Rebirth
		Reflections on the Reception of Carolus-Duran's Work over the Years Carolus-Duran was one of the most prolific portrait painters in the second half of the 19th Century. It is this portion of his work that secured his reputation and he was, during his lifetime, the darling of Paris society. But by about 1890, appreciation had begun to tail off, despite his success as a society portrait painter, and his paintings were the subject of a number of negative remarks. The Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren spoke of Carolus-Duran's "bad taste", his "contemptible mundanity" and judged him "flashy and vulgar" in his Ecrits sur l'art (1881-1892). In fact, Carolus-Duran's reputation broke down, eroded by time and glory, overtaken by modern artistic currents. ...In 1903, Arsène Alexandre proposed a re-assessment of Carolus's work via an exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery. He presented him as "an independent, a painter free of any academicism". He requested an exhibition be organized at the Wicar Museum, in Lille, because "None of us would wish to neglect an opportunity to reconsider the judgments, some of which are too summary and too severe, made by those who have only considered the period [...] of over-opulence and virtuosity, always scintillating but too often superficial." That was not enough, as evidenced by the sentiment of the Nabi painter Emile Bernard, expressed in his Propos sur l'art published the following year: "Carolus Duran has produced a dreadful lithograph; the man can neither see nor draw". In 1906, Carolus was judged decadent by the critic Camille Mauclair who only approved of his works of the period of The Murdered Man and the Equestrian Portrait of Miss Sophie Croizette. After the First World War, Carolus-Duran was practically forgotten, despite the posthumous tribute paid to him by the Musée du Luxembourg in 1919, because the current artistic trend was no longer "towards these vestiges of a past now made even more remote by the upheaval of international conflict". All that remained was the memory of a brilliant personality and a skilled painter, a "master of materials", as he was called by Gustave Coquiot in 1924. The opinion of Henri Focillon, in La Peinture au XIXè siècle of 1928, was similar, he made the painter a victim of the "tyranny of talent", whose "hand [...] has a mind of its own", a painter who gave "brilliance and authority to eclecticism." In 1943, Thadée Natanson, in his work Peints à leur tour, only recognized his genius in his choice of name, "which, from the first day, did more for his reputation than his work for the rest of his life." However, he was surprised at his friendship with Manet and Monet, maintaining that "There is nothing of the 20th Century in Carolus Duran." The friendship between Carolus and Manet has aroused numerous comments, sometimes conflicting, as shown by the following two quotations which were published only one year apart. In 1875, Emile Zola wrote an account of the Salon in Le Sémaphore de Marseille, where he judged that "Carolus-Duran is a clever man: he makes Manet comprehensible to the man in the street, he draws his inspiration from him but within limits, seasoning it to suit public taste." The following year, Pierre Véron wrote in Les Coulisses artistiques, "Carolus likes Manet, almost to the point of admiring him. [...] This admiration would nevertheless appear unwise, because Manet's failings sometimes seem to parody the qualities of his admirer."  Rebirth