Design and Art Australia Online

draughtsman, etcher, sculptor and naval officer, made three brief visits to Australia between 1842 and 1846, although his subsequent career in France is far better known. After training at the Brest Naval School from 1837 to 1839 (where drawing was a standard part of the curriculum) and a period stationed at Toulon when he visited a number of Mediterranean ports and took further art lessons, Meryon embarked in the Rhin under Auguste Bérard for a long cruise. The ship was based at Akaroa, New Zealand to protect French interests in the region. The voyage to New Zealand was broken by visits to a Brazilian port – and to Hobart Town in December 1842 and January 1843. Subsequently the Rhin twice visited Sydney, in November-December 1843 and October 1845-January 1846.

Visits to other New Zealand ports and cruises throughout the Pacific as far afield as Valparaiso in Chile and the southern Marshall Islands brought further variety to what was, for Meryon, a period of increasing frustration and boredom. He turned to reading, to drawing and, after having bought wax and plaster of Paris at Sydney in 1843, to sculpture. The 300 or so drawings known to survive from these years embrace themes as varied as botany, zoology, ethnography and topography. Not surprisingly, the greatest number are from New Zealand. Only four have been identified as being of Australian interest: two views in Sydney Harbour, a head of a dingo, and a pastel portrait of an Aborigine – though the last may have been drawn in France after his return. There is also a drawing of a lyrebird, but it could have been done in Paris as late as 1859. The assertion made by William Moore, that other views of the Australian coastline exist, cannot be substantiated.

After his return to France in September 1846, Meryon decided to pursue the career of artist and explored a number of projects on romantic themes, some deriving from his experiences in the Pacific. There is, however, evidence of only two of these having been executed: a large pastel of a whaling scene (now known only from a photograph) and another pastel showing The Murder of Captain Marion du Frêne in New Zealand, 12 June 1772 . Diverted from this hackneyed romanticism by Eugène Bléry, an innovative and pioneering etcher who was his teacher for a brief period in 1848-49, Meryon then began a visual exploration of the medieval heart of Paris. To the inner city, often picturesque and ennobled by distinguished buildings, but also dark, oppressive and disease-ridden, Meryon brought his own inner pessimism. This took implicit form in the images themselves and found explicit expression in the poems that accompany certain of his plates. In this setting Meryon’s recollections of the South Seas were intensified, offering an Edenic contrast to the evils of nineteenth-century Paris.

Return was impossible, but this fund of memories took visible form, first in 1856, then consistently from 1859 to 1866, in two interrelated ways. Starting with Pilot of Tonga (1856), a poetic text in an ornamental border based on Polynesian art, and ending in 1866, he produced a series of eleven etchings directly derived from his Oceanic travels: five subjects from New Zealand, and one each from New Caledonia, the Wallis Isles, the Marshall Islands and Australia. The etching, Head of a New Holland Dog , dates from 1860. In addition, Meryon devised a title-page which used names, landscapes and various objects in a complex and richly allusive summing-up of his Pacific years. Secondly, there were a number of etchings having no overt connection with the Pacific but into which Pacific allusions were inserted. Among these is the Pont-au-Change, Paris , originally etched in 1854 but radically modified (in 1859?) by the addition of albatrosses, birds of paradise and a lyrebird flying over the heart of Paris. This and the other hybrid images which play on disconcerting contrast were long dismissed as lunatic ravings but a change in critical perspective means that they are now looked on more positively. They represent a despairing attempt to establish a personal balance between two poles of emotional experience: an intolerable but inescapable present and a real but unattainable paradise, distant in both space and time.

In 1858-59 Meryon had been confined in the asylum at Charenton-Saint-Maurice on the outskirts of Paris. He returned there in October 1866 and died sixteen months later. The standard view of Charles Meryon which focuses on the masterpieces of his brief maturity as an etcher in the early to mid 1850s, which dismisses his travels in the Pacific and his artistic apprenticeship as biographical anecdote, and which considers his late works as evidence of failing powers and deepening insanity, overlooks both a fundamental factor in the formation of his artistic vision and its most poignant expression.

Writers:

Collins, R. D. J.

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011