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Notes
1. Charles Baudelaire, “La chambre double,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), vol. 1, 280.
: “Les étoffes parlent une langue muette.”2. Émile Marcelin, Journal Amusant, June 28, 1861, cover: “… Et d'abord pourquoi nos artistes ne nous peignent-ils jamais que des femmes romains en chocolat, des femmes gothiques en bois et des femmes étrusques en zinc, quand il y a des parisiennes!”
3. Jules Claretie, “Deux heures au Salon,” L'Artiste, May 15, 1865, 226
: “Une courtisane sans doute.”4. Jules Claretie, “Échos de Paris,” Le Figaro, June 25, 1865, 6
: “… l'on ne savait à peine si l'on voyait un paquet de chairs nues ou un paquet de linge.”5. Beth Archer Brombert, Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 144.
6. Margaret Mary Seibert, “A Biography of Victorine-Louise Meurent and Her Role in the Art of Édouard Manet” ( PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1986), 17.
7. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), see esp. 257–89
. See also Mary Mathews Gedo, Looking at Art from the Inside Out: The Psychoiconographic Approach to Modern Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).8. Alain Clairet, “Le bracelet de l'Olympia,” L'Oeil 333 (April 1983): 36–41.
9. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 79.
10. Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 283.
11. Ernest Chesneau, “Les excentriques,” Le Constitutionnel, May 16, 1865, 1.
12. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 79.
13. Juliet Wilson-Bareau, The Hidden Face of Manet: An Investigation of the Artist's Working Processes (London: Burlington Magazine, 1986), 45.
14. One writer, in an article on cashmere, called it “the dream of all fiancées, adornment of all expensive wedding baskets [rêve de toutes les fiancées, parure de toutes les riches corbeilles].” Kauffmann, “Les cachemires de l'Inde,” Le Monde Illustré, November 13, 1858, 314. See Susan Hiner, “Unpacking the Corbeille de Marriage,” in Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 45–76
. I have benefited greatly in the preparation of this paper from Hiner's scholarship.15. André, Courrier de Paris, April 10, 1858, 210.
16. Ibid.
17. Jules Janin, “Exposition des produits de l'industrie,” L'Artiste 3 (1839): 146
: “Une femme peut prendre au hasard son amant ou son mari; mais à coup sûr elle choisira son châle avec le plus grand soin; car du soin de ce châle dépend sa vie, dépend sa gloire, dépend surtout l'avenir de son ménage; car si le châle est beau, s'il est d'une belle couleur, s'il est original sans être bizarre, voilà une femme contente pour bien des années.” This is corroborated by the satire in an 1823 issue of Le Règne de la Mode: “What is the first desire of a young woman as soon as she has reached the age of coquetry, which precedes the age of reason? / A cashmere. / What does a woman desire more than a husband and always prefers to him? / A cashmere.” Quoted in Aileen Ribeiro, Ingres in Fashion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 188.18. Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 222.
19. Hiner, Accessories to Modernity, 210.
20. Nancy Locke, Manet and the Family Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 98.
21. “By the 1860s caricatures and journalistic illustrations were such well-established modes of interpreting urban life that their graphic devices began to penetrate the oil paintings, as well as the drawings, of Manet, Degas, and others.” Robert Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 40.
22. “Le costume est quelque chose plus que l'habillement de l'homme. C'est aussi le vêtement de ses idées.” Charles Blanc, “Considérations sur le costume,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, year 1, vol. 2 (June 1, 1859): 257.
23. Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” in The Rise of Fashion: A Reader, ed. Daniel Leonhard Purdy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 295.
24. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, quoted in Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 21.
25. Monique Lévi-Strauss, The Cashmere Shawl (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 16.
26. John Irwin, Shawls: A Study in Indo-European Influences (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1955), 32.
