p.43) was
everything in art, he insisted, and French art would only become great if
it observed this principle.
25 Watelet et Levesque, Dichonnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure, 5vols

(Paris: chez Panckouke, 1795), I, p.518.
26 Emric-David, Recherches sur lart statuaire (Paris: Chez la veuve Nyon ain, 1805).
Further references to this work will be included in the text.
24 Chapter 1
Imiter, cest lart; imiter ce qui est beau, aprs lavoir choisi, cest lart clair des
lumires de got; imiter ce qui est beau, grand et expressif tout--la-fois, cest lart
guid par le got et par la philosophie: mais imiter enfin, imiter avec fidelit, cest
lart dans son essence mme. (Recherches, p.236)
Believing that no artist could hope to surpass natural beauty, this theorist
suggested that art should be governed by the principle of le Vrai idal, and
present le beau visible by imitating the most beautiful forms (Recherches,
p.276).
Emric-David considered that the etymology of the word idal, from
the Greek eido (je vois), gave substance to his claim that ideal beauty lay
in imitation. Quatremre de Quincy also employed the etymological roots
of the word to support his argument in his reply to Emric-Davids work,
written in three articles in 1805 but not published until 1837 in book form
as Essai sur lidal dans ses applications pratiques aux uvres de limitation
propre des arts du dessin.27 Quatremre translates eido as voir par les yeux
de lesprit (Essai sur lidal, p.30) and maintains that it is arts function
not to imitate or to be pleasing to the eye but to satisfy a moral demand
for spiritual beauty,
[] cette sorte de beaut que lart, forc demployer la matire, ne peut pas ne point
rendre visible lorgane physique, mais qui ne fait quy passer, si lon peut dire, pour
sadresser plus particulirement encore lentendement, lme, au sentiment, cest-
-dire aux yeux de lesprit, plutt qu ceux du corps. (Essai sur lidal, pp.3031,
Quatremres italics)
According to his Essai sur le but et les moyens de limitation dans les beaux-
arts of 1823 art should strive to suppress la jouissance matrielle des sens
in order to encourage le plaisir intellectuel de lesprit. Quatremre carries
Lessings neo-classical approach to art into nineteenth-century France when
he condemns those artists who are prepared to changer le plasir intel-
lectuel de lesprit contre la jouissance matrielle des sens, in other words,
27 Quatremre de Quincy, Essai sur lidal dans ses applications pratiques aux uvres de
limitation propre des arts du dessin (Paris: A. Le Clre et cie., 1837). Further refer-
ences to this work will be included in the text.
colour.28 In the next section we will look at how many other nineteenth-
century critics of art continued to see the role of colour as working against
paintings best interests.
Diderot and the beginnings of the Salon
Although the idea of a public exhibition of art was distasteful to many

Academicians, the year 1699 saw the first Salon to be held in the Louvre,
a tradition that would continue throughout most of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. In 1747 La Font de Saint-Yenne wrote the first account
of a public exhibition of art, and set the tone for future critics by proclaim-
ing that le peintre historien est le seul peintre de lme and that les autres
ne peignent que pour les yeux.29
The first writer to make the Salon review into a work of literature
in its own right was of course Diderot. Unlike La Font de Saint-Yenne,
Diderot neither over-valued the history painting (he preferred the genre
paintings of Greuze) nor underestimated the significance of colour, and
it was he who provided the model that Baudelaire would follow. In the
section entitled, with ironic modesty, Mes petites ides sur la couleur in
his Essais sur la peinture of 1766, Diderot demonstrates that far from being
a pernicious influence upon painting, it is colour which gives it life, and
is, moreover, a quality all too rarely found: Cest le dessin qui donne la
forme aux tres; cest la couleur qui leur donne la vie. Voil le souffle divin
qui les anime On ne manque pas dexcellents dessinateurs; il y a peu de
grands coloristes.30 For Diderot, the great colourist is one who is un grand
28 Quatremre de Quincy, Essai sur le but et les moyens de limitation dans les beaux-arts
(Paris: Treuttel et Wrtz, 1823), p.328.
29 Quoted in Fontaine, p.255.
30 Denis Diderot, Essais sur la peinture (1766) in uvres sthtiques, textes tablis, avec
introductions, bibliographies, notes et relevs de variantes, par Paul Vernire (Paris:
Garnier frres, 1959), p.674.
26 Chapter 1
harmoniste Cest celui qui a pris le ton de la nature et des objets bien
clairs, et qui a su accorder son tableau.31 In his Salons, it is Chardin who
fulfils most of these requirements, and Diderot often attempts to describe
the nature of his colour. At first he applauds its realistic quality; Chardins
harmonie des couleurs et des reflets is described as providing above all
une vrit tromper les yeux.32 In subsequent Salons, however, Diderot
begins to appreciate colour not just in terms of its realistic qualities, but
also as an ingenious play of tonal harmonies on the canvas:
Les biscuits sont jaunes, le bocal est vert, la serviette blanche, le vin rouge, et ce jaune,
ce vert, ce blanc, ce rouge, mis en opposition, rcrent lil par laccord le plus parfait.
Et ne croyez pas que cette harmonie soit le rsultat dune manire faible, douce et
lche; point du tout; cest partout la touche la plus vigoureuse.33
Diderot does speak of Chardins consummate awareness of la science de

la couleur, but more often he prefers to allude to Chardins magie, refer-
ring to the artist as a grand magicien,34 rather than analysing the workings
of that science. He was reluctant, or unable, to take the necessary steps
towards examining colour in detail, to be able to transformer sa volupt
en connaissance, to paraphrase Baudelaire. For instance, Diderot praises
the sea-scapes ofJoseph Vernet for their extrme vrit, when it is apparent
to us that it is the dramatic contrast of the colours of fire and moonlight
therein which capture his imagination: ces deux contrastes font un effet
merveilleux dans ce tableau, et, par un mystre qui tient la force de lart, ils
sentraident mutuellement.35 This could be a foreshadowing ofBaudelaires
attraction to the complementary warm and cool colours best exempli-
fied by red and green. Instead Diderot perpetuated some of the ideas of
the colourist when he wrote (even if his tone is mildly ironic): celui qui a
le sentiment vif de la couleur, a les yeux attachs sur la toile; sa bouche est
31 Essais sur la peinture, uvres sthtiques, p.678.

32 Salon de 1763, uvres sthtiques, p.483.
entrouverte; il halte; sa palette est limage du chaos.36 Although his art

criticism is now perhaps best remembered for his enthusiasm for Greuze
and Chardin, Diderots attention to painterly effects and his allusions to
a science of colour were to have a considerable influence on the aesthetic
of Baudelaire.
Despite Diderots best efforts, most Salon writing in the first part of the
nineteenth century continued to be structured along the lines laid down by
the hierarchy of genre established in the early days of the Acadmie. By the
nineteenth century the shift of emphasis from commissioned to un-commis-
sioned art meant that the Salon became an increasingly important means
for artists to find purchasers for their work. The historian Theodore Zeldin
points out that the figure of three or four hundred paintings exhibited in
the Salons of the eighteenth century effectively quadrupled during the first
half of the nineteenth century; and by 1830 the demand for an exhibition
was such that the Salon had become an annual rather than a biennial event.37
The simultaneous growth of the press ensured that the critical review of the
Salon established itself as a journalistic event in many newspapers, mostly
written in a series of articles ranging across several months. These Salons, as
the reviews became known, were written by men whose background might
include an artistic education such as Davids ex-pupil Delcluze, but just as
easily by those with political leanings (Tardieu, Thiers) or, as Zeldin puts
it, part-time writers, journalists, academics, novelists, failed painters, and
leisured civil servants.38 For many of these writers, the huge popularity of
the Salon exhibition and the pressure of having to produce opinions on
hundreds of paintings and sculptures for the benefit of an increasingly
consumerist public resulted in a good deal of hack work and snap judge-
ments; even Gautier complained that the limitations imposed upon him
by regular Salon writing for the newspapers had forced him to tailor his
style accordingly: linvasion du cant et la ncessit de me soumettre aux
36 Essais sur la peinture, uvres esthtiques, pp.674675.

37 Theodore Zeldin, France 18481945, 5vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980),
IV, Taste and Corruption, p.96.
38 Zeldin, IV, p.119.
28 Chapter 1
convenances des journaux, ma jet dans la description purement physique,

je nai plus nonc de doctrine et jai gard mon ide scrte.39
In 1845 Baudelaire too was to turn his hand to this style of writing, and
if at first he followed the model of those art critics whose duty was to guide
the public chapter by chapter through the paintings organized by genre, just
a year later he would organize his Salons and art criticism according to his
own creative preoccupations. But before we consider Baudelaires concept
of colour in his articles and essays, it will be worthwhile considering, from
the mass of newspaper critiques, something of prevailing attitudes towards
art as a whole and colours function within it.
Even though by the 1820s the history painting, or grande peinture,
was practised by only a minority of artists, it still dominated the way most
critics reviewed the art of the day. Despite the introduction of a grand prix
for historic landscape in 1817 even the more progressive art critics were
still influenced by the priorities established a century and a half previously
by Flibien.40 In 1824 the writer on Le Courrier franais, Alphonse Rabbe,
proposes to examine that years paintings daprs lordre convenu de leur
importance Ainsi, les grandes toiles seront en premire ligne, et les tab-
leaux de chevalet aprs.41 Size, for this and for many other critics, provided
the simplest indication of a paintings importance; the bigger the canvas,
the more worthwhile the painting, and accordingly the more space the
critic might usefully devote to describing it. Hence Champfleurys half-
serious, half-satirical explanation of why Vernets Bataille dIsly of 1846
was not as popular as his Prise de la smalah dAbd-el-Kader Tanguin of
39 Quoted by Pontus Grate, Deux critiques de lart de lpoque romantique: Gustave

Planche et Thophile Thor (Stockholm, 1959), p.65.
40 I.J. Lochhead believes that the new prestige which landscape painters began to enjoy
during the 1760s continued to grow during the last three decades of the century.
During this period a growing number of critics questioned the validity of the hier-
archy of genres; see The Spectator and the Landscape in the Art Criticism of Diderot
and his Contemporaries (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), p.17. Although
there is a gradual changing in attitudes towards the importance of genre, most sig-
nificantly in the case of landscape, I have not found evidence to suggest that many
critics questioned the idea that some paintings were more important than others.
41 Alphonse Rabbe, Beaux-arts, Le Courrier franais. 2627aot.
1843: it was simply due to the fact that the earlier painting was bigger.42
The larger the painting, the more important the subject matter was. The
choice of subject, indeed, was thought by many to constitute the artists
finest achievement, Rabbe believing it to be ce quun peintre doit mditer
le plus profondment,43 while the critic of the Quotidienne of the same year
was unable to stress enough de quelle importance il est pour un peintre de
bien choisir un sujet.44 Consequently, throughout most of this period many
columns of the annual Salons were devoted to the lengthy and detailed
descriptions of the stories told by individual paintings with little atten-
tion being paid to actual technique. Moreover, the physical substance of
the paint itself was even suspected of hindering the smooth communica-
tion of the artists message to the spirit of the spectator. Above all it was
colours threat of distracting the eye from the all-important subject matter
that the more conservative critics attacked in the name of preserving arts
nobler qualities. Such qualities were still associated inevitably with arts
aspirations to attain the same level of respect attached to her sister art
poetry, which was seen as having the advantage of not being hampered
by the crude visual stimulus of painting. Both Rabbe and Mly-Janin are
convinced, surtout aujourdhui o nous sommes rassasis de correction
de style, dhabile maniement de la couleur that le matriel de lart, quels
que soit ses prestiges, ne peut plus suffire lexigence des esprits,45 and
doubt that la peinture, avec toute sa puissance de rendre tout sensible
aux yeux, puisse jamais arriver cet effet prodigieux que produit le pote,
qui cependant ne sadresse qu la pense.46 It is little wonder that colour
was seen to embody the very essence of that physicality which prevented
painting from reaching the spiritual heights of poetry.
42 See D.A. Flanary, Champfleury: The Realist Writer as Art Critic (Ann Arbor, MI:
UMI Research Press, 1980), p.67.
43 Rabbe, 1824, 29aot.
44 M. Mly-Janin, Salon de 1824, La Quotidienne, 28aot, 4, 12, 16septembre, 4, 10,
17, 19octobre, 16, 19novembre, 1er, 13dcembre 1824, 18janvier 1825 (signed M.-J.),
4septembre.
45 Rabbe, 1824, 29aot.
46 Mly-Janin, 1824, 19novembre.
30 Chapter 1
Even among the more progressive and informed writers, such as the
young Thiers in his early writerly incarnation, there was a suspicion that too
much colour might get in the way of the paintings true purpose. Although
an early supporter ofDelacroix (and in 1846 Baudelaire will speak as warmly
of Thiers 1822 Salon as he does of Diderots Salons), Thiers is convinced
that the physical presence of colour has little or no useful part to play in
the drama of the history painting, and he excuses another artists inferior
technique by stating that la couleur dans la peinture dhistoire est, notre
gr, un mrite fort accessoire.47 An appealing colour is appropriate, Thiers
explains, for un tableau de chevalet but
[] dans une grande composition, lexpression, le caractre, le dessin, leffet drama-
tique, voil ce qui importe. Que tout le tableau soit plong si lon veut dans une cou-
leur uniforme; que les nuances de chaque objet soient seulement indiques, pourvu
que le ton gnral ne soit pas lourd, et laisse arriver jusqua nos yeux la grandeur des
effets, lobjet de la grande peinture est rempli.48
The message is clear: for Thiers and the many others who still saw history
painting as embodying the finest form of art, colours role was, and should
remain, as minimal as possible. The appreciation of an artists touche and
effet was limited to paintings belonging to what was assumed to be a lower
order and it was generally believed that colour ought to play a lesser part
in serious paintings, lest the visual aspect interfere with the higher aims
of painting.
Draughtsmanship, on the other hand, was still accorded the spir-
itual status that colour lacked. We can see from Thiers summary of what a
grande composition must include that le dessin is considered to be essential
where colour is not. Indeed, in the first half of the nineteenth century the
forms of teaching in the studios of art, with the emphasis on mastering the
neo-classical line first and foremost, had altered little since the Academys
inception. In The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century,
Albert Boime describes how throughout the first half of the nineteenth
47 Thiers, Exposition de 1824, Le Globe, p.36.

48 Thiers, p.36.
century, despite the gradual erosion of the hierarchy of genre, the Academys
teachings on art remained firmly grounded in the mastery of the neoclas-
sical line:
The Academic tradition has always stressed draughtsmanship and linear model-
ling, and for this reason the contour reproduction, or trait, of engravings was not
questioned as a valid principle of instruction until well into the century. Beginning
with his earliest training, the art student was taught the use of linear design as the
basis for visual representation, and the standard for successful drawing became the
scrupulous imitation of the smallest details.49
Amaury-Duval describes how Ingres forbade his pupils to use colour until
they had first mastered the copying of the gravure and subsequently the
bosse (a plaster cast of either individual elements of face or body or whole
statues, based on antique sculptures). This familiar process can be witnessed
even in Baudelaires own schoolboy pride in being premier au dessin (most
likely to be the copying of engravings), and his pleasure at being allowed
to progress is apparent: et lon ma fait passer dans la premire division o
lon dessine des acadmies daprs la bosse (Corr. I, 50, fvrier 1838).
However, by the 1820s there were dramatic challenges to the more
traditional approach to art in France. The increasing popularity of the art
ofGricault, Sigalon and Delacroix, the so-called Romantic artists, meant
that some critics of the 1820s and 1830s now began to call for an apprecia-
tion of their painterly abilities which traditional forms of criticism had no
means of accounting for. Old arguments concerning the relative values of
line and colour were revived in order to assert the superiority of one form
of art over another. Painters were categorized as coloristes or dessinateurs
and discussed accordingly; to each group was apportioned a set of endemic
values and principles which individual painters could do little to escape. The
head of the dessinateur school was assumed to be Ingres, while Delacroix
and his followers were labelled coloristes, with all that the term implied.
And it implied much, as colourist painting was inevitably linked with
49 Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Phaidon, 1971), pp.1920.
32 Chapter 1
Romanticism, and Romanticism in painting was considered by many to

suggest violent excess after Delacroixs first submissions to the Salon, the
Scenes des massacres de Scio of 1824 and the voluptuous sado-masochism
of his La Mort de Sardanapale of 1827. The critics views on the relative
merits of line and colour often took the form of a crude and simplistic
contrast. After seeing Delacroixs Sardanapale one critic was convinced
that Romantic painting sought only to
[] mettre tout feu et sang, accumuler les blessures, pourfendre les guerriers, con-
duire en esclavage leurs hroques veuves, et cependant ne produire aucune impression
profonde et durable. Lartiste qui sadresse lme russira toujours mieux que celui
dont le secret consiste frapper les yeux, en mettant nu les misres humaines.50
Of another artists work in the Salon the same critic writes il cherche plus
toucher lme qu sduire les yeux Dessiner avant tout, fut toujours
le maxime de M. Lethiers. For critics such as these there was no doubt
that drawing embodied a spiritual appeal to the soul, while colour was
synonymous with shocking and violent imagery. Other critics took a more
informed but no less limited approach when it came to colour. tienne
Delcluze, writing for the Journal des Dbats from 1823 until 1863, was
perhaps the leading art critic of the time, and is one of the few contem-
porary Salonniers praised by Baudelaire, even though, as he says, he does
not always agree with him. In fact, the two critics could hardly have been
more different, and in 1855 Baudelaires reference to ce bon M. Delcluze
is rather more ironic (EU55, 589). Like Quatremre de Quincy, Dlcluze
believed that art was meant to please the eye, and he even likens Delacroixs
Massacres of 1824 with two works exhibited by Scheffer and Delaroche
in the same exhibition, artists usually favoured by critics and public for
their juste-milieu appeal. For Delcluze, however, all three sin by trying to
appeal to the imagination more than the eye, and he concludes that tout,
dans ces trois ouvrages, est visiblement prpar pour semparer de lesprit
50 A. Chauvin, Salon de 1827, Le Moniteur universel, 13, 26novembre, 13, 29dcembre

1827, 16, 29janvier, 27fvrier, 1er mars 1828 (signed Ch.) (29janvier).
du spectateur avant tout, et empcher lil dexercer ses facults laise.51

Delcluzes choice of words is significant. Everything is visibly prepared
to seize the spirit; and yet the eyes are also prevented from exercising their
faculties. For Delcluze an appeal to the imagination must meanu that
the essential aesthetic purpose of art was missing, and he does not draw a
distinction between a spiritual form of painting, based on the depiction
of pious or poetic characters as exemplified by the popular Ary Scheffer,
and Delacroixs use of calculated combinations of colour as a means of
expression, a distinction Baudelaire will make so trenchantly in 1846. This
is the year that Baudelaire so scornfully dismisses Ary Scheffers wildly
popular Saint Augustin et Sainte Monique as de la peinture invisible (S46,
475), but the lack of physicality of Scheffers saintly characters was the
very reason why so many critics (with the exception ofDelcluze) marked
out Scheffers painting for special praise that year. Menciaux believed it
to be a noble rejection of la partie matrielle de lart,52 The critic Prosper
Haussard claimed that Scheffer had spiritualis les corps, dessin les mou-
vemens de lme, peint lardente immobilit de lextase,53 and even Delcluze
praised Scheffers posie (25mars). The critic Thophile Thor, who also
wrote under the pseudonym William Brger, described Scheffers paint-
ing as appealing to cette facult intime et profonde de lesprit humain.54
Baudelaire, on the other hand, insisted that true poetry in painting was le
rsultat de la peinture elle-mme (S46, 474). It is interesting to note that,
reviewing the same Salon, Champfleurys remarks are very similar when
he maintains that the true poet-painter does not attempt to be poetic by
choosing an elevated subject matter: il laisse ce soin sa couleur.55 This
suggests that the two men had discussed this question on their visit to the
Salon, and convinced each other of its importance.
51 Delcluze, Salon de 1824, Exposition du Louvre, 1824, Journal des Dbats, 1er, 5,
8, 11, 16 28, 30septembre, 5, 9, 16, 18, 21octobre, 1er, 12, 16, 23, 30novembre, 7, 12,
29dcembre 1824, 16, 19janvier 1825; 8septembre.
52 11avril.
53 Salon de 1846, Le National, 27mars, 10, 28avril, 12, 19mai 1846, 27mars.
54 Salons de T. Thor 18441848, ed. W. Brger (Paris, 1868), p.295.
55 Salon de 1846, uvres posthumes: Salons 184651 (Paris, 1894), pp.1314.
34 Chapter 1
By contrast, Delcluze treated le dessin quite differently, and frequently

employs a musical metaphor to suggest its inner order and cohesion: on
sent que la ligne est un langage qui, ainsi que la mlodie en musique, et la
phrase en posie, est susceptible des modifications les plus dlicates et les
plus nobles.56 This phrase is strikingly similar to that attributed to Ingres,
ce qui me sduit dans la musique, cest le dessin, la ligne.57 Not surpris-
ingly, Delcluze was deeply sympathetic to the paintings ofIngres (the two
men were friends) and is convinced that they will please ceux qui aiment
vraiment la peinture, et qui reconnaissent dans cet art dautres moyens
de sduire et dattacher quun coloris brillant et un effet qui blouit.58 In
other words, colour is superficially seductive, a mere distraction from the
real business of painting.
As Baudelaire acknowledged, at least Delcluze knew his art, having
studied alongside Ingres and moved in artists inner circles all his life. For
the majority of critics, less well informed and artistically well connected, the
stylistic innovations ofIngres were as hard to accept as those ofDelacroix.
Indeed, after the hostile critical reception to his Saint-Symphorien of 1834 it
was Ingres who refused thereafter to submit his paintings to the indignity
of Salon scrutiny. As far as most critics of the 1820s and 1830s were con-
cerned, the solution to colour versus drawing in painting was not to go to
the extremes represented on the one hand by Delacroix and on the other
by Ingres. Consequently, the unchallenging paintings of the juste-milieu
artists such as Delaroche and Vernet, who provided an acceptable subject
matter, an uncontroversial approach and a sufficiently linear style, were
generally preferred in these years. As Pontus Grate has pointed out, it was
in fact the art of the juste milieu, not Ingres or Delacroix, which triumphed
in the critical as well as the public eye in the 1820s and 1830s:
La veine profonde de lart romantique chappa aux regards de ces intellectuels trop
ptris de raison et de bon sens pour comprendre le langage spcifique de leur art.
Presque infailliblement leur prfrence alla une peinture o les gestes, la mimique,
56 Salon de 1824, 5septembre.

57 Quoted in Thor, Salons, p.239.
58 1824, 8septembre.
les dtails anecdotiques croyaient pouvoir suffire communiquer le sentiment po-

tique ou dramatique que certains romantiques cherchaient exprimer aussi par les
moyens plus purement picturaux; ils prnrent outre mesure les manifestations les
plus timores et les plus sages de la peinture anticlassique. Celles-ci leur parurent le
nec plus ultra de lart moderne.59
One eminent art and literary critic who tried to promote what he called
the rconciliation of Classical and Romantic strains in art and theatre was
Gustave Planche. In a recent article on the critic, Marijke Jonker concludes
that in promoting the juste milieu Planche was not simply reacting against
artistic innovation, unlike many of the hack writers, but genuinely search-
ing for an eclectic style of painting which would combine a modern subject
matter with the best of grand dessin.60 However, when we read his articles
it is apparent that Planches wish to reconcile different styles of art meant
that while he could recognize something of the genius of Delacroix, he
could not ultimately allow him the designation of great artist because of
what he lacked as Classical draughtsman. The critics final words on Liberty
Leading the People in 1831 are telling:
Je sais tout ce quon peut dire et tout ce quon a dit contre le dessin et les lignes du
tableau; mais je veux loublier et nen tenir aucun compte pour me rappeler seule-
ment que le tableau peut se placer, pour la chaleur, lnergie et lentranement, ct
du Tournoi, esquisse de Rubens.61
Planches undoubted enjoyment of the energy and passion of this paint-

ing is tinged with regret that the drawing is not better, and though the
comparison to Rubens is intended to flatter, it is notable that Delacroixs
painting is compared to a sketch. His magnanimous attempt to overlook
the faults of drawing of this particular painting, shows in effect that, in
common with those critics who reacted against Romantic themes and
59 Pontus Grate, Deux Critiques de lart de lpoque romantique: Gustave Planche et

Thophile Thor (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1959). For an informative discus-
sion of this period see Grate, pp.114.
60 Jonker, M., Gustave Planche, or the Romantic Side ofClassicism, Nineteenth-Century
Art Worldwide, http://19thc.artworldwide.org/autumn_02/articles/jonk.shtml.
61 Planche, Salon de 1831, LArtiste, II (1831), pp.178190, p.180.
36 Chapter 1
wanted to see more Classical influence in art, at heart Planche believed

that a classically defined style of drawing in painting could not be so easily
dispensed with. In the next section we will see how other critics of the 1830s
and 1840s took a more positive view of colours role within painting, often
for political reasons, but even then were rarely able to free themselves from
age-old concepts of line and colour.
Putting the Case for Colour
A growing influence on art criticism in the 1830s and 1840s were the fol-
lowers of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Although Fourierist critics
chiefly demanded an art that would instruct and improve, they also played
an important role in the nineteenth centurys critical assessment of colour,
as David Kelley has demonstrated in his comprehensive introduction to
Baudelaires Salon de 1846.62 The convictions that led the Fourierists to cast
aside many of societys traditional values also caused them to re-examine
many values and qualities usually associated with the practice of painting.
One notable Fourierist critic was Desir Laverdant. His most perceptive
comments on colour are made in the four articles he wrote on the Salon
of 1845, which he entitled De la mission de lart et du rle des artistes, in
which he proposes ideas on colour which may well have influenced the
young Baudelaire. In an almost Baudelairian phrase, Laverdant stresses that
art is primarily concerned with les jouissances des sens, qui nous enlvent
le plus vivement vers les mondes inconnus63 and wishes the painter to
reproduce what he terms as the rayonnement which, he believes, each
human being exudes. By this he means the painters ability to make the
62 David Kelley, introduction to Baudelaires Salon de 1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1975), pp.7287.
63 Desir Laverdant, De la mission dart et du rle des artistes. Salon de 1845, La
Phalange, t.I, 1er semestre 1845, pp.253294, 397418; p.257.
figures or objects he depicts an integral part of their environment, and

the way in which the artists colour expresses la vie intrieure.64 Only a
colour that unifies the disparate elements of a painting can be deemed to
have achieved its purpose: Cest par l que le peintre nous fait en quelque
sorte pntrer dans les organes et voir la vie intrieure. Cest l le mystre
suprme de lart du coloriste. Aussi (nous pouvons le remarquer), si lartiste
termine schement ses contours, il lui arrive de navoir pas ce quon nomme
une peinture profonde.65 True colour imaginatively draws the spectator
into the painting and provides the means of unification of the human figure
with the atmosphere and of the subject with its execution, thus rendering
the painting a cohesive whole. In contrast, drawing delineates objects and
figures in a painting and artificially separates them from their environment,
which prevents the painting from becoming a unified whole and from
expressing an overall theme. Once again, the qualities of drawing and colour
were assigned roles signifying their conservative or progressive qualities.
tre coloriste, as David Kelley puts it, cela signifie presque que lon croit
au progrs et lharmonie;66 indeed, colourist painting for Laverdant and
his fellow Fourierists meant above all a type of art which was based upon
the harmony that they sought to establish in society as a whole.
Thophile Thor, though not a Fourierist, was an influential and pro-
gressive critic who was influenced by Fourierism in his promotion of lart
pour lhomme. In 1845 he contended (interestingly, in the context of a land-
scape, Rousseaus Alle des chtaigners) that all art could be an art engag:
il sagit donc, quels que soient le sujet et la forme dune uvre dart, tab-
leau ou statue, que lartiste y fasse intervenir un sentiment intime, naturel,
irrcusable, qui se communique aux autres hommes, qui les claire ou les
moralise.67 In fact, Thor found little in the art of the time to satisfy his
demands for both excellent form and uplifting content and suggested that
new systems of art, and art criticism should be drawn up to take account
64 1845, p.401.
65 1845, p.401.
66 In LArt: lharmonie du beau et de lutile, in Romantisme, 58 (19731974),
pp.1836.
67 Salons, p.155.
38 Chapter 1
of scientific developments such as physiognomy and phrenology, prefig-

uring Baudelaires own interest in the connections between science and
art. In his 1833 essay De la phrnologie dans ses rapports avec lart Thor
maintains that the artist who has an increased scientific awareness will
possess des donnes prcises, positives, presque mathmatiques qui vous
mettront le doigt toujours sur la vrit, sur la nature.68 The harmony, or
unit merveilleuse, between the outer and the inner life that Thor sought
encouraged him to hope for a type of art that would show the spiritual life
of man by physical means and he felt that the operations of colour best
embodied the type of art that he sought. In his Salon de 1838 Thor rejects
the commonly-favoured beaut mathmatique, or beauty of neo-classical
proportions, as having no relevance to the beaut idale which a sa source
dans les agitations du cur69 and which can be expressed equally well in
any genre of painting. In this decisive way Thor appears to dismiss both
the importance of a particular style of draughtsmanship and the hierarchy
of genre in painting, both of which had traditionally provided critics with
the means of discriminating against colour. His emphasis is on a personal
interpretation of nature, which will also be an inherently but individually
organized one, and will act to propel the spectators imagination into a
heightened state. For Thor it is colour, not line, which constitutes the
basis of all painting, and he argues that line could even be considered as a
product of colour. Thor ridicules the ingristes tortuous efforts to arrive
at a style of drawing lamentably divorced from the principles of colour
which give it life:
force de tourmenter la ligne pour la prciser, ils narrivent qu un rsultat approxi-

matif qui laisse deviner de nombreux ttonnements; et puis, la finesse du dessin, si
admirable chez Raphal, ne tient pas seulement au contour extrieur, mais aussi
une sorte de dessin intrieur qui lui donne de la souplesse. Ce dessin intrieur, cest
le model et les combinaisons de lombre et de la lumire, par lesquelles chaque corps
prend son relief, avance ou recule, selon son plan.70
68 LArtiste, 1833, p.122.

69 Salon de 1838, p.54.
70 Des envois de Rome, p.378.
Thor puts it wonderfully in this Salon when he says that, despite the
ingristes best attempts, la lumire les poursuit malgr eux, a sentiment that
Baudelaire could have written, and indeed echoes in 1855. Thors formu-
lation of the dessin intrieur is new; with it he suggests, like Haussard,
that not only are all the elements in a good painting internally cohesive
and equal in importance, but that they are, in fact, inseparable. This leads
him to conclude that only colour is indispensable in painting, as it is the
existence of colour that makes drawing possible:
On pourrait, la rigueur, se passer de lignes en peinture, et dessiner avec la couleur
comment concevoir la reprsentation dun corps, sans le circonscrire par lopposition
de deux couleurs au moins, du noir et du blanc? La ligne elle-mme est donc un sac-
rifice la couleur. Mme, proprement parler, il ny a point de lignes dans la nature:
les lignes ne sont que des fictions qui servent sparer les couleurs.71
With this assertion Thor neatly reverses the familiar process of thought
whereby colour was traditionally less respected because it was considered
to come after line, and he prepares the ground for Baudelaires emphasis
on colour. As he says in 1844, la qualit de la couleur est si essentielle en
peinture, quon ne saurait tre peintre qu condition dtre, premirement
et avant tout, coloriste.72 There is another aspect of colour that Thor
emphasized that may well have influenced the young Baudelaire: the con-
nection between colour and music, and this will be explored further in
Chapter 4.
In the 1840s several other critics also attempted to redefine the param-
eters of colour and draughtsmanship. In 1841 the critic Decamps criticized
the tendency to compare the painted form not to nature, but to more famil-
iar but badly-painted pictures. He explains that the drawing of a painter
who, like Delacroix, wishes to depict the mobility of an active figure, must
necessarily differ from the very correct academic fixing of every limb and
line.73 The lack of a vocabulary of colour was pinpointed by Louis Peisse,
71 Des envois de Rome, p.378.

72 Salon de 1844, in Salons, p.77.
73 See Lucie Horner, Baudelaire critique de Delacroix (Geneva: Droz, 1956), pp.35 and
51.
40 Chapter 1
echoing de Piles, as one of the reasons why this element of painting had
never received the attention it deserved. Peisse describes des proprits
qui valent par elles-mmes in painting but which are often the least com-
mented on or even perceived,
[] car, pour les sentir, il faut une sorte dducation particulire des sens et du got.
Aussi sont-elles souvent mconnues l mme o elles brillent avec le plus dclat et de
puissance, sans quon puisse, faute dune langue commune, les expliquer et dmontrer
ceux qui les nient.74
Peisse points to an important reason why colour has been ignored hith-
erto: because there exists no real language in which to analyse its structure
and effects. He notes the irony of the situation whereby the specifically
painterly qualities of a colourist such as Delacroix are sufficient to prevent
him from obtaining universal acclaim, while other, lesser artists are more
popular parce que leur talent est susceptible lanalyse et que la beaut
de leurs uvres est, jusqu un certain point, scientifiquement explicable
et dmontrable.75 In 1846 Champfleury makes a similar point when he
attributes the ubiquitous emphasis on the importance of le dessin to the
bourgeois fear of seeming ignorant in the face of culture:
Le bourgeois, qui a le sentiment artistique moins dvelope encore que le peuple, a

de plus la manie de discuter. Il espre prouver par l quil sait. Il scrie: Delacroix
ne sait pas dessiner. Et comme il ne peut pas comprendre cette peinture, il se sauve,
il a peur.76
Prosper Haussard, observed that the very term coloriste was a degrading
one, for even when seeming to be a mark of appreciation of a painter, it
in fact segregated him from the mainstream of serious art, still presided
over by the dessinateurs. In 1839 he praises Delacroix not as a colourist but
as a great artist:
74 Louis Peisse, Salon de 1841, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1841: II, 549 (p.17).
75 Salon de 1841, p.17.
76 Champfleury, Salon de 1846, uvres posthumes: Salons 184651 (Paris, 1894),
p.16.
On croit avoir tout dit, quand on lappelle coloriste; en consquence, on lui refuse
navement tout art de dessin, et on ne semble pas mme souponner ni sa force de
pense ni sa profondeur de passion. Monsieur Eugne Delacroix nest pas seulement
un grand coloriste, mais un artiste entier, qui la forme ne manque non plus que
lide, le dessin pas plus que le coloris, et quil faut lapplaudir comme penseur et
pote tout en lapplaudissant comme peintre.77
Haussard belongs to a new tradition of art criticism of which Baudelaire

will shortly prove to be the foremost exponent; an important facet of this
art criticism was the removal of the division between colour and drawing
which forced them into an artificial and sterile rivalry.
Thophile Gautier, so admired by the young Baudelaire, was perhaps
the most influential and inspiring critic of this time, dominating the field
of art criticism with his articles for the Parisian daily La Presse from 1830 to
1870. He has recently been the subject of an excellent and comprehensive
study by James Kearns in which the author argues that the categoriza-
tion of Gautier as a minor poet and spokesman of lart pour lart scarcely
begins to account for his position in the French literary field during the
period 183070,78 and at the beginning of this chapter I suggested that the
young Baudelaire was as struck by Gautiers verbal pyrotechnics and poetic
passion in his Salon review of 1838 as he was by his own first viewing of
Delacroixs work shortly after. Gautier was an early and life-long champion
of Delacroixs painting, and his influence on Baudelaire was great, but he
was not without his own paradoxes and inconsistencies where colour was
concerned. In 1833 Gautier had set out his own hierarchy of the arts, which
he envisaged as a group of brothers:
[] larchitecture est le premier de tous les arts plastiques, la plus magnifique expres-
sion de la forme quil soit donne lhomme de raliser. Aprs larchitecte vient le
sculpteur, qui est son frre jumeau Le peintre arrive quelques pas derrire eux, leur
frre aussi, mais pas de la mme porte; il voile avec ses toiles ou ses fresques les grandes
murailles nues; il colorie les arabesques et au besoin mme les statues; il sinfiltre dans
77 Salon de 1839, Le Temps, 5avril 1839.

78 James Kearns, Thophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism in the Second
Republic (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), p.6.
42 Chapter 1
les vitres des croises, et jette aux dalles de la nef des reflets prismatiques. Cest lui qui
met le fard ldifice; il ne vient que le troisime, et quand tout est fini.79
It is telling that Gautier suggests that the painter might be pas de la mme
porte among architects and sculptors precisely because he uses colour;
the artist playing with reflets prismatiques with which
il colorie les ara-
besques is portrayed as a fanciful and capricious younger brother whose
main occupation is to conjure up delights rather than perform the work
of a serious artist. This appears to contradict what Gautier will go on to
say about the power and dark violence of Delacroixs colour in 1838, the
same Salon that Baudelaire had read as a boy. However, even in this Salon
Gautier had issued a warning against too much colour in painting, not
because, as we might have supposed, it was too powerful and disturbing,
but because it might distract from the seriousness of art, as if once again
colour was nothing more than an eye-catching display of brilliance. He
is pleased that the influence of Ingres on artists acts as a counterbalance:
linfluence de M. Ingres et de son crayon si ferme sopposa heureusement
cette invasion chromatique; sans lui les tableaux nauraient bientiot plus
t que des spectres solaires.80 Gautiers allegiance to the sculptural ideal
(bronze and marble are the dures matires dont lart compose son ter-
nit), so discernible in his poetry, is probably what caused him to insist
that Ingres was the greatest artist of his day, frequently defending his use of
colour against criticism, and yet, what Robert Snell calls Gautiers almost
speechless awe ofIngres often leads him to reverential platitudes.81 As Snell
observes in the same passage, Ingres world is complete and definitive;
Gautiers prose evocations are correspondingly restrained, and the energy
of his enthusiasm is generally concentrated in his superlatives, in a syntacti-
cal vacuum away from the content of the pictures themselves. This is never
more apparent than in the Universal Exhibition of 1855 when Ingres is the
subject of a particularly effusive accolade on the part of Gautier:
79 Thophile Gautier, Salon de 1833, La France littraire, VI (1833), pp.139166

(p.139).
80 Salon de 1838, La Presse, 2, 16mars 1838.
81 Robert Snell, Thophile Gautier: A Romantic Critic of the Visual Arts (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982), p.92.
Le premier nom qui se prsente la pense lorquon aborde lcole franaise est
celui de M. Ingres. Toutes les revues de Salon, quelles que soit lopinion du critique,
commencent invariablement par lui [] Seul, il reprsente maintenant les hautes
traditions de lhistoire, de lidal et du style; cause de cela, on lui a souvent reproch
de ne pas sinspirer de lesprit moderne, de ne pas voir autour de lui, de ntre pas de
son temps, enfin. Jamais accusation ne fut plus juste. Non, il nest pas de son tmps,
mais il est ternel.82
Although he praises Ingres in such hyperbolic terms, Gautier was in fact

much more eloquent and verbally inventive on the subject of Delacroix,
of whom he writes in the same year, lesprit du 19e sicle palpitait en lui et
palpite encore.83 It was Delacroix, not Ingres, who inspired Gautier to his
greatest insights as a critic of art, and it is notable that as Baudelaire would
have sensed, it is the artists use of colour in particular that inspired him.
The question ofDelacroixs drawing was almost irrelevant to Gautier in this
context, or rather, he preceded Baudelaire in suggesting that there might
be more than one type of dessin in painting when in 1837 he wrote that
M. Delacroix dessine le mouvement et M. Ingres le repos; lun attaque les
figures par le milieu, et lautre par le bord; celui-ci avec le pinceau, celui-l
avec un crayon: voil tout.84 Gautier repeats this important distinction in
1844 and Baudelaire alludes to his words in his own first Salon, the Salon
de 1845 when he describes Delacroix as a draughtsman equal to Ingres
and Daumier.85 In 1841, however, Gautier did go as far as expressing some
reserves about Delacroixs draughtsmanship, or rather he acknowledged
that criticism of the drawing style could be made: Nous ne savons pas,
pour notre compte, si M. Delacroix dessine bien ou mal, si ses figures sloi-
gnent ou non du type classique, si son excution est bonne ou mauvaise;
il a pour nous une qualit qui les vaut toutes.86 This quality ofDelacroixs,
first mentioned in 1839, and developed in 1841, is an extraordinary concept
82 Exposition universelle 1855, Peinture Sculpture Le Moniteur universel, 12juillet.

83 Ibid., 19juillet.
84 Salon de 1837, La Presse, 1mars 1837.
85 Baudelaire, Salon de 1845, p.355; Gautier, La Presse, 28mars 1844 (see Pichois, OCII,
p.1269).
86 Salon de 1841, Revue de Paris, pp.153171; p.159.
44 Chapter 1
of Gautiers, envisaging the artists ability to project an inner imaginative

world onto the canvas by means of colour alone:
Quand M. Delacroix compose un tableau, il regarde en lui-mme au lieu de mettre

le nez la fentre: il a pris de la cration ce quil lui en fallait pour son art, et cest ce
qui donne cette force dattraction intime des tableaux souvent rebutants daspect.
Sa couleur, avant darriver de son il au bout de son pinceau, a pass par sa cervelle
et y a pris des nuances qui peuvent sembler dabord bizarres, exagres ou fausses,
mais chaque touche concourt lharmonie gnrale et rend, sinon un objet dans son
ct prosaque, du moins un sentiment ou une ide du peintre.87
Baudelaire might well have been thinking of these lines when in the Salon
de 1846 he writes of Delacroix that les rvolutions et les vnements les
plus curieux se passent sous le ciel du crne, dans le laboratoire troit et
mystrieux du cerveau (S46, 429) and that un tableau doit avant tout
reproduire la pense intime de lartiste, qui domine le modle comme le
crateur la cration (S46, 433). Gautier describes Delacroixs colour not in
terms of representation or decorativeness, but as a phenomenon that has its
own cohesive internal logic drawn from the imagination of the painter. In
1855 Gautier returns to this idea once more when he has the opportunity
to see a large selection of Delacroixs work on display in its own gallery.
Instead of the respectful tones he uses when discussing Ingres, his enthu-
siasm for Delacroixs sense of unity is apparent:
Ce qui frappe en voyant dans son ensemble luvre de M. Delacroix, cest lunit
profonde qui y rgne. Lartiste porte en lui un microcosme complet: il a le ciel de
ses arbres, le terrain de ses plantes, les personages de ses fonds, les draperies de ses
chairs [] tout cela dun style et dun ton particulier qui ne pourrait servir autre
chose.88
All the elements of Delacroixs paintings (le ciel de ses arbres, le terrain
de ses plantes, les personnages de ses fonds, les draperies de ses chairs) are
rendered harmoniously through the subtle operations of his colours, and
87 Salon de 1841, pp.159160.

88 Exposition universelle 1855, PeintureSculpture Le Moniteur universel, 19juillet
1855.
each figure is entoure dune atmosphre qui lui est propre, et respirable
seulement pour elle.89 Colour harmony is the central tenet of Gautiers
thought, as it was for Baudelaire when he wrote Lharmonie est la base de la
thorie de couleur in his colour chapter of 1846. Perhaps by 1855 it is now
under Baudelaires influence (rather than the reverse) that Gautier explains
how Delacroixs colour is characterized by a subtle harmony of tones, which
has nothing to do with brightness or even necessarily beauty:
[] elle ne se recommande pas par des rouges, des verts ou des bleus dune grande
vivacit, mais par des gammes de nuances qui se font valoir les unes des autres; ses
tons si riches ne sont pas beaux en eux-mmes, leur clat rsulte de leur juxtaposi-
tion et de leur contraste; teignez telle touche criarde en apparence, lharmonie sera
dtruite; cest comme si vous tiez la clef dune vote.90
In 1855 Gautiers emphasis is on colour harmony as the result of a careful

construction of complementary tones, which is so well balanced that to
remove even one tone would be to destroy its fundamental cohesiveness.
This echoes Baudelaires assertion that un tableau est une machine [] o
un ton est toujours destin en faire valoir un autre (S46, 432) and points
to a significant shift in Gautiers thinking from 1833, when he expressed
his opinion that colour was only le fard ldifice and suggested that the
colourist painter was a whimsical figure, to 1855 when he has come to under-
stand something of the complex nature of the painters colour, its basis in
harmony and its essentially unifying function in the painting as a whole.
Gautier, Laverdant, Thor, Peisse and Haussard were just some of the
critics who went some way towards reassessing colours fundamental role in
art before Baudelaire wrote his first Salon. Yet even the more enlightened
writers could not quite rid themselves of certain preconceptions about
colour-based painting. While praising Delacroix as le plus grand peintre de
la perspective arienne qui ait jamais t, Laverdant finds hard to reconcile
what he calls quelques grosses ngligences de dessin91 with his conviction
91 1846, p.580.
46 Chapter 1
that Delacroix has genius. Charles Blanc persists in the belief that the true
colourist is indisciplinable, impatient du frein et du rgle92 and Peisse, like
Laverdant, describes Delacroix as lacking bien des choses quon rsume sous
le mot dessin.93 Even Thor maintains that one is born a colourist and that
such a talent is shrouded in mystery: On nat coloriste, ou musicien, ou
pote, par la grce de Dieu, et cette royaut de droit divin nchoit qu de
rares privilgis.94 The editor of LArtiste, Arsne Houssaye, summed this
tendency up when he wrote in 1846 of deux coles distinctes, la raison
et la fantaisie, le crayon et la palette, le contour et leffet. To the first of
these schools belong Ingres, Scheffer, Chenavard and others whose work
is dominated by la rgle; Delacroix, Corot and Decamps are among the
second group [qui] va comme limprvu, sans savoir o, scouant du pied
la rose du matin.95 Despite a promising beginning (crayon, palette, contour,
effet), Houssaye shows little awareness of the technical matters involved in
painting, perhaps because he wished to simplify the different styles of art
for his readers or even to create a literary atmosphere. However, the image
ofDelacroix as a vague creature who did not know where he was going (let
alone shaking morning dew from his foot) belies everything we know from
his Journal about the artists well-researched painting techniques, and the
importance that he (and Baudelaire) placed on understanding these tech-
niques. The continuing critical ambivalence acknowledging Delacroixs
genius while cavilling about his drawing skills and underestimating his
colour technique was perhaps the most defining characteristic of those
who advocated the art of the coloristes. Although these critics had begun
the work of reassessing the function and significance of this neglected
element of painting, it was left to Baudelaire to dispense with their reser-
vations and preconceptions; in doing so, he would create an aesthetic for
the nineteenth century which would take its impetus from the structure
and effects of colour.
92 Salon de 1840, p.219.

93 Salon de 1841, pp.1920.
94 Salon de 1845, Salons, p.154.
95 Quoted in Andr Ferran, LEsthtique de Baudelaire (Paris: Hachette, 1933), p.137.
Chapter 2
Colour Vision: The Science of Seeing
Les affinits chimiques sont la raison pour laquelle la nature ne peut pas commettre
de fautes dans larrangement de ces tons; car, pour elle, forme et couleur sont un.
Le vrai coloriste ne peut pas en commettre non plus; et tout lui est permis, parce
quil connat de naissance la gamme des tons, la force du ton, les rsultats des mlanges,
et toute la science du contrepoint, et qu il peut ainsi faire une harmonie de vingt
rouges diffrents. (S46, 424)
A New Type of Salon
Right from the beginning of his very first Salon, the Salon de 1845, Baudelaire
wishes to make things clear: M. Delacroix est dcidment le peintre le plus
original des temps anciens et des temps modernes (S45, 353) he states. These
are his first words, immediately following his quelques mots dintroduction,
and they are placed there both to stop the reader in his tracks and to set
out Baudelaires statement of intent: to be an art critic with a difference.
With this single, peremptory, sentence he does away with the hesitations
and qualifications of even those critics he admires and who have been most
disposed towards Delacroix, including Gautier, Thor and Champfleury,
all of whom praised the artist extensively while never quite letting go of
their doubts about his drawing style. Baudelaire will have none of this:
Aucun des amis de M. Delacroix, et des plus enthousiastes, na os le dire
simplement, crment, impudemment, comme nous (S45, 353). His boldness
in asserting Delacroixs supreme originality in painting effectively means
that Baudelaire is announcing a corresponding originality of his own. His
Salon, as he has already let his reader know in his introduction, will be a
48 Chapter 2
very different affair than what has gone before, the utiles guide-nes or
Salon guides so prolifically produced by the newspapers for the art-hungry
public of the 1830s and 1840s, more often than not to guide those who
wanted to invest in art: Le Salon est [] un genre minemment pratique.
Il oriente la consommation, as Claude Pichois puts it (OCII, 1250). In
1845 Baudelaire, a lover of both art and words, aims to feed his readers
bourgeois souls with something more spiritually substantial than this. He
wants to open their eyes to the glory of Delacroix and Corot and other,
little-known artists such as Haussoullier; he will puncture the grandeur of
Vernet; and he will wittily and knowledgeably take the Salon visitor along
with him on his journey. So confident is he in his ability to make a differ-
ence that the final words of this Salon review are as grandiose as his opening
sally, as Baudelaire calls for nothing less than a new artist, the artist of his
own imagination, for le peintre, le vrai peintre, qui saura arracher a la vie
actuelle son cot pique, et nous faire voir et comprendre (S45, 407) He
plans to develop his thoughts, various works on painting are under way,
and his aspiration to be the nineteenth-century Diderot seems to have got
off to an excellent start.
In fact, after this promising beginning, Baudelaire very nearly stopped
writing about art altogether. His Salon did not make the impression he
hoped for, in fact sold hardly at all, despite Champfleurys article com-
paring it to the Salons of Diderot (as Baudelaire had requested), and to
Stendhal, and the positive reviews of it by Auguste Vitu and Gustave le
Vavasseur. But Baudelaire himself was unhappy with his Salon, feeling
the ideas were too reminiscent of Heine and Stendhal, and destroyed all
remaining copies. Just over a month later he attempted suicide, for reasons
that are still unclear, but the relative failure of his first serious attempt at
writing as well as his despair over the humiliation of the conseil judiciaire
must have contributed to his feeling of deep ennui at this time. The books
The History of Modern Painting, On Caricature and David, Gurin and
Girodet that he had announced as appearing shortly were, for the mean-
time, abandoned. Never again would he write a Salon with such claims of
originality but which followed convention so closely.
When he takes up his pen again almost a year later to write the Salon
de 1846 it will be to follow a very different sort of agenda. This time he
will incorporate a more thoughtful, theoretical approach into his review of

that years Salon exhibition. Instead of a statement about Delacroixs great-
ness, the Salon de 1846 begins with a question: A quoi bon la critique? he
asks himself and his readers. Why write about art? What difference does
it make? The question must have been one he had asked himself after his
failure to achieve recognition in 1845. The answer that he provides for
himself takes the form of a very different kind ofSalon. Stripped of 1845s
dramatic conviction, the Baudelaire of 1846 is more measured, more real-
istic, but no less impassioned. In 1845 Baudelaire had felt compelled by
the conventional Salon format and his admiration ofDiderot to tailor his
observations on the wider artistic issues to fit with remarks on individual
painters; in the Salon de 1846 he will reverse the procedure and use the
artists to illuminate his arguments. In 1845 Baudelaire had felt it necessary
to comment on the work of artists that he found less than mediocre, and
his sense of the artistic restrictions of such a task is palpable. In 1846, and
in all of his subsequent essays on art, the emphasis has shifted to a much
more theoretical approach and he only discusses what matters most deeply
to him in matters of art. In 1845 he prided himself on being one of the few
to have understood Delacroixs art, while in 1846 he wants to explain the
subtlety of colour harmony.
What brought about this change in Baudelaires Salon writing style?
Was it based on a wish to enlighten or antagonize the bourgeois consumer
of art or to be more subtle in his promotion of Delacroix over Ingres and
the more popular artists of the day? One clue to Baudelaires intentions
in 1846 lies in the cover page in his Salon de 1845 which announced that a
work entitled De la peinture moderne was at that time sous presse. In fact,
no such work ever appeared, but most critics assume that it was incorpo-
rated into the 1846 Salon, where his judgements on modern art are care-
fully considered and explained, unlike the superficial quality of the 1845
essay.1 Most importantly of all though, the Salon de 1846 is the essay in
1 Although Baudelaire claimed in a letter to his mother that he had to write his Salon
in a week (Corr. I, 136, mars 1846), it seems likely that he combined a review of that
years art with earlier theoretical material. As Margaret Gilman suggests, the careful
50 Chapter 2
which Baudelaire set out his conviction that Romanticism is an essential

element of a modern aesthetic of painting, and that the understanding of
colour is at the very heart of this.
Understanding Colour Harmony
In the ill-fated Salon de 1845 Baudelaire describes a painting ofDelacroixs

that was exhibited that year, the Dernires Paroles de Marc-Aurle, as magni-
fique, sublime, incompris and mocks another critics too simple reading of
its use of light and shade (see also pp.132135). Delacroixs colour harmony
is too complex a matter to be so easily interpreted, Baudelaire implies, as it
is full of tours de force invisible lil inattentif, car lharmonie est sourde
et profonde. By describing Delacroixs genius in colour as something that
few critics will understand, let alone members of the public, Baudelaire is
promoting himself to a special, privileged position among art critics, but
also suggesting that colour harmony itself is something that is not easy to
understand. Another painting that year, Le Sultan du Maroc entour de sa
garde, is described as one that most people cannot appreciate:
Nous savons que nous serons compris dun petit nombre, mais cela nous suffit.
Ce tableau est si harmonieux, malgr la splendeur des tons, quil en est gris gris
comme la nature gris comme latmosphre de lt, quand le soleil tend comme
un crpuscule de poussire tremblante sur chaque objet. (S45, 357)
In fact, praising Delacroixs harmonious tones in 1845 was not particu-

larly unusual; Gautier, Thor, Pelletan and others all also refer to this in
and deeply thought-out judgements and theories make such a rapid composition
almost impossible and lead one to conclude that the week must have been spent in
dove-tailing the pictures of the Salon onto the essay on modern painting. Baudelaire
the Critic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), p.27.
connection with the Sultan du Maroc.2 What separates Baudelaire from

these critics, however, is the fact that he draws attention to the specialist
technique involved in making such harmonious colour when he states that
Delacroixs colour is:
[] dune science incomparable, il ny a pas une seule faute, et nanmoins, ce ne

sont que tours de force tours de force invisibles lil inattentif, car lharmonie est
sourde et profonde; la couleur, loin de perdre son originalit cruelle dans cette science
nouvelle et plus complte, est toujours sanguinaire et terrible. (S45, 355)
Baudelaire implies that colour at this level of science is simply too subtle
and complex a phenomenon for most people to grasp. With the high-
handed tone that characterizes the 1845 Salon essay he seems content that
Delacroix can only be understood by the initiated few:
Le public se fait-il bien une ide de la difficult quil y a modeler avec de la couleur?
La difficult est double, modeler avec un seul ton, cest modeler avec une estompe,
la difficult est simple; modeler avec de la couleur, cest dans un travail subit, spon-
tan, compliqu, trouver dabord la logique des ombres et de la lumire, ensuite la
justesse et lharmonie du ton; autrement dit, cest, si lombre est verte et une lumire
rouge, trouver du premier coup une harmonie de vert et de rouge, lun obscur, lautre
lumineux, qui rendent leffet dun objet monochrome et tournant. (S45, 355)
Baudelaire might have explained the technique, but it is an explanation

