Handwerker Gallery Newsletter

Winter 2002 – Volume 3, Number 3

From the Permanent Collection

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