Charles Meryon: A Life
by Roger Collins


Charles Meryon. Portrait by an anonymous photographer, circa 1850
(Reproduced by courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum)

Charles Meryon: A Life
Published in hardback by Garton & Co.
October 1999
ISBN: 0 9006030 35 8
322 pages with over 100 illustrations and maps plus 2 colour illustrations.
Four appendices giving details of:
(1) Charles Meryon's family tree
(2) The officers and crew of the Rhin
(3) A NEW chronological LISTING of the etchings
(4) Notes on family and friends.

There is also a comprehensive BIBLIOGRAPHY and INDEX.

In October 1999, Garton & Co, Print Dealers and Publishers, in Wiltshire, England are publishing a long awaited and much needed biography of Charles Meryon (1821-1868). The book has been written by Roger Collins of the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Collins's interest in Meryon began over forty years ago, when he encountered Meryon's work in connection with his studies of French artists working in New Zealand. He has written a number of articles on Meryon, and will be best known to Meryon admirers for the Bibliography he produced in 1984.

Garton & Co have special reasons to publish the book. Their exhibition of Meryon's prints in London in 1985 was one of the only exhibitions devoted to Meryon's work ever held in the UK. They also published a new Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints of Charles Meryon by the late Dr. Richard Schneiderman in 1990.

Some artists have the power to affect the way in which we perceive things. So powerful is their vision that they create a watershed in our perceptions. Anyone who knows Meryon's Paris prints will have found it difficult not to see Paris through his eyes, at least for a time. But Meryon is more than a changer of perceptions. He is an artist at the heart of the Romantic Movement, plumbing the depths of melancholy and striving for inner peace from gnawing anxiety and apprehension. He is the founder of an aesthetic, which would dominate British printmaking for half a century after his death.

Meryon's life, with its brilliance and its afflictions, could easily have come from the pen of Victor Hugo. Indeed there were writers, who wanted to romanticise its tragedy, in literature, even during Meryon's lifetime. Worse was to follow: the artist's father tried to develop the tragedy into a work of fiction after Meryon's suicide.

Faced with such a weight of mythology from the last century, Collins took the view that the best way to understand Meryon's work was to look at his life as a whole, and not only the period when he practised printmaking. This perspective is important because of the formative years Meryon spent in the South Seas. It is Collins's contention that this experience remained with Meryon throughout his brief artistic life and is as important to the Paris prints as it is to the later Oceanic ones.

The work has proved a massive task. It is probable that Collins is the only person who has read every extant letter from Meryon's hand. He has even managed to uncover the artist's medical records. The picture that emerges of the artist's early life will come as a revelation, especially to those who have read the scant biographical sources that exist. Collins describes a highly perceptive and precocious child, a loving and practical mother, and a father (who only met his son four times) wielding a disproportionate influence.

It was perhaps expedient for Charles Meryon's father to send him to sea, as a means of ridding himself from the embarrassment of an illegitimate child. Therefore this precocious teenager was sent to face the rigors of the Naval Academy at Brest, and subsequently endured a four year voyage aboard the Rhin which took him to Australia, New Zealand and to the Islands of the Pacific.

The voyage of the Rhin is described in great detail. We are introduced to many of the factors which recur in Meryon's Paris prints and which later become the artist's obsessions.

Charles Meryon: A Life is published in hardback in October 1999.by Garton & Co.

Price: £55. or $95.