characterized by both a somewhat patronizing tone and a flourishing of
technical terms designed to impress his contemporaries. This was the would-
be expert in matters of art who was known for boasting at the time of his
friendships with artists and his familiarity with well-placed studios, begin-
ning many conversations with M. Delacroix me disait hier 3 With his
specialist knowledge and his ability to write, Baudelaire presents himself as
one of the few who can appreciate colour, and the Salon de 1845 provides
him with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate his superiority.
2 Gautier, 18mars 1845, Thor, Salons, pp.117118, Pelletan, 24mars 1845. See Horner,
pp.5476, for an extensive account of Delacroixs reception at this time.
3 See Conseils au jeunes littrateurs, OCII, p.17 and the humorous account of conversa-
tions in the offices of the Corsaire-Satan newspaper, OCII, p.1087.
52 Chapter 2
In 1846 Baudelaire takes a different approach. Perhaps because of

the shock of a sense of failure when his first Salon essay failed to make the
impression he had hoped it would, or possibly because he simply decided on
a new approach that would incorporate aesthetic theory into the demands
of a Salon review, his Salon de 1846 begins with not the art or the artists,
but an address to his bourgeois audience, who are also the audience for
the Salon exhibition. This preface takes the form of a direct address to the
bourgeois reader and consumer, and the interlocutory theme continues with
the first two chapters which pose the questions quoi bon la critique?
and Quest-ce que le romantisme?. This marks a change in Baudelaire as
Salon writer, from the bold, even brash, declarations ofDelacroixs (and, by
implication, his own) genius that open the 1845 essay to 1846s recognition
of the reading and, more importantly, purchasing public and a question-
ing of his own role as critic and the nature of modern art. By involving the
public in his attempt to answer such questions he might also establish the
reason for writing another Salon after the singular failure (in his own eyes
at least) of his last attempt.
The preface to the Salon de 1846, Aux bourgeois begins to answer
this. This section, along with Des coles et des ouvriers, has attracted
much critical debate concerning the sincerity or otherwise ofBaudelaires
appeal to a class of people he largely held in contempt. Richard Burton
sums up the approach of many when he describes the introductory chap-
ter as simultaneously genuine and bogus4 and indeed it is hard to take
Baudelaire seriously as he solemnly urges the lawyers and businessmen
of his day to improve their hard-won leisure hours with the acquisition
of culture: Vous possdez le gouvernement de la cit, et cela est juste, car
vous tes la force. Mais il faut que vous soyez aptes sentir la beaut; car
comme aucun dentre vous ne peut aujourdhui se passer de puissance, nul
4 Richard Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991), p.37. See also Kelley, Deux aspects du Salon de 1846 de Baudelaire: la ddi-
cace aux bourgeois et la couleur, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 5 (October
1969), pp.331346, Oehler, Pariser Bilder I (18301848): Antibourgeoise Asthetik bei
Baudelaire, Daumier und Heine (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), Hiddleston,
pp.272280.
na le droit de se passer de posie (S46, 414). Although Baudelaires help-

ful advice is of course strictly tongue-in-cheek, and his assumptions about
the bourgeois lack of artistic taste is as guaranteed to give offence as his
rudeness a little later about the extremely popular Vernet and Scheffer, his
wish for his readers to understand something of what matters in modern
painting is rooted in sincerity. He is not simply recommending that the
newly well-to-do furnish their homes with art, he is suggesting (somewhat
patronizingly, of course) that they furnish their minds with a sense of what
good modern art is, an understanding that may not be so easy to acquire
but is an essential aspect of being a collector of art. Baudelaire wonders if
the average bourgeois, who has focused on work and success to the exclu-
sion of all else, has ever been given the necessary tools to understand and
appreciate art (as he himself was given in the studio of his father and those
of his fathers friends):
Jouir est une science, et lexercice des cinq sens veut une initiation particulire, qui
ne se fait que par la bonne volont et le besoin. [] Mais les accapareurs vous ont
dfendu de jouir, parce que vous navez pas lintelligence de la technique des arts,
comme des lois et des affaires. (S46, 415416)
When he describes the accapareurs as wanting to keep art away from the
bourgeois by restricting it to the closed society of the initiated, he could be
describing himself the previous year when he took pride in his inside knowl-
edge of artistic techniques compared to the limited understanding of the
public. If in 1846 Baudelaire is quite aware of the limitations of bourgeois
understanding, and uses the preface to poke fun at it, he has also become
conscious of his own restricted powers as a critic. The implication is clear:
in the Salon de 1846 Baudelaire has set himself the task of providing the
artistic knowledge so lacking in the bourgeois experience up until now.
In the first chapter of the Salon, quoi bon la critique? Baudelaires
acknowledgement of the limits of his abilities certainly appears sincere when
he vividly expresses the doubts that most writers must feel: quoi bon?
Vaste et terrible point dinterrogation, qui saisit la critique au collet ds le
premier pas quelle veut faire dans son premier chapitre (S46, 417) In the
particular case of the art critic his doubts are centred on the quite realistic
54 Chapter 2
presumption that he cannot teach the artist anything that he or she does
not already know, and he is unlikely to teach the bourgeois reader because
most people do not really care about artistic techniques: En fait de moyens
et de procds des ouvrages eux-mmes, le public et lartiste nont rien
apprendre ici. Ces choses-l sapprennent a latelier, et le public ne sinquite
que du rsultat (S46, 418). So what exactly is the point of art criticism? In
1846 Baudelaire acknowledges the limits of the genre, and accepts them.
He describes most of the art criticism of his day as intrinsically negative
in its nature: [] elle recommandera toujours le dessin aux coloristes et
la couleur aux dessinateurs (S46, 418), and even the most cursory reading
of other Salon reviews of the time gives credence to this statement. This
is not what Baudelaire intends to do, though perhaps he is being a little
disingenuous when he claims to be entirely above such matters.
Nor does he want to write the sort of essay that restricts access to
art to people like himself. Even though le meilleur compte rendu dun
tableau pourra tre un sonnet ou une lgie, a response to art in the form
of a poem is not what he is intending to write here, since in any case it
belongs to a different genre, being destin aux recueils de posie et aux
lecteurs potiques (S46, 418), and a creative process that he will engage in
elsewhere. Writing a Salon while taking the bourgeois reader into consid-
eration requires a very different set of skills. The critical part ofBaudelaire
is not prepared to give up on Salon reviewing, but where exactly does he as
a critic fit in? How can a critic make a difference anyway? After all, Salon
reviews were published in every newspaper and pamphlets abounded. There
was plenty for them to write about, as there were at least three thousand
artists operating in Paris in the 1840s. In his article Structures of cultural
production in nineteenth-century France Michael Moriarty has drawn
attention to the increasing number of art auctions taking place in Paris at
this time and the growing influence of the art dealers; as a result of this,
both dealers and prospective buyers required advice from a critic who could
discern art of lasting quality from the mass available. As Moriarty puts it:
The disappearance of neo-classical orthodoxy left room for a wide variety
of critical standpoints, which could accommodate the variety of artistic
production. Baudelaire appreciated this from the outset of his critical career,
assigning the critic the role of mediator between the bourgeois public and
the artistic expression of a temperament.5 The function of the critic was to

separate out from the mass of individual producers the artist of authentic
conviction and temperament,6 as Moriarty writes, and for Baudelaire in
1846 this meant combining his own aesthetic convictions about art with
an awareness of the bourgeois consumer and the time that he was living
in. As he writes in this first chapter, pour tre juste, cest--dire pour avoir
sa raison dtre, la critique doit tre partiale, passionne, politique, cest-
-dire faite un point de vue exclusif, mais au point de vue qui ouvre le
plus dhorizons (S46, 418). Baudelaire wants to use the Salon to suggest
answers both to the bigger questions what is modern painting? but also to
the smaller, how is it achieved? The answer to the first question involves
naivet, Romanticism, imagination. The second will be colour.
Baudelaire concludes the first chapter on criticism with the assertion
that a great artist will combine naivety with the greatest degree of roman-
ticism, which he defines as lexpression la plus rcente et la plus moderne
de la beaut (S46, 419). It also forms the question which is the title of
the second chapter, Quest-ce que le romantisme? and which might have
seemed a curious one to ask in 1846, especially since Baudelaire had made
plain his wish for an artist who would capture modern life in painting. He
had rounded off his Salon de 1845 with the now famous call for a painter
who might capture lhroisme de la vie moderne and a fervent hope for the
following year: Puissent les vrais chercheurs nous donner lanne prochaine
cette joie singulire de clbrer lavnement du neuf! (S45, 407) Such a
hope could well have resulted in disappointment on Baudelaires part when
faced with the Salon exhibition of 1846, in which Ingres once again did not
participate and Delacroix continued with his biblical themes as before. Yet
at the time there was no one who could match this artist in terms of skill
and imagination, so instead Baudelaire had to redefine his idea of what
was modern and find a way of tailoring this to fit Delacroix. To do this he
5 Michael Moriarty, Structures ofCultural Production in Nineteenth-Century France,

in Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France
edited by Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1994), pp.1529; p.16.
6 Ibid., p.19.
56 Chapter 2
would revive the idea of Romanticism as the embodiment of modernity,

the first and last time that he would do so. There is an element in this of
Baudelaire being nostalgic for a time that he senses is already passing, a
feeling that increases in intensity throughout his essays and culminates
in the bitter tone of the Salon de 1859. For now the question still remains
of what Romanticism really means if it no longer represents a particular
subject matter or for that matter the antithesis of classicism with its con-
notations of revolution. Baudelaire suggests that it is a way of feeling, and
that this is the guiding principle in his concept of art:
Le romantisme nest prcisment ni dans le choix des sujets ni dans la vrit exacte,
mais dans la manire de sentir.
Ils lont cherch en dehors, et cest en dedans quil tait seulement possible de le
trouver.
Pour moi, le romantisme est lexpression la plus rcente, la plus actuelle du beau.
(S46, 420)
Those people to whom he refers as looking for the outward manifestations

of modernity could just as easily have been himself the previous year, long-
ing to see combien nous sommes grands et potiques dans nos cravates
et nos bottes vernies (S45, 407). Now, right from the beginning of the
Salon, he has changed his mind, insisting that the choice of subject is not
important for modern art, only the way of feeling, and this is a large enough
definition to cover all types of painting ifBaudelaire chooses. Not that he
had given up on the hope of a truly modern subject matter at this stage.
In the last chapter of the Salon de 1846 Baudelaire will return to the idea
of the heroism of modern life and develop it further, reiterating his hope
that the right artist will come along to express it. However, even though
the idea of a modern subject matter is still there (and will manifest itself
later in his passion for the art of Guys), it is essentially a postscript to the
Salon de 1846 as a whole. His final lines return to the idea of the Romantic
modern hero but, as he acknowledges with his closing eulogy of Balzacs
characters and the man himself, the idea for Baudelaire exists more in his
imagination or in poetry and literature than in the paintings that he sees
around him.
But if modernity in art is Romanticism, and not a modern subject

matter, then how should it be expressed? Baudelaire answers with a list:
Qui dit romantisme dit art moderne, cest--dire intimit, spiritualit, couleur,
aspiration vers linfini, exprimes par tous les moyens que contiennent les arts. []
Que la couleur joue un role tres important dans lart moderne, quoi dtonnant?
(S46, 421).
Colour is the only physical element in the group of qualities that Baudelaire
ascribes to Romanticism, and Romanticism and colour inevitably will lead
to Delacroix. But before Baudelaire begins his analysis of the work of the
artist who is, for him, the embodiment ofRomanticism, he pauses. There
follows something that sets the tone for the rest of the Salon: the chapter
on colour. He introduces it with apparent modesty: je veux crire sur la
couleur une srie de rflexions qui ne seront pas inutiles pour lintelligence
complte de ce petit livre (S46, 422) Though there is no fanfare here as
there might have been in 1845 about these thoughts on colour, the discern-
ing reader would not have been fooled; the phrase ce petit livre suggests
the influence of Diderot who in his Essai sur la peinture (1766) also used
his petites ides sur la couleur to emphasize the need for a greater under-
standing of colour and whose Salon de 1759 had appeared in LArtiste just
before Baudelaire wrote his first Salon.7 Although apparently simple and
straightforward, this chapter is as fundamental to the Salon de 1846 as the
chapters on the imagination are to the Salon de 1859. Both occupy the same
position in their respective Salons (as the third, and the third and fourth
chapters respectively), both establish the primary aesthetic concern of
Baudelaire at that time and both set the tone for the Salon as a whole.
7 In Denis Diderot, uvres sthtiques (textes tablis, avec introductions, bibliogra-

phies, notes et relevs de variantes, par Paul Vernire (Paris 1959), pp.662684). Two
works that consider the influence ofDiderot on Baudelaire are Diderot et Baudelaire
critiques dart (Paris: Garnier frres, 1957) and more recently, Alexandra K. Wettlaufers
In the Minds Eye: The Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin (New York:
Rodopi, 2003).
58 Chapter 2
De la couleur
The chapter invites us to pause, step out of the Salon, and into another
world. It begins like an enchanting fairy-tale:
Supposons un bel espace de la nature o tout verdoie, rougeoie, poudroie et chatoie

en pleine libert, o toutes choses, diversement colores suivant leur constitution
molculaire, changes de seconde en seconde par le dplacement de lombre et de
la lumire, et agites par le travail intrieur du calorique, se trouvent en perptuelle
vibration, laquelle fait trembler les lignes et complte la loi du mouvement ternel
et universel. (S46, 422)
The grande symphonie du jour of the first two paragraphs is nothing less
than a prose poem inviting us into a natural space in which our imagina-
tion can roam. We are asked to envisage a panoply of constantly changing
colours. Nothing is still or fixed as the light and shadows change, accord-
ing to this law of universal movement. Broad washes of colour (verdoie,
rougeoie) and shifting masses of green and blue are followed by splashes
of red, black, white and grey. Gradually the vague colours of the scene
begin to take recognizable shape, with the masses of blue and green gradu-
ally forming into sea, sky, trees and lawns. Contrasting details appear to
emerge at the same time as another level of awareness, the beginnings of
an observation that there might be a hidden logic to this paradise and even
laws to govern these displays of colour: Ce qui me frappe dabord, cest
que partout, coquelicots dans les gazons, pavots, perroquets, etc., le
rouge chante la gloire du vert; le noir, quand il y en a, zro solitaire et
insignifiant, intercde le secours du bleu ou du rouge (S46, 422). What
the red and green splashes are (poppies, parrots) is irrelevant; what matters
is that each provides a contrast to the other, and the parrots are no more
odd an inclusion than any assortment of disparate elements that might
be found in an instructive plate for an encyclopedia.8 However, the scene
8 In my article Baudelaires Parrot: Borrowed from Goethe? (Ann Kennedy, French

Studies Bulletin, 35 (Summer 1990), pp.913) I suggested that one explanation for
parrots in the landscape might be found in the introductory pages ofGoethes Beitrge
depicted is far from being a lifeless illustration, as Baudelaire conjures up

an exuberant picture featuring red and green contrasts, clouds heureuse-
ment dispersing the skys monotonous blue and swirling mists bathing
and softening contours. The suggestion of a playful, picture-book atmos-
phere is increased at the end of the first paragraph by the description of
how, seen from a distance, the landscape resembles a childs spinning top
as the myriad colours fuse into a misty, unifying grey. As in Delacroixs
Sultan du Maroc, grey represents the perfect harmony of hues and has a
unifying vibrancy of its own: la nature ressemble un toton qui, m par
une vitesse acclre, nous apparat gris, bien quil rsume en lui toutes les
couleurs (S46, 423). It is worth comparing this description to the part
of Baudelaires essay Morale du joujou of 1853 when he writes about la
spiritualit de lenfance dans ses conceptions artistiques and states that le
joujou est la premire initiation de lenfant lart, ou plutt cen est pour
lui la premire ralisation (I, 583). As Rosemary Lloyd has observed, this
undoubtedly autobiographical description of an early delight in the playful
aspect of colour offers a powerful insight into the ways in which the young
Baudelaire became aware of the possibilities of art and their close relation-
ship with the senses.9 The link between early childhood experience and
art is taken up again years later in 1863s Le peintre de la vie moderne when
Baudelaire describes an artist who as a child was fascinated by the colours
of his fathers skin while washing, les muscles des bras, les degradations
de couleurs de la peau nuance de rose et de jaune, et le rseau bleutre des
veines (PV, 691) (for links between this anecdote and Baudelaires own
childhood experience see Chapter 3, pp.126127).
In De la couleur Baudelaire wants to stop us in our tracks before
we enter the Salon review proper and to make us consider how a painting
is constructed. Yet he does this, paradoxically, by turning our eyes away
from the paintings of the Salon itself and out towards nature, albeit a
rather strange and composite version of it. As Alexandra Wettlaufer puts
it in her examination of this passage, Rather than describing a painting,
zur Optik (1791), which features a similar description of a natural scene, complete
with parrots.
9 Rosemary Lloyd, Charles Baudelaire (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), p.17.
60 Chapter 2
Baudelaire provides the reader with tools and instructions to synthesize

the visual and emotional experience of a verdant landscape, proving []
that the critic and his reader can create a painting, or at least the experience
of a painting, without a painter.10 There is also a playful aspect to this, as
if Baudelaire were inviting the reader to join in a delightful game, and in
doing so to re-imagine nature and the painting that might result from this
collusion. The act of involvement on the part of the spectator and himself
is at least as important to Baudelaire as the laws of harmony that the bel
espace de nature purports to illustrate, as will become clear in later Salons.
In this first paragraph of the colour chapter of 1846, before guiding us to
any painting or artist, Baudelaire involves us with a shared act of creation
so that we are cajoled by his lightly persuasive lyrical prose into seeing the
interplay of colour tones through his eyes.
There is a change of mood and focus in the second paragraph, as
Baudelaires more serious purpose in this chapter begins to become appar-
ent, and the natural setting changes from being characterized by broad
sweeps of colour to become more lively and complex:
Le sve monte et, mlange de principes, elle spanouit en tons mlangs; les arbres, les
rochers, les granits se mirent dans les eaux et y dposent leurs reflets; tous les objets
transparents accrochent au passage lumires et couleurs voisines et lointaines.
mesure que lastre du jour se drange, les tons changent de valeur, mais respectant
toujours leurs sympathies et leurs haines naturelles, continuent vivre en harmonie
par des concessions rciproques. (S46, 423)
The words underlined by Baudelaire (tons mlangs, glaant) begin to show

his familiarity with the vocabulary of artists, and the purpose behind this
apparently playful exercise, as he stresses the interactive quality of every hue
with another and implies that no colour can exist independently, but, even
on the smallest of scales, is made up of myriad connecting and contrasting
shades. The numerous active verbs used to describe the changing nature of
the tones (monter, spanouir, serpenter, accrocher, se dplacer, multi-
plier) emphasize that this is a vigorous and ever-changing drama that now
10 Wettlaufer, p.133.
demands our attention. The emphasis has shifted from delighting in the
play of colours in a natural scene to a more serious matter: a close observa-
tion of the intricacy of tones and reflections. The paragraph progressively
includes more and more musical metaphors, culminating in the image of the
grand symphonie du jour and many critics have focused on this as an early
demonstration of the principles of correspondances which Baudelaire will
develop in his poetry. Wettlaufer writes that the import of De la couleur
and the synaesthetic symphony of colour is inextricably tied to the vehicle
presenting it the poetic, visually-charged and musically evocative prose
of the salonnier.11 While there are undoubtedly elements of the poetry
here, this overlooks the technical vocabulary which Baudelaire uses at the
beginning of this paragraph and which continues for a page and a half after
it, almost as if, after having allowed himself an imaginative excursion into
colour-as-music, he must now adopt a more serious tone. Indeed, much
of Baudelaires prose in this chapter is deliberately plain, with statements
such as La couleur est donc laccord de deux tons hinting at his reliance
on an authoritative source. This reinforces the primary purpose of the
chapter, which is that everywhere, from the sweeping imaginary landscape
to the smallest scale of a hand, we see evidence of une harmonie parfaite.
Reduced to even more fundamental terms, as Baudelaire points out, the
entire concept of colour is based on the opposition of le ton chaud and
le ton froid, tones that can only exist in relation to one another, and this
elementary contrast is central to all good painting.
It is not surprising that Baudelaire uses terms here borrowed from the
artists atelier, but there is another aspect to this that implies more than
a passing acquaintance with the operations of colour harmony. In 1845
Baudelaire had written of Delacroixs science incomparable of colour, and
now we see the vocabulary of physics and chemistry being used to describe
the combining of colour tones, such as constitution molculaire,
le calo-
rique and les affinits chimiques (S46, 423, 424). Baudelaire appears
deliberately to be choosing words that imply a science of colour at work.
What prompted him to focus on colour in this way, an approach which
11 Wettlaufer, p.140.
62 Chapter 2
differs so much from 1845? There are several aspects of Baudelaires inter-
est in colour in 1846 that can be usefully considered here. In the colour
chapter he asserts that without understanding how colour works, a paint-
ing cannot be properly understood or appreciated. It seems unlikely, given
how the chapter is written, that he reached these conclusions on colour
from an observation of the Salon paintings alone, and in the next section
I will look at how contemporary colour theories from three very different
sources might have influenced his writing of the chapter on colour.
Chevreul and the Scientific Theory of Colour
Not long after Baudelaires return to Paris from his aborted voyage to the
Indian Ocean, the Salon exhibition of 1842 opened. In the vestibule of the
Louvre a sign was displayed which might have caught his eye: Trois fois par
semaine, dans le grand amphithtre des Gobelins, le chimiste Chevreul, qui
depuis 1824 dirige les teintures et professe la Manufacture de tapis, fait sur
le contraste des couleurs un cours que tous les artistes peuvent suivre avec
fruit.12 At the time Baudelaire might not have thought that the director of
a distinguished tapestry-making business would have had much to say on
matters relating to painting, but within a few years of living among artists
and journalists of art it is almost certain that he would have recognized the
name ofChevreul. A chemist of international reputation, Michel-Eugne
Chevreul, became Director of Dyes for the Royal Manufacturers at the
Gobelins in 1824, where he began the detailed study of the visual effects
of dyes and colours used in the tapestry works. The reason for beginning
his research was based on perceived faults in the tapestries colour; cus-
tomers had complained about the quality of the dyes used, and said that
the colours were dull or faded. Chevreul investigated the problem and
12 See Antonin Tabarant, La vie artistique au temps de Baudelaire, troisime dition

(Paris: Mercure de France, 1963), p.63.
concluded that the issue was not with the quality of the dyes themselves or
any chemical changes, but with the optical effects of juxtaposing different
hues, a process that he termed le contraste simultan. The discovery that a
colours neighbouring hues would influence the way in which any colour
was perceived led to fifteen years of research and experiment, the results
of which were published in 1839 in a lavish text volume and separate atlas
entitled De la loi du contraste simultan des couleurs et de lassortiment des
objets colors considrs daprs cette loi dans ses rapports avec la peinture, les
tapisseries, etc.13 What was originally intended for use mainly in wool-dying
factories and tapestry works was soon to be taken over by artists, and the
book became a landmark in the history of colour science.
Scientific theories of colour had been finding their way into the hands
of artists and critics alike since Newtons investigations were published in
his Optiks of 1704. By discovering that white light could be separated into
pure prismatic colours and that these colours could be re-combined to make
white light again, Newton had shown the flaw in the Aristotelian view of
colour as an actual property of perceived objects. His discovery that colour
was a sensation produced in the eye provided the basis of several different
treatises on the subject in France, England and Germany over the next two
centuries, although as Martin Kemp describes it in his excellent overview
of the period, there was an uncomfortable gap between Newtonian sci-
ence and pictorial practice.14 The painter Philipp Otto Runge wished to
combine Newtons scientific discoveries with a more poetic approach. In
13 Michel Eugne Chevreul, De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs et de lassortiment

des objets colors considrs daprs cette loi dans ses rapports avec la peinture, les tapisseries
des Gobelins, les tapisseries de Beauvais pour meubles, les tapis, la mosaque, les vitraux
colors, limpression des toffes, limprimerie, lenluminure, la decoration des edifices,
lhabilement et lhorticulture (Paris: Pitois-Levrault, 1839). Quotations will be taken
from this edition unless otherwise stated; further references to this work will be
given in the text. The second edition of the work (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1889) is
also worth consulting for its superior format and colour illustrations.
14 Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1990), p.287. For a brief account of different examples of colour circles, see History
of Color Circles in Faber Birren, Principles of Color (New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1969).
64 Chapter 2
Die Farbenkugel, oder Construcion das Verhaltnisses aller Mischungen der

Farben zu einander, und ihrer vollstanigen Affinitt of 1810 he pre-empted
Chevreul by designing the first fully developed colour sphere featuring pairs
of complementary colours that he called contrasting harmonies (blue/
orange, yellow/violet, red/green) and describing how ocular fusion of
such colours can occur in tapestries and mosaics.15 Runge died just after
his book was published in 1810, the same year that his friend Goethes Zur
Farbenlehre appeared, and the two books have similarities in their technical
details. However, unlike Runge, Goethes avowed aim was to deny accepted
Newtonian theory and provide an alternative based on an Aristotelian view
of colour as the contrast of light and dark.16 Goethes study of the affective
values of colours, the effects of contrast and combination of warm and
cool colours, the aesthetics of perception and the manifestation of colour
within painting made his theory of immediate interest to painters and writ-
ers, and although his work cannot be regarded as a serious contribution to
physical optics, one critic has argued that Goethes scientific redemption
[] must be derived from the differences between Newtons physical and
Gthes physiological premises.17 The Catalogue gnrale des imprims
of the Bibliothque nationale does not list a French translation of Zur
Farbenlehre until the end of the nineteenth century, although un travail de
Goethe sur les couleurs is referred to by Madame de Stal in De lAllemagne18
and in 1807 Villers wrote of his plan to translate Goethes lesser-known
work, the Beitrge zur Optik (1791), into French.19 In any case, the first
English translation of the Farbenlehre was published in 1840, a year after
15 For all illustration of this sphere, see Kemp, p.328, plate VIII.
16 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (Didaktischer Teil), in Werke, 14
vols (Hamburg: Hamburger Ausg., 1962), XIII, 314536.
17 Werner Heisenberg, quoted in Frederick Burwick, The Damnation ofNewton: Gthes
Colour Theory and Romantic Perception (New York: Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986),
p.10.
18 Anne-Louise Germaine Necker, baronne de Stal-Holstein, De lAllemagne, 5 vols
(Paris: Hachette, 19581960), IV, 250.
19 For details of this see Fernand Baldensperger, Bibliographie critique de Goethe en
France (Paris: Hachette, 1907), p.159. I have discussed the possible influence of
Goethes work on Baudelaire elsewhere; see Kennedy, Baudelaires Parrot.
Chevreuls book appeared in France, and it caused a stir among scientists

and artists alike. The translator, the architect Charles Lock Eastlake, was
criticized by physicists for suggesting that Goethes teachings were more
relevant to the theory and practice of painting than Newtons discover-
ies because they contain more useful principles in all that relates to the
harmony of colour, than any that have been derived from the established
doctrine.20 According to Eastlake, Goethe deserved praise because of his
concern with the phenomena of contrast and gradation, two principles
which may be said to make up the artists world,21 but it was Goethes lists
of the positive and negative values of colours that attracted Turner, who
copied out some of these and in 1843 composed two paintings in response,
Shade and Darkness the Evening of the Deluge and its companion-piece
Light and Colour (Goethes Theory) The Morning after the Deluge Moses
Writing the Book of Genesis.
In France, Chevreuls book was also making waves among artists, as
it helped to make Newtons findings more directly applicable to painterly
practice. The book was in three volumes. In the first part, Chevreul devel-
ops the principles of his law governing the simultaneous optical contrast of
colours, which stated that when the eye sees two contiguous colours they
tend to appear as dissimilar as possible. In the second part of the book he
uses his findings to make recommendations to tapestry-makers, printers
and decorators, and in the third part touches on the question of affinities
between sounds, perfumes and colours. When, early in the first volume,
Chevreul states that deux surfaces colores juxtaposes peuvent prsenter
lil qui les voit simultanment deux modifications, lune relative la hau-
teur des tons respectifs de leurs couleurs, et lautre relative la composition
physique de ces mmes couleurs (De la loi, p.13) he is careful to point out
that la nature chimique des matires colores na aucune influence sur le
phnomne du contraste simultan (De la loi, p.38); the effect is purely
in the eye of the beholder and he demonstrates this with a detailed colour
20 Charles Lock Eastlake, Goethes Theory ofColours (London: F. Cass, 1967), Translators
Preface, p.xi.
21 Ibid., p.xiii.
66 Chapter 2
circle containing seventy-two sectors. In accordance with Newtonian optics,

Chevreuls circle is based on three primary colours (red, yellow and blue)
and three secondary or compound colours (orange, green and violet), and
he called complementary the relation of one primary colour to the second-
ary colour which is comprised of the other two primary colours. Thus red
is the complementary of green (which is the mix of blue and yellow), blue
the complementary of orange (a red/yellow mix) and yellow of violet (a
blue/red mix). Chevreul discovered that when the complementary hues,
which occupied opposite positions on the colour circle, were placed next
to each other, each colour gave its complement to its neighbour, thereby
intensifying the effect of each. Je conclus Chevreul wrote, que toutes
les fois que lil voit simultanment deux objets diffremment colors,
ce quil y a danalogue dans la sensation des deux couleurs prouve un tel
affaiblissement, que ce quil y a de diffrent devient plus sensible dans
limpression simultane de ces deux couleurs sur la rtine (De la loi, p.78).
In other words, when red and green are juxtaposed, red loses whatever
green it contains and appears more red, while green becomes enhanced by
the proximity of red and correspondingly appears more intense. Chevreul
maintained that larrangement complmentaire est suprieur tout autre
dans lharmonie de contraste (De la loi, p.135). He also described the
effects of le contraste successif , when the eye looks from one coloured
surface to another, and the effects of complex combinations of simultane-
ous and successive contrasts. Understanding these effects was important
for anyone using colour, whether artist or craftsman, and in the second part
of the book Chevreul discusses the different ways in which these laws of
contrast can be applied in practice:
Or, quapprend la loi du contraste simultan des couleurs? Cest ds que lon voit
avec quelque attention deux objets colors en meme temps, chacun deux apparat
non de la couleur qui lui est propre, cest--dire tel quil paratrait sil tait vu isol-
ment, mais dune teinte rsultant de la couleur propre et de la complmentaire de la
couleur de lautre objet. (De la loi, p.190)
In the third part of the book Chevreul was less convinced by perceived con-
nections among musical notes and colours, stating javoue que je naperois
point ces rapports intimes que plusieurs auteurs, particulirement le pre
Castel, ont dit avoir aperus entre les sons et les couleurs (De la loi, p.691).
He refers to the famous Clavein oculaire that was designed and con-
structed in 1730 by the Jesuit priest and scientist Louis Bertrand Castel
to attempt to pair colours with musical notes. Although another, more
extensive version of it was built in London in 1754, the experiment was not
deemed a success, though clearly it remained an intriguing experiment.
Although his tables and diagrams are extensive, Chevreul saw his book
as providing not a set of ready-made formulas or infallible prescriptions,
but to increase the artists understanding of colour by demonstrating what
mistakes and distortions could be avoided. As Martin Kemp observes:
Chevreul was concerned to increase the artists understanding of colour, but not to
provide absolute formulas to say how a painting or tapestry must be composed []
The harmonies of contrast and analogy must be exploited with intuitive discre-
tion, not only with respect to each other but also in relation to the type of subject
portrayed. Artistic intuition remained ultimately supreme in the composing of a
great work of art.22
The key to colour harmony had to be established by the individual dyer or

artist: similarly, le coloris dun tableau peut etre vrai ou absolu; et cependant
leffet nen sera pas agrable, parce que les couleurs des objets nauront pas
dharmonie (De la loi, p.183). Chevreul emphasized that it was up to the
artist to provide a sense of harmony in a painting: un peintre est encore le
matre de choisir une couleur dominante (De la loi, p.190). Furthermore,
when in the foreword of his book he stresses that his concern is with la
modification qui se passe en nous, lorsque nous percevons la sensation de
ces deux couleurs (De la loi, pp.xiiixiv, Cheveuls emphasis) he is saying
something important about the nature of perception that Baudelaire echoes.
The eye is not a passive recipient of whatever the artist wishes to portray,
but has an active role which the successful artist (or tapestry-maker, or
decorator) needs to understand.
Chevreul did not dispute Newtons basic principles in his theory of
colour, but like Goethe he was primarily concerned with examining the
22 Kemp, p.307.
68 Chapter 2
eyes reaction to juxtaposed colours, rather than colour as a phenomenon

of physics. Similarly, Chevreuls theory, although written mainly for fellow
scientists and technicians, soon achieved its acclaim among artists. This was
to prove an important development in colours status because it effectively
altered the balance of control in painting; colour was portrayed as acting
independently of the artist and being governed by a set of rules. Chevreul
insisted that his book was a basic grammar with which every chemist of
colour, which, as he himself said, included artists, should familiarize him-
self. He maintained that all painters should perfect le coloris absolu comme
ils se perfectionnent dans la perspective linaire (De la loi, p.215) and
this promoted the sense that colour deserved to be taken as seriously as
draughtsmanship. In the introduction to an English edition of the work
Faber Birren points out that:
[] although he was not an artist and had only an academic interest in art, [Chevreuls]
work, almost immediately upon its its publication in 1839, had a tremendous influence
on art. Where art forms had previously been concerned with craftsmanship, light
and shade relationships (chiaroscuro) and with the mechanical problems of paint-
making and application, suddenly the artist was free from the limitations of his
materials.23
While Birren is possibly overestimating Chevreuls direct influence, there

can be little doubt that his theories on colour had a far-reaching effect and
prepared the path for the Impressionists and Seurats experiments with
optical mixing some years later. In his Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867)
Charles Blanc may have retrospectively exaggerated Delacroixs depend-
ence on Chevreul (see the following section for details of this) but there
can be little doubt that the theories were widely discussed in the 1840s. If
Baudelaire did not hear about them directly by reading Chevreuls book
or attending his public lectures of the 1840s, it is very likely that he would
have at least heard about them from the publications that he was reading
at the time and hoping to write for. In 1842 LArtiste published two articles
23 The Principles ofHarmony and Contrast ofColours and their Applications to the Arts,
M.E. Chevreul, based on the first English translation by C. Martel (1854), with an
introduction and notes by Faber Birren (New York: Reinhold, 1967), p.81.
by a Dr E.V. who summarized the findings of Chevreul solely in relation

to painting and suggested that there was now at last a scientific way of
analysing artists intuitive approach to colour: il serait difficile de nier
le service immense que M. Chevreul a rendu lart du coloris en formulant
une loi si fconde en applications de la plus haute utilit.24
A similar catalogue of Chevreul-influenced colour effects was pub-
lished as the Lettres sur la thorie des couleurs by C.-E. Clerget in the
Bulletin de lAmi des Arts in 1844, another publication Baudelaire would
have been familiar with. In this article the author maintains that la loi du
contraste [] [est] un guide sr, infaillible, car elle est luvre de Dieu;
lhomme ne la pas faite, le savant la trouve, lartiste va lappliquer.25
Much of Chevreuls thinking may have filtered through to Baudelaire in
this way. There is certainly evidence that other art critics were beginning
to take note of them. When Baudelaire was writing his Salon no other
critic had applied Chevreuls findings directly to exhibited paintings, but
after 1846 his work would become more widespread among writers who
professed to know about art. In 1851 Albert de la Fizelire, the editor of the
Bulletin de lAmi des Arts, praised those painters who knew how to manier
harmonieusement des tons sympathiques pour nous servir dun mot la
mode and reproaches an artist for un oubli complet de la loi du contraste
des couleurs, qui interdit certains rapprochements funestes et choquants.26
For this writer at least, there is an assumption that any painter worth his
salt would be familiar with Chevreuls law of contrasts.
Baudelaire did not mention Chevreul by name, and there is in fact no
proof that he ever read De la loi du contraste simultan. Although he writes
about les affinits chimiques of certain colours in the Salon de 1846 as well
as la science du contrepoint and la thorie de la couleur (S46, 424, 425),
there is no mention ofChevreuls most important formulations concerning
24 Dr E.V., Cours sur le contraste des couleurs par M. Chevreul, LArtiste, troisime
srie, I (1842), pp.148150, 162165; p.163.
25 C.-E. Clerget, Lettres sur la thorie des couleurs, Bulletin de lAmi des Arts, 1844,
pp.2936, 5462, 8191, 115121, 175185, 393404. See Kelleys Introduction, Le
Salon de 1846, pp.2829 for a discussion of these articles.
26 Albert de la Fizelire, Salon de 1851, Le Sicle, 15 avril, 5 avril.
70 Chapter 2
le contraste simultan or successif or any real exploration of complementary

colours. According to Baudelaire, the true colourist connat de naissance
la gamme des tons, la force du ton, les rsultats des mlanges, et toute la
science du contrepoint which suggests that he felt that the science of
colour was not necessarily something that could be learned from a sci-
ence book, but is known innately in the same way that nature knows how
to harmonize living colours. Red and green are described by Chevreul as
les couleurs complmentaires les plus gales en hauteur; car le rouge, sous
le rapport de lclat, tient le milieu entre le jaune et le bleu, et dans le vert
les deux extrmes sont runis (De la loi, p.114) but when in the colour
chapter Baudelaire describes un cabaret mi-parti de vert et de rouge crus,
qui taient pour mes yeux une douleur dlicieuse (S46, 425) he is talking
about a very particular and personal power that this combination has on
him, and he does not attempt to analyse this pairings particular resonance
for him by invoking Chevreul or any scientific source. Bernard Howells,
who has written extensively on the rapprochement between Baudelaires
and Chevreuls approaches to colour, notes that in the Salon de 1846 the
critics vocabulary is slightly en arrire of that used by the scientist, but
that this does not matter: Baudelaires aim in De la couleur was to give
the unitiated some idea of the complexities of colour without resorting
to technicalities.27 Howells points out that despite the brilliance of the
chapters evocation of colour effects in nature, there is a notable lacuna in
Baudelaires account; it says nothing about the central paradox or lie
of the painterly craft: how the colours of nature may be translated into
the pigments at the artists disposal.28 It is true that Baudelaires colour
chapter does not resemble Chevreuls systematic approach, and in fact in
the first half is more reminiscent of Goethes descriptive passages in Zur
Farbenlehre, such as this one:
27 Bernard Howells, Baudelaire in the light of Chevreuls theory: Colour, Contrast,

Analogy and Abstraction, Chapter 8 of Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and
the Philosophy of History (Oxford: Legenda, 1996), pp.175199; p.182.
28 Howells, ibid., p 183.
Auch ohne Bezug auf Gestalt sind diese Erscheinungen dem Auge gefllig, und
machen an und fr sich einen vergngenden Eindrck. Wir sehen das einfache
Grn einer frischgemhten Wiese mit Zufriedenheit [] und ein Wald tut in einiger
Entfernung schon als groe einformige Masse unserm Auge wohl.29
Nevertheless, it seems likely that as Howells maintains, scientific litera-

ture, especially the natural sciences, formed a large part of the submerged
iceberg of Baudelaires reading,30 and if he took from Chevreul certain
impressions and parts that suited his own aesthetic while disregarding
the rest, this seems characteristic of his approach to his sources. In her
article Relative Color: Baudelaire, Chevreul, and the Reconsideration of
Critical Methodology Jennifer Phillips argues that Chevreuls scientific
theories must have influenced Baudelaires aesthetic because Chevreul and
Baudelaire share theoretical objectives in reevaluating colours ontologi-
cal status [] and by extension the methods of either scientific analysis
or art criticism.31 From this she concludes that Chevreuls influence on
Baudelaire was greater than most critics have assumed, but while she makes
a valid point in drawing attention to the colour chapters footnote in which
Baudelaire makes it plain that he is referring to des tons purs and la sci-
ence du contrepoint (S46, 422) this does not necessarily connect him to
the scientific theorist more than to painterly practice. Rather, it seems to
suggest that Baudelaire wanted to imply that he was familiar with both
worlds, and while these lent him the authority to speak on colour, they
are also subsumed into his own imaginative viewpoint. There is certainly
much to be explored in comparing Chevreuls and Baudelaires shared view
of colour as incorporating and transcending the opposition between the
objective and the subjective,32 as Phillips eleoquently puts it.
29 Goethe, Goethes Farbenlehre, ed. H. Wohlbold ( Jena: E. Diederich, 1932), p.129.

30 Howells, p.199.
31 Jennifer Phillips, Relative Color: Baudelaire, Chevreul, and the Reconsideration of
Critical Methodology, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 33/34 (SpringSummer
2005), pp.342357; p.343.
32 Phillips, p.348.
72 Chapter 2
Deroy, Delacroix and Chevreul
Baudelaires claims to echo the words of the painter he revered, Eugne

Delacroix, have been well documented. Most critics have been confident
that his greatest debt in learning about colour technique was to that artist;
Margaret Gilman is typical when she writes that most ofBaudelaires tech-
nical comment, what he says of reflections, of the use of touches, of the
chemistry of colours, seems to proceed directly from Delacroix.33 However,
before Baudelaire met Delacroix, and at a time when he was first begin-
ning to formulate his thoughts on painting, his close friendship with the
lesser known artist, mile Deroy, may have had a formative influence on
his views on colours role in painting. Baudelaire first became acquainted
with the artist in 1842, and the two men became close, with their friend-
ship lasting until the painters death in 1846 at the age of twenty-six.34
Deroy is probably now best known for his 1844 portrait of Baudelaire
at the Muse de Versailles and for the fact that this portrait and Deroys
copy ofDelacroixs Femmes dAlger hung on the walls ofBaudelaires apart-
ment in the Htel Pimodan in 1845. Deroy accompanied Baudelaire and
Asselineau on their visits to the Salon of 1845 in the Louvre, and the three
men had long conversations about what they saw. Deroy, whose paintings
show Delacroixs influence, had a particular interest in and loved to dis-
cuss the workings of colour; the poet Thodore de Banville, also a close
friend, observed that:
[] ce peintre extasi comprenait la Couleur comme moi-mme je comprenais la

Rime, cest--dire non pas uniformment blouissante et riche (selon lide que
nous attribuent les sots), mais varie, diverse, amoureusement unie la pense, se
33 Gilman, p.40. See also Jean Prvost, Baudelaire: Essai sur linspiration et la cration
potiques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1953), p.50, Moss, p.73, May, p.27.
34 See Thodore de Banville, Mes Souvenirs (Paris: ditions dAujourdhui, 1980),
pp.8996, Jean Ziegler, mile Deroy (18201846) et lesthtique de Baudelaire,
Gazette des Beaux-Arts (maijuin 1976), pp.153160 and Claude Pichois and Jean
Ziegler, Baudelaire (Paris: Julliard, 1987), p.173.
transfigurant du tout au tout selon la nature du sujet trait, et ne voulant se ressembler

elle-mme que par la fidle et constante recherche de la justesse harmonique.35
Vitu confirms that the promising young artist had lively but unformed
views on painting, writing that Deroy a sur la peinture quantit dides
neuves, quil ne sait dvelopper, et qui nont besoin que dtre mises en
uvre avec quelques restrictions.36 It is possible that Baudelaire saw the
opportunity to combine his own thoughts with the unsophisticated, but
technically informed, ideas of a relatively unknown artist and present them
as his own in the Salon of 1846. Sadly, Deroy died only a few days after the
Salons publication.
Baudelaire never acknowledged his debt to his friend, nor did he
mention Chevreul by name. The only artist and theorist of colour that he
wanted to be associated with was, of course, Delacroix. There can be little
doubt that Baudelaire had met him before he wrote the Salon de 1846; his
first reference to his acquaintance with the artist occurs in his essay Conseils
aux jeunes littrateurs, published in April 1846, where he writes: M. Eugne
Delacroix me disait un jour: Lart est une chose si idale et fugitive, que les
outils ne sont jamais assez expditifs (CJL, 17). Baudelaire liked to hint
at a long-established friendship, but this seems unlikely, especially given
the artists own withering remarks. Delacroixs first mention of a Dufy in
his diaries is in March 1847, the year in which he began writing his journals
again after a gap of fifteen years, and it sounds as if on that occasion, and
others, Baudelaire did most of the talking: Dufy venu [] [il] est frapp
par la ncessit dune rvolution. Limmoralit gnrale le frappe. Il croit
35 Banville, p.93. Significantly, Banville also claims that Deroy also spoke to him of
a subject which would become central to Baudelaires thoughts on colour, namely,
colours ability to convey emotion without reference to subject matter which was
seen as connected to its musical qualities: [Deroy] voulait quun tableau, vu de trop
loin pour quon pt se rendre compte du sujet reprsent, st dj, par des qualits
toutes musicales, mettre lme du spectateur dans ltat o le dsire le peintre (ibid.,
p.93). In the Exposition universelle of 1855 Baudelaire wrote: vu une distance trop
grande pour analyser ou mme comprendre le sujet, un tableau de Delacroix a dj
produit sur lme une impression riche, heureuse ou mlancolique (EU55, 595).
36 Quoted in Ziegler, p.155.
74 Chapter 2
lavnement dun tat de choses o les coquins seront tenus en bride par
les honntes gens.37 Delacroixs allusion to the young critics coquetteries
the following month (Journal, I, 214, 4avril 1847) and, not long after, his
testy remark, Dufys ensuite; jai tort de dire si librement mon avis avec
des gens qui ne sont pas mes amis (Journal, I, 221, 3mai 1847) indicates
that he was quickly tiring of the would-be critic and of having his own
beliefs about painting quoted back at him.38 Two comments point to this
as a possibility: the first, written by Baudelaire in his Salon de 1859, is a
fond recollection of what he depicts as his initiation into painting: je vous
raconterai simplement ce que jai appris de la bouche dun matre homme
cette poque je vrifiais, avec la joie dun homme qui sinstruit, ses pr-
ceptes si simples sur toutes les peintures qui tombaient sous mon regard
(S59, 623). In contrast, the remark which Delacroix makes in 1852, when
he censures those gens mdiocres who vous rptent avec beaucoup de
confiance, comme si ctait de leur cru, ce quils ont ailleurs entendu dire
vous-mme (Journal, I, 461, 25fvrier 1852) suggests his lack of patience
with people who adopted his ideas, and Baudelaire had clearly ceased to
be a welcome visitor by this time.
However short-lived, the access that Baudelaire gained to Delacroixs
studio and the conversations that he held with him undoubtedly fur-
nished him with a lifelong influence and invaluable insights into the
artists painterly technique and theory. In almost every article he wrote
on painting Baudelaire refers to Delacroixs views as coinciding with his
own, most notably in the remark la nature est un vaste dictionnaire
37 Eugne Delacroix, Journal, introduction et notes par Andr Joubin, 3 vols (Paris:
Plon, 1960), I, 197, 2mars 1847. Further references to this work will be included in
the text.
38 After a visit by Baudelaire (his first reference to the critic by that name) Delacroix
witheringly observes ses vues me paraissent des plus modernes et tout fait dans
le progrs (Journal, I, 258, 5fvrier 1849). Fourteen years later Baudelaire appears
still to be smarting from the effects of the artists sharp tongue on this very subject
when, in the obituary notice, he remarks that le causeur qui, devant M. Delacroix,
sabandonnait aux enthousiasmes enfantins de lutopie, avait bientt subir leffet
de son rire amer, imprgn dune piti sarcastique (OVD, 758759).
(S46, 433), repeated in 1859 and in his obituary essay on the artist, where
Baudelaire is particularly keen to state that his thoughts on painting were
written presque sous la dicte du matre (OVD, 747). Of course, it was
in Baudelaires professional interest to imply that he had been granted
a privileged insight into the methods of an artistic genius. Delacroix
famously did not care for many critics, writing of their insuffisance and
peu dutilit (Journal, III, 14, 13janvier 1857). Although occasionally
he wrote warm letters to critics who had written articles praising him,
including Baudelaire, at most other times his journal notes show that he
felt that art criticism only contributed to the lack of a proper appreciation
of art on the part of the public. By the mid-1850s his opinion ofGautiers
criticism appeared to change from a feeling of gratitude towards one of
his earliest public supporters (Je suis sorti de bonne heure pour aller voir
Gautier. Je lai beaucoup remerci de son article splendide fait avant-hier,
et qui mavait fait grand plaisir, Journal, I, 212, 3avril 1847) to exaspera-
tion with Gautiers literary focus:
[Gautier] prend un tableau, le dcrit sa manire, fait lui-mme un tableau qui est
charmant, mais il na pas fait un acte de vritable critique; pourvu quil trouve faire
chatoyer, miroiter les expressions macaroniques quil trouve avec un plaisir qui vous
gagne quelquefois [] il est content, il a atteint son but dcrivain curieux, et je crois
quil ne voit pas au-del. (Journal, II, 341, 17juin 1855)
James Kearns has recently drawn attention to the injustice done both to
Gautier and to Delacroix himself by taking this Journal entry out of con-
text, and argues that part of Delacroixs exasperation with Gautier at the
time was political in nature and stemmed from his conviction that Gautier
had favoured the British artists over their French counterparts. Kearns
maintains that Delacroixs disaffection with Gautier arose from the artistss
frustration with the critics focus on entertaining rather than on instruct-
ing his readers:
From Delacroixs point of view, for Gautier to assume in the proper manner the
responsibility of writing on British artists, he would have had to compare their
achievements with those of their French counterparts by explaining the technical and
material issues that arose when artists from different national traditions addressed
76 Chapter 2
similar developments, such as changing forms of realism, trends in landscape art, or

the growth in genre painting). Instead, Gautier had developed his own system for
creating verbal illusions of paintings, a form of transposition which resulted in a
related but different product.39
In fact when Delacroix read Gautiers praise of his own work in the exhibi-
tion a few weeks later he wrote to thank him, as was the critics due after
almost twenty years of campaigning for Delacroix in La Presse, but the
impression has remained that Gautiers verbally brilliant style of criticism
was more of an irritation to Delacroix (as was Baudelaires criticism) than
a cause of gratitude.40 Despite his own admiration for Gautiers art criti-
cism, in the 1840s Baudelaire might have wished to establish his difference
from more literary Salonniers and to earn the respect of Delacroix, and
emphasizing the technical aspects of painting might have been one way
of doing this.
So might Delacroix and the young critic have discussed Chevreuls
laws? Delacroixs Journal shows how the artists thoughts were often taken
up with thoughts on colour contrasts, often combining the incidental
study of nature with the practical aspects required to plan a painting. On
a walk with Villot in November 1850 the artist notes the brilliant contrasts
of a sunset, as if for the first time; was this because he had been thinking
about Chevreuls words? Not unlike Baudelaire in the 1846 colour chapter,
Delacroix turns it into a mixture of poetic description, painterly notes and
Chevreul-like observation of the colour principles at work in the scene:
Ctait au soleil couchant: les tons de chrome, de laque les plus clatants du ct du
clair, et les ombres bleues et froides outre mesure. Ainsi lombre porte des arbres
tout jaunes, terre dItalie, brun rouge et clairs en face par le soleil, se dtachant sur
39 James Kearns, Thophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism in the Second
Republic (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), pp.45.
40 Although the recent attribution of a warmly grateful letter from Delacroix to
Baudelaire in 1859 might call for a reassessment of this too; see Eugne Delacroix,
Nouvelles Lettres, edition tablie, annote et commente par Lee Johnson et
Michle Hannoosh (Bordeaux: W. Blake, 2000) p.88 and Chapter 5 of this book
(pp.188189).
une partie de nuages gris qui allaient jusquau bleu. Il semble que les tons du clair
sont chauds, plus la nature exagre lopposition grise [] Ce qui faisait que cet effet
paraissait si vif dans le paysage, ctait precisment cette loi dopposition. (Journal,
I, 3novembre. 1849; Delacroixs emphases)
A few days later he observes the same phenomenon again and writes as if
he had been thinking deeply about why these contrasts were so striking:
[] il nest plus clatant, plus frappant le midi, que parce que les oppositions
sont plus tranches. Le gris des nuages, le soir, va jusquau bleu; la partie
du ciel qui est pure est jaune vif ou orang. Loi gnrale: plus dopposition,
plus dclat (Journal, I, 3novembre 1849; Delacroix has 13novembre in
the journal entry). That Delacroix was interested in Chevreuls work on
the science of colour contrasts at this time cannot be disputed. The writer
Charles Blanc, who in his 1867 Grammaire des arts du dessin did so much
to promote the idea of a link between Delacroix and Chevreuls theories,
reports how in 1850 Delacroix was planning to visit Chevreul, but was
prevented from doing so by a throat infection. John Gage has deduced
that it was about this time that Delacroix must have acquired a notebook
summarizing a course of lectures given by Chevreul during the winter of
18478 which included a discussion of painting in flat tints,41 possibly
to solve the practical problem of how best to paint the murals and ceiling
paintings that he was working on at the time, as large-scale projects such
as the Galerie dApollon in the Louvre demanded, as Gage suggests, the
strong contrasting tones that the chemist had explored so thoroughly.42
It is worth noting that consulting Chevreul was not unusual at the time,
nor was the practice restricted to overtly colourist artists; Gage provides
interesting evidence to suggest that the classicizing artists Vernet and Ingres
also had recourse to Chevreuls laws of contrast for the practical solution
to painterly problems, with Vernet in particular, a friend of Chevreuls,
seeking the chemists advice on how to make the military uniforms he
depicted stand out more.
41 See John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames
& Hudson, 2000), pp.199200.
42 Ibid., p.200.
78 Chapter 2
Delacroix, on the other hand, who was so famously linked to Chevreuls

theories by Blanc, never mentioned Chevreul by name in his Journal or
elsewhere, leading Howells reasonably to surmise that Delacroix was as
waspish about scientists who claimed expert knowledge of optical laws as
he was about critics with ready-made aesthetic theories.43 Delacroixs own
professional research into colour contrasts was of course extensive, based
on his own painterly experiments and observations, and he may not have
wished to give the impression, even to himself, of requiring any theoretical
input from others. The Journal contains page after page of his thoughts
on the best combinations of tons, teintes and reflets to be used in his work;
for the decorations for the ceiling of the Salon de la Paix at the Htel de
Ville, for example, he discusses how to resolve the problem of pink-red flesh
tones by adding touches of its complementary colour, green, although he
does not describe it as such: il y a une chose certaine, cest quen faisant
des chairs rouges ou violtres, et en faisant des luisants analogues, il ny a
plus dopposition, partant le mme ton partout Il faut donc absolument
mettre plus de vert dans les demi-teintes dans ce cas (Journal, I, 491, 11
octo-
bre 1852). These careful calculations of which tone to be matched against
which other are, of course, necessary to the preparations for a painting,
but in their emphasis on the optical mixing of complementary colours
they are reminiscent of Chevreuls researches, even if they do not always
reach the same conclusions. One such observation is typical of the notes
that Delacroix wrote: Je devinai un jour que le linge a toujours des reflets
verts et lombre violette. [] Il est probable que je trouverai que cette loi
sapplique tout. Lombre porte sur la terre, de quoi que ce soit, est violette;
les dcorateurs, dans la grisaille, ny manquent pas, terre de Cassel, etc.44
For Delacroix, as for Baudelaire, the emphasis is on the life and vibrancy
to be created by the accurate combinations of colour, and even in its most
abstract form this could give him pleasure. Delacroix claimed that his
youthful ambitions to become a poet foundered mainly because quand je
regarde ce papier rempli de petites taches noires, mon esprit ne senflamme
43 Howells, p.175.
44 Delacroix, uvres littraires, 2vols (Paris: G. Crs et cie, 1923), p.73.
pas aussi vite qu la vue de mon tableau ou seulement de ma palette. Ma

palette frachement arrange et brillante du contraste des couleurs suffit
pour allumer mon enthousiasme (Journal, I, 392, 21juillet 1850). Indeed,
even while he was still alive, Delacroixs palette had a fame of its own, and
in the obituary essay Baudelaire describes it as resembling un bouquet de
fleurs, savamment assorties (OVD, 748).
Delacroixs interest in the contrast of tones was ever present, and clearly
also spilled over into his conversations with friends. In January 1847 George
Sand describes how Delacroix was eager to demonstrate to her and Chopin
some basic principles of colour contrast:
Le matre tablit une comparaison entre les tons de la peinture et les sons de la musi-
que. Lharmonie en musique, dit-il, ne consiste pas seulement dans la constitution
des accords, mais encore dans leur relation, dans leur succession logique, dans leur
enchanement, dans ce que jappelerai au besoin, leurs reflets auditifs. Eh bien! la
peinture ne peut procder autrement! Tiens! donne-moi ce coussin bleu et ce tapis
rouge. Plaons-les cte cte. Tu vois que l o les deux tons se touchent ils se volent
lun lautre. Le rouge devient teint de bleu, le bleu devient lav de rouge et au milieu
le violet se produit. Tu peux fourrer dans un tableau les tons les plus violents; donne-
leur un reflet qui les relie, tu ne seras jamais criard. Est-ce que la nature est sobre de
tons? Est-ce quelle ne dborde pas doppositions froces qui ne dtruisent en rien
son harmonie? Cest que tout senchane par le reflet. On prtend supprimer cela
en peinture, on le peut, mais alors, il y a un petit inconvnient, cest que la peinture
est supprime du coup.45
Throughout his writings Delacroix also demonstrated a keen interest in

the laws that governed music, sculpture, architecture and literature as well
as painting; see also Chapter 4, pp.168169, for more on this. In 1849 the
artist persuaded Chopin to explain la logique en musique to him, and in
his Journal records what he learned from this:
[] cest que la vraie science nest pas ce quon entend ordinairement par ce mot, cest-
-dire une partie de la connaissance diffrente de lart. Non, la science envisage ainsi,
dmontre par un homme comme Chopin, est lart lui-mme, et par contre lart nest
45 George Sand, Impressions et Souvenirs, quoted in Raymond Escholier, Delacroix,

3vols (Paris: H. Floury, 19261929), II, p.144.
80 Chapter 2
plus alors ce que croit le vulgaire, cest--dire une sorte dinspiration qui vient de je ne
sais o, qui marche au hasard, et ne prsente que lextrieur pittoresque des choses.
Cest la raison elle-mme orne par le gnie, mais suivant une marche ncessaire et
contenue par des lois suprieures. (Journal, I, 283284, 7avril 1849)
It is quite possible that Delacroix treated Baudelaire to similar insights into

the workings of colour at around the time that the latter was composing the
Salon de 1846. Although Sand reports Delacroix as saying that he owed his
theory plus souvent linspiration qu la science, which may well have been
true, it is nevertheless significant that when she praises his skill as un peu
de lalchimie, Delacroix contradicts her, saying: cest de la chimie pure.46
This suggests that Delacroix may well have been familiar with Chevreuls
theories earlier than 1847, and in the obituary essay of 1863, Baudelaire
appears to confirm this when he remembers the artists
recherches perp-
tuelles relatives la couleur, la qualit des couleurs, sa curiosit des choses
de chimie et ses conversations avec les fabricants de couleurs (OVD, 747),
all of which could have taken place in the 1840s and before.
In 1899 Paul Signac, following Blanc, attempted to make a definite
connection between Chevreuls theory and Delacroixs paintings in his
influential work DEugne Delacroix au no-impressionnisme. Probably
influenced by the recent publication of Delacroixs Journal from 1893
to 1895, the Neo-impressionist painter asserts that Delacroix attachait
aux lois du contraste et des couleurs complmentaires quil savait tre
des sources inpuisables dharmonie et de puissance.47 Signac considers
Delacroixs paintings comme exemple[s] de lapplication de sa mthode
scientifique,48 but it seems more likely that Delacroixs interest in Chevreuls
theories would have formed just one part of his own observations of, and
experiments in, colour contrast, rather than guiding his painterly output.
John Gage and Lee Johnson have argued that the colour triangle found in
Delacroixs papers and used in the preparations for the Femmes dAlger is
46 Sand, quoted in Escholier, II, p.146.

