Troubled Tinker

Charles Meryon is not a familiar name in art, but it stands for some of the most highly prized etchings ever made. A wizened little man with a black beard and distrustful eye, Meryon 100 years ago set himself the task of putting the people and particularly the architecture of Paris onto copper. A few clear-seeing critics, including Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, praised him to the skies. Meryon brushed aside the praise. He was a perfectionist and he brought no more than a dozen of his meticulously etched plates to the standard that he demanded of himself. His finest works were featured last week in an exhibition of recently acquired prints at Washington's National Gallery. Bequeathed to the gallery by the late Manhattan collector R. Horace Gallatin,

Meryon's etchings shared top honors in the show with Gallatin's two other favorite print-makers: Rembrandt and Albrecht Durer.

The illegitimate son of an English doctor and a French ballet dancer, Meryon joined the French navy in 1841, resigned after seven years "because I did not feel solid enough, either physically or morally, to wield authority over men . . ." As a lonely alternative he took up painting, switched to etching when he found he was color blind. His technical perfectionism was the despair of Meryon himself ("I should have been a tinker"). Combined with his gloomy appreciation of Paris' medieval buildings, it gave his prints the quality of polished mirrors reflecting a magnificently sinister world. "I see an enemy behind each battlement," he once told a friend, "and arms through each loophole."

As time went on, Meryon saw stranger things. His later cityscapes were ruined, collectors thought, by the introduction of monstrous birds and whales wallowing overhead. After he had printed etchings of two perpendicular boxes in which a man and a woman were padlocked to sleep standing up, and made a written attack on ordinary beds ("A piece of furniture that serves the purpose of laziness and lust"), Meryon was hustled off to a madhouse. There, at 46, he died.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.