27. Moniteur Universel, February 1, 1813, quoted in Lévi-Strauss, The Cashmere Shawl, 25.
28. Ibid., 28.
29. Betty Werther, “Paisley in Perspective: The Cashmere Shawl in France,” American Craft 58 (February–March 1983): 7.
30. Ibid.
31. La Mode, August 1839, quoted in Henriette Vanier, La mode et ses métiers: Frivolités et luttes des classes 1830–1870 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960), 48–49
: “Aujourd'hui on ne rencontre des femmes avec un châle pareil; la même femme met souvent trois châles différents dans la même journée, à cause des variations de la température. Quand la température n'est pas chaude, c'est le cachemire de l'Inde, le roi des châles et le châle des reines, qu'elle prend pour sortir” (Today one does not meet women with such shawls; the same woman dons several shawls throughout the day, due to changes in temperature. When it is not hot, it is the Indian cashmere, the king of shawls and the shawl of queens, that she puts on).32. Janin, “Exposition des produits de l'industrie,” 146: “[Le châle] est traité comme un tableau de Decamps à l'Exposition: les Parisiennes se l'arrachent à tout prix.”
33. Irwin, Shawls: A Study in Indo-European Influences, 34.
34. Lévi-Strauss, The Cashmere Shawl, 10.
35. See Ribeiro, Ingres in Fashion; and Madeleine Delpierre, “Ingres et la mode du châle cachemire d'après ses portraits féminins dessinés et peints,” in Actes du colloque: Ingres et Rome (Montauban, France: Société des “Amis du Musée Ingres,” 1986), 75–83.
36. For a thorough discussion of this painting, see Tamar Garb, The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France 1814–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 19–57.
37. Ribeiro, Ingres in Fashion, 114.
38. Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues (Paris: Flammarion, 1966), 182
: “La question du costume est d'ailleurs énorme chez ceux qui veulent paraître avoir ce qu'ils n'ont pas; car c'est souvent le meilleur moyen de le posséder plus tard.”39. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), 18.
40. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 87.
41. Eugène Loudun, Le Salon de 1852 (Paris: L. Hervé, 1852), 8–9
, quoted in Patricia Mainardi, “Gustave Courbet's Second Scandal: ‘Les Demoiselles de Village,’” Arts 53 (1979): 97.42. Théophile Gautier, “Salon de 1852,” La Presse, May 11, 1853, 2, quoted in ibid., 97.
43. Clément de Ris, “Salon de 1852,” L'Artiste 8 (May 1, 1852), 99
, quoted in Albert Boime, Art in the Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 193.44. See Hélène Toussaint, Gustave Courbet, 1819–1877 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 266–68.
45. Mainardi, “Gustave Courbet's Second Scandal,” 97, has pointed out the similarity of the shawl worn in this painting to a fashion plate in Le Magasin des Demoiselles of August 25, 1856. A wood engraving in the June 9, 1857, issue of La Mode Illustrée shows the fashion of the double shawl from behind.
46. Gustave Courbet to Champfleury, November–December 1854, in Letters of Gustave Courbet, ed. and trans. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 132.
47. H. Tresca, Visite à l'Exposition Universelle de Paris en 1855 (Paris: Hachette, 1855), 771
. See also Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 111.48. Augustin Challamel, The History of Fashion in France; or, The Dress of Women from the Gallo-Roman Period to the Present Time (London: Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1882), 229.
49. Thomas Southey, The Rise, Progress and Present State of Colonial Sheep & Wools (London: Effington Wilson, 1851), 91.
50. A frequently run advertisement in multiple issues of Le Charivari in 1856 for Biétry claimed, “M. Biétry a l'honneur d'être fournisseur brevet de leurs majestés impériales; il est filateur et fabricant. … La matière de cachemire employée pour leur fabrication est en tout point la même que celle des plus beaux châles de l'Inde, et par le progrès de la filature les cachemires français sont plus doux.” In the June 28, 1862, issue of Le Charivari an unsigned notice commented on the current exhibition of shawls at Biétry's, calling special attention to Empress Eugénie's most recent purchase.