47 Paul Signac, DEugne Delacroix au no-impressionnisme (Paris: Hachette, 1964),
p.42.
48 Signac, p.72.
likely to have been based on diagrams published in the artist and colour
technologist J.F.L. Mrimes De la peinture lhuile of 1830.49
However, Delacroix also possessed a colour circle similar to the kind
formulated by Chevreul which he used as a guide in his later work, and
one painting in particular suggests a demonstrable link to Chevreuls law of
contrast. This is La Prise de Constantinople par les croiss, exhibited in the
Salon of 1841. In the painting the three fluttering standards held aloft by
the horsemen in the foreground are, from left to right, painted yellow and
violet, red and green and blue and orange: the three pairs of complemen-
tary colours which Chevreul had named. Is it a coincidence that that this
painting, when exhibited, was criticized for resembling une tapisserie des
Gobelins?50 As Ren Huyghe remarks of the flags, they would have served
admirably as an illustration to Chevreuls book.51 Delacroixs allegiance to
complementary colours might have gone too far for certain critics at the
time, but his interest in a system of colour contrasts is not in doubt. Maxime
du Camp recalls how the great artist, finding himself next to a basket full
of skeins of differently coloured yarns one evening, proceeded to group
and divide them, produisant ainsi des effets de coloration extraordinaire,
and commenting on his impromptu wool painting that: les plus beaux
tableaux que jai vus sont certains tapis de Perse.52
Although Baudelaire doubtless absorbed Delacroixs observations
on colour technique, he must equally have learned that for the artist la
couleur nest rien, si elle nest convenable au sujet, et si elle naugmente pas
leffet du tableau par limagination (Journal, II, 1, 2janvier 1853). In 1857
Delacroixs entry for Couleur in his never-completed Dictionnaire des
Beaux-Arts reads simply: De sa supriorit ou de son exclusivit, si lon
veut, sous le rapport de leffet sur limagination (Journal, III, 56, 25janvier
1857). The effect of colour on the imagination is something that Baudelaire
49 Gage, 2000, note to p.47.

50 Pierre Ptroz, Lart et la critique en France depuis 1822 (Paris: Germer Baillir, 1875),
p.69 (Chevreul was, of course, the Director of Dyes for the Royal Manufacturers
at the Gobelins).
51 Ren Huyghe, Delacroix (London, Thames and Hudson, 1963), p.72.
52 Souvenirs littraires (1882), p.290, quoted in Moss, p.222.
82 Chapter 2
will develop further in later Salons. In 1846 he is content to suggest that

the most important aspect of the science of colour is that it allows the
artist to express a mood or ton. But in order to express this accurately, the
colourist must be in control of his means of expression, and that involves
an accurate knowledge of how to create colour harmony by combining
different tones. In the lengthy chapter on Delacroix which follows the
colour chapter, Baudelaire sets out his belief that Delacroix est, comme
tous les grands matres, un mlange admirable de science, cest a dire
un peintre complet, et de navet, cest a dire un homme complet (S46,
435). In the same chapter it is worth noting that Baudelaire is scathing
in his censure of a young painter of his acquaintance who had criticized
Delacroixs work, saying coup sr, ce nest point dans les curiosits dune
palette encombre, ni dans le dictionnaire des rgles, que notre jeune ami
saura trouver cette sanglante et farouche dsolation, peine compense par
le vert sombre de lesprance! (S46, 436) As technically accomplished as
Delacroixs deployment of colour is, its real power comes not from colour
science but from its effects on the imagination, and this will be examined
further in Chapters 4 and 5.
A Science of Harmony
However it came about, Baudelaires interest in a science of colour in

the early 1840s was to be a defining moment in his promotion of colour
throughout his art criticism. From his first Salon of 1845, when he wrote
of Delacroixs progress in la science de lharmonie (S45, 357), the aware-
ness of colour science was linked in Baudelaires aesthetic with the crucial
unifying presence of a harmony of tones within a painting. As David Kelley
observes, ce qui est important pour Baudelaire, cest que ces lois correspond-
ent trs profondment sa conception de lorganisation harmonieuse de
la ralit extrieure, et celle du petit monde que chaque homme porte
en lui sous le ciel du crne.53 Baudelaires assertion in 1859 that un bon

tableau, fidle au rve qui lenfant, doit tre produit comme un monde
(S59, 626) is a sentiment which underlies all of his judgements on art, and
is first expressed in 1846 in terms of whether or not a painting presents
a unified effect through its harmonious colour. In the Salon de 1846 his
most astringent criticism is reserved for those artists whose work demon-
strates their lack of interest in or inability to create a harmony of colour.
Vernet is accused of replacing colour with le charivari (S46, 470), Glaize
is compared to a theatre dresser for his taste for rich hues ungoverned by
harmony (S46, 477), Amaury-Duvals paintings appeal to the majority
only because he waters down tones qui, sils taient intenses, hurleraient
comme le diable et leau bnite (S46, 465) and Diazs paintings are com-
pared to the patterns of a kaleidoscope: M. Diaz est coloriste, il est vrai;
mais largissez le cadre dun pied, et les forces lui manquent, parce quil ne
connat pas la ncessit dune couleur gnrale. Cest pourquoi ses tableaux
ne laissent pas de souvenir (S46, 453).54 Delacroixs marked contempt
for Ingres colour technique was based on that artists use of local colour,
which kept coloured objects separate from one another, and it is true that
Ingres based his considerable skills in colour on, among other things, his
understanding of Greek polychromy. As Delacroix commented, he has
studied with great delicacy the effects of light on marbles, gilding and
fabrics, but he has forgotten one thing: reflexions He has has not the
slightest inkling that everything in nature is reflection and that colour is
essentially an interplay of reflections.55
Like Delacroix, Baudelaire disliked this multi-coloured but ultimately
inharmonious approach. In the Salon de 1846 he praises the quieter Corot
who sait tre coloriste avec une gamme de tons peu varie (S45, 390)
which ensures that presque toutes ses uvres ont le don particulier de
53 Kelley, Introduction, Le Salon de 1846, pp.2829.

54 The pejorative term coloriage which Baudelaire used in 1845 to describe this sort of
colour ungoverned by harmony is, effectively dropped after that year, only being
used on a few subsequent occasions.
55 Quoted in Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to
Abstraction (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), p.201.
84 Chapter 2
lunit, qui est un des besoins de la mmoire (S46, 482). The importance
of memory and its links with colour and imagination in the Salon de 1859
will be explored further in Chapter 5, but from 1846 it is already clear
that the unifying power of colour had become of great importance to
Baudelaire. So much so that some of his earlier views on art had to be
reassessed, and even though the paintings of Ingres still hold a danger-
ous charm for him at this time, he now makes a joke at the great mans
expense: M. Ingres adore la couleur, comme une marchande des modes
(S46, 459). Notably, Baudelaires opinion of Ingres has changed quite
abruptly from a few months earlier, when in Le Muse classique du Bazar
Bonne-Nouvelle he defended the artists Stratonice because
une complica-
tion norme des tons et deffets lumineux nempche pas lharmonie (BN,
413). Might this have been because by the time of writing the Salon de 1846
he was influenced by Delacroix and Chevreul on a colour harmony that
was based on an understanding of colour science? Poking fun at Ingres for
his love of a rich array of local colours that are not arranged according to
the law of colour contrasts might have been a way of demonstrating how
much Baudelaires own understanding of colour had progressed. From
now on, paintings which show no evidence of lharmonie, la mlodie
et le contrepoint (S46, 423) will judged severely, and, as will be seen
in Chapter 3, the art of Ingres most severely of all. In the Salon de 1846,
however, it is important to note that as far as Baudelaire was concerned,
harmony in colour was required not as evidence of technical virtuosity
but to enable the artist to express himself most completely and fulfill the
conditions of his art.
By the time he was writing his next major essay on art, the Exposition
universelle, 1855, Beaux-Arts, Baudelaires has tired of discussing the science
of colour, and showing his superior technical savoir-faire:
Il me serait trop facile de disserter subtilement sur la composition symtrique ou

quilibre, sur la pondration des tons, sur le ton chaud et le ton froid, etc
vanit! je prfre parler au nom du sentiment, de la morale et du plaisir. Jespre que
quelques personnes, savantes sans pdantisme, trouveront mon ignorance de bon
got. (EU55, 579)
By 1855 Baudelaire views science and systme as twin forces that combine
to constrict individual expression and creative flexibility. While his animos-
ity towards systems is largely directed at those whose aesthetic refuses to
allow more than one type of beauty, it also causes him to turn away from
any kind of science as he vows that je suis revenu chercher un asile dans
limpeccable navet (EU55, 578). Consequently, he will concentrate almost
exclusively on the mystical and symbolic aspects ofDelacroixs colour, and
this tendency is explored further in Chapter 4. In the Salon de 1859, how-
ever, where Baudelaire exalts the imagination above all else, he returns to
the idea of a science of colour being at the centre of the artists creativity
and shows how it works in close co-operation with that faculty. In the
middle of the chapter Le Gouvernement de limagination in the Salon
de 1859 Baudelaire includes a paragraph on the colour techniques that he
deems essential for translating le langage du rve. Lart du coloriste, he
maintains, tient videmment par de certains cts aux mathmatiques et
la musique (S59, 625); translating the workings of the imagination into
a tangible form requires a highly-developed set of technical skills. In 1859
Baudelaire stresses the importance of cette grande loi dharmonie gnrale
and states that the separate colours should not be mixed physically on the
canvas but, par la loi sympathique qui les a associes, fused at a certain
distance by the eye itself (S59, 626). This optical mixing, giving rise to the
contraste simultan and successif, was one of Chevreuls main concerns,
and it is significant that Baudelaire should emphasize it now, given his
increasingly literary approach to painting. He compares the organization
of colour, which achieves the demands of the imagination, to the laws
which govern prose: il est vident que les rhtoriques et les prosodies ne
sont pas des tyrannies inventes arbitrairement, mais une collection de
rgles rclames par lorganisation mme de ltre spirituel (S59, 627), an
echo of his words of 1846: il ny a pas de hasard dans lart, non plus quen
mcanique (S46, 432).
In the obituary article on Delacroix the critic returns to the idea of
the artists interest in colour combinations, recalling his early observation
of the artists exhaustive preparations for a painting but now in terms of
carrying out the demands of the imagination:
86 Chapter 2
Il est vident qua ses yeux limagination tait le don le plus prcieux, la facult la plus
importante, mais que cette facult restait impuissante et strile, si elle navait pas
son service une habilet rapide, qui pt suivre la grande facult despotique dans ses
caprices impatients. Il navait pas besoin, certes, dactiver le feu de son imagination,
toujours incandescente; mais il trouvait toujours la journe trop courte pour tudier
les moyens dexpression.
Cest cette proccupation incessante quil faut attribuer ses recherches perp-
tuelles relatives la couleur, la qualit des couleurs, sa curiosit des choses de chimie
et ses conversations avec les fabricants de couleurs. (OVD, 747)
The concept of a science or a set of rules that govern colour is presented

as fundamental to artistic expression. Baudelaires development of the
concept of the imagination has its formative roots in his early introduc-
tion to the science of colour, and he believes that only the artist who has
understood the principles of colour harmony will be able to translate the
workings of the imagination with immediacy and accuracy. As Bernard
Howells observes: When he wrote that imagination was la plus scien-
tifique des facults (Corr. 1, 336) he intended to shock but also to break
down a divide to claim a truth for imagination and to reclaim imagina-
tion for science.56 The artist who ignored scientific principles of colour
combinations risked the failure of a governing harmony in his painting,
as Baudelaires changing views on the line in painting illustrate and will be
explored in the following chapter.
As a child Baudelaire had inherited the love of art from his father
and his art-filled home, but it was perhaps only when he met Deroy and
Delacroix, and learned ofChevreuls research, that he came to understand
more about how colour, that most powerfully expressive part of painting,
worked its magic. When he asserted in 1846 that colour was governed by
a distinct set of precepts requiring highly organized skills, learning and
logic, and maintained that only the painting which operated in accord-
ance with these principles could be successful, Baudelaire endowed colour
with the intellectual validity and formal importance which had eluded it
for so long, usually in favour of draughtsmanship. Moreover, this empha-
sis on harmony, made possible by the recent scientific theories of colour,
56 Howells, Baudelaire, p.199.

meant that a new set of criteria could be brought to bear in the evaluation
of painting which would invert the old academic provisos. Colour was
presented as the central force of painting, establishing the pictures struc-
tural basis, embodying its harmonious appeal, distilling its affective and
symbolic content and corresponding with the soul through the channel
of the eyes, an aspect that Baudelaire will develop more fully later in his
writings. The need for a harmonious organization of colour in the creation
of a painting meant that the relationship of the artist to his means could
be effectively reversed, and that colour could now be presented as making
demands upon the painter.
Chapter 3
Colour and Drawing: Resolving the Conflict?
Du dessin de Delacroix, si absurdement, si niaisement critiqu, que faut-il dire, si ce

nest des vrits lmentaires compltement mconnues; quun bon dessin nest pas une
ligne dure, cruelle, despotique, immobile, enfermant une figure comme une camisole
de force; que le dessin doit tre comme la nature, vivant et agit [] (EU55, 595)
Coloriste versus dessinateur
If in 1846 Baudelaire advocated an art criticism capable of understand-

ing and appreciating different types of art (Vous ignorez quelle dose la
nature a ml dans chaque esprit le got de la ligne et le got de la couleur,
S46, 418) there can be no doubt about his partisanship in this paragraph
from the Exposition universelle de 1855 essay, at the point when the eulogy
of one artist, Delacroix, becomes an opportunity for a lengthy attack on
another, Ingres, for perpetuating the idea that all art should be based on
neo-classical draughtsmanship. Instead of advocating a degree of broad-
mindedness as in 1846 Baudelaire sets upon what he calls the modern
Winckelmanns and the professeur-jurs desthtique (nous en sommes
pleins, la nation en regorge, les paresseux en raffolent) (EU55, 576) and
all those who prefer [s]enfermer dans un systme (EU55, 577), a trap
into which, he ruefully admits, he had himself previously been tempted.1
1 See Felix Leakey, Les esthtiques de Baudelaire: le systme des annes 184447,
Revue des sciences humaines, XXXII fasc. 127, JulySept 1967, pp.48196 for an
analysis of one of these systems.
90 Chapter 3
Although Ingres is not named directly in the paragraph quoted above, the
article on him that Baudelaire wrote for the exhibition was so vituperative
that one newspaper refused to print it, and a planned fourth article was
abandoned.2 At the beginning of the Delacroix article for the Exposition
universelle de 1855, Baudelaire disparages the opposition of supporters
of that artist and Ingres as an amour commun et puril de lantithse
but then proceeds to set the qualities of the coloriste (harmoniousness,
imagination, inclusiveness) against those of the dessinateur (abuse of will,
inflexibility, reductiveness) and to present the art ofIngres and Delacroix
as a demonstration of two irreconcilable forces. Clearly the contest was
not going to be judged impartially. In 1855 Baudelaire was making it clear,
even to the extent of losing his position as published art critic, that the
battle lines between colour and line had been drawn up once again, and
that colour could be the only winner.
Many critics have implied that Baudelaires love for Delacroixs paint-
ing made him incapable of seeing the beauty of other styles of art. Andr
Masson maintained that the critic simply got it wrong on the subject of
Ingres: bref, il joint ses sarcasmes ceux de lineffable critique acadmique
qui reprocha Ingres davoir donn quatre vertbres de trop sa Grande
Odalisque.3 Gita May believes that, with regard to Ingres, Baudelaire was
a victim of the aesthetic prejudices of his time:
[] la prfrence de Baudelaire pour les vives colorations et les formes mouvementes
de Delacroix, opposes aux calmes compositions dIngres, est trop connue pour quil
soit ncessaire dy insister. De fait, sans contester la puissance dIngres, il semble navoir
pas souponn ce quil y a de romantisme surveill et de sensualisme rprim dans la
correction et le fini du dessin du chef de lcole acadmique.4
Margaret Gilman suggests that what she describes as Baudelaires constant

preference for color over line5 frequently rendered him incapable of seeing
2 Baudelaire mentions a quatrime article to Auguste Vitu in June 1855 (Corr. I, 313,
9juin 1855). See Pichois, OCII, p.1366.
3 Andr Masson, Baudelaire et les peintres, Preuves, 207, mai 1968, pp.1625, p.23.
4 May, p.157.
5 Gilman, p.22.
the beauty of a more linear style of art. More recently, J.A. Hiddleston
suggests that the Salon de 1846 was built upon the opposition of colour
and line and plausibly argues that Baudelaire was simply using a tactical
approach in his dealings with Ingres in that earlier Salon: If he is to per-
suade, he has to handle the immense reputation ofIngres with care, which
is why he is impartial to begin with and then little by little tips the balance
decisively in Delacroixs favour.6 This is certainly a position supported
by the direction in which the Salon de 1846 leads the reader, although it
seems more likely that Baudelaires admiration for Ingres was still genuine
at that time and only changed markedly in the 1850s, when changes in the
art world and Baudelaires own aesthetic caused him to take an increasingly
polarized position towards dessin-based art.
This chapter will explore some of the reasons behind the change that
took part in Baudelaires approach to Ingres over the course of his critical
writings, and compare this to his views on the draughtsmanship ofDaumier
and Meryon. An important aspect of Baudelaires interest in colour that
has been little explored to date is the question of how he dealt with the
relationship of colour to draughtsmanship. In fact, it is often particularly
with regard to his remarks on line, whether he deems it to be arid or evoca-
tive, working with or against colour, that Baudelaire expresses his thoughts
on beauty, and the wider issues within painting as a whole. The triumvirate
of Ingres, Delacroix and Daumier embodies his changing attitudes to the
relationship between colour and drawing in the 1840s and 1850s and his
attempts to resolve their supposed antipathy in painting, while his later
admiration for the art of Constantin Guys throws a different light on his
views on the interaction of colour and le dessin. This chapter will consider
his developing attitudes to the function and the nature of drawing in art.
The first part deals with Baudelaires changing views on Ingres, the master
dessinateur of his time, whose singular style of drawing the critic at first
believed exempted Ingres from arts other demands, until the definitive
6 Hiddleston, p.39.
92 Chapter 3
rupture of 1855. The second part is concerned with Baudelaires defence

of the draughtsmanship of Delacroix and the colourist painters, and how
movement is an essential feature of this drawing style because it works in
harmony with colour and subject-matter. In the third section I consider
the importance for his aesthetic of those who do not use colour in their
work but whom he describes as transcending the limitations of the pencil
alone, with reference to Daumier and Meryon. After 1859 Baudelaires
enthusiasm for the work ofConstantin Guys was to a large extent inspired
by his admiration for the artists rapid style of execution which involves
colour and line simultaneously, and this will be looked at in the fourth
section. The late-flowering interest in Guyss method of working and his
mastery of the bauche parfaite might even have prompted Baudelaire to
change his mind about the role of drawing in art. In any case, for him the
workings of colour can never be entirely separated from those of drawing,
and, paradoxically perhaps, it is in his changing attitudes to the function
of drawing within painting, as well as in caricatures and lithographs, that
some of the most important aspects of his concept of colour as a force of
opposition are to be perceived.
Ingres and the neo-classical tradition
It is with the will to commit not just a blasphme but a blasphme impu-
dent that a few pages into his first Salon of 1845, Baudelaire announces of
a work by Delacroix that ce tableau est parfaitement bien dessin (S45,
355). The banality, if boldness, of the phrase belies the seriousness that this
issue will assume in his writings. As Lucie Horner points out, Baudelaire
was not the first to praise Delacroixs drawing; Pelletan, Fromentin and
particularly Haussard had already admired it for its rendering of move-
ment. However, as she notes:
[] ce qui distinguait Baudelaire des autres dfenseurs du dessin de Delacroix, ctait

que le critique, apparamment, abordait le problme entier dun point de vue diffrent,
quil donnait au mot dessin une signification infiniment plus large Bref, le lecteur
a limpression que selon Baudelaire, Delacroix naurait pu dessiner autrement.7
In 1845 Baudelaire wanted to make his mark by making contentious state-

ments, and it is with a keen sense of his own audacity that a little later he
declares that only two men equal Delacroixs talent as a draughtsman:
Daumier and Ingres. Voil certes qui doit stupfier les amis et les enne-
mis, les sides et les antagonistes (S45, 356), Baudelaire trumpets, and
he is indeed provocative; not only is he saying that Delacroix can draw,
but also that he and Daumier, a mere caricaturist, are on an equal footing
with the great Ingres, at the height of his success. By the 1840s Ingres was
already Professor at the cole des Beaux-Arts and had succeeded Vernet as
director to the cole de Rome. On his return to Paris in 1840 he became a
member of the Institute, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and was
the head of a successful studio: In short, Ingres had a position such as even
David had hardly occupied, and of which the enjoyment was marred only
by Delacroixs increasing fame, as Walter Friedlaender puts it.8 In 1845
Baudelaire wished to do away with contemporary critical preconceptions
about art as well as make some daring suggestions: that a colourist might
be able to draw, and that a caricaturist might be able to draw as well as the
acknowledged contemporary master. For Baudelaire, Rubens (being able
to draw movement and physiognomy) was able to express what Raphael
could not; similarly, Ingres did not have a monopoly on what constitutes
true draughtsmanship.9 In the 1845 Salon Baudelaire makes a point of not
7 Horner, p.70.
8 Walter Friedlaender, David to Delacroix (Cambridge, 1966), pp.8485. Ingres ascent
to this position was not an easy one, however, as his idiosyncratic painting style had
alienated many members of the Academy. As Daniel Ternois notes of the artist: hos-
tile aux romantiques, il ne ltait pas moins aux milieux acadmiques qui navaient
pas dsarm son gard, mme aprs son lection lInstitut (Daniel Ternois, Ingres
(Paris: F. Nathan, 1980), p.166).
9 A few years later the Dictionnaire de lAcadmie des Beaux-Arts, 6vols (Paris: Firmin-
Didot, 18581909) offers the traditional definition of draughtsmanship, but the
94 Chapter 3
discriminating among Ingres, Delacroix and Daumier: chacun verra que

ces trois dessins diffrents ont ceci de commun, quils rendent parfaitement
et compltement le ct de la nature quils veulent rendre, et quils disent
juste ce quils veulent dire (S45, 356). With the mixture of idealism and
self-confidence that characterizes the 1845 essay Baudelaire promotes an
artistic reconciliation of differences, and announces aimons-les tous les
trois, but it is he himself who, in later years, will find it increasingly difficult
not to perceive in Ingres the very antithesis of those qualities which he
salutes in Delacroix and Daumier.
As this first reference to Ingres in 1845 indicates, Baudelaires approach
to the work of this artist was not always as hostile as some contemporary
critics have supposed. In the essay on the exhibition ofLe Muse Classique
du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle of 1846 he was positively enthusiastic, partly as
a way of expressing his distaste for the crowd-pleasing juste milieu style
of painting. Here Baudelaire praises the austere style of David and Ingres
and even defends the latter against criticisms of poor colour and greyness,
declaring Ouvrez lil, nation nigaude, et dites si vous vtes jamais de la
peinture plus clatante et plus voyante, et mme une plus grande recherche
de tons? (MBN, 412) By the time he wrote the Salon de 1846 a year later his
admiration for Ingres use of colour has been tempered with a more mock-
ing tone, it is true (M. Ingres adore la couleur, comme une marchande de
modes [S46, 459]), but even then he admits that for potes corrompus
there is pleasure to be found in it. After 1846, the question ofIngres colour
ceases to be discussed directly, although it continues to act as an important,
if often unstated, factor in Baudelaires views on this artist.
In the introductory pages of the Salon de 1846, Baudelaire is still
keen to redefine accepted modes of art criticism, particularly in relation
to its treatment of colour and line. It is absurd, he suggests, que la critique
actuelle [] recommandera toujours le dessin aux coloristes et la couleur
editors suggest that the artist should be inspired by the ancients and Raphael, not
limited by them, and among their pantheon of great dessinateurs they cite Rubens,
car il a exprim, par le mouvement et le model, tous les aspects de la forme anime,
comme il a rendu par la couleur toutes les richesses de la vie (I, 115).
aux dessinateurs when no-one can know quelle dose la nature a ml

dans chaque esprit le got de la ligne et le got de la couleur, et par quels
mystrieux procds elle opre cette fusion, dont le rsultat est un tableau
(S46, 418). There were countless incidences of this sort of practice among
art critics of the time. In 1841 Peisse at first claims that every great artist
a une couleur convenable son dessin et un dessin convenable sa cou-
leur, but only a little later can write of Delacroix il a des rares qualits de
coloriste, mais comme peintre, en gnral, il lui manque bien des choses
quon rsume sous le mot dessin, et ces choses sont trs essentielles. Ce qui
reviendrait dire quil faut voir en lui un grand talent, mais non un grand
matre.10 Baudelaire wished to approach the artists work on its own terms,
by assessing the painting according to what its creator is trying to achieve,
rather than imposing a fixed system of critical rules upon it. This does
not mean that in the Salon de 1846 he avoids a discussion of the problems
which arise from those issues in painting which were commonly categorized
under the headings of la couleur and le dessin. On the contrary; Baudelaire
structures a large part of this Salon around these two themes, balancing
the chapter De la couleur with De lidal et du modle, and De quelques
coloristes with De quelques dessinateurs. Pierre-Georges Castex has sug-
gested that the chapters Eugne Delacroix and Des sujets amoureux et
de M. Tassaert form part of the colour section also; Tassaert is described
as a coloriste after all.11 Several critics have perceived Diderots influence
in this, but in fact the earlier writer reverses Baudelaires order, placing
his penses bizarres sur le dessin before his petites ides sur la couleur.
Diderots emphasis falls nevertheless on the need for a better understand-
ing of colour: on ne manque pas dexcellents dessinateurs; il y a peu de
grands coloristes he wrote.12
By structuring his Salon in this way Baudelaire acknowledges that he
cannot escape from the accepted critical standpoint which a ddoubl la
10 Louis Peisse, Salon de 1841, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1841, II, 549, pp.1920.
11 Pierre-Georges Castex, La critique dart en France au XIXe sicle: Baudelaire (Paris:
Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1957), p.25.
12 Essai sur la peinture, uvres Esthtiques, pp.662684, p.674.
96 Chapter 3
nature en couleur et en ligne (S46, 454), despite his declared reluctance

to reduce the painters methods to this sort of formulaic division. Exalter
la ligne au dtriment de la couleur, ou la couleur aux dpens de la ligne,
sans doute cest un point de vue; mais ce nest ni trs large ni trs juste, et
cela accuse une grande ignorance des destines particulires (S46, 418),
he writes in his quoi bon la critique chapter, and there is little reason
to doubt that he was sincere at this time, though idealistic. As Bernard
Howells reminds us, Baudelaire was determined to drive a wedge into the
split he thinks he can see opening up, in the mid-century, between evolving
public taste and reactionary academic criticism,13 and at this stage he is still
optimistic that old values can be reassessed and that diversity in art will
be celebrated. Coming just before his colour chapter and long discussion
of the genius of Delacroix, it must have been fairly obvious even to him
on which side of the traditional colour/draughtsmanship debate his own
sympathies lay, but although he pokes fun at Ingres colour, Baudelaires
respect for the artists abilities is still considerable at this time. It is significant
that by 1846 this respect was due to one factor alone, and this was Ingres
skills as a draughtsman: Si M. Ingres occupe aprs Eugne Delacroix la
place la plus importante, cest cause de ce dessin tout particulier [] qui
rsume le mieux jusqu prsent lidal et le modle (S46, 459), Baudelaire
stresses, and his stance is unequivocal. Despite the importance accorded
to colour throughout this Salon, and despite its presence at the heart of
Romanticism, its near absence (or what we might term its negative pres-
ence) in the work of Ingres did not significantly diminish that painters
greatness for Baudelaire at this time.
This fact is underlined in the closing pages of the Salon de 1846 when
Baudelaire returns to the idea that art has become the province of the chic,
stating that Delacroix and Ingres are the only two artists who are capable
of distinguishing themselves from this chaos dune libert epuisante et
strile (S46, 492. In his notes to the Pliade edition of the complete works,
Claude Pichois draws attention to Baudelaires linking of these two names:
13 Howells, Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History,

pp.3940.
au-dessus de la mle des rapins et des pltriers, le grand drame se joue entre
Ingres et Delacroix, entre deux conceptions de la peinture, entre le pass
et lavenir (OCII, 1321). While Ingres and Delacroix clearly do represent
two very different concepts of painting for Baudelaire, there is little in
this Salon to suggest that in 1846 the critic considered the work of Ingres
to represent the art of the past. The linking of their names in this context,
when the chaos of modern art is unfavourably compared to Classical unity,
and immediately before his call for new approaches to painting, suggests
rather that Baudelaire sees these two artists as twin beacons equally capa-
ble of lighting paintings future paths. Given his increasing antagonism
towards Ingres in later years, this might strike us as an anomaly in the
critics thought; however, his views on Ingres must be understood within
the context of the evolution of his concept of line and beauty and the rela-
tion of draughtsmanship to colour.
There are three important aspects in the critics admiration for Ingres
draughtsmanship in 1846. The first is concerned with that artists remark-
able fluency, speed and accuracy in his execution. Speed in the execution
of a painting was a quality which Ingres shared with Delacroix, Baudelaire
maintained, and represented a key factor in both artists ability to express
their original thought and achieve an overall unity in their work: aussi lente,
srieuse, consciencieuse est la conception du grand artiste, aussi preste est
son excution (S46, 433). In the chapter De quelques dessinateurs in which
he considers the work of Ingres and of those painters who were taught by
or modelled themselves on him, the ingristes, it is, notably, the sketches of
the master and not his finished paintings which Baudelaire pinpoints as
coming closest to embodying the ideal: M. Ingres dessine admirablement
bien, et il dessine vite. Dans ses croquis il fait naturellement de lidal;
son dessin, souvent peu charg, ne contient pas beaucoup de traits; mais
chacun rend un contour important (S46, 459). Ingres sketches achieve the
ideal of expressiveness and unity with ease for Baudelaire precisely because
they are unencumbered by the weightiness of detail and finish and com-
prise only the most essential contours, unadulterated by the couplings of
tones which Baudelaire is beginning to find painful. Unlike the sketches
of his pupils who take as their starting point les minuties, Ingres employs
simple, all-encompassing strokes, and by doing so comes close to attaining
98 Chapter 3
the unity essential to good painting. The quality of unity was important
to Baudelaire. As Bernard Howells puts it
[] the difference between the Classical period and the Romantic is one of unity
[] Romanticism so far has produced, not schools in the proper sense, but a diver-
sity of sectarian opposition-groups which, Baudelaire complained in Quest-ce que
le romantisme?, had deadened the impact of the Romantic revolution in France by
splitting it up and fighting the battle against Neo-Classicism on a number of separate
narrow fronts, each distorted by theoretical over-specialization.14
The theme of swiftness in execution as a prerequisite for the direct realiza-

tion of the artists dream is a significant factor in Baudelaires conviction that
the artist must possess the principles of colour harmony at his fingertips.
It is an idea which becomes increasingly important to the critic in later
years and is connected to his reformulation of the notion of the fini, usu-
ally conceived of as the smoothing touches which the artist uses to cover
the processes of his creativity and to present a completed artefact with the
physical processes of creation carefully masked. One element ofConstantin
Guys genius for Baudelaire will be that at each stage of the creative process
he believes that Guys work is an bauche parfaite (PV, 700), meaning that
at any given point in its production the work is harmonious enough to be
considered suffisament fini (see Chapter 3, pp.124131 for further discus-
sion of this). In 1846 Baudelaire does not discuss Ingres work in this way,
but there is a sense in which the artists sketches, showing unity, simplicity
and accuracy, are more satisfactory for the critic than the finished painting
that results from them, which introduces false notes of colour and what by
1855 will be seen as an unacceptable level of stylization.
Another element which figures largely in Baudelaires appreciation of
Ingres is that of the artists skill in rendering the erotic contour, as first sug-
gested in Le Muse du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle: in his portrayal of women,
les muscles, les plis de la chair, les ombres des fossettes, les ondulations
montueuses de la peau, rien ny manque (MBN, 413). Cruelty and eroticism
14 Baudelaire: portrait of the artist in 1846, French Studies, 37, 1983, pp.426439,
p.435.
combine in Ingres to fascinate Baudelaire and it is with a somewhat ghoul-

ish delight that in the Salon de 1846 he observes how the painter sattache
leurs moindres beauts avec une aprt de chirurgien; il suit les plus lgres
ondulations de leurs lignes avec une servilit damoureux (S46, 460).
Ingres takes his place alongside Rubens, Watteau, Tassaert and Delacroix
in Baudelaires muse de lamour: together their female figures represent
ce pome immense de lamour crayonn par les mains les plus pures (S46,
444). Significantly, it is through the power of his erotic portrayal of women
that Ingres wins his place among these notable coloristes. David Scott makes
a similar point in his study of artistic influences on Baudelaires poetry:
though preferring Delacroix as a history painter, Baudelaire had from
the start of his career as a poet and art critic always deeply associated the
concepts of amour, volupt and posie intime with Ingres portraits and
nudes.15 In Ingres, at least at this point, Baudelaire finds evidence of those
qualities which always fascinate him in an artist, poet or writer: the artistic
double who is a reflection of his own preoccupations. His identification
with Edgar Allan Poe is well known; he writes to Thor in 1864:
Eh bien! on maccuse, moi, dimiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi jai si patiem-
ment traduit Poe? Parce quil me ressemblait. La premire fois que jai ouvert un
livre de lui, jai vu, avec pouvante et ravissement non seulement des sujets rvs par
moi, mais des PHRASES penses par moi, et crites par lui, vingt ans auparavant.
(Corr. I, 386, 20juin 1864)
There are many instances where Baudelaire integrates the themes of paint-
ings and sculpture into the web of his own preoccupations. In the case of
Ingres drawing of women, Baudelaire appears to detect an erotic viewpoint
which corresponds to his own, delighted to suspect that Ingres employs
such moyens singuliers as the use of a black woman as the model for his
Grande Odalisque, and behind his fascination with that artists coldly sur-
gical yet subservient approach to women lie his own beliefs concerning
the sadomasochistic interaction between men and women. In his Fuses
15 David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century
France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.99.
100 Chapter 3
Baudelaire claims, for example, that il y a dans lacte damour une grande
ressemblance avec la torture, ou avec une opration chirurgicale (F, I,
659), and quant la torture, elle est ne de la partie infme du cur de
lhomme, assoiff de volupts. Cruaut et volupt, sensations identiques,
comme lextrme chaud et lextrme froid (Mon cur mis nu, I, 683). In
1855 and after, what Robert Rosenblum calls the passivity and extraordinary
ductility16 ofIngres women no longer appeals erotically to Baudelaire, and
Ingres is no longer perceived as a lover but rather as a Frankenstein figure
whose surgical experiments are deeply repugnant.
The third and perhaps most important factor in Baudelaires admi-
ration for Ingres in 1846 lies in what the critic sees as the physiognomic
nature of his drawing. This is the appellation that Baudelaire chooses to
distinguish his draughtsmanship from the exact and the imagin; the style
of drawing which is based on the study of physiognomy is un dessin natu-
raliste, mais idalis, dessin dune gnie qui sait choisir, arranger, corriger,
deviner, gourmander la nature (S46, 434). He cites the chapter heading
from Stendhals Histoire de la peinture en Italie Comment lemporter sur
Raphal? The answer, according to Stendhal, and approved by Baudelaire,
is simple; the great painter of modern times will create in his work la beaut
idale tire du temprament (S46, 457) (the emphasis is Baudelaires), in
other words, a beauty which draws from the source of modern physiog-
nomy. In the two chapters which follow, De quelques dessinateurs and
Du portrait, Baudelaire analyses the very quality in Ingres which, in the
critics eyes, ensures that he can indeed go one better than Raphael: Dans
un certain sens, M. Ingres dessine mieux que Raphal, le roi populaire des
dessinateurs. Raphal a dcor des murs immenses; mais il net pas fait
si bien que lui le portrait de votre mre, de votre ami, de votre matresse
(S46, 459). Baudelaire sees the portrait as one of the means of rejuvenating
modern art, of combining what was felt to be a very modern science with
the exigencies of producing an art which was capable of breaking away from
old patterns; Lintroduction du portrait, cest--dire du modle idalis,
16 Robert Rosenblum, Jean-Dominique-Auguste Ingres (London: Thames & Hudson,

1967), p.24.
dans les sujets dhistoire, de religion, ou de fantaisie, ncessite dabord un

choix exquis du modle, et peut rajeunir et revivifier la peinture moderne,
trop encline, comme tous nos arts, se contenter de limitation des anciens
(S46, 457). For Baudelaire the portrait is the modle idalis, something
which is not itself confined by traditional concepts and which can infiltrate
various genres. In the portraits ofIngres, Baudelaire finds the ideal dessin
physionomique, a new category of draughtsmanship that he effectively
invented for that artist alone.
Another quality, connected to the above, that Baudelaire originally cel-
ebrates in Ingres portraits is his capturing of another sort of physiognomy,
that of of modern times: il a fait la redingote de M. Mol; il a fait le carrick
de Cherubini (S46, 459) Baudelaire writes, praising Ingres willingness to
paint fashionable frock-coats and modern carriages as if he were a fore-
runner ofGuys. It is not the depiction of great men that Baudelaire admires
in Ingres Apothose dHomre, but the fact that the artist ne recule devant
aucune laideur et aucune bizarrerie and that il pourrait faire de Mayeux
une chose sublime (S46, 459).17 The introduction of this contemporary
caricature-figure in the context of Ingres portraiture recalls Baudelaires
original linking of the draughtsmanship ofDaumier and Ingres in 1845, and
suggests that for Baudelaire Ingres came close to achieving lhroisme de
la vie moderne with his portraiture, even if that was not the artists inten-
tion. It is one of art historys ironies that Ingres has become for us (as he
was for Baudelaire then) a portraitist above all, a status the painter himself
would have scorned. As Friedlaender observes, he felt himself to be first
and foremost a creator of epic compositions, not a painter of accidental
faces. Je suis peintre dhistoire, je ne suis pas portraitiste, he was accustomed
to say, when, during those financially difficult years in Rome, a customer
asked for M. Ingres le portraitiste.18
17 Mayeux was the grotesque hunchbacked cartoon creation of Travis, a caricatur-

ist for Le Charivari. See Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and
Caricature in 19th Century Paris (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), pp.8384
for an interesting discussion of this character.
18 Friedlander, p.80.
102 Chapter 3
This modern aspect of Ingres art that Baudelaire has managed to

detect stands in direct contrast to the idal du compas (S46, 455) that he
describes in 1846 as cette chose vague, ce rve ennuyeux et impalpable qui
nage au plafond des acadmies (S46, 456). This effectively dismisses the
theories of both Emric-David and Quatremre de Quincy, and Baudelaire
states his belief that trop particulariser ou trop gnraliser empchent
galement le souvenir (S46, 455). The human race, he maintains, is char-
acterized by its variety, a series of broken lines, but also by its unity within
each individual. Baudelaire describes the multifarious quality of the crowd,
tous plus ou moins parisians, passing beneath his window, within which
chaque individu est une harmonie (S46, 456). To lend weight to his con-
victions, he invokes the name of Lavater.
Johann Caspar Lavaters treatise, LArt de connatre les hommes par
la physionomie, was one of the key factors in the popularization of the
science of physiognomy in nineteenth-century France. His book was
reissued in numerous editions during this time since its first appearance
in France between 1787 and 1803, and there was a copy in Baudelaires
fathers apartment. Lavaters book proposed connections between physi-
cal appearance and the inner character, and was intended both as a moral
guide and as a textbook for painters in the style of LeBruns earlier and
simpler guide to expression. Lavater stressed that ce qui rend lhomme
visible au dehors, cest son harmonie, son indissoluble alliance avec le
corps quil habite, o il vit, o il se meut comme dans son lment.19 His
assertion that aucun doigt dun homme ne peut convenir la main dun
autre. Chaque partie dun corps organique est limage du tout et porte
le caractre du tout20 is echoed in Baudelaires statement of 1846 that
telle main veut tel pied; chaque piderme engendre son poil. Chaque
individu a donc son idal (S46, 456). With this Baudelaire indicates
how the ideal should be reinterpreted for modern art, based on the new
19 Johann Caspar Lavater, La Physiognomonie, ou lArt de connatre les hommes daprs

les traits de leur physionomie, leurs rapports avec les divers animaux, leurs penchants,
etc., traduction nouvelle par H. Bacharach; prcde dune notice par A. dAlbans
(Paris: G. Harvard, 1845) p.3.
20 Ibid., p.85.
science of physiognomy rather than on academic traditions, a conclusion

he drew at the same time as other critics and writers. Thor in particular
saw this new science as a means of rejuvenating art and enabling artists
to break free from the oppressive grip of antique beauty: La rhabilita-
tion exclusive de lart antique [] avait eu pour rsultat de circonscrire la
reprsentation de lhomme dans le cadre de lhomme payen, comme si la
vie morale et intellectuelle de lhumanit et par consquent sa manifesta-
tion extrieure navait pas chang depuis 2000 ans.21 In his essay Choix
de maximes consolantes sur lamour published in March 1846 Baudelaire
wrote that les signes physiognomoniques seraient infaillibles, si on les
connaissait tous, et bien (OCI, 547), showing his interest at this time in
all-encompassing systems, as can also be seen in his wish for une gamme
complte des couleurs et des sentiments. Baudelaires interest in systems
will explored further in Chapter 4, but for now it is worth noting that the
study of physiognomy continues to be of interest to him throughout his
writings, culminating in the 1863 essay on Constantin Guys, Le Peintre
de la vie moderne. In this he suggests that the style of clothing of modern
women gives them a physionomie peculiar to the nineteenth century: le
geste et le port de la femme actuelle donnent sa robe une vie et une phys-
ionomie qui ne sont pas celles de la vie ancienne (PV, 695). In 1846 Ingres
portraits of contemporary figures seemed to come closest to embodying
this particular ideal of art for Baudelaire, and he suggests that the artists
skill in capturing the physiognomy of the nineteenth century allows his
painting to be described as surpassing that ofRaphael. Less than ten years
later Baudelaire will have reversed his opinion dramatically, invoking the
name ofLavater only to attack Ingres tendency to distort and manipulate
his material in the name of art.
21 Thophile Thor, Dictionnaire de phrnologie et de physionomie lusage des artistes

(Paris, 1836), p.49. Judith Wechsler offers an informative discussion of the impor-
tance of Lavater and physiognomy to Balzac (A Human Comedy, pp.2039).
104 Chapter 3
The Exposition universelle and the attack on Ingres
The opening article in the essay that Baudelaire wrote for Frances first inter-
national exhibition of art, the Exposition universelle de 1855, Beaux-Arts, is
entitled the Mthode de critique and, like the introductory chapters of
the Salon de 1846, considers the subject of art criticism itself. This was the
Universal Exhibition of 1855, Frances answer to the London exhibition at
Crystal Palace four years before, and among all the international exhibits
in the fields of industry, science and technology it was French success in
the arts in particular that was being celebrated in front of the world, with
a special commission and over 5,000 works on display.22 In the midst of all
the celebrations, Baudelaire chooses to focus on what he sees as the stul-
tifying lack of progress in much of French art, and in this vast display of
paintings, sculpture, prints and architecture he limits his attention mainly
to just two very well-known French artists and the differences between
them. In A Poetics of Art Criticism Timothy Raser draws attention to the
apparent disconnection between Baudelaires plea in the introductory
chapter of the Exposition universelle de 1855 for more understanding of the
art of other cultures and his own restricted choice of painters: Baudelaires
choice of discussing only the works ofDelacroix and Ingres the poles of
painting perhaps, but ofFrench painting for sure is a conspicuous gesture
of critical selectivity, and the notion of judgment is correspondingly at the
fore.23 Even taking into account the missing fourth article, probably on
the English painters, the narrowness of Baudelaires focus in this essay in
fact gave him more range to explore why one approach to art has led to
imaginative development and the other has caused a state of stagnation.
He blames the most celebrated artist of the exhibition, Ingres, for this
and accuses him and his followers of propounding the sacrosanct nature
22 See F.A. Trapp, The Universal Exhibition of 1855, The Burlington Magazine, June
1965, pp.300305.
23 Timothy Raser, A Poetics of Art Criticism: The Case of Baudelaire (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p.115.
of the dessin above all else in art. To be more precise, French art has failed
to flourish in the way that Baudelaire called for in 1846 because of cette
ligne tragique et systmatique, dont actuellement les ravages sont dj
immenses dans la peinture et dans la sculpture. In contrast, the colour-based
approach to painting exemplified by Delacroix is marked by laccord pro-
found, complet, entre sa couleur, son sujet, son dessin, et par la dramatique
gesticulation de ses figures (EU55, 596).
In one article Delacroix is heaped with more praise than ever, while
in the companion piece Ingres Baudelaire was so disrespectful towards
the revered artist that the editors of Le Pays refused to publish it. Ingres
was regarded as the uncrowned king ofFrench art by this time; as we have
already noted, Gautiers assessment of his art that year, typical of many crit-
ics writing about this exhibition, is nothing less than reverential:
Le premier nom qui se prsente la pense lorsquon aborde lcole franaise est
celui de M. Ingres. Toutes les revues du Salon, quelles que soit lopinion du critique,
commencent invariablement par lui Seul, il reprsente maintenant les hautes tra-
ditions de lhistoire, de lidal et du style; cause de cela, on lui a reproch de ne pas
sinspirer de lesprit moderne, de ne pas voir ce qui se passait autour de lui, de ntre
pas de son temps, enfin. Jamais accusation ne fut plus juste. Non, il nest pas de son
temps, mais il est ternel.24
As Patricia Mainardi points out in her excellent analysis of the political

aspects of the Second Empire exhibitions, the numerous references to
the timeless and eternal qualities of Ingres art must also be understood
politically [this] was the quality invoked by monarchists when refer-
ring to the aristocratic and God-given verities of the ancien rgime.25
It is hardly surprising that Baudelaire, aware of his own status as artistic
outsider, would want to raise objections to this. It is ironic, however, that
this exhibition was the first to give Delacroix almost equal status to that
of Ingres and Vernet, as his revolutionary image was brushed aside by the
24 Gautier, Exposition universelle 1855, 12juillet.

25 Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions
of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1987), p.76; see
pp.33120.
106 Chapter 3
government in recompense for his rallying to the Second Empire cause.

