Charles Méryon
This highly accomplished etching captures a tantalizing tension in Charles Méryon’s
works and methods, visually linking two of Paris’s most monumental gothic representations
in watchful surveillance over the modern city. The Cathedral of Notre Dame is represented
by the menacing foreground gargoyle, newly carved by the restoration architect
Viollet-le-Duc; in the distance looms the stranded Tour Saint-Jacques, a fragment of a
parish church destroyed after the 1789 revolution. Méryon captures the latter at a
pivotal moment; having survived repeated demolition threats, the clearance of surrounding
structures was underway in 1853, and full-scale restoration under Haussmann would soon
commence.
These remnants of the past stand sentry over a dense and impacted city,
both fascinating and horrifying Méryon. Fluidly drawn birds of prey and the somber
tonalities of storm clouds and dark alleys take full advantage of the evocative potential
of the etching medium, reinforcing Méryon’s near-mystical medievalism. At the same
time, the crisp architectonics of pictorial structure and painstaking delineation of urban
detail capitalize on the precision of the etching needle, and betray his attraction to the
quick texture of life in a rapidly evolving city. Likely inspired by a brooding passage in
Victor Hugo’s 1831 Notre Dame de Paris, Méryon’s image in turn
inspired homages in other media. Among these is surrealist Brassai’s Nocturnal View
from Notre Dame Overlooking Paris and the Tour Saint-Jacques, of 1933, identically
posed and similarly motivated by the urge to fix an ephemeral Paris.
--- Lauren M. O’Connell
October 2001
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