51. “Avez-vous remarqué de quels regards une femme sans cachemire poursuit dans la rue une femme à cachemire ? … ‘Quel intriguant! dit l'homme.— Comment a-t-elle eu ce cachemire ?’ dit la femme.” Christophe, “Le cachemire,” L'Illustration, November 7, 1846, 151.
52. It is not surprising that many of the topical shawl references are found in lithographic prints. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has observed: “Unlike traditional ‘popular’ prints, which can be considered a conservative form (owing to their themes, conventionality, and relatively fixed formats), lithographic prints—in keeping with their own modernity and rapidity of production—specialized in fashion, topicality, ephemerality; their references were to up-to-date styles, fads, and décor. To the extent that print culture repetitively, ceaselessly staged its erotic feminine display—indeed femininity as display—in direct contiguity with the modern and the modish, the eroticism of the feminine infused its setting and, by extension, the new world of consumption of which the print itself was a talisman.” Solomon-Godeau, “The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Display,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 122–23.
53. Alphonse Karr, Les femmes (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1853), 344
: “Il est singulier de voir les femmes arriver successivement dans un salon et la faire subir réciproquement un rapide et sûr examen de la tête aux pieds: il semble des combattants qui cherchent d'avance le défaut de leurs adversaires. Chaque pièce de parure est, en effet, une arme offensive et défensive: offensive contre les hommes, défensive contre les femmes.”54. Maxime Du Camp, Le Salon de 1857 (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1857), 102.
55. Gustave Planche, “Le Salon de 1857,” Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1857, 396.
56. Edmond About, Nos artistes au Salon de 1857 (Paris: Hachettte, 1857), 153.
57. Théophile Gautier, “Salon de 1857,” L'Artiste, September 20, 1857, 34.
58. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale (Paris: Garnier, 1865), 244.
59. Ibid., 245–46.
60. In the Bréda quarter: “Two cashmeres in one day! … Paul's is beautiful, but Léon promised me a suite of rosewood furniture. Paul's is only mahogany. It's true that Léon does not have a rich uncle like Paul does; on the one hand, Paul doesn't have a thrifty seventy-year-old cousin. On the other hand Paul … yes, but Léon … My God! how unhappy a poor woman is when she doesn't have a business manager to direct her heart's desires. Which one should I choose? … Come on now! how stupid I am to rack my brains over this … I choose … both of them!” Pierre Véron, Paris s'amuse (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862), 9–10.
61. Arnould Frémy, “La victoire des cachemires,” Le Charivari, July 28, 1858
, n.p.: “Quand vous offrez un cachemire à une femme, il va sans dire que vous lui avez offert préalablement toutes sortes de robes, de fleurs, de bijoux, de dentelles: le cachemire n'est que le couronnement de tout cela.” In 1853 the Goncourt brothers published La lorette in the periodicals L'Éclair and Paris before bringing it out in book form. A section entitled “Monsieur l'Amabassade des cachemires” notes that the male lover always has a cashmere on hand and that no matter if he has only given perfumes and bracelets, he remains, in the eyes of the lorette (a type of kept woman), the living symbol of cashmere. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Les lorettes (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1883), 40.62. Christophe, “Le cachemire,” 151.
63. L'Illustration, April 26, 1862: “La femme est devenue une façon de vaniteux étalage. … Le cachemire crie: je coute dix mille francs. … La femme est une plus-value que l'on pourrait coter à la Bourse.”
64. Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991
; reprint, Los Angeles: Getty Trust, 2003), 61. On prostitution in France, in addition to Clayson, see Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) ; Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) ; Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore,” New German Critique 13, no. 39 (Fall 1986): 99–140 ; and Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).65. Honoré de Balzac, Ferragus, 1833, quoted in Hiner, Accessories to Modernity, 27.
66. Gustave Flaubert, L'éducation sentimentale, 1869, quoted in ibid., 99.
67. Janin, “Exposition des produits de l'industrie,” 146
: “Le châle est l'ami des blanches épaules, des bras rebondis, des jeunes seins qui commencent à battre, des tailles souples et fines… . Dis-moi quel est ton cachemire, et je te dirai qui tu es.”68. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905, quoted in Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideas of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 42.