Napolon III visted the Palais des Beaux-Arts and shook the painters hand
warmly, and with the speech that he made the canonization ofDelacroix
was complete:
There are no longer any violent discussions, inflammatory opinions about art, and in
Delacroix the colorist one no longer recognizes the flaming revolutionary whom an
immature school set in opposition to Ingres. Each artist today occupies his legitimate
place. The 1855 Exposition, it must be said, has done well to elevate Delacroix; his
works, judged in so many different ways, have now been reviewed, studied, admired,
like all works marked by genius.26
The government may have wanted to call a truce between colourists and
draughtsmen in French art in 1855; Baudelaire, notably, did not.
It is a striking feature that in his discussion of Ingres this year, and of
his draughtsmanship in particular, Baudelaire in fact employs those very
elements that once attracted him, almost despite himself, to the artists
style in earlier years, but now only in order to attack him. Baudelaire makes
plain that he has turned against the artist by declaring that le dessin de
M. Ingres est le dessin dun homme systme (EU55, 587). Where once
Baudelaire considered Ingres to be the successor to the great tradition of
David, Gurin and Girodet, their names are now invoked only to illustrate
Ingres inadequacy. Baudelaire still acknowledges his talents as a portraitist,
but now his praise is tinged with irony; in a casual aside he describes the
portraits as containing: [] un idal qui mle dans un adultre agaant la
solidit calme de Raphal avec les recherches de la petite matresse (EU55,
586). In the following paragraph, however, Baudelaire cannot resist return-
ing to a familiar subject: Quelle est la qualit du dessin de M. Ingres? Est-il
dune qualit suprieure? Est-il absolument intelligent? (EU55, 587) It is in
answer to these questions, now posed with a new vigour and urgency, that
Baudelaire dismantles piece by piece what he himself had once considered
to be the very framework ofIngres genius. Where once he admired Ingres
speed and accuracy of execution, which he perceived as symptomatic of
26 Quoted in Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire, p.82.

a unified approach to painting, Baudelaire now draws attention to the

stasis and stagnancy of his work, where an apotheosis (Ingres Apothose
de lEmpereur Napolon 1er) becomes un ballon sans gaz, and horses are
created from une matire polie, solide, comme le cheval de bois qui prit
la ville de Troie (EU55, 588). Even the Le Martyre de saint-Symphorien,
which Baudelaire had once described as suggesting its creators agilit
merveilleuse couvrir une toile (S46, 433) is perceived by the critic to be
weighed down by lempilement des figures and suggests only its debt to
the Italian tradition (EU55, 586).
The only mention that Baudelaire makes of the subject which had
so attracted him to Ingres paintings before, his depiction of women, is in
the briefest of nods to Ingres ability to choose what are for the particular
style of the artist the perfect subjects for his portraits: les belles dames,
les natures riches, les sants calmes et florissantes (EU55, 587). The act of
artistic creation has been replaced by Ingres ability to exploit an oppor-
tunity in the society ladies whose portraits he was requested to paint, as
they are exactly the subject best suited to his style. In 1846 Baudelaire had
written that Ingres accurate portrayal of women was due to his uncriti-
cal worship of that sex: il les fait telles quil les voit, car on dirait quil les
aime trop pour les vouloir changer (S46, 460). Now he sees Ingres style
as imposing itself on nature to such an extent that the women have become
distorted and freakish. Instead of rendering the physiognomy of his own
times Ingres is presented as wandering darchasme en archasme, preoc-
cupied by le got de lantique et le respect de lcole (EU55, 588). Where
in 1846 Baudelaire was pleased to observe that in la lutte entre la nature
et lartiste (S46, 457) Ingres emerged as victor, in 1855 he notes cynically
that when looking at this artists paintings:
[] il arrive quelquefois que lil tombe sur des morceaux charmants, irrprochable-
ment vivants; mais cette mchante pense traverse alors lesprit, que ce nest pas M.
Ingres qui a cherch la nature, mais la nature qui a viole le peintre, et que cette haute
et puissante dame la dompt par son ascendant irrsistible. (EU55, 588)
Nature herself rebels against the artifice and threatens to infiltrate herself
like a vengeful guest into the strange world that Ingres has created. In an
108 Chapter 3
unlikely pairing comparable to that used in praise in 1845 of Ingres and

Daumier, Baudelaire compares Ingres to the realist painter Courbet, and
now finds in both un esprit de sectaire, un massacreur de facults (EU55,
586). Ingres has forgotten the lessons taught by physiognomy, or rather,
by 1855 Baudelaire has decided that he never knew them:
Voici une arme de doigts trop uniformment allongs en fuseaux et dont les
extrmits troites oppriment les ongles, que Lavater, linspection de cette poitrine
large, de cet avant-bras musculeux, de cet ensemble un peu viril, aurait jugs devoir
tre carrs, symptme dun esprit port aux occupations masculines, la symtrie et
aux ordonnances de lart. (EU55, 587)
Where in 1846 he had hinted that Ingres was one of the few artists who
could come close to outshining Delacroix with his skill in a draughtsman-
ship based on the principles of physiognomy, thereby creating an art of his
own time, in 1855 Baudelaire has decided that Ingres is too circumscribed
by his admiration for the forms of the past to be able to redefine a modern
ideal. Ingres is no longer presented as making the ordinary sublime, but
rather as distorting and violating in the name of art, and because of this
comes dangerously close to the sort of modern art which Baudelaire vilifies
in 1846 as le chic, meaning absence de modle et de nature [] plutt une
mmoire de la main quune mmoire du cerveau (S46, 468).
In 1846 Baudelaire suggested that the skill of the pur dessinateur lay
to some extent in not seeing, but allowing the eyes to follow the contour
of things and ignoring what lies within: attentifs suivre et surprendre
la ligne dans ses ondulations les plus secrtes, ils nont pas le temps de voir
lair et la lumire, cest--dire leurs effets, et sefforcent mme de ne pas les
voir, pour ne pas nuire au principe de leur cole (S46, 426.) In contrast to
this, Baudelaire advocated another form of not seeing as practised by the
coloristes and even by Ingres in his sketches: the reliance on memory and
seizing of only necessary lines. In 1855 what Baudelaire sees as the deliberate
amputation of human vitality has left the figures in Ingres paintings with
as much substance as paper patterns or, by contrast, with a wooden and
earth-bound solidity. Baudelaire now characterizes Ingres line as freezing its
objects in perfect but rigid arabesques, their contours swollen by an invisible
substance, their antique or raphaelesque proportions denying the harmony
made possible by the study of physiognomy. As Norman Bryson observes

ofIngres later portrait ofMadame Moitessier, the arms and face retain all
the colour but none of the radiance or vibrancy of real flesh: this is tinted
ivory, not skin over bone, and indeed Madame Moitessier is one of the least
vertebrate or skeletally supported of Ingres women: there is no sensation
whatever of the stretch of skin over muscle, or of skin as integument; it is
pure contour.27 It is not difficult to infer from Baudelaires criticisms that
the most noticeable absence from Ingres paintings, although he does not
mention it by name (indeed, colour is not directly alluded to at all in this
article on Ingres): the essential life-giving force that is colour.
Even in a critique of the painting based on its drawing style, the pres-
ence, or, as in this case, absence, of colour is never irrelevant to Baudelaires
assessment of an artists work. The physical presence of colour has been
excluded by Ingres; and Baudelaire describes the world of his paintings as
one denuded of vital oxygen, exhaling the unhealthy atmosphere of the
unnaturally exotic and the artificial. He describes the disturbing sensa-
tion of entering the sanctuary-like room given over to Ingres work in the
exhibition of 1855: Cette impression, difficile caractriser, qui tient, dans
des proportions inconnues, du malaise, de lennui et de la peur, fait penser
vaguement, volontairement, aux dfaillances causes par lair rarefie, par
latmosphre dun laboratoire de chimie (EU55, 585). Nadar had caused a
scandal by comparing the spectators feelings when confronted with Ingres
paintings to that caused by a sick mans handkerchief .28 The insistence on
Baudelaires part that he speaks for the many (repeated in 1859 when he
says, in relation to Diaz, chacun a dj prononc ce que jcris aujourdhui
(S59, 648) stands in contrast to his 1845 praise ofDelacroixs drawing car
personne ne le dit. Perhaps Nadars rudeness helped to give him the courage
to attack the Emperors favoured painter so directly. Although not explicitly
linked to the lack of a harmonious colour, Baudelaire perceives in Ingres
27 Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.146.
28 Le Figaro, 16septembre 1855, quoted in Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second
Empire, p.74.
110 Chapter 3
painting an absence, une lacune, une privation, un amoindrissement dans le

jeu des facults spirituelles (EU55, 585). This lacuna Baudelaire ascribes to
Ingres sacrificial immolation of the imagination, but he could just as easily
have acknowledged that it is the absence of a harmonious, unifying light
which strips the painting of life for him. Despite des mrites, des charmes
mme tellement incontestables in Ingres work, by 1855 Baudelaire is no
longer able to draw a clear distinction between the elements of his art which
attract him and those which repel him. Ingres dismissal of colour is well-
known, such as his belief that il est sans exemple quun grand dessinateur
nait pas trouv la couleur qui convenait exactement au caractre de son
dessin29 and le dessin est la premire des vertus pour un peintre, cest la base,
cest tout; une chose bien dessine est toujours aussi bien peinte.30 In 1855
Baudelaire finally rejects this view, and with it a type of draughtsmanship
that believes it can supersede and even dispense with colour.
Delacroix and the fusion of line and colour
In the Salon de 1845 Baudelaire distinguished between le dessin des color-

istes and le dessin des dessinateurs and argued for an understanding
of the principles that underpin the different drawing styles in painting.
However, despite describing Ingres, Delacroix and Daumier as the three
great draughtsmen of their time he suggests that Ingres style is not one
that corresponds to lharmonie de lensemble and is more about the
caractre du morceau than the caractre de lensemble (S45, 356). A
year later, Baudelaire begins to consider this question more deeply, and
it is significant that his first thoughts on drawing occur towards the end
of the colour chapter of 1846, reflecting the contemporary polarized
29 Quoted by Henri Delaborde, Ingres: Sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine (Paris: Plon,
1870), p.89.
30 Quoted by Amaury-Duval, E.-E., LAtelier dIngres (Paris: Charpentier, 1878), p.17.
positions that considered these two to be mutually exclusive. Baudelaire

enters into the fray by wondering whether an artist can be simultaneously
a great colourist and a great draughtsman and, here at least, opts for a
careful oui et non. No, if the conventional understanding of le dessin is
adhered to, for in a colourist painting la touche mangera toujours la ligne
(S46, 426); but a resounding yes if the limits of thinking which narrowly
define the notion of draughtsmanship can be widened to include other
perspectives and types of drawing. In fact, even in 1846, as we have seen,
the two elements are far from equally balanced. In contrast to the le dessin
du dtail, le contour du petit morceau of the pur dessinateur, Baudelaire
envisages the colourists drawing as le grand dessin, capable of embracing
lamour de lair, le choix des sujets mouvement (S46, 426). The pure
draughtsmen, on the other hand, have based their art on the exclusion of
lair et la lumire: they are des philosophes et des abstracteurs de quin-
tessence (S46, 426). The colourist approach to drawing, and to painting
in general, is presented as the larger one, based on inclusion, the unifying
of all the elements within a painting, a breadth of scope and possibility:
les coloristes sont des potes piques.
The chapter on Delacroix that follows the colour chapter in the Salon
de 1846 shows Baudelaire returning to the question of drawing in the con-
text of this particular artists work and it is significant that he wishes to
integrate a different way of considering line with a greater understanding
of how colour operates. Baudelaire wishes to rectify two wrong assump-
tions that have been made about Delacroix, the first that he is the pain-
terly equivalent of Victor Hugo. Baudelaire insists that while Hugo may
be superficially picturesque in style, Delacroix is souvent, son insu, un
pote en peinture (S46, 432). However, since this prejudice dates from la
malheureuse poque de rvolution (S46, 430) it may have more to do with
the disapproval of both men from official quarters for past revolutionary
connections, and it is true that Delacroixs Libert was still deemed too
incendiary to be put on public display. The other prejudice held against
the painter is le prjug du hasard, and concerns the assumption both that
Delacroixs colour was a fortuitous circumstance, which was judged to be
good, while his dessin was slipshod, which was bad. This certainly can be
seen in the writing of the many critics who were happy to praise Delacroixs
112 Chapter 3
painting while simultaneously regretting his lack of skill in drawing. Typical

remarks in 1845 include Haussards, who praised the artist lavishly while
lamenting les faiblesses accoutumes of his drawing,31 and Laverdants who
regrets that sa main impatiente laisse souvent chapper des ngligences de
dessin dont lil le moins exerc sera choqu.32 Baudelaire will have none
of this, stating firmly that Il ny a pas de hasard dans lart, non plus quen
mcanique (S46, 432), and his insistence on the interconnectedness and
harmony of everything in a painting will play a central role in his aesthetic
of art from this time on:
Un tableau est une machine dont tous les systmes sont intelligibles pour un il
exerc; o tout a sa raison dtre, si le tableau est bon; o un ton est toujours destin
en faire valoir un autre; o une faute occasionnelle de dessin est quelquefois nces-
saire pour ne pas sacrifier quelque chose de plus important. (S46, 432)
Baudelaire was one of the first art critics to suggest that colour and draughts-
manship should be considered not as two separate elements within a paint-
ing, to be judged by separate standards, but as co-operating within an
indissoluble fusion. Delacroix himself often railed in his Journal against
the artificial separation of colour and line by the critics and public:
Il semble que le coloriste nest proccup que des parties basses et en quelque sorte
terrestres de la peinture: quun beau dessin est bien plus beau quand il est accompagn
dune couleur maussade, et que la couleur nest propre qu distraire lattention qui
doit se porter vers les qualits plus sublimes qui se passent aisment de son prestige.
(Journal, III, 56, 5janvier 1857)
Baudelaire does not choose to deny or excuse une faute occasionnelle de

dessin, but to suggest that they may be necessary for the work as a whole
to work. Delacroixs draughtsmanship is subsumed into the bigger picture,
literally, and in this way connects with the colour landscape by playing a
part in the harmony of the finished painting.
31 Prosper Haussard, Salon de 1845, Le National, 1er avril.

32 Gabriel-Dsir Laverdant, Salon de 1845, p.406.
It is significant that Baudelaire had chosen to introduce his study of

Delacroixs art in 1846 with a lengthy quotation from Adolphe Thiers
article, written more than twenty years previously, in which Thiers main-
tained that Delacroix possessed outre cette imagination potique qui est
commune au peintre comme lcrivain, cette imagination de lart, quon
pourrait appeler en quelque sorte limagination du dessin, et qui est tout
autre que la prcdente (S46, 428). As well as underlining Baudelaires
view ofDelacroix as greater poet than Hugo, this phrase, limagination du
dessin, with its close links with limagination de lart plays a significant role
in Baudelaires assessment of Delacroixs work in this Salon. Although, as
we have seen, Baudelaire takes a particular interest in what he calls Ingres
dessin physionomique in 1846, he is no longer willing to place it on the same
high level, as he was in 1845, as the dessin imagin or dessin de cration: le
dessin physionomique appartient gnralement aux passionns, comme
M. Ingres; le dessin de cration est le privilge du gnie (S46, 434). This
type of drawing, best exemplified by Delacroix, is analogue lesprit et
au temprament de lauteur (S46, 434) and as such fulfils a fundamental
condition of art for Baudelaire: the presence of the artists temperament
in every part of his painting. Absolute values of beauty play no part in this,
nor does a fixed concept of linear perfection, when what is important is for
the artist to allow la vitalit de sa pense to guide his hand in recording
lintimit du sujet (S46, 433, 434). In contrast to the dessinateurs who draw
par raison, Baudelaire insists, Les coloristes, les grands coloristes, dessinent
par temprament, presque leur insu (S46, 458), an expression, interest-
ingly, that Delacroix also used, writing in 1851 of [le] degr de force que la
couleur peut ajouter lexpression. Contre lopinion vulgaire, je dirais que la
couleur a une force beaucoup plus mystrieuse et peut-tre plus puissante;
elle agit pour ainsi dire notre insu (Journal, I, 437, 6juin 1851).
Baudelaire suggests that the fusion intime of colour and line occurs at
the moment of the paintings inception, dans le laboratoire troit et mys-
trieux du cerveau (S46, 429) and that it is impossible to divide colour and
line in any painting that has been harmoniously conceived and executed.
In any case, as Baudelaire writes:
114 Chapter 3
Au point de vue de Delacroix la ligne nest pas; car si tenue quelle soit, un gometre
taquin peut toujours la supposer assez paisse pour en contenir mille autres; et pour les
coloristes, qui veulent imiter les palpitations ternelles de la nature, les lignes ne sont
jamais, comme dans larc-en-ciel, que la fusion intime de deux couleurs. (S46, 434)
This was of course in contrast to the official view: the editors of the
Dictionnaire de lAcadmie des Beaux-Arts claimed that le dessin est la
raison essentielle de lart; il est le verbe de ce langage presque divin []
En dfinitive, le dessin est lart mme, puisque sans dessin lart ne peut
exister; le reste nest que complment et agrment. 33 Delacroix would
have disagreed. In a letter to the critic Louis Peisse (apparently unaware
of, or having forgiven, Peisses criticism of his drawing ability some years
earlier) Delacroix wrote: ce fameux beau que les uns voient dans la ligne
serpentine, les autres dans la ligne droite, ils se sont tous obstins ne jamais
voir que dans les lignes. Je suis ma fentre et je vois le plus beau paysage:
lide dune ligne ne me vient pas lesprit (Journal, I, 299, 15juillet 1849).
Thor endorses this approach when he describes Delacroix as using colour
pour dterminer ses images et sparer les objets comme on les voit dans la
nature, sans lartifice des lignes, qui sont, en dfinitive, une convention.34
Colour cannot have invaded line if line did not exist in the first place,
except as an intellectual concept; nonetheless,
le systme des lignes droi-
tes has imposed itself everywhere in painting. Baudelaire is convinced
that draughtsmanship cannot be artificially separated from the workings
of colour in painting, no more than it can be in nature, and the painters
who place a disproportionate emphasis on draughtsmanship are guilty
of perpetrating an artificial operation. Later in the Salon de 1846, in the
chapter entitled De quelques dessinateurs Baudelaire is even more explicit,
describing the purs dessinateurs as drawing par raison and that if they
followed their logic through, they would restrict themselves to the pencil
alone. He argues that the mistake that most dessinateurs make is to include
colour without understanding anything about its laws of harmony. The
33 Dictionnaire de lAcadmie des Beaux-Arts, 6vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 18581909),

I, p.113.
34 Salon de 1839, 16mars.
colourists, on the other hand dessinent parce quils colorent (S46, 458) and
allow their draughtsmanship to be governed by the logic of colours, since
only in this way can it form a part of the overall unity of the painting.
Consequently, for Baudelaire un dessinateur est un coloriste manqu (S46,
458) and although at the time he praises the drawing of Ingres, the impli
cation remains that Delacroix is the greater artist for being the foremost
proponent of limagination du dessin.
For Baudelaire, the relationship of the line to colour in painting in
1846 is, like his theory of colour, based on natural principles. An important
facet of this emphasis on the workings of nature is, for him, the quality of
movement that the art of Ingres and others, aiming for the delineation of
timeless arabesques in space, naturally excludes. In the Delacroix chapter
of 1846, Baudelaire suggests that there might be another law of draughts-
manship that has been forgotten by exponents of neo-classical drawing, and
this is movement: la grande qualit du dessin des artistes suprmes est la
vrit du mouvement, et Delacroix ne viole jamais cette loi naturelle (S46,
435). This is a quality of drawing attuned to nature, and we recall that in the
colour chapter, much ofBaudelaires fascination with natural colour lies in
the constant shifting of qualities of tone which always remain in harmony
with one another; the challenge offered to the painter is to express the
fluid, living nature of that harmony, not to simplify it or change it into a
fixed and artificial version of the original. For Baudelaire, Delacroixs paint-
ing encapsulates the workings of a vibrant and ever-changing world, and,
as he writes in 1846, ses personnages sont toujours agits et ses draperies
voltigeantes (S46, 434). The impression of movement in his paintings is
indicative of their essential vitality.
In the Exposition universelle de 1855, Baudelaire again employs similar
images of moving, flowing crowds and drapery to emphasize the vitality
of Delacroixs paintings, thirty-five of which were exhibited together for
the first time. He writes of La Prise de Constantinople par les Croiss: Et
toujours ces drapeaux miroitants, ondoyants, faisant se drouler et claquer
leurs plis lumineux dans latmosphre transparente! Toujours la foule agis-
sante, inquite, le tumulte des armes, la pompe des vtements, la vrit
emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie! (EU55, 592)
This sense of vigour and life in Delacroixs art is palpable throughout the
116 Chapter 3
descriptions of his paintings in 1855 and stands in stark contrast to what

in the accompanying essay Baudelaire had depicted as Ingres reductive
attempts to reduce art to its linear elements alone:
Remarquons aussi quemport par cette proccupation preque maladive du style,

le peintre supprime souvent le model ou lamoindrit jusqu linvisible, esprant
ainsi donner plus de valeur au contour, si bien que ses figures ont lair de patrons
dune forme trs correcte, gonfls dune matire molle et non vivante, trangre
lorganisme humain. (EU55, 587588)
In Baudelaires eyes, Ingres drawing represents a struggle of the refining

intellect against the life-force that is nature, and yet nature still manages
to infiltrate his work despite his efforts; the paintings ofDelacroix, on the
other hand, are connected to life and movement and have a remarkable
force of their own, corresponding to, but quite separate from, the inner
life of those who observe them:
Mais comment dfinir cet ordre de tableaux charmants, tels que Hamlet, dans la scne
du crne, et les Adieux de Romo et Juliette, si profondment pntrants et attachants,
que lil qui a tremp son regard dans leurs petits mondes mlancoliques ne peut
plus les fuir, que lesprit ne peut plus les viter?
Et le tableau quitt nous tourmente et nous suit. (EU55, 593)
Baudelaire has altered the words ofGautiers poem, substituting nous for
les and underlining the word in order to emphasize the implicit and direct
involvement of the spectator with the work.35 The paintings themselves
have become active, pntrants et attachants, first drawing in and then
hypnotizing the onlooker, whose attempts to resist (fuir, viter) are futile.
The conventional relationship of the product and the consumer is reversed
and Delacroixs art is presented as defying any interpretation that might be
imposed on it. This suggests that an essential shift in the critical discourse
between artist and critic/observer/writer has taken place.
35 From Terza Rima; see Pichois note, OCII, 1376.

A little later Baudelaire observes, in a famous passage, that On dirait

que cette peinture projette sa pense distance, and although this is in the
particular context of colours expressive ability, to be considered at greater
length in Chapter 4, there is a link between the active nature of colour
and Baudeaires emphasis in this essay on the life and movement of his
paintings embodied in their drawing style. Movement forms an integral
part ofDelacroixs genius, which according to Baudelaire is characterized
par lensemble, par laccord profond, complet, entre sa couleur, son sujet,
son dessin, et par la dramatique gesticulation de ses figures (EU55, 596).
As Lucie Horner points out, Baudelaires insistence on the integration of
what were often represented as different elements of art is one which dis-
tinguishes his writings from those of other critics of his time: personne,
avant Baudelaire, navait rig en thorie lide que la couleur, le dessin et
le sujet sinterprtaient rciproquement.36 Such ideas may indeed lie en
germe in critics such as Gautier who defended Delacroixs draughtsman-
ship, but only Baudelaire is unequivocal in his insistence at the time that
the ensemble is the essence ofDelacroixs genius, and that the mutual opera-
tion of colour and line is an essential part of this.
Where the language of the 1855 article on Ingres was so harsh that it
could not published at the time, the lyrical language of Baudelaires essay
on Delacroix, interspersed with extracts from his own and Gautiers poetry,
seems to demonstrate how the harmoniousness ofDelacroixs painting can
be expressed only by a correspondingly lyrical prose. Towards the end of
the essay, however, there is an abrupt change of mood when Baudelaire
writes the paragraph attacking conventional criticisms ofDelacroixs dessin,
the beginning of which was quoted from at the outset of this chapter (see
p.89), and at twenty lines surely must be the longest question in his criti-
cal essays. The question continues here:
[] que la simplification dans le dessin est une monstruosit, comme la tragdie
dans le monde dramatique; que la nature nous prsente une srie infinie de lignes
courbes, fuyantes, brises, suivant une loi de gnration impeccable, o le paralllisme
est toujours indcis et sinueux, o les concavits et les convexits se correspondent
36 Horner, p.136.
118 Chapter 3
et se poursuivent; que M. Delacroix satisfait admirablement toutes ces conditions

et que, quand mme son dessin laisserait percer quelquefois des dfaillances ou des
outrances, il a au moins cet immense mrite dtre une protestation perptuelle et
efficace contre la barbare invasion de la ligne droite, cette ligne tragique et systma-
tique, dont actuellement les ravages sont dj immenses dans la peinture et dans la
sculpture? (EU55, 5956)
Baudelaires bitter outburst at this point in the essay seems to belong more
to the negative Ingres article than to the positive Delacroix one, with its
celebration on the poetic and the imaginative aspects of his work and the
atmosphere of an enthusiasm now shared with the public; as he writes
near the start of the essay, thirty-five paintings exhibited together means
that Delacroixs greatness can no longer be in doubt: La preuve est faite, la
question est jamais vide, le rsultat est l, visible, immense, flamboyant
(EU, 591). It is telling that at the end of the article it is Baudelaire, not the
public, who returns to the question ofDelacroix which despite all of the
glory of the Exhibition still remains, and this is the question of his drawing.
For Baudelaire, the fact that Delacroixs dessin is still being queried means
that his painting as a whole has not been properly understood, and his
own, very long and detailed, question demonstrates that for him the answer
is provided by understanding how colour and drawing work together in
his art. Baudelaires bitter rhetoric amidst the 1855 celebrations must have
stemmed in some part from his feeling that the long-overdue, and imperi-
ally sanctioned, recognition ofDelacroix in the Universal Exhibition was
based on simply overlooking his faults of drawing rather than understand-
ing how that drawing functioned within his art as a whole. Moreover,
Baudelaires growing contempt for Ingres cruelle, despotique, immobile style
of drawing might have been added to by his sense of grievance that this
was one aspect ofDelacroixs painting that people still felt free to criticize,
and this effectively meant that they did not understand how drawing and
colour could operate together. By describing Delacroixs drawing style as
une protestation perptuelle et efficace contre la barbare invasion de la
ligne droite Baudelaire is asserting the right to claim for his artist, now
an establishment figure, and by extension for himself, one last remnant of
revolutionary barricade-storming.
Daumier, Meryon and the expressive line
The artist whose draughtsmanship Baudelaire admired as much as

Delacroixs was that of Honor Daumier, a revolutionary in his own way
and still very much associated with controversy by the imperial govern-
ment. In Baudelaires essay Quelques caricaturistes franais which, along
with De lessence du rire and Quelques caricaturistes trangers, was published
in the mid-1850s, Baudelaire discusses why he considers Daumier to be
a great draughtsman. The date of publication of Quelques caricaturistes
franais, 1857, is significant, regardless of when Baudelaire actually wrote
it (it may have formed part of his 1845 never-published work on modern
painting), given that only two years earlier he had so roundly condemned
the draughtsmanship of Ingres and its associations with art of the estab-
lishment. If this article did survive largely unchanged since 1845 or 1846 it
shows that Baudelaires admiration for Daumier did not weaken as it did
in the case of Ingres, but in fact had grown stronger in the face of trends
in French art. In fact, in this essay Baudelaire celebrates in Daumier pre-
cisely those qualities of dessin which by that time he had found so wanting
in Ingres. Where Ingres paintings are locked in immobility and a fixed
ideal of beauty, Daumiers satirical portraits of politicians reveal him to be
souple comme un artiste et exacte comme Lavater (QCF, 552). Wechsler
discusses the significance of many of the Parisian characters caricatured by
Daumier and observes that: Daumier grasped the professional structure
of the expanding bourgeoisie from the small shopkeeper and concierge,
to the politician, lawyer and banker and interwove its distinguishing
traits with those of a moral characterology drawing on the traditions ofLe
Brun and Lavater.37 While Ingres is portrayed as in love with antiquitys
superficial trappings, Daumier sest abattu brutalement sur lantiquit, sur
la fausse antiquit, car nul ne sent mieux que lui les grandeurs anciennes,
il a crach dessus (QCF, 556). Consequently, it is Daumier, not Ingres,
who draws comme les grands matres (QCF, 556) and shows more of un
37 Wechsler, p.135.
120 Chapter 3
art srieux (QCF, 556) in, for instance, his series of mocking drawings of
the heroes of antiquity (LHistoire ancienne, a series of fifty plates, pub-
lished in Le Charivari from 1841 until 1843), than more acclaimed artists
in their serious works of art.
Baudelaire describes comic, tragic and ironic details of Daumiers
Rue Transnonain, La Libert de la presse, and Le Dernier Bain, and of the
Nemsis mdicale Baudelaire writes a virtual pome en prose: Le ciel parisien,
fidle son habitude ironique dans les grands flaux et les grands remue-
mnage politiques, le ciel est splendide; il est blanc, incandescent dardeur.
Les ombres sont noires et nettes (QCF, 554). Daumiers subject matter,
concerned as it is with the Paris he sees around him and tout ce quune
grande ville contient de vivantes monstuosits (QCF, 554) was always
bound to appeal to Baudelaire, as it did to many people, but he wants to
claim more for Daumier than this, and to suggest that his place is among
the ranks of great artists. Through his close descriptions of just a handful
of the works Baudelaire wishes to show comment srieuse est souvent la
pense de Daumier (QCF, 554) and that his work, taken as a whole, is un
art srieux; cest un grand caricaturiste [] Il dessine comme les grands
matres. Reasons for this include many of those elements that were most
important for Baudelaire in draughtsmanship: accuracy of memory and
speed of execution, capturing the essence of the individual and maintain-
ing the sense of movement and vitality:
Toutes ses figures sont bien daplomb, toujours dans un mouvement vrai. Il a un
talent dobservation tellement sr quon ne trouve pas chez lui une seule tte qui jure
avec le corps qui la supporte. Tel nez, tel front, tel il, tel pied, telle main. Cest la
logique du savant transporte dans un art lger, fugace, qui a contre lui la mobilit
mme de la vie. (QCF, 556)
The science that underpins Daumiers drawings is not only exact in terms
of the laws of physiognomy, still so important to Baudelaire, but also has
been rendered with a light touch that suggests life and movement.
It is also significant that unlike Gavarni, whom Baudelaire also admires,
Daumiers drawings do not need la lgende, titles or humorous words to
explain or define them; they express their meaning without words and
because of this come closer to true art. It is worth noting another context
in which the title of a work of art, or near-lack of it, is important. This is

in the landscape section of the Salon de 1859 when Baudelaire admires the
unpretentious brevity of the titles of Boudins studies such as 8octobre,
midi, vent de nord-ouest and says that, if you had the right meteorologi-
cal knowledge, La lgende cache avec la main, vous devineriez la saison,
lheure et le vent. Je nexagre rien. Jai vu. (S59, 666). Appropriately enough,
the critic saw these landscapes not within the walls of the Salon but as they
were being painted at Boudins studio in Honfleur near where Baudelaire
was staying at his mothers house and writing his review, so he was able to
verify the accuracy of the artists observations. Sonya Stephenss excellent
article Painting (in) the Studio; Artful unfinishedness? reflects on the
important role that the aesthetic of unfinishedness plays in nineteenth-
century writings on art.38 As she points out, Baudelaires idea of finished-
ness was not dependent on the Academic definition of the word but on
the degree of unity and spirituality that he perceived in the work (see also
p.129). Baudelaires approach to the idea of unfinishedness was inconsist-
ent, varying according to which artist he was considering. For instance,
as Albert Boime observes, Baudelaire was much harder on Daubigny and
Thodore Rousseaus lack of finish than he was on Corot and Delacroix.39
In the case ofBoudin, Baudelaire allows himself to approve ofthese meticu-
lous landscapes because they remain outside the boundaries of officially
sanctioned art just as Daumiers cartoons and lithographs do, and so can
be judged by different standards. On one level, Boudins paintings appeal
to him because they are simply studies, or work in progress, and do not
claim to be anything more, unlike many of the landscapes on display at the
Salon in Paris. Their simplicity and directness is expressive in the way that
the etched line is expressive. But it is also worth noting here that part of the
appeal of these studies lies in their ability to be so exact in meteorological
terms that they bypass the need for words and communicate directly with
the viewer. When looking at Boudins studies, Baudelaire is rather surprised
38 In Esquisses/bauches: Projects and Pre-Texts in Nineteenth-Century French Culture,

edited by Sonya Stephens (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.4255, p.52.
39 The Academy and French Painting, note to p.93.
122 Chapter 3
to observe of his own reaction that Chose assez curieuse, il ne marrivera

pas une seule fois, devant ses magies liquides ou ariennes, de me plaindre
de labsence de lhomme (S59, 666). The pleasure that Baudelaire derives
from Boudins sketches is quite separate from what he thought he required
of a painting, and this will lead him to conclusions about art that will be
developed further in Le Peintre de la vie moderne.
Baudelaire does not miss people in Boudins seascapes because they
present him with a new and unexpected sort of stimulus, one that he had
doubted that a landscape alone could ever provide. In the case ofDaumier,
he does not miss colour because the effect on him that colour normally
provides is replaced for him through that artists exceptional deployment
of black and white. The ability to suggest colour where it is not present is
for Baudelaire what makes Daumier a great artist:
Ce qui complete le caractre remarquable de Daumier, et en fait un artiste spcial
appartenant lillustre famille des matres, cest que son dessin est naturellement
color. Ses lithographies et ses dessins sur bois veillent des ides de couleur. Son
crayon contient autre chose que du noir bon dlimiter les contours. Il fait deviner
la couleur comme la pense; or cest le signe dun art suprieur, et que tous les artistes
intelligents ont clairement vu dans ses ouvrages. (QCF, 557)
The concepts of thought and colour are closely related for Baudelaire. In
1855 he describes how Delacroixs painting projette sa pense distance
and that his colour pense par elle-mme, indpendamment des objets
quelle habille (EU55, 595). The suggestive power of Delacroixs colour
finds a parallel in Daumiers lithographs because of their expressiveness
and the symbolic drama that is played out in black, white and grey tones.
Baudelaire had never suggested that the notion of colour lay in the harmony
of pleasing tones alone, and in the concluding chapter of the Salon de 1846
he famously expressed his paradoxical belief that a great colourist could do
without colour and that this might in fact be the best way of representing
the present day: les grands coloristes savent faire de la couleur avec un
habit noir, une cravate blanche et un fond gris (S46, 495). It is not far from
suggesting that a colourist can paint perfectly well in black and white to
the idea that a caricaturist could be described as a colourist if he follows
the colourist approach to art. Daumiers pencil is not restricted to drawing
external characteristics, skilled as he is in the science of physiognomy, but

also expresses the inner life of the characters it describes, and this appeals
to the imagination of the spectator.
Another artist working without colour who made a strong impression
on Baudelaire was Meryon, a striking passage on whom is included in the
landscape section of the Salon de 1859, and repeated in 1862s Peintres et
Aquafortistes. In Meryons etchings of Paris streets Baudelaire found the
drawing style of les vieux et excellents aquafortistes (S59, 666) expressively
combined with the depiction of the modern city, with its heady combi-
nation of Les majests de la pierre accumule, les clochers montrant du
doigt le ciel, les oblisques de lindustrie vomissant contre le firmament
leurs coalitions de fume, les prodigieux chafaudages des monuments en
rparation (S59, 666). Meryons images find an echo in Baudelaires Le
Cygne of 1859:
Paris change! Mais rien dans ma mlancolie

Na boug! Palais neufs, chafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allgorie,
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. (FM, 86)
For Walter Benjamin, Baudelaires celebrated passage on this artist 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 ofClassical antiq-
uity and modernism, and in him the form of this superimposition, the alle-
gory, appears unmistakeably.40 The etched line is as expressive as Delacroixs
colour in the work of this artist where la profondeur des perspectives [est]
augmente par la pense de tous les drames qui y sont contenus (S59, 667).
Baudelaire wished to write poetic lgendes for Meryons Parisian series, and
it is indeed a great shame, as Benjamin says, that the artist was not able to
imagine how this could be done, and so the project of what would have
been extraordinary artistic collaboration came to nothing.
40 Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age ofHigh Capitalism, third edition (London,
1989), p.87.
124 Chapter 3
Guys and the perfect sketch
For Baudelaire in the late 1850s, tiring of Salons and the direction that
French painting was taking with its growing focus on landscape, realism
and photography, artists such as Daumier, Boudin and Meryon repre-
sented a fresh approach to art which was as far from the tired academic
formulae as it was from popular novelty. The fact that these artists were
working in what at the time would have been considered lower forms of
art was fundamentally irrelevant to Baudelaire, as was whether they used
paint, drawing or etching as a means of expression. Baudelaires interest in
artists working outside the confines of the Salon was growing, despite his
lifelong belief in the strictures of the formal Salon system. It is important
to remember that both Baudelaire and Delacroix were firm believers in
the hierarchy of genres and in the primacy of the history painting. Richard
Wrigley has reminded us that in the eighteenth century it was not simply
a question of the Academy imposing the hierarchy of genres on artists,
as is commonly assumed, with critics being compelled to follow in art-
ists lead, but rather that academic structures provided a shared syntax
that both artists and critics agreed on.41 Even Diderot, aptly described
by Wrigley as a comprehensive antagonist of the Academy, wrote his
groundbreaking essays within this critical discourse. In the nineteenth
century Baudelaires wish to adhere to the formal hierarchy of art, and dis-
like of modern fads, was possibly what contributed to his apparent lack of
enthusiasm for the art ofManet, although he clearly admired his art (with
certain reservations) and encouraged him in private, even if his admiration
is laced with a particularly Baudelairian brand of cynicism. The famous
letter that he wrote to the artist from Brussels in 1865 was from one exile to
another (Manet had complained about the cold treatment he was receiving
from the public) and though it has often been read as being rude, in a less
41 Wrigley, 1993, p.286. See also Chapter 1, pp.2122.

truncated form it reveals a genuine warmth: [] vous, vous ntes que le

premier dans la decrepitude de votre art. Jespre que vous ne men voudrez
pas du sans-faon avec lequel je vous traite. Vous connaissez mon amiti
pour vous (Corr. II, 11mai 1865, pp.49697; Baudelaires emphasis). Many
words have been written on the above lines and on Baudelaires notable lack
of words on the subject of Manet, and I will not contribute here to that
particular ongoing debate, except to agree with Hiddleston that timing
played a role in this, and to add that for Baudelaire, whose infant home
was full of eighteenth-century art and who grew up to champion Delacroix
(born in the eighteenth century), the very seriousness of Manets innova-
tion may have been simply too much for him to accept at this stage in his
life. The honour ofLe Peintre de la vie moderne went to Constantin Guys
instead ofManet because, as Hiddleston points out, this artist, like Boudin
and Daumier, embodied the perfect adequacy of form to content42 for
Baudelaire at a time when he had tired of new styles of painting, and as
such fulfilled his aesthetic requirements when he knew that French paint-
ing could not return to Romantic themes.
For Baudelaire, in any case, the croquis, like the etching, was the best
way of conveying the contingency of modern life, though paradoxically
part of this appeal had overtones of nostalgia, and Guys croquis de moeurs,
witty and lightly executed pen and watercolour studies of people and
places, had a very eighteenth-century charm for Baudelaire. He even intro-
duces the work of this little-known artist by placing it in the context of the
delights to be found in coloured engravings by little-known contemporar-
ies of his father, now becoming fashionable again. The Goncourt broth-
ers were the most illustrious collectors of eighteenth-century prints, and
published articles on them from 1859 until 1870 (collected in book form
in 187374).43 In 1857 Baudelaire did not have enough money to buy one
of his own fathers old paintings that he saw in a shop, and he reproached
42 Hiddleston, p.250.
43 See E. & J. de Goncourt, LArt du XVIIIe sicle, 2vols, edited by Jean-Louis Cabans
(Tusson: Du Lrot, 2007).
126 Chapter 3
his mother for this missed opportunity: Mon pre tait un dtestable
artiste; mais toutes ces vieilleries-l ont une valeur morale (Corr. I, 30dc.
1857, p.439), he wrote. His fathers painting may have been lost to him,
but Baudelaire soon was to find a corresponding valeur morale in the art
of Guys, and the opening chapter of Le Peintre de la vie moderne, one of
Baudelaires last essays on art, published in 1863 but probably composed as
early as 1859 or 1860,44 takes the form of a long love letter to the artist who
best fulfilled Baudelaires dream of 1845 of an artist who would celebrate
lhroisme de la vie moderne (S45, 407). Guyss modern/heroic subject
matter included French soldiers on the battlefield and Imperial pomp on
Paris streets, Turkish sultans on parade, London fashion and and Parisian
courtesans at the theatre; the artful combination of lightness of touch,
old-fashioned appeal and sharp observation ofSecond Empire life of these
sketches inspired a renewed enthusiasm for art on the part of Baudelaire,
and a fresh way of thinking about how the method of composition plays
an important part in art.
The anonymity of Guys, who did not sign his studies or want his
name published in reviews, might have inspired Baudelaire to take on
his art as if it were, in some ways, his own, with M.G. as a projection of
his other artist self. This tendency can be seen in an early chapter of the
essay, even the title of which (Lartiste, lhomme du monde, homme des
foules et enfant) interweaves the mysterious Monsieur G. into a particu-
larly baudelairian story with many of its familiar tropes of convalesence,
the flneur, the man of the crowd and the child. There is one description
in particular, in a discussion of how artistic genius is lenfance retrouve
volont, where Baudelaire might even be drawing on his own childhood
experience:
Un de mes amis me disait un jour qutant fort petit, il assistait la toilette de son
pre, et qualors il contemplait, avec une stupeur mele de dlices, les muscles des
bras, les degradations de couleurs de la peau nuance de rose et de jaune, et le rseau
44 See Pichois, OCII, pp.141420, for a detailed consideration of the genesis of the
essay; also Jonathan Mayne, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London:
Phaidon, 1964), p.xviii.
bleutre des veines. Le tableau extrieure le pntrait dj de respect et semparait

de son cerveau [] Ai-je besoin de dire que cet enfant est aujourdhui un peintre
clbre? (PV, 691)
Was this an anecdote about the peintre clbre Delacroix, as is often assumed
(though it seems more likely that Baudelaire would have named him if it
were) or a very early memory of the poets own childhood and a fantasy
of the other artist self that the poet/critic at one point had dreamed of
becoming? As Sima Godfrey reminds us, Baudelaires fathers studio occu-
pied the same space as his childhood bedroom, being one large room. It
is easy to imagine how the physical proximity of the child to his father in
that particular setting, where art and intimate home life were closely inter-
twined, might have have made a lasting impact on his memory:
Charles Baudelaires nursery area was located in a large room that contained not only
the childs furniture and a large bookcase filled with classical and eighteenth-century
books but also a spare bed and a mahogany wash-stand [] this large room, the larg-
est in the apartment, also served as the painting studio for Baudelaires father.45
Godfrey notes that the young Baudelaire was surrounded not only by his
fathers and first wifes paintings, displayed on every wall, but in the nurs-
ery alone there were thirty-four paintings, ten gouaches, thirteen plaster
casts and many unfinished canvases. The fact that the shared bedroom and
studio were one and the same place adds another layer of complexity to the
theme of Sonya Stephenss article Painting (in) the studio? as the studio
was also for Baudelaire a familiar and safe early environment that clearly
had a formative impact on how he first saw the world.
In another memorable passage, also on the theme of morning sensibil-
ity, Baudelaire uses all of his poetic imagination to describe Guys waking
moments in terms of light:
45 Sima Godfrey, Ce pre nourricier. Revisiting Baudelaires Family Romance,

Nineteenth-Century French Studies, FallWinter 200910, pp.3951; p.45.
128 Chapter 3
Quand M.G., son rveil, ouvre les yeux et quil voit le soleil tapageur donnant lassaut
aux carreaux des fentres, il se dit avec remords, avec regrets: Quel ordre imprieux!
quelle fanfare de lumire! Depuis plusieurs heures dja, de la lumire partout! De la
lumire perdue par mon sommeil! Que de choses claires jaurais pu voir et que je
nai pas vues! Et il part! Et il regarde couler le fleuve de la vitalit, si majestueux et
si brillant. (PV, 692; Baudelaires emphasis)
The excitement that Baudelaire feels about Guys engagement with light
and life is palpable. In 1858 the Goncourts attested to this characteristic of
the artist when they described Guys vivacious and stimulating conversation
in a similar way as highly-coloured, almost visible utterance.46 In her article
All that Glitters: Connecting Baudelaires Art Criticism and Poetry Sara
Pappas draws attention to how frequently Baudelaire uses a vocabulary of
light when describing works of art that he admires, and she notes how as
early as in the Salon de 1846 la ligne of ingriste painting is unfavourably
contrasted to la lumire of colourist painting.47 But although light and
colour are undoubtedly closely linked for Baudelaire, there is another ele-
ment to Guyss art that is inseparable from colour, and this is drawing, in
its lightest and speediest form.
At the centre of Le Peintre de la vie moderne the chapter entitled
LArt Mnmonique examines Guys working method more closely, and
goes to the heart of what Baudelaire found so appealing in the work of this
artist at this time. Guys drawing style was one based on speed, simplicity,
and accurate observation, and, most importantly, de mmoire: tous les
vrais dessinateurs dessinent daprs limage crite dans leur cerveau, et non
daprs la nature (PV, 698), as Baudelaire wrote, and the links between
creativity and memory will be explored further in the following chapter.
In 1846 Baudelaire had written that dessinateurs, unlike colourists, nont
pas le temps de voir lair et la lumire (S46, 426), but the working method
of Guys a cet incomparable avantage, qu nimporte quel point de son
progrs, chaque dessin a lair suffisament fini; vous nommerez cela une
bauche si vous voulez, mais bauche parfaite (PV, 700).
46 Journal of 23 April 1858, quoted in Mayne, The Painter of Modern Life, p.10.
47 Sara Pappas, French Forum, Fall 2008, vol 33, no. 3, pp.3353.
It is worth noting that Baudelaire no longer feels the need to be cir-

cumspect or to qualify his admiration with reservations about the sketch
as an art form, as we have already noted with the studies by Boudin in
1859. In her study of the aesthetic of unfinishedness, Sonya Stephens
has observed that Baudelaires concept of the bauche parfaite is some-
thing of a contradiction in terms: An bauche is, by definition, encore
imparfaite (Petit Robert) and perfection implies finish [] In other
words, the paradox of modern beauty (the eternal and the evanescent)
is intensified by a paradox of form.48 In the art of Guys Baudelaire cel-
ebrates the paradox because it involves line and colour at every stage of
the process. Baudelaires closing remarks on drawing at the end of the
LArt mnmonique chapter show how his thinking on the relationship
of colour and line has evolved, and may even have been altered signifi-
cantly by his close observation of how Guys worked. The concept of a
type of draughtsmanship capable of working in close co-operation with
expressive colour is, of course, what Baudelaire had always celebrated in
the work ofDelacroix, but in Guys he has found a lighter, contemporary
version that fits with his idea of modernity. At a time when he is seeking
above all evidence of imagination and poetry in art, and both skilfulness
and innovation leave him cold, with Guys Baudelaire finds all the former
enthusiasm of his youth and a new way of seeing how colour and drawing
can work in harmony.
It is not surprising that the obituary essay on Delacroix, Luvre et la
vie dEugne Delacroix (1863), is nostalgic and revisits much of he had already
written about the artist, including the subject of his colour. There is however
a section in which yet again Baudelaire chooses to revive old arguments
about line and colour, and for the first time discusses directly their respective
positions in the hierarchy of arts formal qualities. As in 1855, Baudelaire is
scathing in his dismissal of those who appreciate only one, Classical, form of
drawing in painting. Quoting from articles he had written in other, smaller
48 Stephens, Esquisses/bauches, pp.4255, p.52.

130 Chapter 3
publications,49 he disparages the thinking of cette classe desprits grossiers

et matriels (le nombre est infiniment grand), qui napprcient les objets
que par le contour, ou, pis encore, par leurs trois dimensions (OVD, 752),
in other words, the traditional view established in the earliest days of the
Academy that only the line in art appeals to the spirit:
Jai souvent entendu des personnes de cette espce tablir une hirarchie des qual-
its, absolument inintelligible pour moi; affirmer, par exemple, que la facult qui
permet celui-ci de crer un contour exact, ou celui-l un contour dune beaut
surnaturelle, est suprieure la facult qui sait assembler des couleurs dune manire
enchanteresse. Selon ces gens-l, la couleur ne rve pas, ne pense pas, ne parle pas. Il
paratrait que, quand je contemple des uvres dun de ces hommes appels spciale-
ment coloristes, je me livre un plaisir qui nest pas dune nature noble; volontiers
mappelleraient-ils matrialiste, rservant pour eux-mmes laristocratique pithte
de spiritualistes. (OVD, 752)
Although never stated so explicitly before, this assignation of an inferior

place to colour by most people undoubtedly contributed to Baudelaires
emphasis upon the spiritual nature of colour. So far, this is nothing new.
What comes next, though, shows that the relative positions of colour and
line have shifted significantly: Ces esprits superficiels ne songent pas que
les deux facults ne peuvent jamais tre tout fait spares, et quelles sont
toutes deux le rsultat dun germe primitif soigneusement cultiv (OVD,
753). It is not the first time that Baudelaire has suggested that il ny a dans
la nature ni ligne ni couleur, but it is the first time that he suggests that
they are both equally abstract concepts and that effectively neither exists
except in the mind of the artist, and the dessinateur-n simply interprets
nature through different means than the colourist. La ligne et la couleur
font penser et rver toutes les deux, Baudelaire writes, les plaisirs qui en
drivent sont dune nature diffrente, mais parfaitement gale et absolument
indpendante du sujet du tableau (PV, 753). Drawing and colour fulfil the
same role in the imaginative communication between artist and spectator,
49 This passage, originally written for Baudelaires 1861 article Peintures murales dEugne
Delacroix Saint-Sulpice, was not included in the text of LArt romantique but is
quoted by Baudelaire himself in Luvre et la vie dEugne Delacroix, pp.751753.
and the fact that Baudelaire writes this in an essay on Delacroix is notable
because it represents a form of truce in a battle he had long fought in that
artists defence. Was Baudelaires change of heart towards drawing a direct
result of observing Guys at work?
In his early art criticism Baudelaire was able to accept a style of
draughtsmanship in the work of Ingres which existed separately from,
and could be assessed independently of, his colour; we might say that he
was prepared to bend his own rules on the need for harmony and unity for
the sake of acknowledging the extraordinary talents of this artist alone. In
1855, however, he accuses Ingres of squandering the inheritance of David,
Gurin and Girodet, as well as his own considerable physiognomic talents,
and describes his art as falsely deriving from an anachronistic ideal. For
Baudelaire, Ingres aesthetic is one based on an impossible version of abso-
lute beauty that, in its almost exclusive emphasis on the linear form, has
effectively denied itself the life-giving source that is colour. In contrast, the
art of Delacroix is characterized in 1846 not only by a supremely expres-
sive colour but also by a draughtsmanship which springs from principles
of harmony and synthesis which are inherent in colour, and in 1855 and
1859 Baudelaire reaffirms this, vehemently defending the artist against
those who fail to acknowledge that there is an equally valid drawing style
based on unifying colourist principles. Colour itself may be absent from
the monochrome lithographs ofDaumier and Meryon, but for Baudelaire
the idea of colour is present, because their use of line is so expressive, and
this is what matters. This paves the way for his appreciation of the art of
Guys, who, like Delacroix before him, displays a consistency of approach
in his simultaneous deployment of line and colour in his sketches. For
Baudelaire the paradox that is the bauche parfaite represents the consum-
mate unity of colour and line, and leads him towards conclusions about
the equally abstract nature of both.
Chapter 4
Colour Symbolism: Art, Poetry and Music
Il semble que cette couleur, quon me pardonne ces subterfuges de langage pour
exprimer des ides fort dlicates, pense par elle-mme, indpendamment des objets
quelle habille. Puis ces admirables accords de sa couleur font souvent rver dharmonie
et de mlodie, et limpression quon emporte de ses tableaux est souvent quasi musi-
cale. (EU55, 594595)
Reading Meaning into Colour
There was, of course, colour symbolism and colour symbolism. In the

Salon de 1845 Baudelaire offered an early indication of how he did not
intend to approach the question of colours symbolism when he mocked
the words of un critique connu who had made the mistake of reading a
too literal symbolism into Delacroixs Les Dernires paroles de lempreur
Marc-Aurle because the character of Commodius was depicted as being
placed in the light, representing the future, while the Stoics remained in
the shade, indicative of their waning powers. The critic was Thor, who had
indeed written: Le pass sassombrit dans les figures et dans les draperies des
amis de Marc-Aurle, et lavenir est rouge comme la robe de Commode. La
lumire ne frappe que sur le torse sanguinolent du jeune Csar, tandis que
les philosophes du rgne prcdent steignent dans lombre.1 Baudelaire
mocks what he sees as too straightforward an interpretation of the painting
and exclaims in mock despair: critique! critiques! (S45, 354). Pontus
1 Thor, Salon de 1845, Salons de T. Thor 184448, p.142.

