Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/34

 dry manner, is a plate of 1856, and in the same year he etched, from photographs, the large panoramic view of San Francisco. More typical Meryons are the two queer etchings of 1855 and 1856 called La Loi Solaire and La Loi Lunaire, in which he propounded very crazy views on morality, one of them being that an upright posture is the proper attitude for sleep, a theory which he himself carried into practice in later years, by passing the night between two upright boards with his arms supported by loops of rope to keep him from falling. Le Pilote de Tonga, a prose poem in a frame, etched in 1856, is the first of what grew, in the sixties, into a long series of etchings founded on his sketches and reminiscences of his early voyage to the South Seas. These filled an even larger place in his thoughts in his last years, but it is to be feared that the etchings of these subjects, of which a few specimens are here reproduced (plates 43-46), leave posterity rather cold.

THE LATE ETCHINGS

The only etchings of any importance that Meryon produced after his release from confinement are some of the last views of Paris, done at the time when he was retouching his old plates of Paris and making the, not very judicious, alterations which distinguish their latest states. The new ones are : Rue Pirouette (1860, plate 36), Tourelle de la rue de l'Ecole-de-Médecine (1861), which shows the house in which Marat was assassinated (plates 25, 26), Rue des Chantres (1862, plates 27, 28), Collège Henri IV (1864, plate 29), Bain-froid Chevrier (1864, plate 30), Le Ministère de la Marine (1866, plates 31, 32) and L'ancien Louvre, vers 1650 (1866, plate 38), in which, fulfilling a commission from the Chalcographie du Louvre, he returned to the study of his old love, Renier Zeeman. The Rue des Chantres is incomparably the finest of these, but it can only be seen to real advantage in the very rare early states, one of which the British Museum possesses (plate 27), in which the spire, a recent addition to Notre-Dame designed by Viollet-le-Duc, soars into an empty sky, which was after