69. Alexandre Dumas, The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte Hermine in the Age of Napoleon, trans. Lauren Yoder (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007), 158–59.
70. For example, “The majestic young woman is a courtesan, with dirty hands, with wrinkled feet; she is reclining, dressed in Turkish slippers and a red knot of ribbons; her flesh has the livid tone of a cadaver displayed at the Morgue … . ” Ego, “Courrier de Paris,” Le Monde Illustré, May 13, 1865, 291. Another example: “Olympia awakens, tired … of dreaming. It was evidently a bad night. Insomnia, accompanied by a stomachache, disturbed her serenity, her coloring indicates it.” C. Postwer, La Fraternité Littéraire, Artistique et Industrielle, June 1, 1865
, quoted in Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 285 n. 32.71. “A nude … is a picture for men to look at, in which Woman is constructed as an object of someone else's desire.” Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 131
. “The hand of Titian's Venus folds inward, fading from view as it elides with her sex. The gesture carries a certain autoerotic suggestion, but that suggestion, as I read it, in no way excludes a male viewer, serving rather as an invitation, a sign of willing receptivity.” Bernheimer, 117. Scholarship is replete with suppositions from Manet's time and our own that the painting was addressed to a male viewer, and these need not be reintroduced here. See Edward Snow, “Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems,” Representations 25 (Winter 1989): 30–41 . On the question of female spectatorship in this painting, see Charles Harrison, Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 52ff.72. “Arthur est certainement dans l'antichambre, qui attend.” Postwer, La Fraternité Littéraire, Artistique et Industrielle, June 1, 1865, quoted in Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 285 n. 32.
73. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 136.
74. Théophile Gautier, “Salon de 1863,” Le Moniteur Universel, July 13, 1863: “Son corps divin semble pétri avec l'écume neigeuse des vagues. Les pointes des seins, la bouche et les joues sont seules teintées d'une imperceptible nuance rose; une goutte de la pourpre ambroisienne se répand dans cette substance argentée et vaporeuse.”
75. A sharp crease of brown paint defines the armpit, but it is difficult to determine if this was meant by Manet to indicate underarm hair.
76. Lévi-Strauss, The Cashmere Shawl, 42.
77. Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris (Paris: J. B. Ballière, 1836)
, quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 50.78. As F. F. A. Béraud writes in Les filles publiques de Paris et la police qui les régit (Paris: Chez Desforges, 1839), 236–37
: “in big cities, and principally in the capital, in the midst of an immense agglomeration of individuals, unknown to each other, the poorest want to appear rich, and the most indigent do not want to tolerate any deprivation. The seamstress dreams of cashmere, the florist of a baby carriage, and one realizes at what price these young women achieve the height of their ambition, if it happens to them at all, after numerous false steps. For several days they gratify their spendthrift tastes, fool themselves into thinking that they are taken for women of distinction, because they have the fine apparel, and that no one knows where they come from; but soon enough the inseparable disorder of the courtesan's existence, causes them to fall beneath their primitive sphere; their new habits distance them from their old work, and they are inevitably lost in prostitution.”79. See especially Beatrice Farwell, Manet and the Nude: A Study in Iconography in the Second Empire (New York: Garland, 1981), 199
ff.; and Theodore Reff, Manet: Olympia (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 48–58.80. Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 163.
81. Rona Goffen, “Sex, Space, and Social History in Titian's Venus of Urbino,” in Titian's “Venus of Urbino” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 79.
82. Reff, Manet: Olympia, 98.
83. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964), 14.
84. Ibid., 2.
85. Ibid., 35.
86. Ibid., 3.
87. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 138.
88. The shawl becomes almost a caricature of painterliness, much like the matador's cloak held up in Manet's 1862 Mlle V … in the Costume of an Espada. See Carol Armstrong, “Manet at the Intersection of Portraits and Personalities,” in Manet: Portraying Life, ed. MaryAnne Stevens (London: Royal Academy, 2012), 42–49
, at 47.89. See James H. Rubin, Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye (Paris: Flammarion, 2010).