134 Chapter 4
Grate has wondered why Baudelaire did not take a more serious interest
in Thors elaborate attempts to suggest a symbolism of colour (the red of
the younger mans tunic as a contrast to the dark garments of his fathers
peers) in this passage.2 The answer almost certainly lies in the limited nature
of Thors approach; although he was one of the few contemporary crit-
ics who did take colour seriously and examine its workings with insight,
Thor, along with other Fourier-influenced critics, made no attempt to
disguise his wish to see the perpetration of his socialist ideals in paintings.3
Moreover, this was a form of colour symbolism associated with costume
and the relative importance of the characters depicted, and as such was not
very dissimilar to the Acadmies belief in the seventeenth century that the
painter should use certain colours to represent the relative importance of the
characters depicted. Kemp describes how Le Brun praised Poussins Ecstasy
ofSaint Paul for its angels dressed in yellow for purity and committed grace
while Saint Pauls red robes denoted ardent charity.4 Such a heavy-handed
approach to interpreting the complexities of colours spiritual significance
will not form part of his method of criticism, Baudelaire implies. Instead,
he prefers to suggest that his own interpretation of colours symbolism
will be a comparatively simple matter, stating of the painting that cette
pondration du vert et du rouge plat notre me. (S45, 355) As Octavio
Paz puts it, ce ne sont ni le sujet ni les personnages qui lont sduit, mais
le rapport de deux couleurs une couleur chaude et une couleur froide.
La prsence que rvle ce tableau nest pas celle de la philosophie ni celle
de lhistoire; elle est prsence plastique, accord entre un bleu et un rouge,
un jaune et un violet.5 Put another way, on the one hand Baudelaire is
2 Grate, p.229.
3 Baudelaires antipathy towards Thor was professional, not personal; in 1864 he
recalls their anciennes discussions (presumably in the mid-1840s) which no doubt
had had some influence on Baudelaires aesthetic (Corr. II, 386, 20juin 1864). In 1865,
Baudelaire writes about the immense plaisir he received, as an exile in Belgium, on
seeing Thor, whom he claims not to have seen since 1845 (Corr. II, 459, 12fvrier
1865).
4 Kemp, p.281.
5 Octavio Paz, Prsence et prsent, Preuves, 207 (May 1968), pp.715, p.7.
showing off his knowledge of the artists technical term, pondration;6 on

the other he is being both mysterious and somewhat poetic. The apparent
simplicity of plat notre me indicates the deeper spiritual currents that
colour is capable of tapping into, and this is what interests Baudelaire, not
a simple reading of what certain colours correspond to.
In the Salon de 1846 Baudelaire appears to take a different approach
at the beginning of the pivotal colour chapter, when he allows imaginary
colours to float free of signification and operate with apparent independ-
ence until they culminate in the grande symphonie du jour. Colours
affective potential is touched on by Baudelaire only towards the end of
the chapter, and then almost parenthetically, when a consideration of style
and sentiment leads him to state simply that il y a des tons gais et foltres,
foltres et tristes, riches et gais, riches et tristes, de communs et doriginaux
(S46, 425). Such a glib assertion might give the impression that Baudelaire
was not very interested in the sort of mood engendered by colour. But
after a similarly brief allusion to the calme et gaie colour of Veronese
and the plaintive and terrible colour of Delacroix and the little-known
artist Catlin, there follows a striking, if slightly bizarre, observation: Jai
eu longtemps devant ma fentre un cabaret mi-parti de vert et de rouge
crus, qui taient pour mes yeux une douleur dlicieuse. From a fairly neu-
tral summary of the moods of different artists, which most people would
probably accept, Baudelaire suddenly introduces another arrestingly poetic
confession similar to plat notre me. The particular impact of the red/
green colour combination on Baudelaire will be discussed more fully a little
later in the chapter (see pp.151165), but for now it is worth noting that
in the colour chapter it provides the bridge between Baudelaires thoughts
on what could be termed the more physical qualities of colour and the sci-
ence behind the combining of different tones with the particular personal
effect that colour can have on the imagination. These suggestions are put
forward in the famous passage which, Baudelaire is confident, will appeal
to tous ceux qui aiment sincrement la nature, even though this is a nature
6 Littr defines it as Terme de beaux-arts. Juste quilibre des masses, des figures. mile
Littr, Dictionnaire de la langue franaise (Paris, 18631878), p.1209.
136 Chapter 4
filtered through the dream-like imagination of Hoffmann, and by exten-

sion, Baudelaire himself:7
Jignore si quelque analogiste a tabli solidement une gamme complte des couleurs
et et des sentiments, mais je me rappelle un passage dHoffmann qui exprime par-
faitement mon ide, et qui plaira tous ceux qui aiment sincrement la nature: Ce
nest pas seulement en rve, et dans le lger dlire qui prcde le sommeil, cest encore
veill, lorsque jentends de la musique, que je trouve une analogie intime entre les
couleurs, les sons et les parfums. Il me semble que toutes ces choses ont t engen-
dres par un mme rayon de lumire, et quelles doivent se runir dans un merveilleux
concert. Lodeur des soucis bruns et rouges produit surtout un effet magique sur ma
personne. Elle me fait tomber dans une profonde rverie, et jentends alors comme
dans le lointain les sons graves et profonds du hautbois. (S46, 425426)
This famous paragraph works on several different levels. Baudelaire first

hints at the possibility of understanding the network of connections
between colour and emotions and then, explaining that the Hoffmann
passage expresses his idea perfectly, he neatly sidesteps the issue of colour/
emotions and enters into the realm of a much more general synaesthesia,
a concept expressed most famously in his poem Correspondances.8 In La
Mystique de Baudelaire Jean Pommier traces the influence ofHoffmanns
writings on the poet, although mainly in terms of the imagery of sound or
music that they might have suggested to him. The passage which Baudelaire
chooses to quote indicates, however, that he had a wider range of connec-
tions in mind. To the idea of certain colours, or combinations of colour,
having the power to provoke certain moods, Baudelaire will add a further
suggestion of his own: that there might be links between colour, music
7 Leakey is correct, I believe, in perceiving no irony in the Baudelaires implicated

inclusion of himself among ceux qui aiment sincrement la nature; this statement
is in keeping with the particular form of love of nature that Baudelaire advocated
in art at the time. As Leakey puts it, the artist must, [Baudelaire] agrees, observe and
follow Nature closely; but this is only a starting-point, and thereafter begins the work
of imaginative transposition and modification or (as he himself variously terms
it) of idealization, interpretation or generalization (Baudelaire and Nature,
pp.7576).
8 Jean Pommier, La Mystique de Baudelaire (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), pp.315.
and perfumes that can only rarely be perceived. He chooses to leave this
as an implied aspect of colour, and indeed it could be argued that it is
in the poetry, not the criticism that it finds its most potent expression.
However, throughout the art criticism there will be an increasing focus
on the spiritual, symbolic part of colour and the role it plays in connect-
ing music and poetry.
By the time Baudelaire was writing his Exposition universelle of 1855
he was enjoying success in his writing. His translations of Poes stories,
which would form part of the Histoires extraordinaires and the Nouvelles
Histoires extraordinaires, had been published in Le Pays from July 1854 to
April 1855. The respected Revue des Deux Mondes published eighteen of his
poems under the title ofLes Fleurs du Mal and Lessence du rire et gnrale-
ment du comique dans les arts plastiques was also published that year. He
was becoming increasingly confident in his poetic views. At the end of the
Exposition universelle of 1855, the bitterness that characterizes Baudelaires
remarks on Ingres and the current state of French art is briefly suspended
when he looks at Delacroixs paintings once more and is transported into
an imaginative world of correspondances. The critics analytical sharpness is
replaced by the poets sensitivity to paintings connections with music and
ideas. The subject of the painting is virtually irrelevant; indeed, individual
paintings are not distinguished from one another as Delacroixs paintings
appear to become disconnected from reality and rvle le surnaturalisme
(EU55, 596). A few lines previously Baudelaire had railed against the narrow
views of critics who found fault with one part of Delacroixs painting, his
drawing style; now he allows himself to become immersed in enjoyment
of his art as a whole. Asking himself why Delacroix is le peintre aim des
potes (EU55, 596), he decides that it is not because ofDelacroixs literary
subjects but because his painting can provide a higher form of stimulus
than that of most modern artists. This is brought about par lensemble,
par laccord profound, complet, entre sa couleur, son sujet, son dessin, et
par la dramatique gesticulation de ses figures (EU55, 596); there is har-
moniousness in all the parts of Delacroixs painting which results in its
unique power. In the accompanying Ingres essay Baudelaire had accused
that artist of tricherie and manipulation of natural harmony in obtaining
138 Chapter 4
his effects; now he is happy to be captivated by Delacroixs potent and

harmonious magic. Delacroixs art provides the starting point for his own
imaginative engagement with music, perfumes and ideas, with colour in
particular operating as la symbolique inne des ides innes (S46, 432) a
means of making the imagination engage with the symbolic connections
everywhere.
Une gamme complte des couleurs et des sentiments
Although in the colour chapter of 1846 he claimed not to know si quelque

analogiste a tabli solidement une gamme complte des couleurs et et des
sentiments Baudelaire cannot have been unaware that various attempts at
such a table, in one form or another, had indeed been drawn up. In 1845,
when preparing to write La Fanfarlo, Baudelaire made notes on the idea
of Cramer writing four books, one of which was a work on la symbol-
ique des couleurs (LF, I, 580).9 As Pichois remarks, the mention of these
books prouvent les multiples curiosits de Baudelaire quand il crit La
Fanfarlo.10 It was not only Baudelaire who was curious about this, as it
happens; Madame de Stal, Balzac, Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Leconte
de Lisle and Thor were just a few of the writers and poets who expressed
an interest in the rapports between colours, musical notes, perfumes and
flowers. As Jean Pommier observes of Baudelaire: que na-t-il pas aussi
assist ce dner de famille, o Alfred de Musset se fcha, parat-il, dtre
oblig de soutenir une discussion pour prouver que le fa tait jaune, le
sol rouge, une voix de soprano blonde, une voix de contralto brune!11
9 See Pichois, OCII, p.1413; Leakey allows a more lengthy (and possibly more realistic)
estimate of composition of between 1843 and 1846 (Baudelaire and Nature, p.353).
It was published in January 1847.
10 OCII, p.1428.
11 La Mystique de Baudelaire, p.9.
Allusions to colours and emotions must have formed a part of dinner-party

discussions of the time, but they could scarcely be described as compre-
hensive in their approach. Many of the dinner guests were presumably
aware of le Pre Castels eighteenth-century experiments with an ocular
clavichord; and Goethes attempts in Die Farbenlehre to define colours
affective potential might have been another topic of conversation. Recently
published in England, and attracting the attention of scientists, writers
and no less an artist than Turner, Goethes listing of the various effects
of different colours are based on fairly conventional associations, but an
important part of his theory is devoted to his contention that colours are
immediately associated with the emotions of the mind [] Hence, color
considered as an element of art, may be made subservient to the highest
aesthetic ends.12 It is interesting to note that although Delacroix copied
a long passage from Alphonse Karrs Einerley on the emotional sens of
colours into a notebook he did not include the paragraphs which Karr
wrote on colours analogies with musical notes, though his interest in
connections between his painting and the music of his friend Chopin has
been well documented.13
A writer whose work Baudelaire certainly had read was the leading
socialist Charles Fourier, another edition of whose uvres compltes (first
published in 1822) had begun to be published in 1841. In his chapter entitled
Unit de lhomme avec lunivers, ou psychologie compare et analogie uni-
verselle, Fourier considers the symbolism of flowers, perfumes and birds and
asks O donc est le lien entre les vgtaux et les passions? A quel effet de
passion se lie cette fleur nomme liris; quelle passion correspond chacun
des 40,000 vgtaux?14 He draws up a table entitled Gamme des droits
naturels avec analogies which includes rights and curves and musical
notes as well as colours and emotions, such as the one shown here:
12 Goethe, Goethes Colour Theory, edited by Ruprecht Matthaei, translated by H. Aach

(London: Studio Vista, 1971), p.168.
13 See Moss, pp.98100.
14 Charles Fourier, uvres compltes, 10vols (Paris: ditions Anthropos, 19661968),
IV, p.217.
140 Chapter 4
Passions Couleurs
Amiti Violet
Amour Azur
Famillisme Jaune
Ambition Rouge
Cabaliste Indigo
Papillonne Vert
Composite Orang15
Pommier wonders whether the Baudelaire of 1846 has sous les yeux les
tables de Fourier;16 it is certainly likely that he would have known about
them and discussed Fourier and Swedenborg with Thor, among others;
pour les critiques tels que Thor, Charles Blanc et Laverdant les rapports
entre un tableau coloriste et le paradis terrestre sont trs troits. Croire
la couleur en matire dart semble impliquer la croyance au progrs, et
vice versa,17 as David Kelley puts it. At the time aesthetic and socialist
ideas were closely linked, and the political leanings of Baudelaire at the
time made his interest in Fourier virtually a given. In the 1840s Baudelaire
was reading a wide range of thinkers with great interest as he sought to
establish a system of his own. It is apparent that his readings at that time
were extremely eclectic as Pichois puts it in his biography, though often
Baudelaires understanding ofSwedenborg and Lavater was filtered through
literary sources such as Balzac. Pichois draws attention to Baudelaires
introduction to his 1848 translation ofPoes Mesmeric Revelation, in which
Baudelaire praises novelists like Balzac who put togeher their own systems
based on their extensive readings. For Baudelaire, Balzac is:
[] that great mind consumed by the legitimate pride of encyclopaedic knowledge,

who attempted to combine in a unitary and definitive system different ideas drawn
15 Fourier, III, p.229.

16 Pommier, p.73. P.S. Hambly also points out Gautiers interest in this table in
Thophile Gautier et le fouririsme, Australian Journal for French Studies, 11/3
(SeptemberDecember 1974), pp.210236, p.230.
17 David Kelley, Deux aspects du Salon de 1846 de Baudelaire: la ddicace aux bourgeois
et la couleur, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 5 (October 1969), pp.331346,
p.346.
from Swedenborg, Mesmer, Marat, Goethe, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Edgar Allan
Poe was also haunted by the idea of unity, and spent no less effort than Balzac in
pursuit of this cherished ideal [] Animal unity, fluid unity, the unity of raw mate-
rials, all those recent theories have occasionally fallen by some strange accident into
the minds of poets, as well as scientists.18
As Pichois points out, the last sentence quoted shows that Baudelaire
was thinking of himself that lover of systems he would later come to
despise,19 and the preface shows how he enjoyed the idea of poet and
scientist benefiting from their reading of recent theories. Although after
1855 Baudelaire rejected the Fouriers teachings (though not Swedenborgs
philosophy) many Fourierist ideas and vocabulary can still be traced years
later in his criticism and Les Fleurs du Mal.
One of the books that Baudelaire might have been reading in the
1840s was Des couleurs symboliques dans lantiquit, le moyen-age et les temps
modernes written by Fredric Portal and published in 1834.20 In this work
Portal examines at some length the history of symbolism in colour and
discusses the significance of seven colours in their spiritual and secular
contexts. For instance, Portal remarks on the significance of the colour
red for religious ritual: Le costume rouge des prtres reprsentent lamour
divin; le manteau pourpre des rois fut lemblme de la puissance de Dieu
ou du droit divin [] Les cardinaux sont aujourdhui les hritiers de ce
symbole de la souverainet.21 While claiming to embrace the teachings
of antiquity, Portals system is conventional in its assumptions about the
symbolic meaning of colours, and neither Portal nor Fourier concern them-
selves with the phenomenon of painting. The theories ofVictor Cousin and
Thodore Jouffroy may have interested Baudelaire more. Jouffroys Cours
desthtique took up Cousins theory of the aesthetic symbol and extended
18 Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, Baudelaire, translated by Graham Robb (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1989), p.144.
19 Ibid., p.144.
20 Fredric Portal, Des couleurs symboliques dans lantiquit, le moyen-age et les temps
modernes (Paris: Treuttel et Wrtz, 1979).
21 Ibid., pp.129 and 131.
142 Chapter 4
it considerably into the world of painting; in this book he writes that signs
and symbols traduisent et trahissent linvisible22 and that:
[] tout objet, toute ide, est jusqu un certain point un symbole. Toute ide que
nous saisissons excite effectivement en nous lide de ce quelle est, et lide dautre
chose encore qui nest pas elle. Tout objet que nous voyons nous donne lide de ce
quil parat, plus lide dautres objets que nous ne voyons pas. Lart qui nous prsente
des sons, des formes, des couleurs ou des paroles, ne provoque pas seulement en nous
lide de ce quil prsente, mais dautres ides qui sy rattachent par association.23
Jouffroys book was published in 1843, and as Lloyd Austin remarks, il est
difficile de croire, malgr labsence de toute preuve, que Baudelaire na pas
mdit ces pages.24 There was indeed no proof that Baudelaire had read
Jouffroy, as is more often than not the case in Baudelaires writings, but it
seems very likely that at that time, finding his feet as a writer on art and a
poet, he would have been more attracted to Jouffroys complex concept of
art with its implied connections to music and language than to Fouriers
simpler ideas of colour values.
By the time Baudelaire wrote his often quoted letter to Toussenel in
1856 he had certainly rejected any type of systematic approach to symbol-
ism, but this might also imply that he wished now as a poet to distance
himself from the formative influences of his youth:
En somme, quest-ce que vous devez Fourier? Rien, ou bien peu de chose. Sans
Fourier, vous eussiez t ce que vous tes. Lhomme raisonnable na pas attendu que
Fourier vnt sur la terre pour comprendre que la Nature est un verbe, une allgorie,
un moule, un repouss, si vous voulez. Nous savons cela, et ce nest pas par Fourier
que nous le savons; nous le savons par nous-mmes, et par les potes. (Corr. I, 337,
21janvier 1856)
Poetry and poets can come to the same conclusions as the greatest
thinkers; Baudelaire makes the same point more lengthily when writing
22 Thodore Jouffroy, Cours desthtique (Paris: L. Hachette, 1875), p.254.

23 Ibid., p.175.
24 Lloyd James Austin, Lunivers potique de Baudelaire: symbolisme et symbolique (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1956), p.160.
on Hugo in the 1861 series of essays on poets, Rflexions sur queleques-uns

de mes contemporains:
Fourier est venu un jour, trop pompeusement, nous rvler les mystres de lanalogie.
Je ne nie pas le valeur de quelques-unes de ses minutieuses dcouvertes, bien que je
croie que son cerveau tant trop pris dexactitude matrielle pour ne pas commet-
tre derreurs et pour atteindre demble la certitude morale de lintuition. (RQC,
132133)
Before Fourier, Baudelaire continues, Swedenborg had already taught poets

que tout, forme, mouvement, nombre, couleur, parfum, dans le spirituel
comme dans le naturel, est significatif, rciproque, converse, correspondant
and Lavater, whose books were on Baudelaires fathers shelves, had shown
le sens spirituel du contour (RQC, 133). His familiarity with their works is
intended to demonstrate how he and Hugo as poets are superior to them,
but it also shows the enduring influence of all of these writers. By 1861
Baudelaire was keen to align himself with great poets and to be accepted
into the Acadmie franaise; wishing to prove his poetic originality was
understandable. Although Baudelaire might have once nurtured the idea
of developing his ideas on the symbolism of particular colours (pntrer
le sens (vague et gnral) des couleurs. Divisions et subdivisions is one
of the plans he had made a note of ),25 his interest in such an exercise was
short-lived, though his readings on related subjects informed his thinking
on colour symbolism throughout his writings. Indeed, even in the Salon
de 1846 when his interest in developing a system was at its peak, it could
be argued that his description of a mental state where the free association
of music, scents and colours takes place, which Baudelaire claims exprime
parfaitement mon ide is the exact opposite of a solid, comprehensive
system of analogies which he believed he was seeking. Although Fourier
and others undoubtedly influenced his thoughts on colour symbolism,
the more fruitful idea for him as a critic of art was not to close the discus-
sion in the colour chapter with a readily definable reading of colours but
25 Undated note in Baudelaires uvres posthumes, edited by Jaques Crpet, 3vols

(Paris: Conard, 1952), III, p.10.
144 Chapter 4
to suggest that colours expressive and symbolic potential might be much

greater and more deeper-reaching than this.
Separate Colours and their Significance
One of the ways in which Baudelaire allows colour to take on significance

in its own right in his analysis of painting is his playing down of the impor-
tance of figurative reference in every case. There are certain points in his
writings where colour appears to be about to free itself from its representa-
tional bonds and refer to nothing other than itself. Describing Delacroixs
La Madeleine dans le dsert he writes droite dans le haut, un petit bout
de ciel ou de rocher quelque chose de bleu (S45, 354), and a year later
the vert sombre et uniforme of his Piet ressemble autant des amas
de rochers qu une mer bouleverse par lorage (S46, 435). What these
colours illustrate is less important in the context of the painting than the
fact that they are there; their presence can be interpreted as representing
various objects that are very disparate in kind (sky or rock, rocks or sea)
but what they signify is less relevant than the abstract force of the colours
themselves. It would be wrong to suggest that Baudelaire, or Delacroix for
that matter, had advocated abstract art before it was invented, and both men
firmly believed in the hierarchy of genre with figurative paintings at the top.
However, some of Baudelaires writings certainly imply that at different
times in his life he was interested in the idea of a non-realistic colour. In the
character of Samuel Cramer, his fictional alter ego in La Fanfarlo of 1847,
Baudelaire playfully portrays an extreme version of this point of view in the
figure of an aesthete for whom the operations of nature hold no intrinsic
merit: Il aimera toujours le rouge et la cruse, le chrysocale et les oripeaux
de toute sorte. Il repeindrait volontiers les arbres et le ciel, et si Dieu lui
avait confi le plan de la nature, il laurait peut-tre gt (LF, I, 577). Jules
Levallois recalls a comparable lack of interest in natural beauty on the part
of Baudelaire himself around this time, despite his lyrical invocation of a
natural landscape in the colour chapter of 1846: Baudelaire prenait rare-

ment part nos divertissements champtres, trouvant le vert des arbres trop
fade. Je voudrais, disait-il avec son air de pince-sans-rire, les prairies teintes
en rouge, les rivires jaune dor et les arbres peints en bleu. La nature na pas
dimagination.26 Claude Pichois connects the fictional would-be painter
Cramer with Delacroix,27 though an important distinction should be made,
in that while Cramer might have spoiled nature had he been responsible
for repainting it, Delacroixs knowledge of colour harmony is based on
natural laws of harmony. Like nature itself, the true colourist cannot make
mistakes, as Baudelaire writes in the Salon de 1846, and this allows a certain
freedom: tout lui est permis, parce quil connat de naissance la gamme
des tons, la force du ton, les rsultats des mlanges. The colourists innate
knowledge of harmony means that si un propritaire anticoloriste savisait
de repeindre sa campagne dune manire absurde et dans un systme de
couleurs charivariques, le vernis pais et transparent de latmosphre et lil
savant de Vronse redresseraient le tout et produiraient sur une toile un
ensemble satisfaisant, conventionnel sans doute, mais logique (S46, 424).
The fantasy of repainting nature in a riot of clashing shades remained in
his fiction; in art, whether in the landscape or elsewhere, a harmonious
approach was essential to Baudelaire.
Clearly, he took pleasure in shocking his friends and acquaintances in
his dismissal of natural beauty, but, when it came to art, he was making a
serious point when he called for a more imaginative approach to looking
at a painting. In 1855 he takes issue with Alphonse Karr for making fun of
Delacroixs pink horse in La Justice de Trajan: ce tableau fut illustr jadis
par les petites plaisanteries de M. Karr, lhomme au bon sens de travers,
sur le cheval rose; comme sil nexistait pas des chevaux lgrement ross,
et comme si, en tout cas, le peintre navait pas le droit den faire (EU55,
592). Baudelaires approach is a double one: he maintains that colour can
be realistic and unrealistic at the same time, that there are pink horses
26 Jules Levallois, Mmoires dun critique (Paris, 1895), quoted in F. Leakey, Baudelaire
and Nature, p.113.
27 OCI, p.1427.
146 Chapter 4
and red smoke and that even if there were not, the painter has the right
to invent them. In 1859 Baudelaire returns to Karrs words, once again to
attack narrow preconceptions about colour: Ah! les chevaux roses, ah! les
paysans lilas, ah! les fumes rouges (quelle audace, une fume rouge!), ont
t traits dune verte faon (S59, 632). It is significant that Baudelaire only
singles out particular colours in this instance (and puns on them) in order
put right other critics misrepresentation of their significance; it is they,
not he, who have removed these colours from the context to which they
belong in order to criticize them. It is as ifBaudelaire were reluctant to draw
attention to any particular colour in isolation, but is drawn into the fray by
the need to defend the colourist method. He defends Delacroixs choice of
colour firstly as perfectly in accordance with reality (comme sil nexistait
pas des chevaux lgrement ross) but secondly, and most importantly,
in terms of the painters right to paint horses whatever shade he pleases as
long as it is consistent with the overall harmony of the painting. According
to Armand Moss, Baudelaire dfend mal Delacroix contre les petites
plaisanteries de M. Karr sur le cheval rose de La Justice de Trajan: il ne
sait pas quil avait vu au Maroc des chevaux de robe blanche ou caf au lait
trs lger, teinte de rose par la chair que recouvre une peau trs fine.28 In
fact, although it is true that Baudelaire is unlikely to have seen such horses
himself, he argues that Delacroixs choice of colour was probably based
on reality. Neither the artist nor the critic was promoting a break with
the laws of colour in nature, but rather a different way of seeing, where
on the one hand the realistic properties of colour are recognized (horses
are sometimes slightly pink, smoke can appear red) and on the other, that
the artist should be more free in his work to accentuate certain colours in
order to make the painting more expressive. This Delacroix certainly did,
and was often criticized for his daring choices of colour, although, as F.A.
Trapp points out,
Delacroix was not an entirely free agent in his exploitation of colour. To a certain
extent his choices were determined by the descriptive or expressive demands of his
subjects [] Bold though his departures from realism or established convention
28 Moss, p.178.
may sometimes have been, his commitment to subject matter limited his options in
exploring the possibilities of scientifically unnatural colour.29
For Baudelaire, the most important thing is that Delacroixs expressive

combinations of colour are always portrayed as working within the laws of
colour harmony, and a familiarity with the workings of colour science is no
impediment to the imaginations readiness to be affected by colour.
Even though Baudelaire comes to reject the idea of a systematic
approach to colour symbolism and did not often choose to write directly
about the significance of any single colour, there are several instances where
he pays particular attention to the vibrativit or poetic resonance of cer-
tain tons purs. We will look briefly at some examples here, beginning with
the colour green. Although Baudelaire claimed not to be affected by land-
scape, the frequent formulations verdure or verdoyant in the Salons and
essays on art suggest lushness and plenty, and his sensuous enjoyment of
natures opulence: of one 1845 landscapist he writes tous ces paysages
taient potiques et donnaient lenvie de connatre ces ternelles et grasses
verdures quils exprimaient si bien (S45, 392). In the colour chapter of
1846 he describes how le vert est le fond de la nature, parce que le vert se
marie facilement tous les autres tons (S46, 422) and even in 1859, when
his dislike of landscape reaches its peak, he cannot help exclaiming over la
volupt si triste qui sexhale de ce verdoyant exil (S59, 636) that Delacroix
has depicted, while of a painting of Tabars he writes que de verdure, et
quelle belle verdure, doucement ondule suivant le mouvement des col-
lines! (S59, 644). Green often derives its intensity from its proximity to
red, as will be seen in the next section, but when considered on its own
it has a less dramatic, more peacefully sensuous quality that Baudelaire is
content simply to enjoy, similar to le vert paradis des amours enfantines
that he describes in Msta et errabunda.
The same could be said of the colour blue, which also often suggests a
hyperbole of nature, a blue that is almost supernatural in its intensity. Of
Delacroixs Luxembourg ceiling Baudelaire notes:
29 F.A. Trapp, The Attainment of Delacroix (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1971), p.333.
148 Chapter 4
Quant au ciel, il est bleu et blanc, chose tonnante chez Delacroix; les nuages, dlays
et tirs en sens divers comme une gaze qui se dchire, sont dune grande lgret;
et cette vote dazur, profonde et lumineuse, fuit une prodigieuse hauteur. Les
aquarelles de Bonington sont moins transparentes. (S46, 438439)
As well as admiring Delacroixs technical virtuosity in creating such a sense

of lightness and transparency with oils, Baudelaire is enraptured by the
sheer blueness of the sky, its very intangibility and evanescence and the
unobtainable heights to which it appears to soar, and at other times appear
to be endlessly deep. Themes of flight and of soaring through the sky recur
in poems such as lvation:
Tu sillonnes gaiement limmensit profonde

Avec une indicible et mle volupt. (FM, I, 10)
The prose poem Un Hmisphre dans une Chevelure also links blue-
ness with the idea being transported, suggesting that in his mistresss hair
lespace est plus bleu et plus profond and dans la nuit de ta chevelure, je
vois resplendir linfini de lazur tropical (SP, I, 300301). In this descrip-
tion the colour blue becomes a synonym for linfini; in Mon cur mis nu
Baudelaire wonders:
Pourquoi le spectacle de la mer est-elle si infiniment et si ternellement agrable?
Parce que la mer offre la fois lide de limmensit et du mouvement. Six ou sept
lieues reprsentent pour lhomme le rayon de linfini. Voil un infini diminutif.
Quimporte sil suffit suggrer lide de linfini total? Douze ou quatorze lieues (sur
le diamtre), douze ou quatorze de liquide en mouvement suffisent pour donner la
plus haute ide de beaut qui soit offerte lhomme sur son habitacle transitoire.
(MCMN, I, 696)
The colour blue represents infinity in sky, sea or eye, with all their possibili-
ties of voluptuous self-immersion and escape: as he says ofDelacroixs Ovide
chez les Scythes in the Salon de 1859 Lesprit sy enfonce avec une lente et
gourmande volupt, comme dans le ciel, dans lhorizon de la mer, dans les
yeux pleins de pense, dans une tendance fconde et grosse de rverie (S59,
636). Blue particularly suggests infinity when framed by black, as can be
seen in Baudelaires description ofPetites Mouettes, a painting by Penguilly-
lHaridon: lazur intense du ciel et de leau, deux quartiers de roche qui font
une porte ouverte sur linfini (vous savez que linfini parat plus profond
quand il est plus resserr) (S59, 653). Several critics have drawn attention
to the importance of the frame in conjunction with the idea of the infinite
for Baudelaire;30 and in his poetry as well as his art criticism the theme
of profundity and intensity within a restricted framework is a prevalent
motif. When he searches for a way of explaining Delacroixs spcialit he
draws on this idea: Cest linfini dans le fini. Cest le rve! (S59, 636). In
connection with the structure of the sonnet Baudelaire writes in a letter
to Armand Fraisse: Avez-vous observ quun morceau de ciel, aperu par
un soupirail, ou entre deux chemines, deux rochers, ou par une arcade,
etc., donnait une ide plus profonde de linfini que le grand panorama vu
du haut dune montagne? (Corr. I, 676, 18fvrier 1860).31 In the 1863 essay
loge du maquillage Baudelaire draws attention to the noir artificiel
which frames the eyes and observes that ce cadre noir rend le regard plus
profond et plus singulier [et] donne lil une apparence plus dcide de
fentre ouverte sur linfini (PV, 717). Black works to deepen the sense of
the infinite.
The prose poem Le Dsir de peindre (SP, I, 340) explores black as
the embodiment of a different kind of infini, one connected with oblivion
and the disappearance of the self. The narrator, a would-be artist, describes
how the woman he wishes to paint resembles un soleil noir and says that
En elle le noir abonde: et tout ce quelle inspire est nocturne et profonde.
The act of looking at her, of being attracted to this darkness within, could
be fatal as it leads to a wish to to die sous son regard; the act of love and of
creativity merge to suggest the loss of self in an infinite blackness. Another
sort of black that associated with the painting of modern life is repre-
sented by Daumier (see Chapter 3, pp.119122) who in the 1840s and 1850s
came close to embodying the ideal modern artist for Baudelaire because he
provided proof that Les grands coloristes savent faire de la couleur avec
30 Among them Alison Fairlie in Aspects ofExpression in Baudelaires Art Criticism,

in French 19th Century Painting and Literature, edited by Ulrich Finke (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1972), pp.4064, and Sima Godfrey in Baudelaires
Windows, LEsprit Crateur, 22 (Winter 1982), pp.83100.
31 For a discussion of poets views of the pictorial frame in connection with the sonnet,
see Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, pp.7687.
150 Chapter 4
un habit noir, une cravate blanche et un fond gris (S46, 495). Daumiers
lithographs are expressive and accurate in what they depict despite, or even
because of, his choice of mediums necessarily restricted range of colours.
In Le Cholra white and black are starkly opposed, with the pureness of
the white expressing a murderous heat and the accompanying shadows a
sinister, unadulterated blackness: le ciel est splendide; il est blanc, incan-
descent dardeur. Les ombres sont noires et nettes (QCF, 554). Similarly,
Meryons etchings captured la noire majest de la plus inquitante des
capitales (S59, 667): the sinister grandeur ofParis is expressed in the dark-
ness of his work.
Grey, along with black and white, is one of the colours with which
Baudelaire paints modern life and represents neutrality, a respite from the
extremes of black and white. Grey in painting is connected with a sense
of calm and the perfect harmonizing of tones, as in the description of a
painting being gris comme la nature (S45, 357) and in 1846 nature is grey
because like a childs spinning top in motion, this colour is the sum of all
other colours combined. Grey is at other times invested with a sense of
mystery; in 1846 Baudelaire describes a portrait by Haffner as noy dans le
gris et resplendissant le mystre (S46, 466). Shades of pink and purple, as
well as being mysterious, have, for Baudelaire, unmistakeably erotic implica-
tions. In a note in the Fuses, one of the few discussions of what a particular
colour symbolizes, Baudelaire notes De la couleur violette (amour contenu,
mystrieux, voil, couleur de chanoinesse) (F, I, 650). This finds its cor-
responding expression in Guys work Les femmes et les filles:
Sur un fond dune lumire infernale ou sur un fond daurore borale, rouge, orang,
sulfureux, rose (le rose rvlant une ide dextase dans la frivolit), quelquefois violet
(couleur affectionne des chanoinesses, braise qui steint derrire un rideau dazur),
sur ces fonds magiques, imitant diversement les feux de Bengale, senlve limage
varie de la beaut interlope. (PV, 719720)
The colour pink, in all its permutations, symbolizes another aspect of the
feminine for Baudelaire, from the virgin and the priestess to the prostitute
and the wanton.
The association of red with the mysticism of religious ritual is used
several times in the Salon de 1859, most strikingly in the abstract formulation
which concludes the first chapter on the imagination: Nous allons entrer
plus intimement dans lexamen des fonctions de cette facult cardinale (sa
richesse ne rappelle-t-elle pas des ides de pourpre?) (S59, 623) Crimson
is associated with the queen of the creative faculties for Baudelaire, and
later in this Salon he uses a similar image to describe the imagination of
Delacroix, notably in the context of his religious paintings: Voil bien
le type du peintre-pote! Il est bien un des rares lus, et ltendue de son
esprit comprend la religion dans son domaine. Son imagination, ardente
comme les chapelles ardentes, brille de toutes les flammes et de toutes les
pourpres (S59, 631632). It is noticeable here that the colour is used in a
purely metaphorical sense, describing not the paintings but the creative
imagination itself, though it is a colour often associated with that artist.
A corresponding use of red can be seen in Baudelaires linking of different
shades of the colour to the impression that the music of Wagner had on
him when he first heard it in concert in 1859. In his letter to the composer
Baudelaire attempted to describe this effect: je suppose devant mes yeux
une vaste tendue dun rouge sombre. Si ce rouge reprsente la passion, je
le vois arriver graduellement, par toutes les transitions de rouge et de rose,
lincandescence de la fournaise (Corr. I, 673, 17fvrier 1860). In Chapter
5 I will consider in more detail how the imaginary dimension of colour
becomes increasingly important to Baudelaire in his later writings, particu-
larly in connection with the differents arts capacity to translate.
The Red-Green Combination and Les Phares
There was one particular colour combination that was particularly respon-
sible for prompting Baudelaires thoughts on the language of colour. This
was, of course, the juxtaposition of red and green, which for Baudelaire
had a significance that far outstripped any single colour, and there can be
no question of its importance in his concept of colour. Early in the colour
chapter of 1846 Baudelaire writes that ce qui me frappe dabord, cest que
partout, coquelicots dans les gazons, pavots, perroquets, etc., le rouge
152 Chapter 4
chante la gloire du vert (S46, 422). The importance of the formulation

dabord should not be overlooked; the relationship of red and green in a
painting is indeed what will strike Baudelaire first, and most consistently,
over the years. The deceptively simple sentence Cette pondration du vert
et du rouge plat notre me at the beginning of his first Salon, the Salon
de 1845, finds lesser echoes throughout in this Salon. A sentimental painting
by Mme Pensotti is redeemed by le vert ou le rose, ou plutt le verdtre et
le rostre doucement combins (S45, 383), and, a year later, La Mort de
Cloptre by Delacroixs pupil Lassalle-Bordes has quelque chose qui plat
et attire le flneur dsintress; could it be the fact that lajustement vert et
rose de la ngresse tranche agrablement avec la couleur de sa peau? (S46,
442) Of a Janmot painting he writes that il y a, dans la couleur mme et
lalliance de ces tons verts, roses et rouges, un peu douleureux lil, une
certaine mysticit qui saccorde avec le reste (S45, 375). In 1845 Baudelaire
was content to be drawn to certain paintings without looking more deeply
into the nature of that attraction. The mysticit of red and green attracted
him but was not something he wished to analyse; as Alison Fairlie puts it,
quite apart from technical or symbolic explanations, this was obviously
an immediate reaction of his nerves.32
In the few pages of the chapter De la couleur of the Salon de 1846
alone there are no less than five separate allusions to the combination of
red and green. Even though the colour chapter gives the appearance of
a detached view of the operations of colour harmony in nature, and by
association, painting itself, Baudelaire cannot help, in the end, making
it personal. After a textbook listing of rules of colour harmony, he sud-
denly describes the view from his window of the green and red of a gaudy
tavern-front as giving his eyes une douleur dlicieuse (S46, 425), as if his
sense of sight and his feelings were directly linked and indivisible. The
fact that he chooses this example to show the power that colour can have
on the person who beholds it just after invoking the names of great artists
might seem incongruous, but it is not as illogical as it might first appear;
the tavern can be taken to represent a part of a believable landscape of the
32 Fairlie, p.51.
city, and it is, indeed, closer to a real landscape for him than the natural
(but quite artificial) landscape described at the beginning of the chapter.
When Baudelaire invented a landscape it featured combinations as unreal
as poppies and parrots, fantasy embodiments of red and green, and it could
be argued that even the example he gives of pink and green in a hand
is perhaps a little contrived.33 But when he describes the effect that this
particular colour combination has on him personally, despite or because
of the drab cityscape, the image is more direct and convincing, and the
fact that the merest glimpse of it in such a context can trigger thoughts of
Hoffmann and lyrical analogies of colour, scent and music demonstrates
the power of red and green all the more strongly.
In the rest of the Salon de 1846 Baudelaire seems actively to look for
this appealing combination in as many different landscapes as possible.
The first artist whose works are described in the chapter De quelques
coloristes is George Catlin, an artist who was admired by Delacroix and
who was briefly famous for bringing to Paris some of the North American
Indians whose portraits he had painted, causing a stir among the bourgeois
art-lovers. Baudelaire is less interested in the novel subject matter than in
Catlins colour, which has quelque chose de mystrieux qui me plat plus
que je ne saurais dire (S46, 446). The mystery of the appeal of Catlins
painting is, once again, the interplay of red and green:
Le rouge, la couleur du sang, la couleur de la vie, abondait tellement dans ce sombre
muse, que ctait une ivresse; quant aux paysages, montagnes boises, savanes
immenses, rivires dsertes, ils taient monotonement, ternellement verts; le rouge,
cette couleur si obscure, si paisse, plus difficile pntrer que les yeux dun serpent,
le vert, cette couleur calme et gaie et souriante de la nature, je les retrouve chantant
leur antithse mlodique jusque sur le visage de ces deux hros. (S46, 446)
33 Michel Butor, who includes a brief chapter on Baudelaires preoccupation with what
he calls le rose et le vert in his Histoire extraordinaire also questions this example: On
voit quil lui faut un srieux coup de pouce pour accorder sa description sa thorie
des couleurs le rouge chante la gloire du vert, car il nous est difficile de lui concder
que les veines de la main nous apparaissent comme vertes. On remarquera aussi quil
tire le rose vers le rouge. Histoire extraordinaire: essai sur un rve de Baudelaire (Paris:
Gallimard, 1961), pp.223230.
154 Chapter 4
The colours are described on the one hand as independent forces (red is
the colour of blood and life), and on the other as intimately connected
with the type of painting produced by Catlin, suggesting the mountains,
plains and rivers of the North American landscape. The red and green
recall natural phenomena (snakes, woods) while also suggesting a certain
mysterious quality that is described as impenetrable, eternal and obscure.
Moreover, the colours are so mutually dependent that each appears to take
on, to some extent, the qualities of the other, or rather their qualities are
interchangeable; thus, red is both the colour of life, its presence amid the
sombreness and monotony of the green being an ivresse, while in the second
half of the sentence, green is gaie et souriante while it is red which is si
obscure and si paisse. Not all red/green combinations are as dramatic,
and it is a combination that is capable of soothing Baudelaires senses too.
In the Salon de 1859 he encounters another sort of landscape, as he describes
a battle scene by Tabar, the Guerre de Crime; fourrageurs, as presque une
pastorale: Luniforme gaye ici, avec lardeur du coquelicot ou du pavot,
un vaste ocan de verdure (S59, 644), he writes, using strikingly similar
terms to the description of the imaginary landscape in the colour chapter
of 1846. The soldiers have become abstract figures embodying the sensu-
ous pleasure to be found in this colour for Baudelaire. In this year too he
describes Boudins clouds as ces immensits vertes et roses which go to his
head like une boisson capiteuse ou comme lloquence de lopium (S59,
666), causing him a surprisingly intense pleasure.
The artist who best embodied this combination in painting for him
was, of course, Delacroix, and it is telling that the particular power of
red and green is referred to in powerfully poetic terms in Baudelaires
first in-depth study of the artists work in 1846. After a description of the
moving qualities of Delacroixs Piet Baudelaire criticizes the view of an
unwise artist friend who called it peinture de cannibale and accuses him
of imaginative and creative weakness: coup sr, ce nest point dans les
curiosits dune palette encombre, ni dans le dictionnaire des rgles, que
notre jeune ami saura trouver cette sanglante et farouche dsolation,
peine compense par le vert sombre de lesprance! (S46, 436) Michel
Riffaterre makes an interesting point concerning Baudelaires pairing of
these colours in this passage:
It suffices that there exists a clich making green the colour of hope for our oppo-
sition to dictate to Baudelaire the sentence: cette sanglante et farouche dsola-
tion, peine compense par le vert sombre de lesprance the verb expressing
the colour polarity (compense) is cancelled by its adverb ( peine), and this
leads to a parallel alteration of the colour, and thus of its symbolism: the green
has darkened.34
The green may not have darkened but intensified in its effect by its juxtaposi-
tion with red; and red in its turn has become fiercer and bloodier by being
seen beside green. Baudelaires poetic description seems a long way from
Chevreuls laws of colour contrast, with red and green soberly described as
les couleurs complmentaires les plus gales en hauteur (De la loi, p.114)
but Baudelaire is nevertheless making a point about how these colours are
mutually dependent and how each causes the other to be stronger in its
effect. The clash of dsolation/esprance works on different levels: as a way
of describing the abstract qualities of this particular painting (the dark
green background could be sea as well as rocks) but also signifying painting
as stronger stuff, emotional drama in short. Baudelaire likens the strength
of this colour combination to strong red wines which are unpalatable to
those accustomed to the ples violettes du Mdoc (S46, 436), an ironic
reference to Ingres and those who followed him.35 This appeal to a complex
range of emotions and the drama inherent in the opposing forces of hope
and despair is the essence of colour harmony for Baudelaire.
It is in the articles on the Exposition universelle of 1855 more than any-
where else that Baudelaire stresses the mysterious qualities of colour and
its potential for symbolic meaning, as well as its sheer power. If the ideal
spectator is passive and receptive, allowing the magic of the painting to
work on him, Delacroixs colour is portrayed as just the opposite. These
are paintings that make demands on the spectator, penetrating the eye and
34 Michel Riffaterre, Models of the Literary Sentence in French Literary Theory Today,
edited by T. Todorov, translated by R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), pp.1833 (pp.2122).
35 M.E. McGoey points out that Ingres was born in nearby Montauban in Rhetorical
Strategies in Baudelaires Criticism of Eugene Delacroix (unpublished thesis,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1986), p.114.
156 Chapter 4
entering the soul: the Prise de Constantinople par les Croiss is si profond-
ment pntrant, abstraction faite du sujet, par son harmonie orageuse et
lugubre the Chasse aux lions is une vritable explosion de couleur (que ce
mot soit pris dans le bon sens). Jamais couleurs plus belles, plus intenses,
ne pntrrent jusqu lme par le canal des yeux (EU55, 594). In 1855
Baudelaire constantly chooses active adjectives and particularly verbs to
suggest colours power (pntrants et attachants, sanguinaire, mordante,
despotique, pentrer, exhaler, briller, attacher, senfoncer, fonder) and alters
the words ofGautier to emphasize the dramatic power of the paintings to
affect the spectator directly: Et le tableau quitt nous tourmente et nous
suit. (EU55, 593)36 It is the colour of such paintings that is so powerful, with
its ability to go beyond a particular paintings subject matter and change
the way the mind responds, and it is significant that Baudelaire chooses
to consider Delacroixs paintings from afar, effectively altering their status
from figurative to abstract painting:
Dabord il faut remarquer, et cest trs important, que, vu une distance trop grande
pour analyser ou mme comprendre le sujet, un tableau de Delacroix a dj produit
sur lme une impression riche, heureuse ou mlancolique. On dirait que cette pein-
ture, comme les sorciers et comme les magntiseurs, projette sa pense distance.
Ce singulier phnomne tient la puissance du coloriste, laccord parfait des tons,
et lharmonie (prtablie dans le cerveau du peintre) entre la couleur et le sujet.
(EU55, 594595)
Delacroix himself had written something similar:
Avant mme de savoir ce que le tableau reprsente, vous entrez dans une cathdrale,
et vous vous trouvez plac une distance trop grande du tableau pour savoir ce quil
reprsente, et souvent vous tes pris par cet accord magique; les lignes seules ont
quelquefois ce pouvoir par leur grandiose. Cest ici quest la vraie supriorit de la
peinture sur lautre art, car cette motion sadresse la partie la plus intime de lme
Elle, comme une puissante magicienne vous prend sur ses ailes et vous emporte
36 From Terza Rima; Baudelaire has substituted nous for les and underlined the
word (see Pichois note, OCII, 1376).
devant. Elle ajoute ce que serait le spectacle dans la nature, cet lment qui vrifie
et qui choisit, lme du peinture, son style particulier.37
Even though he, like Baudelaire, uses a striking image of paintings magic
ability to project its thought from a distance, it is interesting to note that,
according to Delacroix who wanted to establish arts difference from lit-
erature, this could as easily be achieved by grandiose lines as by colour.
Baudelaire, on the other hand, makes it clear that he is describing the par-
ticular ability that colour has to think for itself, to project its thoughts
from a distance, and this leads to a sensation that for him is similar to that
experienced when listening to music. He attempts to express ces sensations
subtiles through the words of un pote:
Delacroix, lac de sang, hant des mauvais anges,

Ombrag par un bois de sapins toujours vert,
O, sous un ciel chagrin, des fanfares tranges
Passent comme un soupir touff de Weber. (EU, 595)
The poet was of course Baudelaire himself, the quatrain is from Les Phares
from the Spleen et idal section ofLes Fleurs du mal, and this attempt to
combine criticism with his own poetry is rare in his writings. The poem was
not composed until 1857, and the quatrain and its commentary were added
to the 1855 essay by Baudelaire for his collected works of art criticism, the
Curiosits esthtiques, published in 1868. In this revised version of the essay,
the quatrain becomes an integral part of his assessment of the painters work,
and it is the essential relationship of red and green that explicitly connects
Delacroixs colour into the world of music and poetry.
Although Baudelaire did not make many analogies between art and
music, unlike the more musically informed Thor, whose criticism I con-
sider in the following section, the connection of Delacroix to Weber had
previously provided the final word on the effect that the artists colour
had on him. In the Salon de 1846 Baudelaire summed up the prevailing
note of sadness that for him characterized many of Delacroixs paintings:
37 Eugne Delacroix, uvres littraires, 2vols (Paris: Crs, 1923), I, pp.6364.

158 Chapter 4
Cette haute et srieuse mlancolie brille dun clat morne, mme dans sa
couleur, large, simple, abondante en masses harmoniques, comme celle de
tous les grands coloristes, mais plaintive et profonde comme une mlodie
de Weber (S46, 440). This musical analogy echoes the musical vocabulary
of grande symphonie du jour, mlodies and hymne compliqu that are
the culminating words of the colour landscape Baudelaire described a
few pages earlier, but in the Exposition universelle essay the musical con-
nection has a more personal and direct significance. As Peter Collier has
pointed out, the quatrain also makes an unspoken but equally important
poetic connection between Delacroix and Dante, and he draws attention
to the Dantesque overtones inherent in Baudelaires description of the lac
du sang and bois de sapins toujours vert evoking Dantes frequent allu-
sions to tears and rivers of blood and the Infernos wood of the suicides.38
Even Webers music has echoes of Dante in this reading: it is not impos-
sible that there might be, behind the strange fanfares, in their context of
wicked angels (i.e. devils), a reminiscence of Dantes vulgar demons of
Inferno XXI and XXII, one of which avea del cul fatto trombetta.39 In the
context of Baudelaires other allusions to Delacroixs Dante et Virgile aux
enfers in this essay it is not surprising that he decided that the stanza from
Les Phares would be a suitable addition here, with Webers music in this
context tinged with Dantes poetry. In the following chapter I point out
how Baudelaire increasingly sees corresponding qualities in very different
writers and artists, such as Poe, Delacroix and Guys, and this quatrain could
indeed be evidence of this.
Baudelaire was careful to provide an apparently straightforward trans-
lation of the quatrain:
Lac de sang: le rouge; hant des mauvais anges: surnaturalisme; un bois toujours
vert: le vert, complmentaire du rouge; un ciel chagrin: les fonds tumultueux et
orageux de ses tableaux; les fanfares et Weber: ides de musique romantique que
rveillent les harmonies de sa couleur. (EU55, 595)
38 Peter Collier, Baudelaire and Dante, Studi Francesi, 102 (anno XXXIV), fasciolo
III, pp.417435.
39 Ibid., p.419.
Many Baudelairians have wondered why he chose to translate this quatrain

in such a cursory way, given the rich literary and musical embedded in the
imagery. Armand Moss suggests that that the stanza may have been written
to send to Delacroix and that the translation provided by Baudelaire was,
in its no-nonsense approach, tailored to this artists well-known impatience
with poetic bizarreries. Moss observes of this gloss that: On ne trouve nulle
part ailleurs chez lui lexplication dun texte, la dpotisation dun beau vers.
Ce ne peut tre, semble-t-il, que si Delacroix ne comprend pas ce quil veut
dire quand il parle de lui que Baudelaire saccusera dobscurit.40 This is a
possibility, of course, but in the context of this essay fails to account for
Baudelaires inclusion of a lengthy poem by Gautier at the start and a line
from him in the middle, and nowhere else does he attempt to translate
his ideas on Delacroix into simpler terms. Even if we agree that that the
critic included his poetic view only tentatively, parenthesizing the quat-
rain with a very humble introduction and a deliberately plain explanation
and with the anonymous attribution to un pote possibly even disguising
his own connection with it, Mosss explanation strikes an unlikely note.
Would Baudelaire really have been so self-effacing? In his essay on the
calque in literature, Michael Riffaterre maintains that Baudelaires gloss is
essentially irrelevant:
What does matter is that this opposition, so simple and natural, could generate such
a romantic landscape. A landscape was required by the context, and the characteristic
green of Delacroix, in the code of landscape, could only be vegetation. But what is
striking is that this green has produced, rather than any other tree, firs, a hyperbole of
greenness. And, among all the possible reds, this red has called up the most extreme
this dramatic lac de sang, a hyperbole of redness.41
40 Moss, p.46. Delacroix complained to Thor on nous juge toujours avec des ides de
littrateurs et ce sont elles que lon a la sottise de nous demander. Je voudrais bien quil
soit aussi vrai que vous le dites que je nai que des ides de peintre; je nen demande
pas davantage. Quoted by Louis Hautecur, Littrature et peinture en France du
XVIIe au XXe sicle, 2e dition (Paris: A. Colin, 1963), p.89.
41 Models of the literary sentence, p.21.
160 Chapter 4
Although Riffaterre makes an interesting point concerning the hyperbolic

qualities of the colour descriptions involved, this fails to explain the sig-
nificance of the stanza and its explication de texte. Baudelaires particular
attention to red and green lies less in his transmutation of clich (red and
green were familiar complementary colours) than in evolving a symbolism
of colour capable of encapsulating Delacroixs art and his own response to
it. The fact that Baudelaire chooses to translate this stanza himself for its
inclusion in the article seems also more important than Riffaterre allows.
The clumsiness of the explanation is more likely to be due to Baudelaires
reluctance to present the critic and the poet as having the same approach.
The sentence which follows Baudelaires famous assertion in the Salon
de 1846, le meilleur compte rendu dun tableau pourra tre un sonnet
ou une lgie, is often left unquoted,42 but is worth remembering here:
Mais ce genre de critique est destin aux recueils de posie et aux lecteurs
potiques (S46, 418). As a poet Baudelaire does not wish the painting to
become overtaken by his subjective response to the work, so he translates
back his poetry from metaphor into specifically painterly terms, and the
poetry of the painting remains.
There is another instance of Baudelaire using his verse non pas
dillustrer, mais dexpliquer le plaisir subtil, but this time without explain-
ing the explanation. In the Salon de 1859 Baudelaire includes five and a
half stanzas that are based on the subject of Christophes statuette from
his poem Danse macabre in the Tableaux parisiens section ofLes Fleurs
du mal, culminating in the lines:
Tu rponds, grand squelette, mon got le plus cher!
Viens-tu troubler, avec ta puissante grimace,
La fte de la vie .? (S59, 679)
It is noticeable that Baudelaire only includes the verses up to this point

after which, half way through the twenty-second line, the poem moves into
unmistakeable allegory. The verbs in particular contribute to this descrip-
tion/allegory sequence (which is even more marked a csura than in poems
42 By Ferran, p.119 and p.365, Gilman, pp.34 and others.

such as Le Squelette laboureur, Sur le Tasse en prison or Bohmiens en

voyage; David Scott discusses interestingly the pictorial qualities of these
and other poems in his Pictorialist Poetics). In the first five quatrains of
Danse macabre there are scarcely any active verbs, while the lines which
follow this excerpt abound in them (peronner, pousser, chasser, exhaler).
Even though he proclaimed his wish not to illustrate the statue, Baudelaire
nevertheless includes a very descriptive, static part of the poem. From this
we might conjecture that he did not wish to impose too much of his own
reading on the sculpture in the context of an essay on art. Baudelaire
is also self-deprecating, referring to his poem as as un lambeau rim, a
mere doodling in the margins of a masterpiece, in the same way that he
claims a similar reserve earlier in the Salon de 1859 when discussing the
power of Delacroixs Ovide chez les Scythes: Certes je nessayerai pas de
traduire avec ma plume la volupt si triste qui sexhale de ce verdoyant exil,
claiming that he prefers to cite the official catalogues simple description
instead. However, the catalogue excerpt is preceded by a long passage from
Chateaubriand, with its quotation from Ovid, to set the scene, and despite
claiming his reluctance to translate la volupt si triste this is followed by his
own lengthy, poetic analysis of why this painting is so evocative:
Tout ce quil y a dans Ovide de dlicatesse et de fertilit a pass dans la peinture de

