Unfinished Homage: Manet's Burial and Baudelaire

Little precise documentation exists for [acute{E}]douard Manet's The Burial, a painting that has been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1909 (Fig. 1) [1] The work, which Manet listed in an inventory of his works as "L'Enterrement la Glaci[grave{e}]re," [2] never left Manet's studio in the painter's lifetime, and it was authenticated by Suzanne Manet, the painter's widow, in 1884. The painter Camille Pissarro, who owned it by 1894, referred to it as "an extraordinary sketch" he had obtained in an exchange with the dealer Ambroise Vollard: "a superb [size] 30 canvas." [3] The modern viewer can easily discern what appealed to Pissarro about the work: it is a real landscape that offers the kind of apparent fidelity Pissarro so valued with regard to weather effects, to shifts in topography, and to the monuments of the Paris skyline. In the painting, a funeral cortege makes its way across the tight foreground field; it seems enclosed by the canopy of the city above and around it. There are varying accounts of the precise location of the vantage point and suggestions that the work commemorates the funeral of Manet's great friend Charles Baudelaire, which took place on September 2, 1867. [4]

For all its specificity in certain areas, the painting remains strangely vague in others. Unlike the figures in so many other Manet paintings, the figures in the cortege cannot be identified. In contrast to the background of recognizable Paris monuments, the middle ground is sketchy and unfinished. Although some writers have suggested a relation between the dark clouds in the picture and the storm that broke out at Baudelaire's funeral, there is scarcely a detail to relate the picture to the funeral of a specific person. [5] Since Manet never finished the painting and did not exhibit it, its precise date is not known. Several commentators, however, have noted the specifically imperial uniform of the figure at the end of the cortege, a detail that indicates a date prior to 1870, while the stylistic evidence points to a date of late 1867 or after. [6]

Given this tantalizing mix of the particular and the ambiguous, it is necessary to think more broadly, or better yet, speculate: If Manet were to paint a picture commemorating Baudelaire's funeral, what might it be like? Perhaps more important: What would it not be like? What other examples would Manet have been responding to in 1867? And what kind of a funeral, and what kind of a picture of Paris, does the painting actually offer?

First, the location. It has long been noted that the painting was done somewhere at the foot of the Butte Mouffetard, which features on its summit the Panth[acute{e}]on, prominent in the painting's skyline. In the 1930s, Adolphe Tabarant had proposed Manet's vantage point as the rue de l'Estrapade, but that area, at the heart of the Fifth Arrondissement, seems too close to the Panth[acute{e}]on to offer a glimpse of all the other monuments depicted. [7] Eric Darragon suggests the area around the Gobelins tapestry works; certainly it provides an excellent perspective on the Panth[acute{e}]on from the present-day avenue des Gobelins. [8] The major monuments themselves have not been much in dispute: the canvas shows the rounded dome of the Observatoire at left and, close to it, the vaulted dome of the Val-de-Gr[hat{a}]ce; the highest point is occupied by the Neoclassical Panth[acute{e}]on, and near it lies the belfry of St-[acute{E}]tienne-du-Mont and the Tour de Clovis, part of the Lyc[acute{e}]e Henri IV. Des pite the painting's appearance of faithful transcription, many critics have argued that Manet must have juggled and rearranged the monuments. Theodore Reff has proposed that the painting could literally represent the Montparnasse cemetery, where Baudelaire was buried, and that the structure usually identified as the Val-de-Gr[hat{a}]ce could instead be the dome of the Sorbonne, another seventeenth-century building. [9] Charles Sterling and Margaretta Salinger observe that if La Glaci[grave{e}]re is the location, then Manet has moved the Observatoire and the Val-de-Gr[hat{a}]ce closer together. [10] Most recently, and more accurately, however, Henri Loyrette reinforces the idea that the painter's viewpoint was the rue tie la Glaci[grave{e}]re; a painting with a view of Paris from Gentilly shows essentially the same view from farther away."

There is, in fact, a contemporary text that almost perfectly describes Manet's view. In [acute{E}]mile de Lab[acute{e}]dolli[grave{e}]re's Le nouveau Paris: Histoire de ses 20 arrondissements, 1860, the writer suggests a walk out to the new Thirteenth Arrondissement:

The stroller who, after having followed the rue Mouffetard, turns right and takes the rue Petit-Gentilly [today from the avenue des Gobelins to the rue Abel Hovelacque], finds himself unarguably faced with one of the most beautiful landscapes that can be found in Paris. Right before his eyes, he has a valley watered by the Bi[grave{e}]vre, to which he is not close enough to breathe its deleterious and nauseating emanations. [12]