90. As Solomon-Godeau, “The Other Side of Venus,” 113, has observed, “In becoming not only the commodity's emblem but its lure, the feminine image operates as a conduit and mirror of desire, reciprocally intensifying and reflecting the commodity's allure.”
91. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, 96.
92. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, vol. 1, 1851–1865 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), 768: “elle garde ses outils.”
93. Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,” in Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 146.
94. See Agnès Rocamora, Fashioning the City: Paris Fashion and the Media (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), xv.
95. See Ruth E. Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
; and Gloria Groom, ed., Impressionism, Fashion, & Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).96. “Voilà qui est fort sot, s'écria Manet, il faut être de son temps, faire ce que l'on voit, sans s'inquiéter de la mode.” Manet, quoted in Antonin Proust, Édouard Manet Souvenirs (Paris: L'Échoppe, 1996), 10.
97. Quoted in Justine De Young, “Fashion and the Press,” in Groom, Impressionism, Fashion, & Modernity, 246.
98. Stéphane Mallarmé single-handedly edited La Dernière Mode, a short-lived fashion periodical in 1874, the same year he wrote his essay on Manet. He, too, was interested in the corbeille and the shawl, even after it had gone out of style in 1870 after the introduction of the bustle: “All this that we must have been glimpsing must for various reasons have its place in the corbeille and an Indian cashmere shawl, of a certain price—indispensable, even if only very rarely worn. (Fashion having declared it not to be formal dress.) Let it [this shawl] slip from the shoulders, with its Oriental folds, and envelop other marvels—all that jewel box which, stone by stone or pearl by pearl, we have been recounting.” Mallarmé, La Dernière Mode, quoted in Hiner, Accessories to Modernity, 45.
99. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 133.
100. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 375.
For Barbara Wright, Trinity College, Dublin.
This essay came about as a result of an invitation from MaryAnne Stevens to speak at the Royal Academy of Arts in London for the exhibition Manet: Portraying Life in April 2012. I am grateful to Dr. Stevens and Dr. Alison Bracker for their generous hospitality in addition to their comments on my presentation. I also thank Gloria Groom for the opportunity to present my ideas to the Old Masters Society at the Art Institute of Chicago in July 2013 during the exhibition Fashion, Impressionism and Modernity, where I gained insights from Hollis Clayson and Susan Strauber. Steven Levine generously read an earlier draft of this essay and made several valuable suggestions, as did Susan Sidlauskas. Susan Hiner's scholarship provided significant information, and her generosity in reading a draft of this essay is acknowledged with gratitude. I am also grateful for the feedback I received at the “Manet: Then and Now” symposium on April 11, 2014, sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania through Kaja Silverman and André Dombrowski. My gratitude also goes to Catherine Soussloff and Sima Godfrey for inviting me to present this material at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. I also thank Kirk Ambrose and the anonymous readers for The Art Bulletin for their suggestions. I am grateful to Cally Iden for her assistance with the photographs and to Lory Frankel for her editorial suggestions.
I began collecting information on the shawl as a graduate student at Bryn Mawr after Charles Dempsey challenged my reading of a caricature that I had written about in my master's thesis on Gavarni. Clearly, I had not adequately made my point, and I was determined one day to prove my argument in an article that eventually evolved into this essay, following from the invitation by the Royal Academy. So a final thanks to Charles Dempsey and my apologies for it taking me forty years to answer his pertinent question.
Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
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Therese Dolan
Therese Dolan has authored Manet, Wagner and the Musical Culture of Their Time (2013) and edited Perspectives on Manet (2012). She has published in The Art Bulletin, Word & Image, Print Quarterly, Nineteenth Century French Studies, Women's Art Journal, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, and La Revue de l'Art [Department of Art History, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, 2001 N. 13th Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 19122, [email protected]].