Delacroix; et, comme lexil a donn au brillant pote la tristesse qui lui manquait, la
mlancolie a revtu de son vernis enchanteur le plantureux paysage du peintre []
Lesprit sy enfonce avec une lente et gourmande volupt, comme dans le ciel, dans
lhorizon de la mer, dans les yeux pleins de pense, dans une tendance fconde et
grosse de rverie. (S59, 636)
These are themes that are familiar from his own poetry, and this last sen-
tence resembles a pome en prose. Timothy Raser observes that Baudelaire
has done the impossible: he has described the painting with citations, or
rather, he has evoked it without recourse to description. Description, the
very basis of art critical discourse, is lacking.43 Although there are many
43 Timothy Raser, The Simplest of Signs: Victor Hugo and the Language of Images in
France: 18501950 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp.123134.
162 Chapter 4
words to evoke the effect that the painting has on him, Baudelaire indeed
appears to be avoiding anything that resembles a description, apart from
the quotation from the catalogue: Les uns lexaminent avec curiosit, les
autres lui font accueil leur manire, et lui offrent des fruits sauvages et
du lait du jument (S59, 636). The official part of his Salon writing done,
he is free to concentrate on what really interests him: the mood of poetic
melancholy engendered by this painting.
It is not simply a question of modesty or an inability to express what
he thinks of as Delacroixs meaning that makes Baudelaire appear to seem
tentative or over-explain his words when he offers his own poetry or poetic
language as part of his analysis of art. It is rather the idea of traduire itself
when it applies to the effects of colour, music and words, and is a theme
which comes to play an increasingly important role in Baudelaires criticism
as a whole, and will be discussed further in Chapter 5. In 1855 it is already
apparent from his inclusion of the Phares quatrain and his rather brutal
act of translation that Baudelaire has conflicting feelings about using a
verbal language, poetic or otherwise, to translate the art that has affected
him so deeply, because it carries the paradoxical risk reducing the visual
impact of Delacroixs art. As Richard Wrigley observes of eighteenth-
century Salon writers, In relation to criticism, the ready assumption that
painting and literature, not just poetry, worked on analogous lines can only
have encouraged authors to try their hand at Salon criticism. In practice
writers only exceptionally admitted that language was not adequate to the
task of finding an equivalent for arts mimetic marvels.44 This was not the
case for Baudelaire who increasingly tried to find other ways of expressing
his feelings about art that often were not traditional methods of analyzing
the work of art.
After all, this is the Exposition universelle (1855) essay, in the introduc-
tion to which Baudelaire had written so eloquently about the need not to
analyze too much but rather to allow the effect of art object to work on us.
In the introductory essay on the Mthode de Critique he stated his belief
that the best sort of critics are those for whom aucun voile scolaire, aucun
44 Wrigley, pp.242243.
paradoxe universitaire, aucune utopie pdagogique, ne se sont interposs

entre eux et la complexe vrit. Ils savent ladmirable, limmortel, linvitable
rapport entre la forme et la fonction (EU55, 576). Such critics are content
to look and to study rather than to interpret; the ideal critic will choose not
to criticize after a certain point. Baudelaire likens the critic to a dreamer
whose mind is turned to the consideration of the mystical aspects of the
universe and who can adapt himself to the demands that a work of art
places upon him. To illustrate this Baudelaire gives the example of how
one might react without perplexity to un produit chinois, produit trange,
bizarre, contourn dans sa forme, intense par sa couleur, et quelquefois
dlicat jusqu lvanouissement; he had recently observed at first hand the
antagonistic or simply puzzled reactions of other critics and Academicians
to the display of Chinese art at the 1855 Exposition. Less than a century
previously even Diderot had poured scorn on what he called the bizarrerie
ofChinese art because of its non-representational qualities, and Baudelaire
was determined not to fall into the same aesthetically limited trap: il faut,
pour quil soit compris, que le critique, le spectateur opre en lui-mme
une transformation qui tient du mystre, et que, par un phnomne de la
volont agissant sur limagination, il apprenne de lui-mme participer
au milieu qui a donn naissance cette floraison insolite (EU55, 576).45
The critic/spectator should be receptive and imaginative enough to adapt
to the demands that any work of art, however strange or disconcerting,
makes. However, the object itself does not have to be obviously bizarre
45 A year later Baudelaire will describe, in a letter to Asselineau, another produit bizarre,
this time of his subconscious, which has marked similarities with the Chinese artefact:
Cest un monstre n dans la maison et qui se tient ternellement sur un pidestal.
Quoique vivant, il fait donc partie du muse. Il nest pas laid. Sa figure est mme jolie,
trs basane, dune couleur orientale. Il y a en lui beaucoup de rose et de vert. Il se
tient accroupi, mais dans une position bizarre et contourne. (Corr. I, 338, 13mars
1856). Butor interprets this strange figure (who has an umbilical-like cord attached
to his body) as the unborn Baudelaire himself who wears the colours de sa voca-
tion, ou, si lon prfre, de sa damnation and whose identity might be punningly
revealed in the formulation (which Butor wittily if somewhat convolutedly bases
on the earlier initial p veiling the impolite word in his edition of the letter), Il y a
en lui beaucoup de prose et de vers (Histoire extraordinaire, pp.226, 227).
164 Chapter 4
for Baudelaire to make his point; as he says in a famous formulation a page

or two later, Le beau est toujours bizarre (EU55, 578); all beauty must have
an element of strangeness and unpredictability for it to exist. This being
the case, a produit chinois and an apparently more conventional work of
art should call for the same inner transformation on the part of the specta-
tor. An ideal spectator is like a receptive traveller or cosmopolitan man for
whom the sights and tastes of a foreign country create un monde nouveau
dides, monde qui fera partie intgrante de lui-mme, et qui laccompagnera
sous la forme de souvenirs jusqu la mort (EU55, 576). The true critic, the
rveur, willingly enters into the new world of a painting and submits him-
self to the operations it works upon him. Accordingly, Baudelaire rejects
any system as une espce de damnation which of its very nature will pre-
clude the playing of limmense clavier des correspondances! (EU55, 577);
a system represents a set of preconceived ideas and by its nature precludes
the ever-adaptable imaginative process. In the article on Ingres Baudelaire
wonders que cherche donc, que rve donc M. Ingres?, and answers that in
his search for a particular form of beauty Ingres is condemned to remain
un homme systme, one who is resolutely not open to the promptings
of the imagination. He notes that while Ingres art has des mrites, des
charmes mme tellement incontestables there is a lacuna at the centre of
his work: the lack of imagination, a theme that will dominate the Salon de
1859. In a passage calculated to upset both men, Baudelaire likens Ingres to
Courbet, accusing both of waging war on the imagination by sheer force of
will: la facult qui a fait de M. Ingres ce quil est, le puissant, lindiscutable,
lincontrlable dominateur, cest la volont, ou plutt un immense abus de
la volont (EU55, 589). In such a willed form of art there can be no room
for expressiveness or mystery. In contrast, the range of Delacroixs work
on display in the exhibition is characterized by words such as surnatural-
isme, rverie, bizarre and mystrieux, and can only be expressed verbally
by poetry. Baudelaires semi-apologetic inclusion of the stanza from Les
Phares is because la sincrit peut faire passer la bizarrerie; his own art,
being bizarre, is an appropriate response to another.
He acknowledges that this is a move away from the way he wrote on
art before: Il me serait trop facile de disserter subtilement sur la compo-
sition symtrique ou quilibre, sur la pondration des tons, sur le ton
chaud et le ton froid, etc vanit! Je prfre parler au nom du senti-

ment, de la morale et du plaisir. Jespre que quelques personnes, savants
sans pdantisme, trouveront mon ignorance de bon got (EU55, 579). If
the young Baudelaire had once put forward his technical savoir-faire as
a basis for art criticism in the early Salons (we recall the use of the term
pondration in 1845) as well as hinting at his status as artistic insider and
friend ofDelacroix, now he is celebrating his critical ignorance and his own
fundamental sensitivity as a poet. By 1855 Baudelaire is concerned more
with indicating colours mystery and its vast possibilities of suggestion
than with defining its parameters by imposing a verbal language on it. He
has jettisoned his carefully acquired knowledge of the technical aspects of
art in his wish to adopt a form of critical naivet and warns other critics
against analyzing too much, urging them instead to be more receptive to
the magic of painting:
La peinture est une vocation, une opration magique (si nous pouvions consulter
l-dessus lme des enfants!), et quand le personnage voqu, quand lide ressucite,
se sont dresss et nous ont regards face face, nous navons pas le droit du moins
ce serait le comble de la purilit de discuter les formules vocatoires du sorcier.
(EU55, 580)
Baudelaire has long ago lost interest in any attempt at a systematic approach
to symbolism of colours and instead celebrates the magicians formules
vocatoires. Instead of imposing a verbal translation on the art with his
critical essays, Baudelaire becomes increasingly interested in looking for
echoes among the arts. The idea of similarities among the arts as a means
of enabling a superior kind of translation and communication to take place
will be explored further in Chapter 5. It is worth noting here that it is in
his only essay on music, Richard Wagner et Tannhaser Paris of 1861, that
Baudelaire unapologetically illustrates his idea of correspondences among
the arts by including, without explanation or translation, two stanzas from
his poem Correspondances. In the following section I consider some of
the particular connections that music had with colour for Baudelaire.
166 Chapter 4
Colour and Music
Lart du coloriste tient videmment par de certains cts aux mathma-

tiques et la musique, Baudelaire wrote in the Salon de 1859 (625), and
one of the most consistent ways in which he praised Delacroixs painting
throughout his art criticism was to compare it to music. His descriptions
of colour are permeated with musical terms; there seems to be a particular
affinity for him between music and colour, as there was for Delacroix him-
self. On one level many of Baudelaires references to musical terms, such
as coquetterie musicale (S45, 357), la grande symphonie du jour (S46,
423), une harmonie de vingt rouges diffrents (S46, 424), un tableau []
mlodieux (S46, 425) and hymne terrible la douleur (S46, 436), could
be taken as standard critical epithets to describe the effects of colour. Lucie
Horner cites similar musical analogies in the writings of other art critics,
namely Delcluze, Pelletan and Du Camp, and comments that
[] nous ne pouvons que difficilement rsister au soupon que la plupart des critiques
[] navaient pas exprim ce quune sensibilit particulire leur avait fait sentir, mais
avaient considr la transposition des termes plutt comme un artifice ingnieux
pour prter leur critique un nouvel accent.46
One critic who took a more serious interest was Thophile Thor, who in the
Salon de 1838 wrote: On na pas assez compar la peinture la musique; on
en aurait tir dutiles enseignemens sur les rapports des couleurs et des sons.
Il y a une hirarchie, une gamme de couleurs, comme il y a une hirarchie
de sons, depuis les couleurs basses ou sombres jusquaux couleurs hautes ou
clatantes.47 In 1839 Thor stated his belief that la couleur est au peintre
ce que le son est au musicien48 and describes how certain painters possess
different ranges of tones, comparing Rousseaus landscapes to the music of
Beethoven. In Delacroix too he sees musical tendencies, echoing the art-
46 Horner, p.133.
47 Salon de 1838, p.51.
ists own interests, and, as Thor writes: M. Delacroix serait sans doute un
grand musicien, sil ntait un grand peintre et un grand pote.49 In 1844, he
asks despairingly of contemporary artists dans quel ton jouent-ils? Quelle
est la note dominante de lharmonie de leur tableau? and the answer that
he gives, with its culminating dramatic emphasis on Delacroixs use of
red and green, is echoed by Baudelaire in the colour chapter of his Salon
de 1846: Velasquez aurait pu rpondre: Je suis dans le ton gris argent.
Decamps rpondrait: Grenat ou feuille morte. Delacroix dirait, la faon
de Beethoven: Ma symphonie commence en pourpre majeur et continue
en vert mineur.50
In calling for a study of the relationship between colour and music,
Thor demonstrated his conviction that colour, like music, had its own
system and organization and that the creation of colour in a painting is a
composition in the same sense that music has always been understood to
be composed. Thors (and later Baudelaires) wish for a system of analogy
between colour and music is not just significant in its implications for cor-
respondences generally between the arts, but it also represents their belief
in colours inherent organization and logic. Moreover, the comparison
of colour with music allows Thor to assert that painting is not just a less
articulate version of writing, but that it has a more appropriate relationship
with music precisely because of the evocative distance which both keep
from proses clarity and directness of meaning. In 1845 Thor sums up the
harmonious nature ofDelacroixs colour in the Sultan du Maroc: La cou-
leur est si harmonieuse, que cette peinture clatante et varie parat sombre
au premier regard. Cest l le talent incomparable dEugne Delacroix, de
marier les nuances les plus riches et les plus diverses, comme les musiciens
qui parcourent toute la gamme des sons.51 Thor chooses the word sombre
rather than the more Chevreul-like gris that Baudelaire will use in his
Salon; but, even though the neophyte critic mocked the respected Thor

50 Thor, Salons, p.20.
51 Thor, Salons, p.118. Of the same painting Baudelaire writes: Ce tableau est si har-
monieux, malgr la splendeur des tons, quil en est gris (S45, 357).
168 Chapter 4
a little for reading too much symbolism into Delacroixs use of colour in
Marc-Aurle, Thor had a much more sophisticated view ofDelacroixs use
of colour than Baudelaire gave him credit for. In 1845 he praises Delacroix
for his harmonizing of colour and expression comme tous les dtails sont
en harmonie avec la pense principale!, a sentiment that Baudelaire would
reprise a year later in the Salon de 1846.
It was in this Salon that Baudelaire first made the link between
Delacroixs painting and the music ofWeber that he would go on to develop
in Les Phares. The law of harmony was one important link between colour
and music; as David Kelley puts it:
[] en 1846 Baudelaire ne sintresse pas tellement aux possibilits de la transposi-

tion dart comme genre littraire. Il voudrait surtout prouver que la couleur obit
des lois analogues celles de la musique, et plus particulirement la loi harmonique
qui sous-tend lorganisation de lunivers.52
There is also the fact that the terminology of music offered Baudelaire the
possibility of suggesting emotion, without reducing it to the linguistic and
rational forms of traditional analysis. Later he was to describe music itself
as being able to exprimer la partie indfinie du sentiment que la parole,
trop positive, ne peut pas rendre (RW, 786). Delacroix was interested in
the connections between painting and music for similar reasons, and saw
their ability to affect the emotions directly as a way in which both arts
could be seen as superior to literature. He observed:
Le plaisir que cause un tableau est un plaisir tout diffrent dun ouvrage littraire.
Il y a un genre dmotion qui est tout particulier la peinture; rien dans lautre nen
donne une ide. Il y a une impression qui rsulte de tel arrangement de couleurs, de
lumires, dombres, etc. Cest ce quon appellerait la musique du tableau.53
52 Salon de 1846, p.30.

53 uvres littraires, I, pp.6364.
As George Mras observes, Delacroix was but reflecting the new prestige of
music as a non-mimetic and directly expressive medium,54 and in Chapter2,
pp.7980, I have discussed some of the conversations he had on the subject
with Chopin, when Delacroix compared musics reflets auditifs to the
laws governing colour contrast. Delacroix was consistently interested in
how different colour combinations could engender particular moods, and
in 1850, not long after his conversation with Chopin is said to have taken
place, Delacroix noted down some of Webers thoughts from LArtiste on
the affective quality of music. Among the passages that Delacroix included
was one in which the composer had written that
il ny a que lharmo-
nie communicative qui puisse faire vibrer une corde De mme le cur
de lhomme peut tre touch et peut raisonner lexcs si lon attaque le
ton qui le rend sensible (Journal, I, 336, 1fvrier 1850). It is possible that
Baudelaire may have been aware of the artists interest, and they may well
have discussed Weber, but for many years he did not explore the affinities
between music and colour in any greater detail than this.
This changed when in 1860 when he heard Wagner conducting extracts
from his work. He wrote to the composer to describe the sensations that
his music had worked upon him. Words almost fail him, he claims: Ce
que jai prouv est indescriptible, et si vous daignez ne pas rire, jessaierai
de vous le traduire (Corr. I, 672, 17fvrier 1860). He confided his plans
to write quelques mditations sur les morceaux of the composers works,
and these meditations are included in the resulting essay Richard Wagner
et Tannhaser Paris. This was the only piece of music criticism that
Baudelaire wrote, and it is where we find his most detailed remarks on
the particular relationship between music and painting. In his descriptions
of Delacroixs painting he chose musical vocabulary and in this essay on
Wagner he deliberately employs artistic terms to underline the arts inter-
changeability. The composer excels in peindre lespace (RW, 785) and his
music is a vritable arabesque des sons dessine par limagination (RW,
789). It is an essay as much about the nature of connections among the arts
54 George Mras, Eugne Delacroixs Theory of Art (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1966), p.37.
170 Chapter 4
as about Wagners music. Having established Wagner as a supreme translator

of the human soul (comme artiste traduisant par les mille combinaisons
du son les tumultes de lme humaine (RW, 781)) Baudelaire turns to the
idea of translation itself. He refutes the idea, held by many, that music
cannot translate an idea as authoritatively as the word and painting can;
Baudelaire acknowledges that musics effect is indeed different from these,
but nevertheless elle traduit sa manire, et par les moyens qui lui sont
propres (RW, 781). To show how music can produce similar effects on
different people, and prompted no doubt by Wagners own explanation of
the pieces in a brochure published for the performances,55 Baudelaire quotes
from three traductions of the Lohengrin overture: Wagners own descrip-
tion, that of Liszt, and finally Baudelaires own impressions. By quoting
from these translations, with their similar features, Baudelaire attempts
to produce proof of the conviction that he has always held, namely, that
music, like colour or poetry, is not only capable of suggesting an impression
indpendamment des objets quelle habille (EU55, 595), but also that one
art is capable of producing sensations normally associated with another.
In this case, Wagners music suggests, not a range of reds as Baudelaire
described in his letter, but what we might describe as colour in a more
abstract sense, types of light and space, and these are the words he under-
lines in his own version, demonstrating his increasing tendency to depict
painting in abstract terms rather than using detailed description. In her
recent article, All that Glitters: Connecting Baudelaires Art Criticism and
Poetry, Sarah Pappas discusses the imagery of light throughout Baudelaires
criticism and poetry: A lexicon of bright, glimmering color and light scat-
ters across Baudelaires art critical text and resurges in the poems: clater,
blouir, resplendir, scintiller, miroiter, flamboyer, rayonner, and their respec-
tive adjectives and adverbs are used to differentiate between good and
bad art in the Salon writings.56 It is worth adding that it is particularly in
55 Entitled Concert de Richard Wagner, the title page of the brochure reads Dans
limpossibilit de faire entendre en entier ses opras, lauteur se permet doffrir au
public quelques lignes dexplications, qui lui feront mieux comprendre le sens des
morceaux dtachs quil lui soumet aujourdhui (quoted by Pichois, OCII, 1456).
56 French Forum, 33/3 (Fall 2008), pp.3353.
Baudelaires later writings that the imagery of light comes to the fore. In
La Mystique de Baudelaire Jean Pommier observed that the attribution of
visual aspects to Wagners music was not unique to Baudelaire; Nerval and
Mendoza, however, saw this music in terms of objects rather than diffuse
light.57 In Baudelaires own description of the piece of music in question, he
underlines the words large lumire diffus, clart dune intensit de lumire,
ce surcrot toujours renaissant dardeur et de blancheur (RW, 784785); in
Liszts version he draws attention to the words avec un clat blouissant de
coloris, avait brill devant nos regards aveugls, dans toute sa magnificence
lumineuse et radiante and cette intensit de rayonnement solaire (RW, 783)
and in Wagners programme notes he underlines la lumineuse apparition
and les flammes brlantes adoucissent progressivement leur clat and les
profondeurs de lespace (RW, 782). This coincidence in the vocabulary of
the three descriptions, each a traduction invitable (RW, 784) produced
by the imagination, gives Baudelaire enough proof triumphantly to confirm
his credo in a famous formulation:
[] ce qui serait vraiment surprenant, cest que le son ne pt pas suggrer la couleur,
que les couleurs ne pussent pas donner lide dune mlodie, et que le son et la couleur
fussent impropre traduire les ides; les choses stant toujours exprimes par une
analogie rciproque, depuis le jour o Dieu a profr le monde comme une complexe
et indivisible totalit. (RW, 784)
With none of the self-consciousness or explanatory hesitations which

accompanied his quoting from Les Phares in 1855, Baudelaire inserts
the two quatrains from his poem Correspondances to emphasize his
idea and to put his own poem into this shared artistic context. The inclu-
sion of the poem in the Wagner essay is not just making the point that
there are correspondences in nature, but that any vritable work of art
is capable of creating connections with another. Baudelaires second edi-
tion of the Fleurs du Mal had just ben published and the creative process
was in his mind, in particular finding the links that connected his own
poetic stimulus to music and colour. The ability of every art to express
57 Pommier, pp.1013.
172 Chapter 4
or translate an idea was, for Baudelaire, fundamentally allied to its abil-

ity to translate the other arts; and in the final chapter we will consider
Baudelaires increasing emphasis on the imagination as the synergistic
force enabling this process.
Chapter 5
Colour and Imagination: Translating the Dream
Mais enfin, monsieur, direz-vous sans doute, quel est donc ce je ne sais quoi de mys-
trieux que Delacroix, pour la gloire de notre sicle, a mieux traduit quaucun autre?
Cest linvisible, cest impalpable, cest le rve, cest les nerfs, cest lme; et il a fait cela
observez-le bien, monsieur, sans autres moyens que le contour at la couleur; il la fait
mieux que pas un; il la fait avec la perfection dun peintre consomm, avec la rigueur
dun littrateur subtil, avec lloquence dun musicien passionn. (OVD, 744)
The Creative Imagination
1859 was an unusually productive year for Baudelaire. He had fulfilled his
long-held dream of living in Honfleur (at least temporarily) and wrote
some of his greatest poems for the second edition of the Fleurs du Mal,
as well as the translation of De Quincey and a major essay on Gautier.
When he wrote the Salon de 1859 in the spring of this year, it is hardly
surprising that creativity was foremost in his mind when he formulated
the concept that would dominate this final Salon and, indeed, his critical
writing for the last part of his life: la reine des facults, the creative imagi-
nation. Richard Burton has suggested that it was this unusually sustained
period of creativity that played the major part in Baudelaires concept of
lImagination, while other critics believe the idea to be the summation
of years of thought about the creative process, suggesting that prototypes
for the imagination exist in in his earlier emphasis on originalit, naivet
174 Chapter 5
and the idal.1 One connection that has been less well explored has its
roots in Baudelaires ideas on colour. This chapter will explore how his
thoughts on the operations of colour find an echo in the concept of the
imagination, which in turn influences his thoughts on the significance of
colour itself. Baudelaires perception of the imagination at the centre of
all artistic creation is, with its emphasis on synthesis and analogy, closely
linked to the ideas of translation and the links among the arts that he devel-
ops at this time. Colours position as an expressive language par excellence
is particularly central to this process and we will see how Baudelaire often
returns to a visual imagery in order to suggest how music or literature can
transcend their particular boundaries. Baudelaires own preoccupations as
a littrateur and critic come to the fore in much of this later critical writ-
ing, and cause him to reassess the essential qualities of the arts, as well as
his own role as poet-critic.
In his idea of the imagination Baudelaire may have been inspired by
his own imaginative creativity that year, but there is a sense, of course, in
which he also drew inspiration from what he perceived as its increasing
diminution in French culture generally. Embittered by the public reaction
to, and subsequent banning of, the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, and
turning his back on Paris in favour of Honfleur, he composed the Salon
de 1859 almost without reference to the actual exhibition itself, or so he
claimed. As Timothy Raser astutely puts it, thus the essay by the writer
who wasnt there, about the works which werent there, invokes a concept
of imagination that wasnt there because the artists didnt have it.2 Indeed, it
suited Baudelaires aesthetic purposes in this Salon to maintain that he had
never even been to that years Salon because he knew beforehand what he
would find there; he later admitted to one fleeting visit and much assistance
from the catalogue, showing that he had long ago made up his mind about
1 See Richard Burton, Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Gilman, pp.119123. Felix
Leakey argues that the criterion of idealization elaborated some thirteen years
earlier in the Salon de 1846 [] [is] now replaced by the analogous concept of the
guiding creative imagination (Baudelaire and Nature, p.312).
2 Raser, The Simplest of Signs, p.127.
what he thought about modern French art.3 It was not positive. Although
professing to be a man who still has lamour de la Peinture jusque dans
les nerfs, gone is the youthful enthusiasm of 1845 and 1846. In a fitting
conclusion to this, the last Salon he would write, Baudelaire records his
fruitless search: Je mtais impos de chercher lImagination travers le
Salon, et, layant rarement trouv, je nai d parler que dun petit nombre
dhommes (S59, 681). It is clear from the outset of the Salon de 1859 that
Baudelaire had become bitterly disillusioned with French culture and art
and knew all along that he would not find what he was looking for, but
would turn this knowledge into a brilliant treatise on what was effectively
the opposite of his 1846 planned book on De la peinture moderne: the 1859
version would be about its absence.
The fact that he found la banalit everywhere in the Salon allowed
him to provide an extended meditation on what should have been there.
In 1846 he was hopeful that a greater understanding of colour and its laws
of harmony could change the way art was created and perceived; by 1859
he has decided that the French creative spirit is moribund and that there
was nothing that can be done about this state of affairs. In the first chapter
of the Salon, LArtiste Moderne, he nostalgically contrasts the potique
miroir presented by the work of the English artists that he saw in 18554 to
tant de platitudes menes bonne fin, tant de niaiseries soigneusement
lches, tant de btises ou de faussets habilement construites (S59, 610)
offered by his French compatriots. In fact the whole Salon is steeped in
nostalgia for Baudelaire, and not just for English artists and the glories of
1855. He is mourning the passing of an era when artists and poets could
exist as equals. Where once he had conversed with artists such as Daumier,
Ricard and Delacroix, now Baudelaire maintains that je ne me rappelle
plus personne qui soit digne de converser avec un philosophe ou un pote
3 See Corr. I, letters to Nadar, pp.575 and 578, 14 and 16mai 1859.
4 In the Exposition universelle (1855) Baudelaire alluded briefly to this exhibition,
held at the avenue Montaigne (EU55, 582), and it is thought that he had originally
intended to include an article on it at that time (see Pichois, OCII, pp.13661367).
Patricia Mainardi writes informatively on the importance of this English exhibition
for French art in Art and Politics of the Second Empire, pp.103107.
176 Chapter 5
(S59, 611). The thinking, Romantic artist was, in Baudelaires eyes, the
natural inheritor of the tradition embodied by LeBrun and David; but
the modern artist, instead of being lartiste ce frre antique du pote (S59,
611), is now nothing more than lenfant gt who succeeds by
[] bouchant de mieux en mieux son me, et surtout ne lisant rien, pas mme Le
Parfait Cuisinier, qui pourtant aurait pu lui ouvrir une carrire moins lucrative, mais
plus glorieuse. Quand il possde bien lart des sauces, des patines, des glacis, des frot-
tis, des jus, des ragots (je parle peinture), lenfant gt prend de fires attitudes, et se
rpte avec plus de conviction que jamais que tout le reste est inutile. (S59, 613)
Although Baudelaire has used the imagery of food in art in positive ways
in the past, particularly in relation to colour, here the poet-painter has
been replaced by the amateur chef whose efforts are restricted to concoct-
ing glazes, gravies and insubstantial sauces for the appetite of the French
public.5 Baudelaires scorn is directed at those painters who are efficient at
creating the semblance of painting (patines and glacis also recall the polished
surface of the well finished painting) but this is a form of painting that
is all surface and no soul. It is significant that these artists are portrayed
as rejecting literature, which Baudelaire, who in previous essays called
for the grand Romantic artists subject matter of Byron and Shakespeare
even while he sought the painter of modern life, cannot forgive. But the
modern artist is not the only one who is excoriated; the greater blame for
what French art has become is the subject of the second chapter, Le public
moderne et la photographie.
Gone is the ironic flattery of the Aux Bourgeois preface directed at the
wealthy but ignorant art consumer of 1846. In 1859 Baudelaire does not pull
his punches; the French public is not just lacking in artistic knowledge, it is
fundamentally stupid and shows le got du bte in wishing to be amused
by the droll titles such as Amour et Gibelotte that Baudelaire has seen listed
in the catalogue. He admits that he does not know if such paintings are
good or bad; again we are reminded of his absence from the Salon and his
5 See my article, Ann Kennedy, Food for the Eyes: Baudelaire and the Artist as parfait
cuisinier, Romance Studies, 13 (Winter 1988), pp.4953.
refusal to play the critics supposed role of describing what he sees. Though
in one form of reading he is assiduous; it is worth noting that Baudelaire
describes his frustration in reading the catalogue four times in order to find
out the name of a sculpture that had appealed to him, which turned out to
be Hberts Toujours et Jamais. Words and art have lost their connection and
titles have become either tiresome or meaningless as indicators of the art
object. In any case, Baudelaire resents the fact that the modern artist needs
to adopt measures such as word-play and obliqueness in titles to pique the
publics interest, devices that have nothing to do with the art in question.
Worse was to come, however. Another, much more serious development
that threatens French art, Baudelaire believes, is the growing success of une
industrie nouvelle [] qui ne contribua pas peu confirmer la sottise dans
sa foi et ruiner ce qui peut rester de divin dans lesprit franais (S59, 616).
This was of course photography, which according to Baudelaire results
from the credo of the public Je crois la nature et je ne crois qu la nature
[] Ainsi lindustrie qui nous donnerait un rsultat identique la nature
serait lart absolu (S59, 617). Photography is just one of the manifestations
of la sottise de la multitude; the real culprit is is the growing emphasis on
the present which has displaced the imagination in French life.
Later in the Salon in the Du paysage chapter Baudelaire will use simi-
lar reasons to attack the burgeoning genre of landscape. By 1859 all modern
landscapists have become connected in Baudelaires mind with the cult of
nature, notably la nature sans lhomme at a time when he is particularly
nostalgic for the literary subject-matter of the Romantic tradition, and he
insists that this is a dangerous aberration:
Les artistes qui veulent exprimer la nature, moins les sentiments quelle inspire, se
soumettent une opration bizarre qui consiste tuer en eux lhomme pensant et
sentant, et malheureusement, croyez que, pour la plupart, cette opration na rien
de bizarre ni de douloureux. Telle est lcole qui, aujourdhui et depuis longtemps,
a prvalu. (S59, 660)
Part of the reason for Baudelaires antipathy to the landscape genre can be
traced back to what he perceived as landscapes growing connection with
the art ofCourbet and his followers. Baudelaire had long since abandoned
the Realists political stance which he had embraced in the 1840s, but he
178 Chapter 5
found it harder to distance himself from its associations with a particular

type of art. As David Kelley observes:
[] le mouvement raliste des annes cinquante est all beaucoup plus loin dans le
sens du positivisme et de lengagement social que Baudelaire naurait pu lenvisager
en 1846, et, dautre part, lesthtique de ce mouvement ne pouvait correspondre
la philosophie pessimiste tendances anti-naturalistes que le pote a adopte aprs
1852.6
Baudelaires denunciatory essay on realism, Puisque ralisme il y a, is thought

to have been composed around 1855, the same year that the Goncourts
were celebrating the variety and accomplishments of modern landscap-
ists. Baudelaire wrote at the time in the Exposition universelle (1855) that
il marrivera souvent dapprcier un tableau uniquement par la somme
dides ou de rveries quil apportera dans mon esprit (EU, 579) and it
is not surprising that he identified the increasing popularity of landscape
and photography with a public appetite for realism, sensation and a sim-
plified view of art. It was an irony of history that Les Fleurs du Mal was
denounced as manifesting un ralisme grossier in the verdict passed on
it in 1857, becoming known in the daily newspapers as cette dernire pro-
duction du ralisme.7
Baudelaires change of attitude towards the genre of landscape from
seeing it in his earlier Salons as potentially imaginative in the hands of cer-
tain painters to the marked antipathy of 1859 is worth considering in a little
more detail. In 1845 Baudelaire saw Corot and Rousseau as embodying la
navet et loriginalit (S45, 389), words closely associated for him with the
imagination, while in the colour chapter of 1846 Baudelaire claimed that
he was one of those qui aiment sincrement la nature (S46, 425), albeit
nature as an extension of the poets imagination permeated by correspond-
ences of colour, perfume and music. In this same Salon he wrote:
Lors de la rvolution romantique, les paysagistes, lexemple des plus clbres

Flamands, sadonnrent exclusivement ltude de la nature; ce fut ce qui les sauva
6 Kelley, Salon de 1846, p.114.

7 Pichois and Ziegler, Baudelaire (1987), p.355.
et donna un clat particulier lcole du paysage moderne. Leur talent consista

surtout dans une adoration ternelle de luvre visible, sous tous ses aspects et dans
tous ses dtails. (S46, 479)
Perhaps influenced by Thors championing of Vermeer and the Dutch

artists, in 1846 Baudelaire did not see the close study of nature as preclud-
ing imaginative involvement; on the contrary, at that time he described
Rousseau as the natural ally of Delacroix and praised la magie de ses tab-
leaux. Il y mle beaucoup de son me, comme Delacroix; cest un naturaliste
entran sans cesse vers lidal (S46, 485). However, in 1859 Baudelaire
turns on Rousseau, accusing him of imaginative barrenness and of putting
nature before all else: il tombe dans le fameux dfaut moderne, qui nat
dun amour aveugle de la nature, de rien que la nature; et il prend une
simple tude pour une composition (S59, 662). It is as ifBaudelaire blames
Rousseau for continuing to do what he has always done, when it is his own
attitude towards landscape that has become polarized by developments
in French art. Baudelaires mistrust of landscape is markedly at odds with
the pro-landscape mood of the times, as enthusiastically expressed by the
Goncourt brothers in 1855:
Le paysage est la victoire de lart moderne. Il est lhonneur de la peinture du XIXe
sicle. Le Printemps, lt, lAutomne, lHiver, ont pour servants les plus grands et
les plus magnifiques talents, que se prpare relayer une jeune gnration anonyme
encore, mais promise lavenir et digne de ses espoirs.8
In their novel Manette Salomon of 1867 the Goncourts celebrated in their

fictional artist [] le grand mouvement du retour de lart et de lhomme
du XIXe sicle la nature naturelle, [] qui restera le charme et la gloire
de notre cole prsente.9 Patricia Mainardi reminds us that the rise of
8 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, La peinture lExpostion de 1855, quoted in Patricia

Mainardi Landscape in the Second Empire: Between Barbizon and Impressionism
in Art and Literature of the Second Empire, edited by David Baguley (Durham:
University of Durham, 2003), pp.313.
9 Manette Salomon (Paris: Gallimard 1996; first published 1867). Matthew T. Simms
has pointed to an interesting correlation in the Goncourts interest in landscape and
180 Chapter 5
landscape painting during the Second Empire is an important develop-

ment in art that has often gone unnoticed, due to the emphasis on the
Barbizon art of the 1830s and 1840s and the Impressionist art to come.
Yet during the 1850s, she writes, landscape painting, both in style and
subject, covered virtually the entire spectrum of nineteenth-century pos-
sibilities.10 Baudelaire would not have agreed. By the late 1850s he refused
to see landscape as embodying any possibility other than that of artificially
removing the moi from the scene. It is not simply that landscapists lack
imagination; for Baudelaire it is the subject matter that they choose, nature,
that encourages the erasing of their personality: force de contempler,
ils oublient de sentir et de penser (S59, 625), he writes. In the landscape
chapter Baudelaire admits his boredom with the genre and its failure to
stimulate his own imagination: M. Rousseau ma toujours bloui; mais il
ma quelquefois fatigu (S59, 662). He concludes his section on Rousseau
and Corot by acknowledging that they at least have subtlety and modera-
tion in their use of colour, whereas the modern landscape is brash and
inharmonious, and les Vronse les plus lumineux paratraient souvent
gris et ples sils taient entours de certaines peintures modernes plus
criardes que des foulards de village (S59, 663).
The last half of the Du Paysage chapter is given over to his enthusiasm
for the work of two artists whose seascapes and cityscapes were not even on
display in the Salon, Boudin and Meryon. In Chapter 3 (see pp.121123)
I have discussed aspects of what contributed to the appeal of these artists
for Baudelaire; in the context of the landscape in the Salon de 1859 it is
also worth noting what they are not: not on display in the Salon, of course,
being merely studies and etchings (and with Meryons talent cut short by
his declining mental state, not likely to be developed further), not the
their championing of lart animalier in the 1850s: The displacement of the human
that had been the focus of lcole historique by the animal represents a return to nature,
argue the Goncourts, just as painting the human form was being replaced by land-
scape; in The Goncourts, Gustave Planche, and Antoine-Louis Baryes Un Jaguar
dvorant un livre Nineteenth-Century French Studies (FallWinter 20092010),
pp.6781, p.77.
10 Mainardi, Landscape, p.3.
typically brightly coloured scenes admired by Salon-goers, and perhaps

above all not trying to be something that they are not. In their inclusion
in the second half of the chapter they instead belong to the other notable
category of landscape that is also not there, le paysage romantique that
Baudelaire misses, and he is eloquent on what is absent:
Je regrette ces grands lacs qui rprsentent limmobilit dans le dsespoir, les immenses
montagnes, escaliers de la plante vers le ciel, do tout ce qui paraissait grand parat
petit, les chteaux forts (oui, mon cynisme ira jusque-l), les abbayes crneles qui
se mirent dans les mornes tangs, les ponts gigantesques, les constructions ninivites,
habites par le vertige, et enfin tout ce quil faudrait inventer, si tout cela nexistait
pas! (S59, 667)
Of course, this landscape is also absent because it does not in fact exist,
except in its composite form in Baudelaires memory and imagination and
as a written description. As a genre the romantic landscape may no longer
be present in the Salon, but Baudelaire has summoned it up, or invented
it, in his detailed verbal word-picture at a time when he appears to have
given up describing actual works of art. Timothy Raser has argued con-
vincingly that another sort of non-presence in the Salon is important, the
element of narrative: Instead of using description, which would entail
present-tense verbs, Baudelaire arranges his accounts of works as stories
[] While art criticism tends to use the present tense to the exclusion of
others, Baudelaires accounts use the pass compos and the future.11 While
this is true of paintings such as Ovide chez les Scythes, it is also worth noting
that in Baudelaires listing of the elements of the Romantic landscape, as
with his listing of features of Boudins seascapes and Meryons etchings,
there is a form of present tense more reminiscent of poetry than of criti-
cism: Les majests de la pierre accumule, les clochers montrant du doigt le
ciel, les oblisques de lindustrie vomissant contre le firmament leurs coali-
tions de fume, les prodigieux chafaudages des monuments en rparation
(S59, 666) are images used to summon up Meryons etchings but also to
11 Raser, The Simplest of Signs, p.133.

182 Chapter 5
create his own parallel verbal transposition of them.12 Baudelaire uses the
accumulation of plurals in describing the work ofMeryon, Boudin and the
missing Romantic landscapes to give the sense of their being many paintings
or etchings contained in one, and this is effectively the landscape that he
has provided himself with the prose poem of his words. Like the stanza
that he includes by Hugo, le roi des paysagistes (S59, 668), the poetic evo-
cation of the Romantic landscapes that he misses means that the verbal,
poetic landscape is more real in the context of this essay than any painted
landscape on display. The imaginary landscape has replaced the real one,
because most present painted landscapes cannot fulfil Baudelaires imagi-
native requirements and poetry must stand in for painting.
The Imagination and Colour
Baudelaires antipathy to the overly naturalistic properties of photography

and landscape means that his theory of the imagination acquires much of
its impetus from being a force of opposition to the prevailing trend. He
affirms his own personal credo: je trouve inutile et fastidieux de reprsenter
ce qui est, parce que rien de ce qui est ne me satisfait. La nature est laide, et
je prfre les monstres de ma fantaisie la trivialit positive (S59, 620). The
central tenet of his antipathy to the cult of nature in art and photography
is his conviction that the thinking and feeling man has been removed from
such work; in other words, that poetry is no longer involved in painting.
There are more references to the poet and poetry in this Salon than in any
of his other articles on art. He had already linked the two in the frequently
quoted letter to Toussenel of 1856:
12 Emily Salines draws attention to one particular etching by Meryon, The Clock Tower
(1852), which appears to contain many of the elements that Baudelaire describes; see
Salines, pp.223224.
Ce qui est postif, cest que vous tes pote. Il y a bien longtemps que je dis que le
pote est souverainement intelligent, quil est lintelligence par excellence, et que
limagination est la plus scientifique des facults, parce que seule elle comprend
lanalogie universelle, ou ce quun mystique appelle la correspondance. (Corr. I, 336,
21janvier 1856)
Part ofBaudelaires rancour in 1859 in his blistering attack on those artists

with too much habilet and too little imagination was inspired by his convic-
tion that the poet had been rudely ousted from the arena ofFrench art (and
he must have been thinking of himself ): je rclame sans cesse lapplication
de limagination, lintroduction de la posie dans toutes les fonctions de lart
(S59, 657), he declares in his personal manifesto. Baudelaire blames the lack
of imagination in modern art for the schism between painting and poetry
that has made the poet-critic obsolete, and he seeks to reunite what has been
artificially divided. There is little in the art on show in the Salon de 1859 to
cater for the appetite of the poet, and this is the spur to his celebration of
a faculty in which all the arts are described as having their source: Elle est
lanalyse, elle est la synthse (S59, 620). The imagination is, or should be,
the guiding principle for all creativity: Cest limagination qui a enseign
lhomme le sens moral de la couleur, du contour, du son et du parfum.
Elle a cr, au commencement du monde, lanalogie et la mtaphore (S59,
621). Baudelaire sees the imagination as helping the painter to compose a
harmony from natures disparate details and to acquire the technical means
of transferring his view onto the canvas, and the phrasing ofElle a cr, au
commencement du monde, lanalogie et la mtaphore recalls the words
of Hoffmann quoted in 1846: [] je trouve une analogie et une reunion
intime entre les couleurs, les sons et les parfums. The ability that colour has
to form part of a complex network of interchangeable signs will prove to
be of particular relevance to Baudelaires concept of the imagination.
There are several important ways in which Baudelaires words on colour
are linked to his thoughts on the imagination. In the Salon de 1846 the
colour chapter assumes a principal significance in its place as the third and
most developed of the introductory chapters. In the Salon de 1859 the two
chapters on the imagination (La Reine des facults and Le Gouvernement
de lImagination) echo the placing of the colour chapter, as third and
184 Chapter 5
fourth chapters respectively, and are also, like the essay on colour, placed
immediately before the discussion of the Salon proper. There can be no
doubt that the theme of the imagination dominates the latter Salon; and the
concept of colour, although in a less overt way, is of comparable importance
in the Salon de 1846. There are other elements that connect the themes of
colour and the imagination in Baudelaires aesthetic. In the chapter Le
Gouvernement de lImagination Baudelaire expands the precepts he estab-
lished in La Reine des facults. Having first quoted from Catherine Crowe
to illustrate the difference between fantasy and the constructive imagina-
tion, he then links these thoughts directly to Delacroix and a discussion on
colour technique and symbolism. Baudelaire reiterates Delacroixs view that
la nature nest quun dictionnaire (S59, 624) to suggest that the external
world provides only the raw material from which the creative imagination
builds its own reality. This leads him to assert the importance of the artists
tools and, most importantly, his use of colour in the attempt to translate
his particular conception:
[] tout enfin doit servir illuminer lide gnratrice et porter encore sa couleur
originelle, sa livre, pour ainsi dire. Comme un rve est plac dans une atmosphre
qui lui est propre, de mme une conception, devenue composition, a besoin de se
mouvoir dans un milieu color qui lui soit particulier. (S59, 625)
The metaphorical and literal senses of colour exist side by side, and this is
an important aspect of the imagination for Baudelaire. He does not want
his imaginative ideal to resemble any academic principle of beauty, which
he described in 1846 as ce rve ennuyeux et impalpable qui nage au pla-
fond des acadmies (S46, 456), but connects the imagination directly to
the real artists experience: the artistic process, its tools, and the method
of composing a painting. To obey the demands of the imagination, it is
particularly the method of producing the painting that Baudelaire focuses
on in Le Gouvernement de lImagination:
Un bon tableau, fidle et gal au rve qui la enfant, doit tre produit comme un
monde [] un tableau conduit harmoniquement consiste en une srie de tableaux
superposs, chaque nouvelle couche donnant au rve plus de ralit et le faisant
monter dun dgr vers la perfection. (S59, 626)
We are reminded of the colour landscape he evoked in the Salon de 1846

where washes of colour built up in layers until they became defined as rep-
resenting separate objects. He describes the patchwork working method
of artists such as Vernet or Delaroche as an illustration of how not to com-
pose a painting, claiming to have seen canvases of theirs with some parts
completely finished and the rest of the picture indicated in black or white
contours, waiting to be filled in. He compares such an approach to that of a
manual labourer, working his way through each stage of the job in a piece-
meal or linear fashion until the painting is completed. Instead, Baudelaire
maintains that a painting governed by the imagination consists of a series
of versions which are gradually built up, each giving more and more preci-
sion to the depiction of the dream or idea. This accumulative, synthesizing
method is, according to Baudelaire, the best one for the imaginative artist,
and the science of colour is a fundamental part of this process, because its
inherent order governing certain combinations of tones is demanded by
lorganisation mme de ltre spirituel (S59, 627), and this allows the dream
to be expressed with speed and fluency. The rules governing the harmony
of tones are compared to the rules of rhetoric and prosody which, far from
impeding originality of expression, give it greater power, as his own poetry
showed. Once again, the rules that underpin the structure of colour and
those of literature and poetry are fruitfully compared in this Salon. Because
of his own experience as writer and poet Baudelaire feels justified in advocat-
ing the colourist method as la mthode la plus sre pour les imaginations
riches (S59, 626) and one which should be pursued by all artists because
it corresponds most closely to the workings of the imagination.
Four years later, in the obituary essay on Delacroix, Luvre et la vie
dEugne Delacroix, Baudelaire connects Delacroixs mastery of colour tech-
niques even more closely to the demands of the imagination and expressing
the intangible by physical means. Early in the article Baudelaire asks quel
est donc ce je ne sais quoi de mystrieux que Delacroix a mieux traduit
quaucun autre?, answering cest linvisible, cest limpalpable, cest le rve,
cest les nerfs, cest lme; et il a fait cela, observez-le bien, monsieur,
sans autres moyens que le contour et la couleur (OVD, 744). Delacroixs
technical ability in art is necessary to fulfilling the demands of the imagi-
nation, and Baudelaire recalls the artists interest in technical matters, first
186 Chapter 5
alluded to in the Salon de 1846 (ses recherches perptuelles relatives la

couleur, la qualit des couleurs, sa curiosit des choses de chimie et ses
conversations avec les fabricants de couleurs, OVD, 747) but now linked
explicitly to the imagination. Colour is still at the heart of painting but it
has become incorporated into a much more extensive view of the creative
process. The imagination has replaced colour as the guiding principle for
artists, and Delacroix is presented above all not as a colourist but as un
homme imaginatif for whom colour is the most important tool: Pour ce
grand peintre, toutes les parties de lart, dont lun prend celle-ci et lautre
celle-l pour la principale, ntaient, ne sont, veux-je dire, que les trs hum-
bles servantes dune facult unique et suprieure (S59, 625).
What lies behind this change of emphasis in Baudelaires approach
to art? To establish this we should consider something of the background
to his placing of the imagination at the head of creativity. Towards the
end of his section on the imagination Baudelaire writes wistfully that il y
aurait tant de choses dire, particulirement sur les parties concordantes
de tous les arts et les ressemblances dans leurs mthodes! (S59, 627). One
of the analogies Baudelaire uses to suggest the vital links between two or
more arts is the idea of translation. Michle Hannoosh and Emily Salines
are two critics who have written informatively on the metaphor of trans-
lation throughout Baudelaires writings on art, and we shall look at some
of their remarks later in this chapter.13 It is worth pointing out that it is
particularly in the later essays that Baudelaire takes a marked interest in
the idea of translation and in the connections which exist between poetry,
music and painting, and it is at this time that he comes to consider the idea
of translation as a necessary bridge between poetry, in the widest sense of
the word, and the other arts.
13 Michle Hannoosh, Painting as Translation in Baudelaires Art Criticism, Forum

for Modern Language Studies, 22/1 ( January 1986), pp.2233; Salines, Alchemy and
Amalgam, pp.20146.
Translating the Arts
The Painter as Poet: Delacroix
In this section I would like to examine the implications of one ofBaudelaires

opening remarks in the 1863 obituary essay, Luvre et la vie dEugne
Delacroix, in which he declares his wish to demonstrate, autant que la parole
crite le permet, lart magique grce auquel [Delacroix] a pu traduire la
parole par des images plastiques plus vives et plus approximantes que celles
daucun crateur de mme profession (OVD, 743). For him, Delacroix is
the master of translating the word (i.e. literature) into visual terms; and
Baudelaire as a critic modestly hopes to be able to use words sufficiently
well to express the nature of that genius. Underpinning his exploration
of Delacroixs painting is a study of the meta-literature involved in the
act of criticism, and in this essay Baudelaire explores the creative process
involved in the use of words to explore or translate another medium. The
word traduire and its cognates are employed repeatedly throughout the
essay; Baudelaire claims to quote the artists words when he writes that
puisque je considre limpression transmise lartiste par la nature comme
la chose la plus importante traduire, nest-il pas ncessaire que celui-ci soit
arm lavance de tous les moyens de traduction les plus rapides? (OVD,
746747). The metaphor of translation is a particularly important one for
Baudelaire at this time, suggesting, on the one hand, the most direct form
of transmission from one plane (the imagination) to another (the canvas,
and thence to the imagination of the spectator), and, on the other, how the
artists power can be transposed into another, verbal, language and here the
meta-textual aspect of writing about art is examined more closely. One of
the main purposes of the obituary article is to allow Baudelaire, as a poet
and writer, to lay a final claim to this painter as his own, and he emphasizes
Delacroixs connection to the word by locating his painterly genius in the
world of the arts, especially literature and poetry, and showing how it fits
there. Delacroixs ability to recreate literary or poetic subjects has often
been referred to by Baudelaire in the past, but nowhere else does it play
188 Chapter 5
such an important role in the artists genius. He sees both himself and the
artist as allied in their relationship to a verbal language, even to the extent
that, as far as the appreciation and understanding of art is concerned, writ-
ers and poets are superior to artists themselves because their imaginative
powers are greater: [] je vous prierais dobserver, monsieur, que, parmi la
foule accourue pour lui rendre les suprmes honneurs, on pouvait compter
beaucoup plus de littrateurs que de peintres. Pour dire la vrit crue, ces
derniers ne lont jamais parfaitement compris (OVD, 745), he writes. This
represents a significant shift in Baudelaires opinion since 1846 when he
observed that une mthode simple pour connatre la porte dun artiste
est dexaminer son public. E. Delacroix a pour lui les peintres et les potes
(S46, 475). Painters and poets are represented at that time as being almost
equally important, with particular deference being paid to painters, but this
changes in the Exposition universelle (1855) when Delacroix is described as
having a quality that is essentiellement littraire, making him le peintre
aim des potes (EU55, 596). After Delacroixs death it seems that only
poets are capable of the imaginative involvement that the artists works
demand; as for painters, ces derniers ne lont jamais parfaitement com-
pris. In other words, Baudelaire considers himself to be the best (indeed
perhaps the only) candidate for the task of evaluating the artists genius,
and this is connected to his use of poetic language. The claims which he
makes to understanding the late artist can easily be interpreted as a subtle
form of revenge, given the scorn which Delacroix had at times poured
upon literary critics, and in particular his cool treatment of Baudelaire
himself in the early 1850s: the artists protestations now silenced, the critic
feels entitled to have the last word.
It is worth pointing out in the light of recent research that reports of
Delacroixs coldness towards Baudelaire might have been exaggerated. The
authors of a recent edition of letters by Delacroix have included a well-
known letter from the artist, which because it has no name, address or date
has provoked much discussion as to its correspondent and subject matter.
Hannoosh and Johnson argue convincingly that the letter was written on
2 July 1859, the day after the fifth part of the Salon de 1859 was published
in which Baudelaire had compared Delacroix to Scott, Byron and Goethe
and described him as le type du peintre-pote. Delacroix wrote:
Jai t dj bien heureux de vous voir accourir comme vous lavez fait et larticle que
je lis, car jignorais quil ft paru hier, me rend de nouveau votre oblig, heureux de
ltre. Vous dites admirablement au public ce que vous avez vu, mais y verra-t-il tout
cela? Limagination du spectateur fait le tableau quil regarde. Vous mavez vu en pote
et les potes sont rares. Mille sentiments de main bien dvous, Eugne Delacroix.14
If this was indeed addressed to Baudelaire, as it seems plausible it was, the

warmth that the artist extends to a critic who at times irritated him con-
siderably, as most art critics did, could be explained by a shared disaffec-
tion with recent developments in French art, a genuine love of literature
and a belated recognition on Delacroixs part that Baudelaires loyalty had
never wavered. Was it simply coincidence that Delacroix also refers to the
imagination in his note?
It is all the more natural in the light of this letter that in the obituary
article Baudelaire should take take some credit for his status as Delacroixs
longest-serving supporter, and even his many quotations from earlier arti-
cles are justified, he argues, by his self-elected role as the translator of the
great artist: Ici, monsieur, je vous demanderai la permission de me citer
moi-mme, car une paraphrase ne vaudrait pas les mots que jai crits autre-
fois, presque sous la dicte du matre (OVD, 747). These are of course his
own words which have been given another layer of historical veracity by
their being repeated, but Baudelaire is nevertheless quoting himself. He
highlights his unique role in translating with his words what Delacroix
might have been able to say if his own expression in writing had not been
hampered by what Baudelaire disparagingly calls certaines locutions un
peu uses, un peu poncif, empire mme (OVD, 754). Baudelaire may have
been unaware of the lucidity and profundity of the Journal or Delacroixs
considerable work on the never-completed Dictionnaire, but it also suited
his critically creative purpose to be the artists mouthpiece. While osten-
sibly paying homage to the artist, Baudelaire also suggests that Delacroix
needs the words of the poet/writer to provide a bridge between him and
his public. The primary act of translation that the painter performs (be it
of a literary source or the dream) must be accompanied by a second act of
14 Delacroix, Nouvelles Lettres, p.88.

190 Chapter 5
translation: that performed by the spectator, or the critic (who is, after all,
a professional spectator). Part ofBaudelaires interest in the idea of transla-
tion at this time can be seen in his willingness to make puns on the differ-
ences between types of language: Autant [Delacroix] tait sr dcrire ce
quil pensait sur une toile, autant il tait proccup de ne pouvoir peindre
sa pense sur le papier (OVD, 754). The irony is based on some truth, in
that Delacroix as a young man had longed for the ability to write: Que
je voudrais tre pote! Mais, au moins, produis avec la peinture! fais-la
nave et ose (Journal, I, 99, 11mai 1824). There is little evidence later in
his writings, however, to suggest that he felt that his painting was lacking
in expressiveness.
In the obituary article it suits Baudelaires poetic purpose to stress that
Delacroixs remarkable ability to translate the impalpable is not depend-
ent upon technical qualities alone but has its roots in a frustrated literary
impulse. His final tribute to the painter places him firmly in the pantheon of
great poets and writers; the effect of his death is compared to the dpression
dme caused by the deaths of Chateaubriand, Balzac and Vigny (OVD,
769). Delacroix is presented as a man most at home in the company of
poets and musicians:
Il tait trop homme du monde pour ne pas mpriser le monde; et les efforts quil y
dpensait pour ntre pas trop visiblement lui-mme le poussaient naturellement
prfrer notre socit. Notre ne veut pas seulement impliquer lhumble auteur qui crit
ces lignes, mais aussi quelques autres, jeunes ou vieux, journalistes, potes, musiciens,
auprs desquels il pouvait librement se dtendre et sabandonner. (OVD, 761)15
While Delacroixs links with Chopin are well known, it is likely that, as
we have already noted, his acquaintance with Baudelaire was limited. Yet
in 1863 Baudelaire (far from humbly) suggests that there was not only a
close friendship but also marked similarities between himself and the artist:
admiring Delacroixs taste for writers such as Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau
and Montesquieu, he compares the artist to un pote he knows, dune
15 Baudelaire uses the appellation homme du monde to describe Guys in Le Peintre de

la vie moderne to mean that unlike the artist who closets himself away from others,
il sintresse au monde entier (PV, 689).
nature toujours orageuse et vibrante, quun vers de Malherbe, symtrique

et carr de mlodie, jette dans de longues extases (OVD, 754). The impli-
cation of this is clear: in the same way that he wrote of Wagners music
il me semblait que cette musique tait la mienne (Corr. I, 673, 17fvrier
1860), and that Poe had written des PHRASES penses par moi (Corr.
I, 386, 20juin 1864), it becomes increasingly important to Baudelaire to
suggest that he and Delacroix are fundamentally two sides of the same
coin. Baudelaire had always maintained that what contributed to and
even defined Delacroixs particular genius was his ability to integrate into
his painting elements more usually associated with other arts. This places
the artist at the forefront of artistic innovation and achievement in his
century; for, as Baudelaire suggests, the ability to evoke music or literature
that Delacroixs paintings possess is not simply a by-product of the artistic
process, but is rather an element that is fundamental to his art. La peinture
nest intressante que par la couleur et par la forme (S46, 474) Baudelaire
observed in the Salon de 1846 and almost twenty years later he has not
changed his mind: Delacroix achieves his extraordinary effects, as we recall,
sans autres moyens que le contour et la couleur (OVD, 744). One differ-
ence between 1846 and his later articles is that he no longer considers the
influence of other arts on painting as necessarily a bad thing: the arts can,
rather, lend each other des forces nouvelles. This is nothing to do with
introducing novelty or bastardizing one art with elements of another; in
the Salon de 1859 Baudelaire is deeply scornful of modern artists who wish
to introduce clever wordplay and des moyens trangers lart (S59, 616).
Delacroix is first and foremost a painter, and it is his excellence in that art,
along with his imagination, which allows him intuitively to understand
and to translate the essence of literature and music into his work.
The Poet as Painter: Hugo and Gautier
Modern poetry, Baudelaire wrote in 1861 introducing the collection of

articles Rflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains, had also come
to represent un tat mixte and to incorporate into itself elements not
traditionally associated with it, and this was a positive development: La
192 Chapter 5
posie moderne tient la fois de la peinture, de la musique, de la statuaire,

de lart arabesque, de la philosophie railleuse, de lesprit analytique, et, si
heureusement, si habilement agence quelle soit, elle se prsente avec des
signes visibles dune subtilit emprunte divers arts (RQC, 167). One poet
whose work seemed particularly to reflect this new tendency for Baudelaire
was Victor Hugo. This poet, towards whom the critic was notoriously
ambivalent, perhaps, as Butor suggests, because it is resulted from une
admiration qui voudrait tre plus complte,16 is described unequivocally
in 1861 as, like Wagner or Delacroix, a supreme translator:
Le vers de Victor Hugo sait traduire pour lme humaine non seulement les plaisirs
les plus directs quelle tire de la nature visible, mais encore les sensations les plus
fugitives, les plus compliques, les plus morales (je dis exprs sensations morales)
qui nous sont transmises par ltre visible, par la nature inanime, ou dite inanime.
(RQC, 132)
Baudelaire explores at some length the idea of Hugos capacity to express

what the former calls the plusieurs tats simultans of nature (RQC, 132);
to do this, the poet seems to employ elements outside the range of poetry, as
Delacroix did in painting: La musique des vers de Victor Hugo sadapte aux
profondes harmonies de la nature; sculpteur, il dcoupe dans ses strophes la
forme inoubliable des choses; peintre, il les illumine de leur couleur propre
(RQC, 132). Although this description could be seen as featuring the sort
of hyperbole a poet like Hugo tended to attract, it is not a matter of chance
that Baudelaire persists in the metaphor of this poet as painter, comparing
him, as a peintre universel, to Rubens, Veronese, Velasquez and Delacroix,
and capable, like them, of
tout peindre [] depuis le visible jusqu linvisi-
ble (RQC, 135). Earlier references to Hugo as a painter were less flattering:
Trop matriel, trop attentif aux superficies de la nature, M.Victor Hugo
est devenu un peintre en posie; Delacroix, toujours respectueux de son
idal, est souvent, son insu, un pote en peinture (S46, 432). However,
by 1861, Baudelaire has changed his mind and singles out Hugos descriptive
talents for special attention:
16 Butor, p.77.
La transparence de latmosphre, la coupole du ciel, la figure de larbre, le regard de

lanimal, la silhouette de la maison sont peints en ses livres par le pinceau du paysagiste
consomm. En tout il met la palpitation de la vie. Sil peint la mer, aucune marine
ngalera les siennes. (RQC, 135)
On one level, Baudelaire is making the conventional link between poet

and painter because of the vividness of Hugos imagery. In his fascination
with Hugos imagery, it is impossible to ignore Baudelaires own preoccu-
pations as a poet and art critic: Ainsi est-il emport irrsistiblement vers
tout symbole de linfini, la mer, le ciel (RQC, 135) could apply to himself
as much as to Hugo. However, although Baudelaire goes on to state his
conviction that this poet is also a peintre de genre and a peintre dhistoire,
by concentrating on this poets imagery of natural phenomena Baudelaire,
almost despite himself, transforms Hugo into a landscapist in poetry.
Throughout the essay on Hugo Baudelaire underlines his belief that
the poet is the quintessential translator: Or quest-ce quun pote (je
prends le mot dans son acception la plus large), si ce nest un traducteur,
un dchiffreur? (RQC, 133) Only the poet can read the symbols of the
world and translate their spiritual meanings for the understanding of others.
Baudelaire does not limit his definition of poet to the written word, and it
is clear from his writings on Delacroix, Wagner, Poe and Guys that these
are all translators of the spiritual and the invisible. It is also true that at
this time Baudelaire specifically characterizes the poets verbal means, his
use of metaphor, analogy and epithets, as those best suited to the task of
translation. In 1859 Baudelaire had celebrated the foremost exponent of
poetry, Gautier, for skills that echo his own:
Manier savamment une langue, cest pratiquer une espce de sorcellerie vocatoire.
Cest alors que la couleur parle, comme une voix profonde et vibrante; que les monu-
ments se dressent et font saillie sur lespace profond; que les animaux et les plantes,
reprsentants du laid et du mal, articulent leur grimace non quivoque; que le parfum
provoque la pense et le souvenir correspondants; que la passion murmure ou rugit
son langage ternellement semblable. (TG, 117118)
Baudelaire had written in the Fuses de la langue et de lcriture, prises

comme oprations magiques, sorcellerie vocatoire (F, I, 658), and of laride
194 Chapter 5
grammaire in Le Pome du hachisch becoming une sorcellerie vocatoire

(PH, 431) when seen through a haze of opium. In the Exposition universelle
(1855), la peinture est une vocation, une opration magique (EU55, 580)
and that Delacroixs painting comme des sorciers et les magntiseurs, pro-
jette sa pense distance (EU55, 595). Verbal language and the language of
colour have a particular affinity; both are governed by exact rules, both are
precise in their effect once the poet or colourist is familiar with these rules
and both are a type of sorcellerie vocatoire that can elevate the mind into
an ultra-perceptive state analogous with that induced by opium. Baudelaire
celebrates Gautiers linguistic exactitude in this essay: Il y a dans le style
de Thophile Gautier une justesse qui ravit, qui tonne, et qui fait songer
ces miracles produits dans le jeu par une profonde science mathmatique
(TG, 118). Two years later Baudelaire will write:
Chez des excellents potes, il ny a pas de mtaphore, de comparaison ou dpithte qui
ne soit dune adaptation mathmatiquement exacte dans la circonstance actuelle, parce
que ces comparaisons, ces mtaphores et ces pithtes sont puises dans linpuisable
fonds de luniverselle analogie, et quelles ne peuvent tre puises ailleurs. (RQC,
133)
Baudelaires emphasis on the mathematical exactness of language cannot

help but remind us of his words on colour, lart du coloriste tient videm-
ment par de certains cts aux mathmatiques et la musique (S59, 625)
which in turn echoes his assertion that la phrase potique peut imiter (et
par l elle touche lart musical et la science mathmatique) la ligne hori-
zontale, la ligne droite ascendante, la ligne droite descendante (PP, I, 183).
Evocativeness and the restraints imposed by rules are presented as mutually
enhancing. It is significant that in 1861 Baudelaire returns to the theories of
Charles Fourier who had, after all, coined the phrase luniverselle analogie,
in order to criticize them for lacking the mathematical rigour of poetry:
Fourier est venu un jour, trop pompeusement, nous rvler les mystres
de lanalogie. Je ne nie pas la valeur de quelques-unes de ses minutieuses
dcouvertes, bien que je croie que son cerveau tait trop pris dexactitude
matrielle pour ne pas commettre derreurs et pour atteindre demble
la certitude morale de lintuition (RQC, 132). Baudelaire makes it clear
that he now rejects the socialists thoughts on analogy, maintaining that
this is the preserve of poets alone. With his claim to be able to translate
almost all the manifestations of nature and to present their meanings in
a readily accessible form, Fourier is at once too ambitious and too simple.
It is worth noting that an important part of Baudelaires greater admira-
tion for the writings of Swedenborg and Lavater undoubtedly lies in the
limits which they set themselves: Lavater, limitant au visage de lhomme
la dmonstration de luniverselle vrit, nous avait traduit le sens spirituel
du contour, de la forme, de la dimension. (RQC, 133) It is important for
Baudelaire that both language and colour refuse to yield the all secrets of
their magic, which is a fitting response, he feels, to the symbolic mystery
of the world. Hence his approval of Hugo for his ability to leave some
symbols untranslated; allowing the obscurity which is central to many
things to remain intact in his work: Non seulement il exprime nette-
ment, il traduit littralement la lettre nette et claire; mais il exprime, avec
lobscurit indispensable, ce qui est obscur et confusment rvl (RQC,
132). Like the symbolic meanings which can be derived from certain col-
ours, Baudelaire wishes to leave certain matters untranslated and poetry
is possibly the best form for this.
The Novelist as Etcher: Balzac
Another evocation of the littrateur as artist in the 1859 article on Thophile

Gautier is Baudelaires analysis ofBalzacs raising of the roman de murs (ce
genre roturier) to sublime status. His allusions to the author are, of course,
frequent throughout his work but it is significant that it is in the context
of an article about a poet that Baudelaire chooses to depict Balzacs work
in predominantly visual terms, as poetry and art are particularly connected
for him at this time. Toutes ses fictions sont aussi profondment colores
que les rves, Baudelaire writes of the author of the Comdie humaine, and
describes how Balzacs skill is to revtir, coup sr, de lumire et de pourpre
la pure trivialit (TG, 120). However, it is not in terms of a colourist that
Baudelaire depicts the novelist, but as a consummate etcher:
196 Chapter 5
Et comme tous les tres du monde extrieur soffraient lil de son esprit avec un
relief puissant et une grimace saisissante, il a fait se convulser ses figures; il a noirci
leurs ombres et illumin leurs lumires. Son got prodigieux du dtail, qui tient
une ambition immodre de tout voir, de tout faire voir, de tout deviner, de tout
faire deviner, lobligeait dailleurs a marquer avec plus de force les lignes principales,
pour sauver la perspective de lensemble. Il me fait quelquefois penser ces aquafor-
tistes qui ne sont jamais contents de la morsure, et qui transforment en ravines les
corchures principlaes de la planche. De cette tonnante disposition naturelle sont
rsultes des merveilles. (TG, 120)
Baudelaires linking ofBalzac with the aquafortiste is specific and detailed;

he knew enough about the practice to make his description an accurate
one. It is with a particular type of etching that Balzac is identified, one
characterized by precision and impact rather than deftness and immediacy.
Baudelaire describes Balzac as being like the etcher who allows the acid to
bite deeply into the plate (Baudelaire here showing his familiarity with the
technique involved), causing a dramatic effect. Balzacs use of detail and
complexity in his fiction requires strong lines and heightened characteriza-
tion in order to maintain the unity of the whole and reflects the individual
nature of his particular view of the external world. It is no coincidence
that the language Baudelaire uses to describe Balzacs writings echoes the
stark terms in which he had evoked, some years previously, the etchings
of Daumier. As I noted in Chapter 4, it is clear that part of Daumiers
attraction for Baudelaire lay in the drama of black and white, their evoca-
tive juxtaposition as powerful as that of red and green. In order to give his
literary figures life, Balzac a noirci leurs ombres et illumin leurs lumires
in a comparable fashion; and Baudelaire is fascinated by such a polariza-
tion. Where Hugo was perceived as possessing the ability to describe the
things of nature in a vivid and visually realizable way, Balzacs view of the
world is presented as a predominantly visionary one. Baudelaire portrays
this author as sharing the particular vision of a certain type of artist: Balzac
thinks like an etcher.
The art of etching was enjoying a revival at the time, and Baudelaires
enthusiasm for it provides an important insight, both into his hopes for it
as part of a new aesthetic of art and his own preoccupation with the con-
nections between the two disciplines of art and literature. Baudelaire owned
etchings by Meryon, Jongkind and Legros and had studied the technique
closely, and in his 1862 essay Peintres et aquafortistes he explores how the
art form fits into his conception of modern art. In an earlier version of this
article, LEau-forte est la mode, also written in 1862, Baudelaire notes:
Parmi les diffrentes expressions de lart plastique, leau-forte est celle qui
se rapproche le plus de lexpression littraire et qui est le mieux faite pour
trahir lhomme spontan (OCII, 736), and he develops this in the defini-
tive version of the article by describing etching as un genre et une mthode
dexpression qui sont, dans leur pleine russite, la traduction la plus nette
possible du caractre de lartiste (PA, 739). Etching is presented as having a
particular affinity with literature because of its ability to express the artists
character, an association that was also made by several other writers of the
time, including Gautier, Castagnary and Thor. The nineteenth-century
etching may have become so closely associated with literature because
etchings often appeared as illustrations for a text. David Scott suggests
that etchings appeal to writers and poets might be based on its existing
outside the formal conventions of painting and the fact that it embodies
within it the evocative element of surprise:
[] neither as finished nor as self-conscious as the painting proper, [the etched
image] retained a kind of fortuitous availability which, as it caught the poets eye at
the turn of a page, sometimes enabled it to release itself from its immediate context
and offer itself up in all its bizarre autonomy to the poets imagination. It is this
striking, graphic quality of the etched image especially if heightened by the ironic,
erotic or macabre that most appealed to Baudelaire.17
It is an art that, once the technique has been mastered, was presented by
Baudelaire as providing all the benefits (along with the dangers) of a fluent
translation of the artists inner vision. It is significant that Baudelaire portays
the etchers mind as already containing within it toutes les arabesques de
la fantaisie, toutes les hachures du caprice (PA, 739); the imaginative and
the physical processes are presented as so closely merged that they appear
17 In Baudelaires Transposition dart Poetry, Proceeds of the Royal Irish Academy, 80c
(December 1980), pp.251262, p.259.
198 Chapter 5
to be almost synonymous. As Michle Hannoosh observes, this also sug-

gests the work of art existing in [the artists] mind18 already, and which
only requires the skills of an acquired technique for it to take shape. For
Baudelaire, the etching, like colour, was able to reflect the workings of the
imagination in a particularly striking way once the technique was mastered
and its expressive powers understood.
Poe Between Delacroix and Ingres
In his linking ofBalzac and Daumier, like his association ofDelacroix and
Weber, Baudelaires wish is not just to make general connections between
the arts but to draw specific analogies between writer and artist, and artist
and musician. In 1855 he had noted: je ne connais pas de problme plus
confondant pour le pdantisme et le philosophisme que de savoir en vertu
de quelle loi les artistes les plus opposs par leur mthode voquent les
mmes ides et agitent en nous des sentiments analogues (EU55, 580).
Artistes in this context could be referring to painters alone but in the light
ofBaudelaires interest in translation in his later essays we can see how this
remark expresses his belief that the work of musicians, artists, poets and
writers can embody hidden connections. Their ability to have elements in
common lies in the manner of sensations that a great work of art is capable
of evoking in the spectator or auditor; and so it is principally the specta-
tors perception of the various arts that endows them with the potential to
integrate with one another. Baudelaires role as critic and translator allows
him to use his imaginative involvement in each art to bridge the technical
differences that separate them. Unlike Delacroix, who was occasionally
frustrated by his inarticulacy in written language, Baudelaire does not
focus on the limitations of any one medium or imply that any artist is
confined by his art. Instead, the evidence of technical excellence guided
by the imagination enables each art to have the potential to be translated
into another language. Given Baudelaires perception of certain artists as
18 Michle Hannoosh, Etching and Modern Art, p.51.

mirror images of himself, it is perhaps not surprising that he should wish

to suggest that they might bear comparisons with one another. What is
particularly interesting, however, in the case of the writer with whom he is
most enduringly associated, Edgar Allan Poe, is that although Baudelaire
strove to link his stories to an artist he revered, Delacroix, he could not
entirely avoid the connections of Poe to an artist whose style of painting
by that time he had come to detest: Ingres.
In the Salon de 1859 Baudelaire had emphasized the central power
of colour as its capacity not only to suggest but to realize the atmosphere
the painter wishes to convey: Comme un rve est plac dans une atmos-
phre qui lui est propre, de mme une conception, devenue composition,
a besoin de se mouvoir dans un milieu color qui lui soit particulier (S59,
625). A good painting is imbued with its own particular colour and its
meaning can be conveyed in this abstract way. Given the emphasis that he
places on colours atmosphere, it is not surprising that Baudelaire should
use a very similar idea to explain why Poes stories had such a particular
potency for him. In a note in his Fuses Baudelaire writes of Les milieux, les
atmosphres, dont tout un rcit doit tre tremp. (Voir Usher et en rfrer
aux sensations profondes du hachisch et de lopium) (F, OCI, 655). Poes
The Fall of the House ofUsher is a particularly interesting attempt on Poes
part to explore the links between an environment and those who inhabit
it: in Baudelaires translation the narrator describes the maison Usher as
an appellation usite parmi les paysans, et qui semblait, dans leur esprit,
enfermer la famille et lhabitation de famille.19 In the storys opening para-
graph the narrator seems to be enclosed by the oppressive view of the house
and its surroundings and its reflected double in the dark waters of the
nearby tarn. But it was not only this particular story which Baudelaire had
in mind in the second version of the biographical essay Edgar Poe, sa vie
et ses uvres, published in March 1856 as the introduction to the Histoires
extraordinaires, when he describes, in very similar terms to the Fuses note,
the importance of the defining atmosphere in the work of Poe:
19 La Chute de la maison Usher, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires par Edgar Poe,

traduit par Charles Baudelaire, uvres compltes, Crpet, pp.91116, p.94.
200 Chapter 5
Les fonds et les accessoires y sont appropris aux sentiments des personnages. Solitude
de la nature ou agitation des villes, tout y est dcrit nerveusement et fantastiquement.
Comme notre Eugne Delacroix, qui a lev son art la hauteur de la grande posie,
Edgar Poe aime agiter ses figures sur des fonds violtres et verdtres o se rvlent
la phosphorescence de la pourriture et la senteur de lorage. La nature dite inanime
participe de la nature des tres vivants, et, comme eux, frissonne dun frisson surna-
turel et galvanique. (EP2, 317318)
Baudelaire takes the particular combination of colours that was so evoca-

tive for him in the painting of Delacroix (red and green) and transposes
it metaphorically into the stories of Poe. Like Wagners music, the mood
that Poes stories suggest to Baudelaire is evoked in visual terms; here,
however, the terms are made even more specific by their being linked to
the work of a particular artist. He suggests that the qualities that he had
always revered in Delacroixs painting find their literary correlation in the
writings ofPoe. Evidently Baudelaire wished to draw a comparison between
the painter whom he had long championed, and who now enjoyed wider
recognition, and the still relatively unknown writer whose stories he had
already spent several years translating and now wished to introduce to
France with this essay.
There was one person in particular whom he wished to introduce to
Poes stories and this was Delacroix himself. Baudelaire gave the artist a
copy of the book in 1856, showing that there was still a polite connection
between the two men. It was a gift and a comparison that Delacroix
evidently appreciated. Three separate entries in Delacroixs Journal testify
to his growing interest in Poes writing as he slowly read the book, and show
that he took seriously Baudelaires suggestion of their being similarities
between himself and the writer. The simple fact that Delacroix responded,
even if only in private, to Baudelaires linking of his art with Poes stories
is astonishing, because, as Michle Hannoosh reminds us, Despite the
widely held opinion that Delacroix did not appreciate the connection (or
Baudelaires criticism in general), this is the only place in the entire diary
in which he reflects at any length upon a critics view of himself.20 In the

first entry, dated the 27th of March 1856, Delacroix describes taking the
book to the country with him, in the second he writes about his not very
positive impressions ofPoe (Je conois la rigueur une dbauche du genre
de celle-l, mais tous ces contes sont sur le mme ton) (Journal, 27mars
1856, II, p.437) and in the third and most interesting entry, Delacroix
considers at some length Baudelaires view that he, Delacroix, and Poe are
linked by a common approach:
Cette lecture rveille en moi ce sens du mystrieux qui me proccupait davantage
autrefois dans ma peinture, et qui a t, je crois, dtourn par mes travaux sur place,
sujets allgoriques etc, etc. Baudelaire dit dans sa prface que je rappelle en peinture
ce sentiment didal si singulier et se [sic] plaisant dans le terrible. Il a raison: mais
lespce de dcousu et lincomprhensible qui se mle ses conceptions ne va pas
mon esprit. (Journal, 30mai 1856, II, pp.4501)
It is interesting to note that Delacroix felt Baudelaire was at least partly right,
in that his earlier paintings did indeed contain something of Poes senti-
ment si singulier et si plaisant dans le terrible, but this did not apply to his
more recent large-scale mural and ceiling paintings (the travaux sur place
that he was now involved in). This indicates that even by 1856 Baudelaire
was already feeling nostalgic about the old, Romantic Delacroix, and
Poes stories might have reminded him of the more mysterious and intense
paintings such as La Mort de Sardanapale and the Mede furieuse, which
Baudelaire first encountered through Gautiers vivid verbal transpositions.
Delacroix shared Baudelaires interest in connections among the different
arts, as his conversations with Chopin and others testify; and, as Hannoosh
remarks, Baudelaires unusual association accomplished what Delacroix
demanded of criticism generally: bringing together analogous artists to
stimulate the readers own critical imagination, provoking a consideration
of the specific talent of each.21 We recall that Delacroixs irritation with
Gautiers review of the 1855 exhibition was based on the latters failure to
20 Michle Hannoosh, Painting and the Journal of Eugne Delacroix (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1995), p.114.
21 Ibid., p.114.
202 Chapter 5
fulfil his critical role properly rather than on antipathy to that critics lit-
erary style (see Chapter 1, pp.7576); it seems that Baudelaire succeeded
in stimulating his interest in a previously unexplored literary connection,
and shows the shared interest in analogies among the arts that artists and
writers were interested in exploring at the time.
Since Baudelaire viewed his own writings on art as a form of transla-
tion, it was natural that he also believed that his essays helped to give a
voice to Delacroix. In the case of Poe, of course, Baudelaire quite liter-
ally gave him his French voice, and from this it was a small step to seek to
establish common features in the writer and painter who had influenced
him most, and who might be said to correspond through him. Another
artistic connection to Poe, one that Baudelaire seemed to have preferred
to ignore, was that of Ingres. In the first version of the biographical study
of Poe of 1852 Baudelaire describes the supernatural atmosphere evoked
by Poes literature:
On dirait quil cherche appliquer la littrature les procds de la philosophie,

et la philosophie la mthode de lalgbre. Dans cette incessante ascension vers
linfini, on perd un peu lhaleine. Lair est rarefi dans cette littrature comme dans
un laboratoire. On y contemple sans cesse la glorification de la volont sappliquant
linduction et lanalyse. (EP1, 283284)
There is no mention ofDelacroix here, and Baudelaire does not link Poes
stories with any type of red or green. The words he chooses, and the ideas
which Poe suggests to him, do not suggest the work of Delacroix at all
in fact, but are reminiscent instead of his description of le sanctuaire
attribu aux uvres de M Ingres, the room where the paintings of Ingres
were exhibited at the Exposition universelle of 1855. Baudelaire described
the atmosphere there, as we recall, as one which fait penser vaguement,
involontairement, aux dfaillances causes par lair rarefi, par latmosphre
dun laboratoire de chimie (EU55, 585). Baudelaire began the second version
of the article on Poe in the last months of 1855, not long after completing his
articles on the Universal Exhibition and his comments on Ingres must still
have been fresh in his mind. In the rewritten article (altering the emphasis
of the first version) Baudelaire portrays Poe primarily as a poet who shares
his own creative concerns, but he may have realized that, with its emphasis
on paleness, sickly air and the glorification of the will, his earlier descrip-
tion of the atmosphere that Poe deploys in his stories was very similar to
his recent condemnation of the unhealthy aura ofIngres colour. Hence it
would have been quite simple for him to change a predominantly colour-
less atmosphere to one characterized by the interplay of red and green. His
subsequent emphasis on Delacroix as Poes spiritual partner seems calculated
to deflect any comparison of Poe with Ingres, and indeed the essay is the
only one in which Baudelaire represents Delacroixs backgrounds in this
way. As David Kelley puts it, the atmosphere ofDelacroixs paintings, na
rien de rarefi for Baudelaire; au contraire, cest un air qui est paissi et
illumin par les reflets du feu et du sang.22 Baudelaires interpretation of
Poe seems to have had an influence on his view ofDelacroix, if only in the
context of this article, with the suffix -tre added to the colour adjectives
contributing to the eeriness of the scene. Rather than believe that two artists
working in their different media might appeal to him for quite different
reasons, Baudelaire prefers to rewrite his view of Delacroix in order to
bring about a seemingly natural translation between his favourite writer
and his favourite painter. Interestingly, his experiment worked, and drew
the approval of the painter himself.
As Kelley observes, que Baudelaire a tent dtablir un rapprochement
entre Delacroix et Poe, cela indique quel point il cherchait runir dans
une mme dfinition ses divers gots et ses diverses ides.23 In later life
Baudelaire clearly wished to present his aesthetics as a unified whole; in
1865, looking for an editor for his critical essays, he writes to Julien Lemer
bien que ces articles, inconnus pour la plupart, aient paru de trs longs
intervalles, ils sont relis entre eux par une pense unique et systmatique
(Corr. II, 442, 3fvrier 1865). The evidence shows that Baudelaire was far
from systematic in his approach but changed and developed his ideas over
the years. On the question of affinities among the arts there is a particularly
22 David Kelley, Delacroix, Ingres et Poe. Valeurs picturales et valeurs littraires dans
luvre critique de Baudelaire, Revue dHistoire littraire de la France, 71/ 4 (juillet
aot 1971), pp.606614, p.607.
23 Ibid., p.614.
204 Chapter 5
marked change of attitude. In the Salon de 1846 Baudelaire resisted what

he saw as the critical temptation to establish comparisons among poets
and painters:
Dans la malheureuse poque de rvolution on a souvent compar Eugne Delacroix

Victor Hugo. On avait le pote romantique, il fallait le peintre. Cette ncessit
de trouver tout prix des pendants et des analogues dans les diffrents arts amne
souvent dtranges bvues, et celle-ci prouve encore combien lon sentendait peu.
(S46, 430)
By the 1850s, however, as we have seen, Baudelaire was actively seeking

to harmonize the different parts of himself, and presented these artists
as extensions of himself as a poet, or at any rate sharing his creative con-
cerns. Like the student of physiognomy that he was, Baudelaire felt bound
to maintain that there was a harmonie native (S46, 456) among all the
different parts of himself in music, art, poetry and literature. His smooth-
ing over of any major disparities is all the more significant in the light of
the importance that he places upon translation at the time. The fact that
the values that he places upon a writer and an artist are quite dissimilar
does not present him with an impediment to this process.
Guys and Poe
Baudelaire could not have known at the time of writing his articles on Poe
that he would discover in another artist an even closer analogy with the
writer. He did not encounter the work ofConstantin Guys until 1859; the
artist is mentioned in Baudelaires letter to Poulet-Malassis in December
of that year, when he describes how he has begun to collect Guys draw-
ings and to think about writing about him.24 Early in Le Peintre de la vie
moderne of 1863 Baudelaire seeks to put Guys sketches of society into a
respectable artistic, but also literary, context, and suggests that le gnie
24 See Corr. I, 626627, 13dcembre 1859.

de lartiste peintre de murs est un gnie dune nature mixte, cest--dire

o il entre une partie desprit littraire (PV, 687). One readable part of
Guys genius as a draughtsman was the sheer amount of information, eco-
nomically expressed, contained within the sketches that Guys had rapidly
executed on the battlefield; Baudelaire describes seeing une masse con-
sidrable de ces dessins improviss sur les lieux mmes, et jai pu lire ainsi
un compte rendu minutieux et journalier de la campagne de Crime, bien
prfrable tout autre (PV, 689). Baudelaire is careful to emphasize the
differences between Guys and other painters of battle scenes by stating
that while the popular Horace Vernet, an artist he despised, is a vritable
gazetier, Guys is a peintre essentiel (PV, 701) who happens to use the
sketch to document the French armys foreign campaigns. The idea ofGuys
drawings being capable of being read has an added significance when it is
seen in conjunction with the remark Baudelaire makes in the following
paragraph, in which he describes Poe as a painter: Vous souvenez-vous
dun tableau (en vrit, cest un tableau!) crit par la plus puissante plume
de cette poque, et qui a pour titre LHomme des foules? (PV, 689) Once
again Baudelaire actively seeks the characteristics of one art in another,
quite different creative form. There were important differences; Guys
art suggests reading primarily because his drawings on the battlefield dis-
seminate knowledge, while Poes story resembles a painting because it has
the immediacy and dramatic unity of a picture (moreover, es lsst sich
nicht lesen, the phrase with which Poe opens and closes the story).25 As
Sima Godfrey puts it, Poes story ends in the frustration of unreadability;
the convalescent fails to produce a lgende for his picture, other than the
lgende of the impossibility of reading the objective world.26 Reading in
this context also means understanding, and the ceaseless wandering of
the man of the crowd presents a mystery to the narrator that cannot be
interpreted or read by himself or the assumed prospective reader of the
25 LHomme des foules, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires par Edgar Poe, traduit par
Charles Baudelaire, uvres compltes, Crpet, pp.5467, pp.54, 67.
26 Sima Godfrey, Baudelaires Windows, LEsprit Crateur, 22 (Winter 1982), pp.83100,
p.96.
206 Chapter 5
story. There is no narrative progression for the man of the crowd, only the
fate of eternally re-enacting the same frenzied quest, and this sense of the
present means that this storys theme could be represented visually as an
etching. The etching or drawings immediacy and economy of expression
are implicitly likened to that of the short story.
In fact, Baudelaire alludes to the story The Man of the Crowd pri-
marily not to illustrate how painting and literature can exchange roles, but
to place Guys within Poes picture-tale as the narrator of the story. Guys
resembles Poes febrile protagonist who endlessly pursues a mysterious
stranger because he too, in Baudelaires view, was a form of spiritual con-
valescent who was governed by an insatiable curiosity to absorb what he
sees around him: Le convalescent jouit au plus haut degr, comme lenfant,
de la facult de sintresser vivement aux choses, mme les plus triviales en
apparence (PV, 690), Baudelaire observes. In 1856 Baudelaire had noted
that no-one was better than Poe at describing les ardeurs de curiosit de
convalescence (EP2, 317), and that Poe est lcrivain des nerfs, et mme
de quelque chose de plus, et le meilleur que je connaisse (EP2, 316). For
Baudelaire, Guys is the painter of nerves, and his drawings and paintings
project a comparable highly charged engagement with the world. The
state of convalescence represents a condition whereby ordinary perception
becomes exaggerated and intense, and this is an important metaphor in
Le Peintre de la vie moderne to suggest how Guys heightened imagination
enables him to experience external stimulii with unusual immediacy and
expressiveness. Unlike Poes protaganist, the painter is able to to translate
the story he sees and to convey his experiences into art.
Throughout his criticism, as well as his poetry, Baudelaire highlights
the state of increased awareness as one that is fundamental to the artistic
process for both the artist and the spectator/auditor/reader. This condi-
tion represents a heightened interaction between the imagination and the
world, and it is necessary for the artist to possess this faculty in order to be
able to recreate that intense state in his art and convey it to the spectator.
Without this heightened state, there would be no means of translating the
unseen essence of things, no capacity on the part of the artist to connect
the contingent elements of the world into a unified whole and no ability
on the part of the spectator to re-experience the artists vision. Whether it
is related to the dream or drug-induced hyperaesthesia, this intense mental

condition is essential for the translation to be realized. In the following
section I will consider some examples of this.
The Dream, Intoxication and Memory
In the Salon de 1859 Baudelaire summed up Delacroixs spcialit by using

the metaphor of the dream: Cest linfini dans le fini. Cest le rve! et je
nentends pas par ce mot les capharnams de la nuit, mais la vision produite
par une intense mditation, ou, dans les cerveaux moins fertiles, par un
excitant artificiel. En un mot, Eugne Delacroix peint surtout lme dans
ses belle heures (S59, 637). Delacroix has become for Baudelaire primarily a
visionary artist who has the power to suggest laspect tonnant des choses
(S59, 636) and the dream is not just a component of the picture but its
source, providing the metaphorical couleur originelle (S59, 625) that the
painter must translate into physical terms. A painting must be the repre-
sentation of the artists inner world: fidle et gal au rve qui la enfant
(S59, 626) and one part of Baudelaires despair concerning the modern
artist is based on his conviction that such an artist is unlikely even to use
words to say anything qui fasse penser ou rver (S59, 611), let alone pro-
duce such a painting. Closely related to the dream-state for Baudelaire is
the metaphor of intoxication that links such disparate artists as Delacroix,
Guys, Boudin, Wagner and Poe. Like the dream, the imagery of drugs and
potent wines is used to suggest, on the one hand, the magical, supernatural
side of life that these artists translate into their work and on the other, the
effect of their work, whereby the spectators imagination is propelled into
a state of heightened sensitivity. For Baudelaire, these artists, musicians and
writers distil the essence of the opium or hashish experience and this has
a particularly potent effect on similarly poetic souls, or un esprit cultiv,
exerc aux tudes de la forme et de la couleur (PH, 429), as he describes
himelf in Le Pome du hachisch. The formula could easily be reversed; as
208 Chapter 5
a cultivated spirit trained in the use of intoxicants, Baudelaire felt all the
more susceptible to the heady effects of the arts.
In the Le Pome du hachisch of 1860 Baudelaire develops several of the
themes touched upon in his Du vin et du hachisch of 1851, in particular the
extraordinary effects which the hallucinogenic drug has on sense percep-
tions. The high point of the process of intoxication, for Baudelaire, comes
when the senses become preternaturally acute: Les sons se revtent de
couleurs, et les couleurs contiennent une musique (PH, 419). This hyper-
aesthesia is closely followed by sensory confusion of the most stimulating
kind; the hallucinations produced prompt an imaginative involvement with
the external world which in a normal mental state is rarely possible. Music
and colour appear to exchange their properties, allowing the drug-taker to
experience both sensations anew. In 1860 Baudelaire points out that the
drug only mimics the hypersensitivity that the poetic, creative imagination
is capable of producing naturally. As Richard Burton suggests,
[] his choice of language strongly suggests that there is no qualitative difference

between the way in which the brain functions under the influence of drugs and the
explosive delivery of long gestating memories, images and associations which he
clearly experienced, [] so the associative powers of the drug-intoxicated brain, its
apparently limitless capacity to perceive all manner of analogies and correspondences
between disparate phenomena, its ability to allegorize even the minutest detail of
the world about it, are no more than artificially and perversely heightened forms of
the operations of the creative imagination itself. (Burtons emphasis)27
By the end ofLe Pome du hachisch Baudelaire rejects or, more poignantly,
claims to reject the uncontrollability of the drugs effects and the fact
that they are not ordered by the governing part of the imagination. The
drug contains no magical properties, nor does it aid the creative impulse:
[] admettons un instant que le hachisch donne, ou du moins augmente le
gnie; ils oublient quil est de la nature du hachisch de diminuer la volont, et
quainsi il accorde dun ct ce quil retire de lautre, cest--dire limagination
sans la facult den profiter (PH, 440). Opium and hashish temporarily
27 Burton, Baudelaire in 1859, p.173.

present the mind with a rich fund of analogies but simultaneously prevent
the poet from translating them into a meaningful whole.
In contrast, the source of stimulus to be found in art cannot be
exhausted; Baudelaire finds that he can return to and re-immerse himself
in that state of heightened sensations at will. He describes Poes stories as
containing toutes les magies du rve, tous les souvenirs de lopium (NNEP,
320); while Delacroixs paintings have the effect of un excitant artificiel
(S59, 637), and are la traduction de ces beaux jours de lesprit (EU55, 596),
a natural state of mind which is likened to the effects of opium. Boudins
painted sketches go to Baudelaires head like une boisson capiteuse ou
comme lloquence de lopium (S59, 666), and make him forget tempo-
rarily that he does not care for landscape painting. Of Wagners music
Baudelaire writes: Il semble parfois, en coutant cette musique ardent et
despotique, quon retrouve peintes sur le fond des tnbres, dchir par
la rverie, les vertigineuses conceptions de lopium (RW, 785). Similarly,
la saveur amre ou capiteuse du vin de la Vie (PV, 724) is concentrated
in Guys drawings. In the chapter Lartiste, homme du monde, homme
des foules et enfant of Le Peintre de la vie moderne Baudelaire describes
Guys permanent state of heightened sensitivity as being in itself a type of
inebriation, comparable to a childs natural gift for constantly perceiving
the world anew: Lenfant voit tout en nouveaut; il est toujours ivre. Rien
ne ressemble plus ce quon appelle linspiration, que la joie avec laquelle
lenfant absorbe la forme et la couleur (PV, 690).28 In Le Peintre de la vie
moderne Baudelaire describes Guys lucid perception of the world as result-
ing from the artists ability to resuscitate the memory of the childs vision
within him, which he combines with his analytical powers to form a har-
monious work of art: [] le gnie nest que lenfance retrouve volont,
lenfance doue maintenant, pour sexprimer, dorganes virils et de lesprit
analytique qui lui permet dordonner la somme de matriaux involontai-
rement amasse (PV, 690). The state of heightened perception, normally
28 Possibly Baudelaire is thinking of his own early memories of encountering art in

his fathers studio as well as the world around him; see Chapter 3, pp.126127, for a
discussion of this.
210 Chapter 5
experienced only in childhood and through intoxication, can be summoned

by the artist at will, and the impressions received will be ordered by the
artists analytical and synthesizing skills. Memory, like intoxication and the
dream, works on at least three levels for Baudelaire. In one sense it is the
equivalent of the dictionary, providing the raw material to the imagina-
tion; it also provides the means of filtering the elements of the dictionary
and unifying them into a meaningful whole; and thirdly, it provides a
bridge between the artist and the spectator. The great artists work will be
governed by memory as much as it is by the imagination, and these two
faculties are closely intertwined.
The process of creating such stimulating art is, however, not without its
dangers. Baudelaire accepts as inevitable the irony of the situation whereby
the writer is consumed and destroyed by his constant desire to regener-
ate his visions, and Poes death might have been caused by the dangerous
attempt to recover memories of heightened sensations; as Butor puts it, ce
nest point un volupt doubli que Poe cherchait dans les bouteilles, mais
bien au contraire le moyen de reprendre possession dun souvenir quon
voudrait lui faire perdre.29 In the Pome du hachisch Baudelaire warned
others of the dangers of the drug: Celui qui aura recours un poison pour
penser ne pourra bientt plus penser sans poison (PH, 440). In Poes case,
of course, the poison was alcohol, which in the 1851 article Baudelaire had
rather navely considered to be a boon to the artist as much as to the work-
ing man: Le vin exalte la volont, le hachisch lannihile [] Le vin est utile,
il produit des rsultats fructifiants. Le hachisch est inutile et dangereux
(VH, 397). Almost a decade later, Baudelaire avoids any such facile clas-
sifications, perhaps because of what he had learned about Poe, of whom
he wrote: livrognerie tait un moyen mnmonique, une mthode de
travail, mthode nergique et mortelle, mais approprie sa nature passion-
ne. Le pote avait appris boire, comme un littrateur soigneux sexerce
faire des cahiers de notes [] Une partie de ce qui fait aujourdhui notre
jouissance est ce qui la tu (EP2, 315). His own implied wish to reject any
such paradis doccasion (PH, 441) was sadly unsuccessful.
29 Butor, p.149.
Boudins sketches intoxicated Baudelaire, but he remained sober enough

to observe that these were not finished paintings, but only improvised stud-
ies. Boudin sait bien quil faut que tout cela devienne tableau par le moyen
de limpression potique rappele volont; et il na pas la prtention de
donner ses notes pour des tableaux (S59, 665), and Baudelaire chooses to
ignore the implications of the exhilaration that he himself nevertheless feels
for this unfinished art form.30 Although Boudins free improvisations are
linked to the great art ofDelacroix, Guys, Poe and Wagner by the metaphor
of intoxication, the very fact that they were sketches made Baudelaire feel
that he could not fully endorse them. As Hannoosh observes:
[] although they may thus approach the beautiful, they lack the controlling, restrain-
ing influence of art so prominent in these other artists, and thus run the risk, like all
intoxicants, of producing a mere paradis artificiel. They involve precisely the same
dangers, and the same poetic possibilities, as etching.31
Because etching allows the artist to recreate his fantasy on the metal plate
with such immediacy and clarity, any conceptual or technical weaknesses
on the etchers part will be all the more apparent. The types of art or writing
which allow the most imaginative freedom also offer the greatest number
of pitfalls. Even the artists subject matter can be dangerous; in the Salon de
1859 Baudelaire promotes peinture de fantaisie as a genre that can encapsulate
the artists imaginative aspirations but warns about its temptations:
Cest dans ce genre surtout quil faut choisir avec svrit; car la fantaisie est dautant
plus dangereuse quelle est plus facile et plus ouverte; dangereuse comme la posie
en prose, comme le roman, elle ressemble lamour quinspire une prostitue et qui
tombe bien vite dans la purilit ou dans la bassesse; dangereuse comme toute libert
absolue. (S59, 644)
In the same Salon, when his judgement of other landscapes was so harsh,
Baudelaire reminds his readers (and himself ) that Boudins seascapes are
only studies for finished paintings and must be assessed as such, although
30 See also Chapter 3, pp.120122.

31 Hannoosh, Etching and Modern Art, p.53.
212 Chapter 5
we note that this has the result of freeing him from some of his own
Academic reservations about what a painting should be. The difference
between Boudins sketches sur le vif and the finished paintings that might
result from them has for Baudelaire nothing to do with the polish of its
execution and everything to do with the operation of the poetic memory.
Memory as a guiding force in the artistic process is an important factor
throughout Baudelaires criticism, and in the later essays is represented by
the ordering function of the imagination. The artist should use his selective,
harmonizing skills rather than copy what he sees; this aesthetic memory
enables Delacroix to see beyond the contingent mass of nature and to re-
create from its diverse elements his own vision, which in its unity appeals
directly to the spectators imagination. As Arden Reed remarks, memory
functions in Baudelaire as the great defense against contingency,32 but
memory is also presented as intensifying emotions, the more effectively
to convey them through painting. Colours ability to think for itself , and
to transmit an impression which is quasi musicale (EU55, 595) is closely
linked to the artistic memory which serves to filter out the circumstantial
and the extraneous and to make lintimit du sujet (S46, 434) all the more
concentrated. Baudelaire sees the creative memory at work in all those art-
ists whom he admires most. In contrast to the detested but successful artist
of 1859 who paints ne pas ce quil rve, mais ce quil voit (S59, 619), Corot,
Daumier and Guys use their memory as an artistic tool to express their par-
ticular vision of their subject. Corots paintings ont le don particulier de
lunit, qui est un des besoins de la mmoire (S46, 482), Daumier has une
mmoire merveilleuse et quasi divine qui lui tient lieu de modle (QCF,
556) and Guys is like all great draughtsmen who dessinent daprs limage
crite dans leur cerveau et non daprs la nature (PV, 698). For all these
artists, when it comes to the definitive execution of their work, le modle
[leur] serait plutt un embarras quun secours (PV, 698); the proliferation
of details, each insisting on attention, only functions to interfere with the
clear transmission of the creative memory.
32 Arden Reed, Romantic Weather: The Climates ofColeridge and Baudelaire (Hanover:
Brown University Press/ University Press of New England, 1983), p.239.
The type of composition based principally on the operations of memory

is described in most detail in the chapter LArt mnmonique in Le Peintre
de la vie moderne. In a memorable phrase Baudelaire likens Guyss approach
to that of Corot, who was one of the few landscapists he still admired in
1859: Il nest pas superflu dobserver ici que beaucoup de gens ont accus
de barbarie tous les peintres dont le regard est synthtique et abrviateur,
par exemple M. Corot, qui sapplique tout dabord tracer les lignes prin-
cipales dun paysage, son ossature et sa physionomie (PV, 697698). For
Baudelaire, the fact that Guyss vision is equally abrviateur is important,
because it allows accuracy without losing vitality, and because the specta-
tor has to become involved imaginatively in the work of art, a feature that
consistently has attracted him to etching as a means of expression. Guys
uses his memory as a means of sifting through his sense impressions and
his ability as an artist is to translate these with such accuracy and economy
that the spectators imagination does the rest:
Ainsi, M.G., traduisant fidlement ses propres impressions, marque avec une nergie
instinctive les points culminants ou lumineux dun objet (ils peuvent tre culminants
ou lumineux au point de vue dramatique), ou ses principales caractristiques, quelque-
fois mme avec une exagration utile pour la mmoire humaine; et limagination du
spectateur, subissant son tour cette mnmonique si despotique, voit avec nettet
limpression enivrante. (PV, 698)
In a similar way to the active imaginative participation demanded by

Delacroixs paintings, the viewer becomes involved in the artistic process
and is affected (enivr), as Baudelaire puts it: Le spectateur est ici le tra-
ducteur dune traduction toujours claire et enivrante (PV, 698). Memorys
function is analogous to that of the ordering imagination, in that it selects
and transforms the raw material it has been presented with, and the synthe-
sis of creation and memory becomes increasingly important to Baudelaire.
Even though the emphasis is at first on Guys drawing style, this very soon
becomes indistinguishable from his use of colour. The mmoire rsurrec-
tioniste, vocatrice that spurs Guys on is married to un feu, une ivresse,
de crayon, de pinceau, ressemblant presque une fureur (PV, 699). Little
or no distinction is made between pencil and paintbrush; un feu, une
ivresse is balanced by de crayon, de pinceau and this reflects Baudelaires
214 Chapter 5
conviction that Guys uses tous les moyens dexpression to create his art.
There is something very familiar about the different stages ofGuyss work-
ing method, as described here by Baudelaire:
M.G. commence par de lgres indications au crayon, qui ne marquent gure que la
place que les objets doivent tenir dans lespace. Les plans principaux sont indiqus
ensuite par des teintes au lavis, des masses vaguement, lgrement colores dabord,
mais reprises plus tard et charges successivement de couleurs plus intenses. Au dernier
moment, le contour des objets est dfinitivement cern par de lencre. (PV, 699)
The way in which Guys builds up his drawings, using pencil at first only to
indicate the place of each object on the canvas, then applying washes and
deeper tints of colour, and finally indicating the contours of the objects
with ink, is reminiscent of the landscape so vividly described at the begin-
ning of the colour chapter of 1846 where colours gradually build up into
a discernible natural scene. In the Salon de 1859 Baudelaire wrote that for a
painting to be truly harmonious in its finished state, it must evolve in such
a way that all its elements spring from the same source:
De mme que la cration, telle que nous la voyons, est le rsultat de plusieurs cra-
tions dont les prcdentes sont toujours complmentes par la suivante; ainsi un
tableau conduit harmoniquement consiste en une srie de tableaux superposs,
chaque nouvelle couche donnant au rve plus de ralit et le faisant monter dun
degr vers la perfection. (S59, 626)
At that time Baudelaire had not discovered the art ofGuys, let alone seen
him at work, so it is interesting to note how the subsequent description of
that artists working method, with its simultaneous and harmonious deploy-
ment of line and colour, corresponds closely to the theoretical approach he
had envisaged. He concludes Lart mnmonique by allying Guys defini-
tively not, as we might expect, with other draughtsmen, but with colourists,
by emphasizing the importance of his fonds or backgrounds:
Il attache une immense importance aux fonds, qui, vigoureux ou lgers, sont tou-
jours dune qualit et dune nature approprie aux figures. La gamme des tons et
lharmonie gnrale sont strictement observes, avec un gnie qui drive plutt de
linstinct que de ltude. Car M.G. possde ce talent naturellement mystrieux du
coloriste, vritable don que ltude peut accrotre, mais quelle est, par elle-mme, je
crois, impuissante crer. (PV, 700)
The fact that Guys was not a great painter and master of colour hardly seems
to matter, as it did not in the case of Daumier or Meryon, because colour
itself is less important to Baudelaire than the artists ability to stimulate the
imagination. Whether it is real or suggested, colour works to consolidate
all the components of a painting and enables the most effective means
of translation. Governed by memory, it has the potency of an intoxicant
to stimulate an accordingly visionary state on the part of the spectator.
Possessing ce talent mystrieux du coloriste means that Guys already has a
talent that can be built on, and it shows that, many years after his first essays
on art, this colourist approach to art is still at the heart of Baudelaires
views on creativity.
Conclusion
Le lecteur ne sera donc pas tonn que je considre le pote comme le meilleur de
tous les critiques. (RW, 793)
Baudelaires prose poem Les Fentres offers an ironic commentary on

the process of reading a painting, as the narrator contemplates a woman
framed by her attic window: Avec son visage, avec son vtement, avec son
geste, avec presque rien, jai refait lhistoire de cette femme, ou plutt sa
lgende, et quelquefois je me la raconte moi-mme en pleurant (SP, 339).
To the putative readers question Es-tu sr que cette lgende soit la vraie?
the narrator replies Quimporte ce que peut tre la ralit place hors de
moi, si elle ma aid vivre, sentir que je suis et ce que je suis? (SP, 339).
The poetic impression that is received is represented as more significant
than any attempt at an objective reading of the living artwork. Of course,
this particular narrator is a narcissistic caricature of the poet-critic, but
the personal and imaginative response to a work of art was nonetheless an
intrinsic part of the artistic process for Baudelaire. In Richard Wagner et
Tannhaser Paris he writes that dans la musique, comme dans la peinture
et mme dans la parole crite, qui est cependant le plus positif des arts, il
y a toujours une lacune complte par limagination de lauditeur (RW,
781782). The real interpreter here is the critic, the ideal spectator/transla-
tor who can express or translate the essence of the work of art, while allow-
ing it to maintain its obscurit indispensable. Octavio Paz pinpoints this as a
key change in nineteenth-century art criticism, heralding a new approach:
Que dit la peinture? Les rapports entre le spectateur et luvre dart sont
totalement inverss: luvre dart nest plus une rponse la question du
spectateur, elle devient elle-mme une intrrogation dont la rponse (cest-
-dire la signification) dpend de celui qui contemple letableau.1 Above all
1 Paz, p.9.
218 Conclusion
it was colour in painting that presented Baudelaire with a series of ques-

tions which he continued to answer throughout his criticism.
For Baudelaire, being a critic involved a continuous meta-textual exam-
ination of the critics role which was at least as important for him as the
evaluation of the Salon art of the day. As we have seen, the presence of the
analytical faculty within the creative became more important to Baudelaire
as time went on and French art increasingly disappointed him; words, and
imaginary or unofficial art, increasingly took the place of the art sanctioned
by the Academicians or the public. The description of actual paintings in
the Salon of 1859 was, more often than not, supplanted in his Salon essay
by what Raser described as the concept of absence, or, more precisely, that
of non-presence,2 allowing Baudelaire even freer rein to examine the art
of his choosing and the narratives that interested him more. On a practi-
cal level, he identified himself increasingly among almost all of the artists
and musicians that he admired, and was pleased, but not surprised, to find
that their opinions on the best sort of artistic method coincided with his
own. This confirmed his conviction that tous les grands potes deviennent
naturellement, fatalement, critiques (RW, 793) and appears to anticipate
Barthes definition of criticism as seconde criture avec la premire criture
de luvre.3 For Baudelaire, the poet and the critic represent this necessary
doubling; the poet is un traducteur, un dchiffreur (RQC, 133) of natures
hidden symbols and the critic within the poet performs a secondary, but
equally necessary, act of translation by illuminating the work of art through
the medium of the written word. The critical act mirrors the primary act of
translation by which the poet/poetic creator comprehends the world and
another set of connections among the different arts follows.
Implicit throughout Baudelaires writings on colour, imagination and
translation is the question of language. We recall that just before he saw the
paintings he was introduced to Delacroixs work through the emotionally
charged poetic verbal imagery ofGautiers art criticism; the paintings and
the painter had existed in his imagination through the medium of words
2 Raser, The Simplest of Signs, pp.132133.

3 Roland Barthes, Critique et vrit (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966), p.14.
Conclusion 219
before they became reality. Paintings standing in relation to poetry was

a question that preoccupied Baudelaire increasingly throughout his writ-
ings, and, as a poet, he was particularly aware of the very different processes
governing poetic and painterly language. In his later essays he attempted
to resolve this by presenting the act of criticism as a creative process that
linked the different arts and was a way of bridging verbal and non-verbal
forms of communication. His view of modern art in 1859 is affected by the
conviction that painters no longer share his poetic concerns, and that the
essential connection between painter and poet has been lost. His obituary
ofDelacroix is framed by references to the latters standing as a man of let-
ters, and he notes with satisfaction that Wagner wished to introduce ele-
ments from poetry into his music. The poetic imagery ofGautier, Hugo and
Balzac seems on the point of displacing the painterly image for Baudelaire
until he discovers the art and the personality of Guys, who embodied for
him the ideal combination of artistic technique and human presence as
homme du monde: to paraphrase Baudelaire, Guys was the artist that he
would have had to invent if he did not already exist, and in Le Peintre de la
vie moderne this is effectively what has happened, as the artist has gained
more life through Baudelaires brilliant essay than his works alone would
have allowed.
It is important to remember that Baudelaire was one of the last great
proponents of Romantic painting, and part of his admiration for that
school of art was, as he acknowledged himself, based on its strong connec-
tions with literature. His enduring love ofDelacroixs work was undoubt-
edly due in part to the latters ability to channel the works ofShakespeare,
Dante, Byron and Homer through the medium of colour, and his antipa-
thy to landscape, as he himself acknowledged in 1859, was connected to
his nostalgic yearning for what was absent from the other paintings on
display, namely, the dramatic scenes of conflict and voluptuousness that
had inspired his earliest desire to write about art. Yet his enthusiasm for
Boudins paintings went beyond his desire for the human element, a fact that
he could not quite explain to himself, but seems to us to be obviously con-
nected to his enjoyment of the abstract power of colour without reference
to its content. As the critic Anne-Marie Christin points out: Baudelaire
reconnat la force suggestive de ces esquisses qui rompent avec la tradition
220 Conclusion
la fois par leur thme et par leur caractre inachev but like most of the
critics of his time, il refuse, lui aussi, dcouter les leons de son plaisir.4
It is true that despite everything, Baudelaire was in some senses not
able to recognize the growing influence of colour in painting. He was
intrinsically connected to an official French system of art, the Academy and
its official Salon, that was already moribund by the time he wrote his last
review. The Romantic art that he cherished had already been replaced in
the publics affections by the landscape and worse, photography, the form
of art that captured only too well a present that he would have preferred
to forget. There were other paradoxes. Baudelaire wanted to be compared
to Diderot, but also to incorporate contemporary theories and scientific
respectability into his aesthetic. He wanted his essays to be part of a literary
tradition, and to give a voice to an area of art, colour, long regarded as rela-
tively unimportant by many. He wanted to express his thoughts on why cer-
tain colours had such a strong personal effect on him, but also to proclaim
himself as the voice ofDelacroix as if the essays were a joint endeavour and
he was merely the mouthpiece of the artist. He championed lesser forms
of art such as the cartoon and the etching because of their expressiveness,
but condemned photography and landscape as unworthy of the thinking
person. He criticized the art of Ingres for emphasizing the beauty of the
past, but chose to give the honour ofLe Peintre de la vie moderne to Guys,
whose sketches reminded him of charming eighteenth-century engravings,
rather than to the eminently more deserving Manet.
With all of these contradictions and more, how seriously can we take
Baudelaires views on colour? To answer this question would take more than
this short book allows, but it is worth noting that, like Diderot before him,
Baudelaire elevated the concept of colour from its lesser position in the
hierarchy of painting and acknowledged the skills and intellectual powers
that lay behind it, as well as its unique expressive powers. Despite adhering
to many traditional aesthetic principles of painting, Baudelaire under-
mined the long-held prejudices of many by insisting on the importance of
4 Anne-Marie Christin, Lcrit et le visible: le dix-neuvime sicle franais, LEspace

et la lettre (Paris: U.G.E., 1977), pp.163192, pp.178179.
Conclusion 221
colour. He integrated the fairly unwieldy science of complementary colours

into a rich literary context ofHoffmann and poetic correspondences, and
suggested that the power of colours symbolism was infinitely more com-
plex than any conventional system had allowed. The depth and range of
Baudelaires writings on art show that he did not need to write a sonnet or
an elegy to express what was poetic in the art of others, and that his criticism
was equal to this task: Analyser ainsi, cest crer, as Hugo wrote to him of
the Paradis artificiels.5 In his essays of art criticism Baudelaires insistence
on the importance of what he termed the colourist method, based on the
cohesiveness of subject and execution and a high level of expressiveness,
was far in advance of his time, and his assertion that colour thinks for
itself , with a spiritual resonance that prevails over and precedes the paint-
ings subject matter, marked an irrevocable change in the direction of how
painting would henceforth be perceived.
5 Lettres Charles Baudelaire, tudes baudelairiennes, 45, publis par Claude Pichois
avec la collaboration de Vincenette Pichois (La Baconnire: Neuchtel, 1973), 19juillet
1860, p.162.
Bibliography
Baudelaire Editions Consulted
uvres compltes, edited by Jacques Crpet, 19vols (Paris: Conard, 19221953)

uvres posthumes, edited by Jacques Crpet, 3vols (Paris: Conard, 1952)
The Painter ofModern Life and other essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne
(London: Phaidon, 1995)
Art in Paris 18451862, Salons and other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire,
translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965)
Correspondance, texte tabli, prsent et annot par Claude Pichois avec la collabora-
tion de Jean Ziegler, 2vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973)
uvres compltes, texte tabli, prsent et annot par Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard,
1975, 1976)
Lettres Charles Baudelaire, tudes baudelairiennes, 45, publis par Claude Pichois
avec la collaboration de Vincenette Pichois (La Baconnire: Neuchtel, 1973)
Salons and Original Texts
Amaury-Duval, E.-E, LAtelier dIngres (Paris: Charpentier, 1878)

LAtelier dIngres, dition critique de louvrage publi Paris en 1878; introduction,
notes, postface et documents par Daniel Ternois (Paris: Arthena, 1993)
Asselineau, Charles, Baudelaire et Asselineau. Textes recueillis et comments, ed. Jacques
Crpet and Claude Pichois (Paris: Nizet, 1953)
Banville, Thodore de, Mes Souvenirs (Paris: ditions dAujourdhui, 1980)
Blanc, Charles, Salon de 1840, Revue du progrs, III, 15mars 1840, pp.217218
Grammaire des arts du dessin (Paris: Renouard, 1886)
Champfleury, Oeuvres posthumes: Salons 184651 (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1894)
224 Bibliography
Chevreul, Michel-Eugne, De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs et de lassortiment

des objets colors daprs cette loi dans ses rapports avec la peinture, les tapisseries des
Gobelins, les tapisseries de Beauvais pour meubles, les tapis, la mosaque, les vitraux
colors, limpression des toffes, limprimerie, lenluminure, la decoration des edifices,
lhabilement et lhorticulture (Paris: Pitois-Levrault, 1839)
De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs avec une introduction de
H.Chevreul (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1889)
The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and their Applications to the
Arts, M.E. Chevreul, based on the first English translation by C. Martel (1854),
with an introduction and notes by Faber Birren (New York: Reinhold Pub.
Corp, 1967)
C.-E. Clerget, Lettres sur la thorie des couleurs, Bulletin de lAmi des Arts, 1844,
pp.2936, 5462, 8191, 115121, 175185, 393404
Henri Delaborde, Ingres: Sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine (Paris: Plon, 1870)
Delacroix, Eugne, Journal, introduction et notes par Andr Joubin, 3vols (Paris:
Plon, 1960)
Correspondance gnrale dEugne Delacroix, ed. Andr Joubin (Paris: A. Joubin,
1938)
uvres littraires, 2vols (Paris: Crs, 1923)
Dictionnaire des beaux-arts, reconstitution et dition par Anne Larue (Paris:
Hermann, 1996)
Nouvelles Lettres, dition tablie, annote et commente par Lee Johnson et
Michle Hannoosh (Bordeaux: W. Blake, 2000)
Delcluze, E.J., Exposition du Louvre, 1824, Journal des Dbats, 1er, 5, 8, 11, 16 28,
30septembre, 5, 9, 16, 18, 21octobre, 1er, 12, 16, 23, 30novembre, 7, 12, 29dcem-
bre 1824, 16, 19janvier 1825
Dictionnaire de lAcadmie des Beaux-Arts, 6vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 18581909)
Diderot, Denis, uvres sthtiques, textes tablis, avec introductions, bibliographies,
notes et relevs de variantes, par Paul Vernire (Paris: Garnier frres, 1959)
Eastlake, Charles Lock, Goethes Theory of Colours (London: F. Cass, 1967)
Emric-David, Recherches sur lart statuaire, considr chez les anciens et chez les mod-
ernes, ou mmoire sur cette question propose par lInstitut national de France:
Quelles ont t les causes de la perfection de la sculpture antique et quels seroient
les moyens dy atteindre? (Paris: Chez la veuve Nyon ain, 1805)
E.V., Dr, Cours sur le contraste des couleurs par M.Chevreul, LArtiste, troisime srie,
I (1842), 148150, 162165
Flibien, A., Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens
et modernes (Paris: D. Mariette, 1696)
Bibliography 225
Fizelire, Albert de la, Salon de 1851, Le Sicle, 9fvrier, 13, 15mars, 5, 10, 12, 15, 19,
21, 22, 26avril
Fourier, Charles, uvres compltes, 10vols (Paris: ditions Anthropos, 196668)
Gautier, Thophile, Salon de 1833, La France littraire, VI (1833), pp.139166
Salon de 1837, La Presse, 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24mars, 8, 29avril,
1mai 1837
Salon de 1838, La Presse, 2, 16, 22, 23, 26, 31mars, 13avril, 1er mai 1838
Exposition universelle 1855, Le Moniteur universel, 29mars15dcembre 1855
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Zur Farbenlehre (Didaktischer Teil), in Werke, 14vols
(Hamburg: Hamburger Ausg., 1962), XIII, 314536
Goethes Farbenlehre, ed. H. Wohlbold ( Jena: E. Diederich, 1932)
Goethes Colour Theory, edited by Ruprecht Matthaei, translated by H. Aach
(London: Studio Vista, 1971)
Goncourt, E. & J. de, Manette Salomon (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)
LArt du XVIIIe sicle, 2vols, dition prsente et annote par Jean-Louis Cabans
(Tusson: Du Lrot, 2007)
Haussard, Prosper, Salon de 1839, Le Temps, 5avril 1839
Jouffroy, Thodore, Cours desthtique (Paris: L. Hachette, 1875)
Lavater, Johann Caspar, La Physiognomonie, ou lArt de connatre les hommes daprs
les traits de leur physionomie, leurs rapports avec les divers animaux, leurs pen-
chants, etc., traduction nouvelle par H. Bacharach ; prcde dune notice par
A. dAlbans (Paris: G. Harvard, 1845)
Laverdant, Gabriel-Dsir, De la mission dart et du rle des artistes. Salon de 1845,
La Phalange, I, 1er semestre 1845, pp.253294, 397418
LeBrun, Charles, Mthode pour apprendre dessiner les passions: propose dans une
confrence sur lexpression gnrale et particulire (Amsterdam: Chez Franois
van-der Plaats, 1702)
Lessing, G., Laokon: or, The Limits ofPoetry and Painting, translated from the German
by William Ross (London: J. Ridgeway & sons, 1836)
Littr, mile, Dictionnaire de la langue franaise (Paris, 186378)
Newton, Isaac, Opticks (New York: Dover Publications, 1952)
Peisse, Louis, Salon de 1841, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1841, II, 549
Piles, Roger de, Dialogue sur le coloris (Paris: N. Langlois, 1673)
Cours de peinture par principes (Paris: chez Jacques Estienne, 1708)
Planche, Gustave, Salon de 1831, LArtiste, II, 1831, pp.178190
Portal, Fredric, Des couleurs symboliques: dans lAntiquit, le Moyen-ge et les temps
modernes (Paris: Treuttel et Wrtz, 1837)
Quatremre de Quincy, A.-C., Essai sur le but et les moyens de limitation dans les
beaux-arts (Paris: Treuttel et Wrtz, 1823)
226 Bibliography
Essai sur lidal dans ses applications pratiques aux uvres de limitation propre des
arts du dessin (Paris: A. Le Clre et cie., 1837)
Rabbe, Alphonse, Beaux-arts, Le Courrier franais, 2627, 29, 31aot, 2, 6, 9, 12, 15,
17, 20, 30septembre, 5, 18 26octobre, 14novembre 1824
Runge, Philipp Otto, Die Farbenkugel, oder Construcion das Verhaltnisses aller
Mischungen der Farben zu einander, und ihrer vollstanigen Affinitt (Cologne:
Tropen: Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1999)
Stal, Anne-Louise Germaine Necker de, De lAllemagne, 5vols (Paris: Hachette,
195860)
Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, texte tabli par Henri Martineau (Paris:
ditions dAujourdhui, 1980)
Thiers, A., Beaux-arts. Exposition de 1824, Le Globe, I, pp.78, 2324, 2728, 3132,
3536, 4748, 6364, 7980, 108110
Thor, Thophile, De la phrenologie dans ses rapports avec lart, LArtiste, 6, 1833,
pp.122125, 259261
Dictionnaire de phrnologie et de physionomie lusage des artistes (Paris, 1836)
Salon de 1838, Revue de Paris, nouvelle srie, LI, pp.5258, LII, pp.3848,
26779, LIII, pp.5059
Des envois de Rome (peinture), LArtiste, srie 2, 1839, I, 1839, pp.37782,
3923
Salon de 1839, Le Constitutionnel, 4, 11, 16, 19, 26, 28mars, 6, 16, 21, 28, avril,
1er, 8mai 1839
Salons de T. Thor 1844, 1845, 1846, 1847, 1848, avec une preface par W. Brger
(Paris: Librairie internationale, 1868)
Watelet et Levesque, Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure, 5vols (Paris:
chez Panckouke, 1795)
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, Histoire de lart chez les anciens, 2vols (Amsterdam:
Amster, 1766)
Selected Critical Works
Austin, Lloyd James, Lunivers potique de Baudelaire: symbolisme et symbolique (Paris:

Mercure de France, 1956)
Baldensperger, Fernand, Bibliographie critique de Goethe en France (Paris: Hachette,
1907)
Bibliography 227
Baguley, David (ed.), Art and Literature of the Second Empire (Durham: Durham
University Press, 2003)
Barasch, Moshe, Modern Theories of Art, 1: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire (New
York and London: New York University Press, 1990)
Barthes, Roland, Critique et vrit (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966)
S/Z (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1970)
Becq Annie, Rhtoriques et littrature dart en France la fin du XVIIe sicle: le
concept de couleur, Cahiers de lAssociation Internationale des Etudes Franaises,
24 (1972), pp.215232
Gense de lesthtique franaise moderne: De la raison classique a limagination
cratrice (16801814), 2vols (Pisa: Pacini, 1984)
Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism,
third edition (London and New York: Verso, 1989)
Birren, Faber, Principles of Color (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969)
Blunt, Anthony, Art and Architecture in France 15001700 (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1970),
Boime, Albert, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Phaidon, 1971)
Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 18481871 (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2007)
Brunot, F., Histoire de la langue franaise des origines nos jours, 8vols (Paris: Librairie
Armand Colin, 1966)
Bryson, Norman, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Rgime (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984)
Burton, Richard, Baudelaire and the Second Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991)
Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity (Cambridge:
Burwick, Frederic, The Damnation of Newton: Gthes Colour Theory and Romantic
Perception (New York and Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986)
Butor, Michel, Histoire extraordinaire: essai sur un rve de Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard,
1961)
Carrington Shelton, Andrew, Art, Politics, and the Politics of Art: Ingress Saint
Symphorien at the 1834 Salon, The Art Bulletin (December 2001)
Castex, Pierre-Georges, La critique dart en France au XIXe sicle: Baudelaire critique
dart (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1957)
228 Bibliography
Christin, Anne-Marie, Lcrit et le visible: le dix-neuvime sicle franais, LEspace et

la lettre (Paris: U.G.E., 1977), pp.163192
Clark, Timothy J., The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 18481851
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1973)
The Painting ofModern Life: Paris in the Art ofMonet and his Followers (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999)
Collier, Peter, Baudelaire and Dante, Studi Francesi, 102 (anno XXXIV), fasciolo
III, pp.417435
and Lethbridge, Robert (eds), Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts
in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1994)
Condon, Patricia, Ingres: In Pursuit ofPerfection: The Art ofJ.A.D. Ingres (Louisville:
J.B. Speed Art Museum, Indiana University Press, 1983)
Escholier, Raymond, Delacroix: peintre, graveur, crivain, 3vols (Paris: H. Floury,
19261929)
Fairlie, Alison, Aspects of Expression in Baudelaires Art Criticism, in French 19th
Century Painting and Literature, edited by Ulrich Finke (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1972), pp.4064
Ferran, Andr, LEsthtique de Baudelaire (Paris: Hachette, 1933)
Flanary, D.A., Champfleury: The Realist Writer as Art Critic (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1980)
Fontaine, Andr, Les Doctrines dArt en France: Peintres, Amateurs, Critiques de Poussin
Diderot (Paris: H. Laurens, 1909)
Friedlaender, Walter, David to Delacroix (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1966)
Gage, John, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2009)
Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames and Hudson,
2000)
Gilman, Margaret, Baudelaire the Critic (New York: Columbia University Press,
1943)
Godfrey, Sima, Baudelaires Windows, LEsprit Crateur, 22 (Winter 1982),
pp.83100
Ce pre nourricier: Revisiting Baudelaires Family Romance Nineteenth-Century
French Studies, 38/12 (FallWinter 20092010), pp.3951
Grate, Pontus, Deux critiques de lart de lpoque romantique: Gustave Planche et
Thophile Thor (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1959)
Hambly, P.S., Thophile Gautier et le fouririsme, Australian Journal for French
Studies, 11/3 (SeptemberDecember 1974), pp.210236
Bibliography 229
Hannoosh, Michle, Painting as translation in Baudelaires art criticism, Forum for

Modern Language Studies, 22/1 ( January 1986), pp.2233
Etching and Modern Art: Baudelaires Peintres et aquafortistes, French Studies
( January 1989), pp.4760
Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity (University
Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992)
Painting and the Journal de Eugne Delacroix (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995)
Hautecur, Louis, Littrature et peinture en France du XVIIe au XXe sicle, 2e dition
(Paris: A. Colin, 1963)
Hiddleston, J.A., Baudelaire and the Art of Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1999)
Honour, Hugh, Romanticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)
Horner, Lucie, Baudelaire critique de Delacroix (Geneva: Droz, 1956)
Howells, Bernard, Baudelaire: Portrait of the Artist in 1846, French Studies, 37 (1983),
pp.426439
The Problem with Colour. Three Theorists: Goethe, Schopenhauer, Chevreul,
in Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France,
Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History (Oxford:
Legenda, 1996)
Huyghe, Ren, Delacroix (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963)
Jonker, M., Gustave Planche, or the Romantic Side ofClassicism, Nineteenth-Century
Art Worldwide, http://19thcartworldwide.org/autumn_02/articles/jonk.
shtml
Kearns, James, Thophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism in the Second
Republic (Oxford: Legenda, 2007)
Kelley, David, Deux aspects du Salon de 1846 de Baudelaire: la ddicace aux bour-
geois et la couleur, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 5 (October 1969),
pp.331346
Delacroix, Ingres et Poe: Valeurs picturales et valeurs littraires dans luvre
critique de Baudelaire, Revue dHistoire littraire de la France, 71/4 (juilletaot
1971), pp.606614
Introduction, Le Salon de 1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp.1117
Kemp, Martin, Science And Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1990)
Kennedy, Ann, Food for the Eyes: Baudelaire and the Artist as parfait cuisinier,
Romance Studies, 13 (Winter 1988), pp.4953
230 Bibliography
Baudelaires Parrot: Borrowed from Goethe?, French Studies Bulletin, 35 (Summer

1990), pp.913
Leakey, Felix, Baudelaire and Nature (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1969)
Les esthtiques de Baudelaire: le systme des annes 184447 Revue des sciences
humaines, XXXII fasc. 127 ( JulySept 1967), pp.481496
Lee, R.W., Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1967)
Lethbridge, Robert, Manet and the Politics of Art in David Baguley (ed.), Art
and Literature of the Second Empire (Durham: University of Durham, 2003),
pp.1937
Lloyd, Rosemary, Baudelaire et Hoffmann: Affinits et Influences (Cambridge:
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (Cambridge: Cambridge
Charles Baudelaire (London: Reaktion Books, 2008)
Lochhead, I.J., The Spectator and the Landscape in the Art Criticism ofDiderot and his
Contemporaries (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982)
Mainardi, Patricia, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of
1855 and 1867 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987)
Landscape in the Second Empire: Between Barbizon and Impressionism in
Art and Literature of the Second Empire, edited by David Baguley (Durham:
University of Durham, 2003), pp.313
Masson, Andr, Baudelaire et les peintres, Preuves, 207 (mai 1968), pp.1625
May, Gita, Diderot et Baudelaire critiques dart (Paris and Geneva: Minard/Droz,
1957)
McGoey, M.E., Rhetorical Strategies in Baudelaires Criticism ofEugne Delacroix
(unpublished thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1986)
Moriarty, Michael, Structures ofCultural Production in Nineteenth-Century France,
in Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France,
Moss, Armand, Baudelaire et Delacroix (Paris: Nizet, 1973)
Mras, G.P., Eugne Delacroixs Theory of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1966)
Oehler, Dolf, Pariser Bilder I (18301848): Antibourgeoise Asthetik bei Baudelaire,
Daumier und Heine (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979)
Pappas, Sarah, All that Glitters: Connecting Baudelaires Art Criticism and Poetry,
French Forum 33/3 (Fall 2008), pp.3353
Bibliography 231
Paz, Octavio, Prsence et prsent, Preuves, 207 (May 1968), pp.715

Ptroz, Pierre, Lart et la critique en France depuis 1822 (Paris: Germer Baillire,
1875)
Pevsner, Nikolaus, Academies of Art Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge
Phillips, Jennifer, Relative Color: Baudelaire, Chevreul, and the Reconsideration
ofCritical Methodology, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 33/34 (Spring
Summer 2005), pp.342357
Pichois, Claude Baudelaire: tudes et tmoignages (Neuchtel: La Baconnire, 1976)
and Ziegler, J., Baudelaire (Paris: Julliard, 1987)
Baudelaire, translated by Graham Robb (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989)
Pommier, Jean, La Mystique de Baudelaire (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967)
Prendergast, Christopher, Paris in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell,
1992)
Puttfarken, Thomas, Roger de Piles Theory of Art (New Haven and London: Yale
Prvost, Jean, Baudelaire: Essai sur linspiration et la cration potiques (Paris: Mercure
de France, 1953)
Raser, Timothy, A Poetics of Art Criticism: The Case of Baudelaire (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1989)
Citation and Narrative in Baudelaires Art Criticism, Word and Image, 4 (1993),
pp.309319
The Simplest ofSigns: Victor Hugo and the Language ofImages in France: 18501950
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004)
Reed, Arden, Romantic Weather: The Climates ofColeridge and Baudelaire (Hanover:
Brown University Press/ University Press of New England, 1983)
Riffaterre, Michel, Models of the Literary Sentence, French Literary Theory Today,
edited by T. Todorov, translated by R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), pp.1833
Rosenblum, Robert, Jean-Dominique-Auguste Ingres (London: Thames and Hudson,
1967)
Art of the Nineteenth Century: Painting and Sculpture (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1984)
Rocheblave, Samuel, Le got en France de 1600 1900 (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin,
1914)
Salines, Emily, Alchemy and Amalgam: Translation in the Works ofCharles Baudelaire
(Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Baudelaire, Ides (Paris: Gallimard, 1966)
232 Bibliography
Scott, David, Baudelaires Transposition dart Poetry, Proceeds of the Royal Irish
Academy, 80c, December 1980, pp.251262
Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Signac, Paul, DEugne Delacroix au no-impressionnisme (Paris: Hachette, 1964)
Simms, Matthew T., The Goncourts, Gustave Planche, and Antoine-Louis Baryes
Un Jaguar dvorant un livre, Nineteenth-Century French Studies (FallWinter
20092010), pp.6781
Sloane, Joseph, French Painting between Past and Present (Princeton: Princeton
Snell, Robert, Thophile Gautier: A Romantic Critic of the Visual Arts (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1982)
Stephens, Sonya, Baudelaires Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics ofIrony (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999
Painting in the Studio: Artful Unfinishedness? in Esquisses/bauches: Projects
and Pre-Texts in Nineteenth-Century French Culture, edited by Sonya Stephens
(New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.4255
Tabarant, A., La vie artistique au temps de Baudelaire, troisime dition (Paris: Mercure
de France, 1963)
Ternois, Daniel, Ingres (Paris: F. Nathan, 1980)
Teyssdre, Bernard, Roger de Piles et les dbats sur le coloris au sicle de Louis XIV (Paris:
la Bibliothque des arts, 1965)
Trapp, F.A., The Universal Exhibition of 1855, The Burlington Magazine ( June 1965),
pp.300305
The Attainment of Delacroix (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press,
1971)
Wakefield, David, Stendhal and the Arts (London: Phaidon, 1973)
Wechsler, Judith, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century
Paris (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982)
Wettlaufer, Alexandra K., In the Minds Eye: The Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire
and Ruskin (New York: Rodopi, 2003)
Wright, Barbara and Scott, David, La Fanfarlo and Le Spleen de Paris (London: Grant
and Cutler, 1984)
Wrigley, Richard, The Origins of French Art Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993)
Zeldin, T., France 18481945, 5vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)
Ziegler, Jean, mile Deroy (18201846) et lesthtique de Baudelaire, Gazette des
Beaux-Arts (maijuin 1976), pp.153160
Index
Acadmie Royale de Peinture et de Boudin, Eugne

Sculpture, see Academy, the abstract appeal of, 122, 182, 219
Academy, the, 3 intoxicating effect of, 154, 207, 209,
beginnings and organization, 211212
1014 memory and poetry connections,
on draughtsmanship and colour, 181, 212
1417, 3031, 130 sketch as art form, 120121, 124, 125,
on hierarchy of genre, 1213, 19, 27, 129, 180
124 see also bauche parfaite; landscape;
in nineteenth century, 163, 130, 184, Salon de 1859
218, 220 Bryson, Norman, 12, 109
de Piles opposition towards, 1721 Burton, Richard, 52, 173174, 208
see also LeBrun, Charles; Salons; Butor, Michel, 153 n. 33, 163 n. 45, 192,
hierarchy of genre 210
Amaury-Duval, E.-E., 31, 83 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 176, 188,
aquafortisme, see etching 219
Asselineau, Charles, 72, 163 n. 45
Aupick, General Jacques, 79 caricature, 1, 2, 48, 92, 101, 119, 217
see also Daumier, Honor; Quelques
Balzac, Honor de caracturistes franais
influence on Baudelaire, 56, 103, 138, Castex, Pierre-Georges, 95
140141 Champfleury, 2829, 33, 40, 4748
links to art and artists, 195196, Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simon, 3, 2627
198 Chevreul, Michel-Eugne, 1, 4, 6269,
writing as replacement for art, 190, 8486, 155
219 Baudelaires knowledge of, 6971,
Banville, Thodore de, 7273 73, 167
Barthes, Roland, 218 see also colourist painting; Delacroix,
Baudelaire, Joseph-Franois, 7, 53, 59, 86, Eugne; Salons
102, 125127, 143 Chopin, Frdric, 7980, 139, 169, 190,
Baudelaire, Charles, see under individual 201
works Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 1011
Benjamin, Walter, 123 Collier, Peter, 158
Blanc, Charles, 46, 68, 77, 140 colorisme, see colourist painting
234 Index
colourist painting David, Jacques-Louis, 27, 48, 93, 94, 106,

Baudelaire on colourist approach as 131, 176
most important to art, 2, 186, Daumier, Honor, 45, 92, 108
215, 221 connections with other arts, 175, 198
coloristes versus dessinateurs, 3, 4, connections to the imagination in,
1721, 25, 54, 68, 8997, 106, 215
110117, 128129, 130131 expressive drawing of, 43, 9194,
colour in black, white and grey, 122, 101, 110, 119122, 124125, 131,
150 149150, 196
colourist artists, 8384, 99, 153 role of memory in, 212
connections with other arts, 6, 194, see also caricature; etching;
195 physiognomy; Quelques
expressive power of, 156, 158 caracturistes franais
Fourierist links to, 3637, 140 Decamps, Alexandre-Gabriel, 39, 46, 167
Guys as colourist, 5, 214215 Delacroix, Eugne, 45, 44
memory and imagination in, 108, acquaintance with Baudelaire, 51,
215 7276, 80, 86, 165, 188190, 220
other critics perceptions of, 2526, analogies of his painting with effects
37, 3135, 3646 of opium, 207213
scientific basis of, 47, 70, 77, 82, 85, approach of critics to, 3035, 3943,
145 4546, 94, 117
terminology of, 21 n. 22, 40 colour science, interest in, 5051, 61,
see also draughtsmanship in art and 68, 7682, 8586
under individual artists and connections of his painting with
Salons other arts, 158159, 162, 187194,
Conseils aux jeunes littrateurs, 51 n. 3, 204, 218219
73 expressive power of his colour and
correspondences, theme of, 61, 87, drawing, 8994, 9697, 110118,
136138, 142143, 171, 178 119, 122123, 129131, 137, 156157,
among different arts, 164165, 171, 164, 194
193, 202, 208 Journal and other writings, 46,
imagination and, 178, 182183, 7381, 114, 169, 188190, 112, 113,
220221 200202
see also Fleurs du Mal, Les imagination and his painting, 151, 173,
Corot, Camille, 46, 48, 83, 121, 178, 180, 185186
212213 Ingres opposition to, 2, 3132, 49,
see also landscape 8384, 8992, 9597, 99,
Courbet, Gustave, 108, 164, 177 104106, 108, 110111, 198204
see also realism modernity of, 5556
Cramer, Samuel, 138, 144145 music, interest in, 7980, 1389,
see also Fanfarlo, La 166169, 190191
Index 235
other artists links to, 121, 152, 153, 175, as expression of modern life, 125,
179, 211 206
Les Phares, 151165 imagination and, 197, 213, 220
symbolism of his colour, 59, 135, literature, poetry and, 180182,
137139, 144148, 184 195198
traditionalism of, 99, 124, 125 Meryon and, 123, 150
see also colourist painting; Gautier, Exposition universelle (1855), 45, 162163
Thophile; Hugo, Victor; connections with other arts, 198199,
imagination; modernity; music; 204
Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism; drawing versus colour, 8992,
Salons 104110, 115118
Delaroche, Paul, 32, 34, 185 imagination, 110
Delcluze, tienne, 27, 3234, 166 landscape, 178179
Deroy, mile, 4, 7273, 86 music of colour, 73 n. 35, 158, 170,
dessinateur, see draughtsmanship 194, 212
Diaz (Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Pea), poetry in painting, 137, 188, 193194
83, 109 role of critic, 162165
Diderot, Denis, 3, 2527, 30, 4849, 57, science of colour, 8485
95, 124, 163, 220 suggestive power of colour, 73 n. 35,
draughtsmanship in art 122, 194, 209
Academic approach to, 1421, 3031 symbolism of colour, 116117, 145,
and Daumier, 91, 119123 155160
and Delacroix, 92, 110118, 131 see also colourist painting; Delacroix,
and Guys, 128131, 205206, 213214 Eugne; Ingres, Jean-Auguste-
and Ingres, 5, 8994, 97103, Dominique
106110
imagination of drawing, 115, 122, 113 Fanfarlo, La, 138
other critics on, 8, 32, 3846, 68 see also Cramer, Samuel
see also colourist painting and under Flibien, Andr, 1114, 19, 20, 28
individual artists and Salons flneur, le, 126, 152
see also Guys, Constantin
bauche parfaite, 5, 92, 98, 124126, Fleurs du Mal, Les, 6, 8, 137, 141, 157,
128129, 131 160161, 171, 173174, 178
see also Peintre de la vie modern, Le Bohmiens en voyage, 161
Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses uvres (1856), Le Cygne, 123
199200 Correspondances, 136, 165, 171
see also Poe, Edgar Allan Danse macabre, 160
Emric-David, Toussaint-Bernard, 2324, lvation, 148
102 Les Phares, 151165
etching, 1, 124 Le Squelette laboureur, 161
dangers of, 197, 211 Sur Le Tasse en prison, 161
236 Index
see also correspondences, theme of; in nineteenth century, 2829, 38, 41

realism see also colourist painting; bauche
Fourier, Charles, 3637, 134, 140144 parfait; landscape
Fourierism, see Fourier, Charles history painting, 1213, 25
Fuses, 99, 150, 193, 199 in nineteenth century, 28, 30
Baudelaires views on, 99, 124
Gage, John, 77, 80 see also hierarchy of genre
Gautier, Thophile, 3, 2728, 197 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 136, 153, 183, 220
Baudelaire and Gautiers art criticism, homme du monde, 126, 190, 190 n.15, 209,
89, 4145, 47, 201 219
Baudelaire and Gautiers poetry and see also Peintre de la vie modern, Le
colour, 116117, 173, 191195, 201, Horner, Lucie, 2, 92, 117, 166
218219 Howells, Bernard, 1, 7071, 78, 86, 96, 98
Delacroix and, 4345, 50, 7576, 117, Hugo, Victor, 5, 219, 221
201202 Baudelaire on as painter in poetry, 5,
Fourierist interest of G., 138, 140 n. 16 182, 191193, 196
on hierarchy of arts, 4142, 45 and Delacroix, 111, 113, 204
on Ingres, 4244, 105 and Fourierism, 138, 142143, 195
see also colourist painting
Gricault, Thodore, 31 imagination, the, 8, 48, 136, 163
Gilman, Margaret, 2, 4950 n. 1, 72, 90 absence of imagination, 6, 110, 129,
Glaize, Auguste-Barthlemy, 83 145, 164, 177
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 58 n. 5, the creative imagination, 1, 5, 55, 90,
6465, 7071, 139, 141, 188 151152, 172175, 187
Goncourt, E. de and J. de, 125, 128, Delacroix on, 81, 188189, 201
178180, 179 n. 9 landscape and imagination, 180
Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 25, 27 colour and imagination, 5, 82, 8586,
Guys, Constantin, 5, 92, 98, 131, 214215, 135, 147, 174, 182186, 208, 215
219220 intoxication and imagination,
see also Peintre de la vie modern, Le 207208
memory and imagination, 181, 210,
Hannoosh, Michle, 1, 186, 198, 201, 211 212215
Haussard, Prosper, 33, 4041, 45, 39, 92, other arts and imagination, 56, 169,
112 171, 218
Haussoullier, William, 48 other art critics on imagination, 26,
Heine, Heinrich, 38 33, 38, 44
Hiddleston, J.A., 1, 91, 125 see also also correspondences, theme
hierarchy of genre of; landscape and under
Academic tradition, 10, 1213, 21, 31 individual artists and Salons
Baudelaires belief in, 124, 129, 144, Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 84,
220 107, 109
Index 237
archaic quality of his art, 106108, Laocon, 22

220 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 100103, 108, 119,
colour in his art, 31, 77, 8384, 94, 140, 143, 195
109110, 155 see also physiognomy
draughtsmanship of, 45, 9294, Laverdant, Desir, 3637, 45, 46, 112,
97103, 113, 115, 116, 118119, 131 140
imagination of, 110, 164 Leakey, Felix, 2, 136 n. 7, 174 n. 1
music in his painting, 34 LeBrun, Charles, 10, 11, 18, 19, 176
success of, 93, 93 n. 8 on physiognomy, 1516, 102, 134
see also colourist painting; Delacroix, see also Academy
Eugne; draughtsmanship in art; Legros, Alphonse, 197
Gautier, Thophile; modernity; Lemer, Julien, 203
physiognomy; Poe, Edgar Allan; Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 2223, 24
Salons lithography, 2, 5, 92, 131, 121, 122, 150
ingrisme, 3839, 97, 128 see also Daumier, Honor
Lloyd, Rosemary, 2, 59
Jongkind, Johan Barthold, 197
Jonker, Marijke, 35 Mainardi, Patricia, 105, 175 n. 4, 179180
juste milieu, 32, 3435, 94 Manet, douard, 124125, 220
Masson, Andr, 90
Karr, Alphonse, 139, 145146 May, Gita, 2, 90
Kearns, James, 41, 7576 Meryon, Charles, 91, 119, 124, 180, 197
Kelley, David, 2, 36, 37, 82, 140, 168, 178, connections with Baudelaires poetry,
203 123, 181182
Kemp, Martin, 63, 67, 134 suggestion of colour in, 92, 131, 150,
Kennedy, Ann, 58 n. 8, 176 n. 5 215
see also etching; landscape
landscape modernity, 35, 74 n. 38
appeal of to Baudelaire, 122, 123, 154, Baudelaires hopes for modern art,
214 1, 45, 6, 4950, 5253, 55, 119,
Baudelaires disaffection with, 124, 183
147, 177181, 209, 211, 219, 220 Daumier as artist of modern life,
Baudelaires imaginary landscapes, 149150
5861, 112, 145, 152153, 158, 159, Delacroix as artist of modern life, 47,
185 55, 97, 137
changing status of, 13, 17, 28, 7576, etching as modern art, 122123, 125,
179180 197
Romantic landscape, 181182 Guys and heroism of modern life, 56,
see also Boudin, Eugne; Corot, 125126, 129, 101
Camille; Rousseau, Thodore; Ingres and modernity, 97, 100102,
Tabar, Franois; Salons 105, 108
238 Index
negative developments for Baudelaire Paz, Octavio, 134, 217

in modern art, 175180, 191, 207, Peintres et aquafortistes, 123, 197198
219 Peintre de la vie moderne, Le, 59, 98, 103,
Romanticism and modernity, 50, 124129, 204207
5557 analogies of art with effects of opium,
see also Guys, Constantin; Lavater, 209
Johann Caspar; Salons child-like perception in, 59, 126127,
Mon Cur mis nu, 7, 100, 148 206
Moriarty, Michael, 5455 connections with other arts, 205207
Moss, Armand, 2, 146, 159 expressive power of colour and draw-
Muse du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle, Le, 84, ing, 130, 128129, 214215
94, 98 physiognomy of modern life, 103
music, 5, 151, 133 passim, 165172, 198, role of memory and imagination,
212, 217 212213
analogies of music with effects of symbolism of colour, 149150
opium, 207209, 211 see also bauche parfaite; flneur, le;
connections with other arts, 174, 186, Guys, Constantin
190193, 200, 204, 219 Peisse, Louis, 3940, 4546, 95, 114
Delacroixs painting and, 173, 157159, Perrault, Charles, 14
165 Petits Pomes en prose, Les, see Spleen de
mathematics and music, 85, 194 Paris, Le
other art critics use of music termi- Phillips, Jennifer, 1, 71
nology, 18, 34, 39, 46, 61, 73 n. 35 photography, 1, 124, 176178, 182, 220
symbolism of colour and music, phrenology, 38, 103
6667, 136139, 142143, 151, 153 physiognomy, 38, 15, 93, 100103, 204
see also Delacroix, Eugne; Thor, in Daumier, 119120, 122
Thophile; Wagner, Richard; in Guys, 213
Salons Ingres use of, 5, 100101, 107109, 131
see also Lavater, Johann Caspar;
Nerval, Grard de, 171 LeBrun, Charles
Newton, Sir Isaac, 6366, 67 Pichois, Claude, 2, 9, 48, 9697, 138,
140141, 145
uvre et la vie de Delacroix, L, 86 Piles, Roger de, 3, 1721, 22, 40
colour and imagination in, 185191 Planche, Gustave, 3536
connections with other arts, 173, 187, see also juste milieu
190191 Poe, Edgar Allan, 99
drawing and colour, 130131 analogies of writing with effects of
poetry in painting, 187188, 190 intoxication, 207211
science of colour, 7980, 86, 185186 connections with Baudelaire, 99, 137,
translation, 173 140141, 191
see also Delacroix, Eugne and Delacroix, 198202, 203
Index 239
and Guys, 204207 Rubnistes, see Poussinistes et Rubnistes

and Ingres, 158, 198, 202204 Runge, Philip Otto, 6364
Pome du hachisch, Le, 207208, 210,
194 Salines, Emily, 1, 182 n. 12, 186
pome en prose, see prose poetry Salons, growth of, 22, 25
Pommier, Jean, 136, 138, 140, 171 Salon de 1845, Le, 4, 13, 28
Portal, Frdric, 141 composition and structure of, 4752,
Poussin, Nicolas, 13, 1617, 1921, 134 175
see also Academy drawing versus colour, 43, 9294, 101,
Poussinistes et Rubnistes, quarrel of, 1721 108, 110, 113
see also Piles, Roger de heroism of modern life 126
prose poetry, 58, 120, 161162, 182, 211, 217 influence of Deroy on, 7273
see also Spleen de Paris, Le music of colour, 166
origins of theory of imagination, 178
Quatremre de Quincy, A.-C., 2325, science of colour, 6162, 8283, 165
32, 102 symbolism of colour, 133135, 144,
Quelques caracturistes franais, 119120, 147, 152
122, 150, 212 see also modernity; music and under
querelle des anciens et des modernes, see individual artists
Poussinistes et Rubnistes Salon de 1846, Le
Aux Bourgeois, 176
Raser, Timothy, 1, 104, 161, 174, 181, 218 composition and structure of, 4850,
realism, 7576, 124, 178 5257, 9497
in colour, 26, 144146 De la couleur, 4, 20, 45, 5762, 70,
Fleurs du Mal accused of, 178 214
see also Courbet, Gustave drawing versus colour, 8991, 94103,
Rflexions sur quelques-uns de mes 107108, 110115, 122, 128, 131
contemporains, 143, 191195, 218 heroism of modern life 5557
Richard Wagner et Tannhuser Paris, influence of Deroy on, 7273
168172, 209, 217, 218 music of colour, 157158, 167168
Riffaterre, Michael, 155, 159160 origins of theory of imagination,
Romanticism, 4, 3536, 5557, 98, 159 183185
Baudelaires nostalgia for, 125, paintings connections with other
176177, 181182, 201, 219220 arts, 191, 203204
connections with colour, 50, 96 poetry in painting, 33, 160, 188
Delacroix as Romantic artist, 31, 32, science of colour, 6971, 80, 8286,
201 145, 175, 186
see also Delacroix, Eugne; landscape symbolism of colour, 135145, 147,
Rousseau, Thodore, 37, 121, 166, 178180 148, 150155
Rubens, Peter Paul, 17, 20, 35, 93, 94 n. 9, see also modernity; landscape and
99, 192 under individual artists
240 Index
Salon de 1859, Le Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 48, 100

Baudelaires disaffection with French Stephens, Sonya, 1, 127, 129
art in, 6, 7, 56, 109, 164, 174177, symbolism, colour, 133143, 184
183, 191, 218219 Baudelaires rejection of systems of,
colour and imagination links in, 57, 143144, 164165, 221
85, 183185, 199 Fourier and theories of, 139, 141
composition and structure of, of separate colours, 144160
173175 see also correspondences, theme of
Delacroixs views on, 188189 and Salons
ideal method 83, 131, 214 synaesthesia, 61, 136
landscape in, 121123, 147, 154, see also correspondences, theme of
177182, 213
memory and intoxication in, 148, Tabar, Franois, 147, 154
207212 Thiers, Adolphe, 27, 30, 113
photography in, 176178, 182 Thor, Thophile (William Brger), 33,
poetry in, 160162, 182183, 191 47, 99, 179, 159 n. 40, 197
symbolism of colour in, 146, 150151 on colour, 3, 3739, 45, 46, 5051, 114,
see also imagination; landscape and 133134, 168
under individual artists and Fourierism, 37, 138, 140
Scheffer, Ary, 7, 8, 3233, 46, 53 and music, 157, 166168
sculpture and physiognomy, 103
Baudelaires views on, 99, 104105, see also colourist painting; music
118, 161, 177 translation, 2, 151, 186, 203, 204
Delacroixs interest in, 79 Baudelaire as translator of others, 137,
importance of in Academic tradition, 140, 173, 198200
1, 3, 2223, 31 Baudelaire as translator of own
Scott, David, 99, 161, 197 poetry and impressions, 6, 157,
Scott, Sir Walter, 188 161162, 165, 169, 171
Shakespeare, William, 176, 219 colours ability to translate, 70, 86,
Sigalon, 31 171, 173, 187, 190191, 184, 213,
Signac, Paul, 80 215
Snell, Robert, 42 imagination and translation, 85, 171,
Spleen de Paris, Le, 58, 120, 182, 211 174, 187
Le Dsir de peindre, 149 other arts ability to translate and
Les Fentres 217 be translated, 5, 165, 170172,
Un Hmisphre dans une Chevelure, 201202
148 poet-critic as supreme translator, 6,
Msta et errabunda, 147 187195, 217218
see also prose poetry see also under individual works and
Stal, Madame de, 64, 138 Salons
Index 241
ut pictura poesis, or poetry as paintings Wagner, Richard, 5, 169, 192, 219

sister art, 3, 13, 10, 2123, 29 see also music and colour; Richard
Wagner et Tannhuser Paris;
Vavasseur, Gustave le, 48 translation
Vernet, Horace, 93 Weber, Carl Maria von 157158, 168169,
Baudelaires attitude to, 78, 48, 198
105106, 185, 205 Wettlaufer, A.K., 57 n. 7, 5961
influence of Chevreul on, 77, 83 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 3, 2223,
popularity of, 2829, 34, 53 89
Vernet, Joseph, 26
Vin et du hachisch, Du, 208, 210 Zeldin, Theodore, 27
Vitu, Auguste, 48, 73, 90 n. 2
Modern French Identities
Edited by Peter Collier
This series aims to publish monographs, editions or collections of

papers based on recent research into modern French Literature. It
welcomes contributions from academics, researchers and writers in
British and Irish universities in particular.
Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone
writing of the twentieth century, whose formal experiments and
revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of
literary forms, from the thematic autobiographies of Michel Leiris and
Bernard Nol to the magic realism of French Caribbean writers.
The idea that identities are constructed rather than found, and
that the self is an area to explore rather than a given pretext, runs
through much of modern French literature, from Proust, Gide and
Apollinaire to Kristeva, Barthes, Duras, Germain and Roubaud.
This series reflects a concern to explore the turn-of-the-
century turmoil in ideas and values that is expressed in the works of
theorists like Lacan, Irigaray and Bourdieu and to follow through the
impact of current ideologies such as feminism and postmodernism on
the literary and cultural interpretation and presentation of the self,
whether in terms of psychoanalytic theory, gender, autobiography,
cinema, fiction and poetry, or in newer forms like performance art.
The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists,
comparative studies, and interdisciplinary projects, including those
where art and cinema intersect with literature.
Volume 1 Victoria Best & Peter Collier (eds): Powerful Bodies.

Performance in French Cultural Studies.
220 pages. 1999. ISBN 3-906762-56-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4239-9
Volume 2 Julia Waters: Intersexual Rivalry.
A Reading in Pairs of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Volume 3 Sarah Cooper: Relating to Queer Theory.
Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig
and Cixous.
231 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906764-46-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-4636-X
Volume 4 Julia Prest & Hannah Thompson (eds): Corporeal Practices.
(Re)figuring the Body in French Studies.
Volume 5 Victoria Best: Critical Subjectivities.
Identity and Narrative in the Work
of Colette and Marguerite Duras.
Volume 6 David Houston Jones: The Body Abject: Self and Text in
Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett.
Volume 7 Robin MacKenzie: The Unconscious in Prousts A la recherche
du temps perdu.
Volume 8 Rosemary Chapman: Siting the Quebec Novel.
The Representation of Space in Francophone Writing in Quebec.
Volume 9 Gill Rye: Reading for Change.
Interactions between Text Identity in Contemporary French
Womens Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant).
Volume 10 Jonathan Paul Murphy: Prousts Art.
Painting, Sculpture and Writing in A la recherche du temps perdu.
Volume 11 Julia Dobson: Hlne Cixous and the Theatre.
The Scene of Writing.
Volume 12 Emily Butterworth & Kathryn Robson (eds): Shifting Borders.
Theory and Identity in French Literature.
VIII + 208 pages. 2001.
ISBN 3-906766-86-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5602-0
Volume 13 Victoria Korzeniowska: The Heroine as Social Redeemer in
the Plays of Jean Giraudoux.
144 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-92-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5608-X
Volume 14 Kay Chadwick: Alphonse de Chteaubriant:
Catholic Collaborator.
Volume 15 Nina Bastin: Queneaus Fictional Worlds.
Volume 16 Sarah Fishwick: The Body in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir.
Volume 17 Simon Kemp & Libby Saxton (eds): Seeing Things.
Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies.
Volume 18 Kamal Salhi (ed.): French in and out of France.
Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogue.
Volume 19 Genevieve Shepherd: Simone de Beauvoirs Fiction.
A Psychoanalytic Rereading.
Volume 20 Lucille Cairns (ed.): Gay and Lesbian Cultures in France.
Volume 21 Wendy Goolcharan-Kumeta: My Mother, My Country.
Reconstructing the Female Self in Guadeloupean Womens Writing.
Volume 22 Patricia OFlaherty: Henry de Montherlant (18951972).
A Philosophy of Failure.
Volume 23 Katherine Ashley (ed.): Prix Goncourt, 19032003: essais critiques.
Volume 24 Julia Horn & Lynsey Russell-Watts (eds): Possessions.
Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory.
223 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-005-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-5924-0
Volume 25 Steve Wharton: Screening Reality.
French Documentary Film during the German Occupation.
Volume 26 Frdric Royall (ed.): Contemporary French Cultures and Societies.
Volume 27 Tom Genrich: Authentic Fictions.
Cosmopolitan Writing of the Troisime Rpublique, 19081940.
Volume 28 Maeve Conrick & Vera Regan: French in Canada.
Language Issues.
186 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03-910142-9
Volume 29 Kathryn Banks & Joseph Harris (eds): Exposure.
Revealing Bodies, Unveiling Representations.
Volume 30 Emma Gilby & Katja Haustein (eds): Space.
New Dimensions in French Studies.
Volume 31 Rachel Killick (ed.): Uncertain Relations.
Some Configurations of the Third Space in Francophone Writings
of the Americas and of Europe.
Volume 32 Sarah F. Donachie & Kim Harrison (eds): Love and Sexuality.
New Approaches in French Studies.
Volume 33 Michal Abecassis: The Representation of Parisian Speech in
the Cinema of the 1930s.
Volume 34 Benedict ODonohoe: Sartres Theatre: Acts for Life.
Volume 35 Moya Longstaffe: The Fiction of Albert Camus. A Complex Simplicity.
Volume 36 Arnaud Beaujeu: Matire et lumire dans le thtre de Samuel Beckett:
Autour des notions de trivialit, de spiritualit et dautre-l.
377 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0206-8
Volume 37 Shirley Ann Jordan: Contemporary French Womens Writing:
Womens Visions, Womens Voices, Womens Lives.
Volume 38 Neil Foxlee: Albert Camuss The New Mediterranean Culture:
A Text and its Contexts.
349 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0207-4
Volume 39 Michael ODwyer & Michle Raclot: Le Journal de Julien Green:
Miroir dune me, miroir dun sicle.
289 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-319-9
Volume 40 Thomas Baldwin: The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust.
Volume 41 Charles Forsdick & Andrew Stafford (eds): The Modern Essay
in French: Genre, Sociology, Performance.
Volume 42 Peter Dunwoodie: Francophone Writing in Transition.
Algeria 19001945.
Volume 43 Emma Webb (ed.): Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives.
Volume 44 Jrme Game (ed.): Porous Boundaries : Texts and Images in
Twentieth-Century French Culture.
164 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-568-7
Volume 45 David Gascoigne: The Games of Fiction: Georges Perec and Modern
French Ludic Narrative.
Volume 46 Derek ORegan: Postcolonial Echoes and Evocations:
The Intertextual Appeal of Maryse Cond.
329 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-578-7
Volume 47 Jennifer Hatte: La langue secrte de Jean Cocteau: la mythologie
personnelle du pote et lhistoire cache des Enfants terribles.
332 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-707-0
Volume 48 Loraine Day: Writing Shame and Desire: The Work of Annie Ernaux.
315 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-275-4
Volume 49-50 Forthcoming.
Volume 51 Isabelle McNeill & Bradley Stephens (eds): Transmissions:
Essays in French Literature, Thought and Cinema.
221 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-734-6
Volume 52 Marie-Christine Lala: Georges Bataille, Pote du rel.
178 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-738-4
Volume 53 Patrick Crowley: Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names.
242 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-744-5
Volume 54 Nicole Thatcher & Ethel Tolansky (eds): Six Authors in Captivity.
Literary Responses to the Occupation of France during World War II.
Volume 55 Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze & Floriane Place-Verghnes (eds):
Potiques de la parodie et du pastiche de 1850 nos jours.
361 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-743-7
Volume 56 Forthcoming.
Volume 57 Helen Vassallo: Jeanne Hyvrard, Wounded Witness:
The Body Politic and the Illness Narrative.
243 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-017-9
Volume 58 Marie-Claire Barnet, Eric Robertson and Nigel Saint (eds):
Robert Desnos. Surrealism in the Twenty-First Century.
390 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03911-019-5
Volume 59 Michael ODwyer (ed.): Julien Green, Diariste et Essayiste.
259 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-016-2
Volume 60 Kate Marsh: Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian
Decolonization 19191962.
238 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-033-9
Volume 61 Lucy Bolton, Gerri Kimber, Ann Lewis and Michael Seabrook (eds):
Framed! : Essays in French Studies.
235 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-043-8
Volume 62 Lorna Milne and Mary Orr (eds): Narratives of French Modernity:
Themes, Forms and Metamorphoses. Essays in Honour of David
Gascoigne.
365 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-051-3
Volume 63 Ann Kennedy Smith: Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaires
Art Criticism.
253 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-094-0
Volume 64 Sam Coombes: The Early Sartre and Marxism.
330 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-115-2
Volume 67 Alison S. Fell (ed.): French and francophone women facing war /
Les femmes face la guerre.
301 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-332-3
Volume 68 Elizabeth Lindley and Laura McMahon (eds):
Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture.
238 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-349-1
Volume 69 Georgina Evans and Adam Kay (eds): Threat: Essays in French
Literature, Thought and Visual Culture.
248 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-357-6
Volume 70 John McCann: Michel Houellebecq: Author of our Times.
229 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-373-6
Volume 71 Jenny Murray: Remembering the (Post)Colonial Self:
Memory and Identity in the Novels of Assia Djebar.
258 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-367-5
Volume 72 Susan Bainbrigge: Culture and Identity in Belgian Francophone
Writing: Dialogue, Diversity and Displacement.
230 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-382-8
Volume 75 Elodie Lagt: LOrient du signe: Rves et drives chez Victor Segalen,
Henri Michaux et Emile Cioran.
242 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-402-3
Volume 76 Suzanne Dow: Madness in Twentieth-Century French Womens
Writing: Leduc, Duras, Beauvoir, Cardinal, Hyvrard.
217 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-540-2
Volume 77 Myriem El Mazi: Marguerite Duras ou lcriture du devenir.
228 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-561-7
Volume 79 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins (eds): Guilt and Shame:
Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture.
231 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-563-1
Volume 80 Vera Regan and Caitrona N Chasaide (eds): Language Practices
and Identity Construction by Multilingual Speakers of French L2:
The Acquisition of Sociostylistic Variation.
189 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-569-3
Volume 81 Margaret-Anne Hutton (ed.): Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in
Contemporary French and Francophone Womens Writing.
294 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-567-9
Volume 82 Elise Hugueny-Lger: Annie Ernaux, une potique de la
transgression.
269 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-833-5
Volume 83 Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith (eds):
Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture.
359 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-846-5
Volume 84 Adam Watt (ed./d.): Le Temps retrouv Eighty Years After/80 ans
aprs: Critical Essays/Essais critiques.
349 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-843-4
Volume 85 Louise Hardwick (ed.): New Approaches to Crime in French
Literature, Culture and Film.
237 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-850-2
Volume 87 Amaleena Daml and Aurlie LHostis (eds): The Beautiful and the
Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture.
237 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-900-4
Volume 88 Alistair Rolls (ed.): Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction.
212 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-957-8
Volume 89 Brnice Bonhomme: Claude Simon : une criture en cinma.
359 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-983-7
Volume 90 Barbara Lebrun and Jill Lovecy (eds): Une et divisible? Plural Identities
in Modern France.
258 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0123-7
Volume 91 Pierre-Alexis Mvel & Helen Tattam (eds): Language and its Contexts/
Le Langage et ses contextes: Transposition and Transformation of
Meaning?/Transposition et transformation du sens ?
272 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0128-2
Volume 93 Michal Abecassis et Gudrun Ledegen (ds): Les Voix des Franais
Volume 1: travers lhistoire, lcole et la presse.
372 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0170-1
Volume 94 Michal Abecassis et Gudrun Ledegen (ds): Les Voix des Franais
Volume 2: en parlant, en crivant.
481 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0171-8
Volume 96 Charlotte Baker: Enduring Negativity: Representations of Albinism in
the Novels of Didier Destremau, Patrick Grainville and Williams Sassine.
226 pages. 2011. ISBN ISBN 978-3-0343-0179-4
Volume 97 Florian Grandena and Cristina Johnston (eds): New Queer Images:
Representations of Homosexualities in Contemporary Francophone
Visual Cultures.
246 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0182-4
Volume 98 Florian Grandena and Cristina Johnston (eds): Cinematic Queerness:
Gay and Lesbian Hypervisibility in Contemporary Francophone
Feature Films.
354 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0183-1

Painted Poetry Colour in Baudelaires Art Criticism Modern French Identities

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Painted Poetry Colour in Baudelaires Art Criticism Modern French Identities

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Modern French Identities 63 Modern French Identities

Ann Kennedy Smith Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaires Art Criticism

Ann Kennedy Smith is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and wrote

Ann Kennedy Smith Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaires Art Criticism

Ann Kennedy Smith is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and wrote

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Smith, Ann Kennedy, 1962-

Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2011

All rights reserved.

My thanks go to Peter Collier for his continuing interest, assistance and

OCI and OCII Baudelaire, Charles, Oeuvres compltes, texte tabli,

CJL Conseils aux jeunes littrateurs

1 Baudelaire and the Art of Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

have written informatively on, respectively, the metaphor of translation

of colour. The imaginative involvement on the part of the spectator was

3 Claude Pichois, Notices, notes et variants in Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres compltes,

The Establishment of the Academy and the

4 Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge

De ce jour, lart est devenu, en France, chose de gouvernement. De ce jour, par le

It is accurate to say that a fundamental distinction would be made, for over

The Academicians were convinced that a regular discourse on artistic would

it formed the core of artistic instruction. Students were forbidden to use

11 Reproduced in Pevsner, Figure 9, pp.9293.

provides a clear indication of the Acadmies view of what was important in

13 Quoted in Annie Becq, Rhtoriques et littrature dart en France la fin du XVIIe

De Piles: Putting the Argument for Colour

15 Becq, Gense, p.68.

style and superlative colour. Bernard Teyssdre, writing of the querelle,

De Piles envisages painting as un Tout harmonieux (Cours, p.111) and to

De Piles differentiates between couleur (the seductive colours to be found

19 Dialogue sur le coloris (Paris: N. Langlois, 1673), p.30.

Colours function within painting could not afford to be understated.

Despite de Piless pioneering writings on the issue of paintings diffrence,

21 Becq, Gense, I, p.75.

depiction of beauty. With this assertion he rejected the long-held notion of

25 Watelet et Levesque, Dichonnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure, 5vols

Diderot and the beginnings of the Salon

Although the idea of a public exhibition of art was distasteful to many

Diderot does speak of Chardins consummate awareness of la science de

31 Essais sur la peinture, uvres sthtiques, p.678.

entrouverte; il halte; sa palette est limage du chaos.36 Although his art

36 Essais sur la peinture, uvres esthtiques, pp.674675.

convenances des journaux, ma jet dans la description purement physique,

39 Quoted by Pontus Grate, Deux critiques de lart de lpoque romantique: Gustave

47 Thiers, Exposition de 1824, Le Globe, p.36.

Romanticism, and Romanticism in painting was considered by many to

50 A. Chauvin, Salon de 1827, Le Moniteur universel, 13, 26novembre, 13, 29dcembre

du spectateur avant tout, et empcher lil dexercer ses facults laise.51

By contrast, Delcluze treated le dessin quite differently, and frequently

56 Salon de 1824, 5septembre.

les dtails anecdotiques croyaient pouvoir suffire communiquer le sentiment po-

Planches undoubted enjoyment of the energy and passion of this paint-

59 Pontus Grate, Deux Critiques de lart de lpoque romantique: Gustave Planche et

wanted to see more Classical influence in art, at heart Planche believed

Putting the Case for Colour

62 David Kelley, introduction to Baudelaires Salon de 1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

figures or objects he depicts an integral part of their environment, and

of scientific developments such as physiognomy and phrenology, prefig-

force de tourmenter la ligne pour la prciser, ils narrivent qu un rsultat approxi-

68 LArtiste, 1833, p.122.

71 Des envois de Rome, p.378.

Le bourgeois, qui a le sentiment artistique moins dvelope encore que le peuple, a

Haussard belongs to a new tradition of art criticism of which Baudelaire

77 Salon de 1839, Le Temps, 5avril 1839.