page_title: Charles Meryon
section_title: Birth and childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Meryon / Birth and childhood
context_page_description: Charles Meryon was a French artist who worked almost entirely in etching, as he suffered from colour blindness. Although now little-known in the English-speaking world, he is generally recognised as the most significant etcher of 19th century France. He also suffered from mental illness, dying in an asylum. His most famous works are a series of views of Paris.
context_section_description: Meryon's mother, Pierre-Narcisse Chaspoux, was a Parisian, born in 1791, who became a dancer in the Paris Opera in 1807 with the stage name of Narcisse Gentil.  Her appearances there stop in 1814, and it was presumably about this time that she moved to London, where she became the mistress of Viscount Lowther, the future William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale, then an unmarried Tory MP, junior minister, and friend of the Prince Regent.  She had a daughter Frances (Fanny) by him in 1818.  She was also friendly with Dr Charles Lewis Meryon, who had been a fellow boarder at 10 Warwick Street, Charing Cross, off Cockspur Street, around 1818.  In 1821, when she was appearing as a dancer at the London Opera, Pierre-Narcisse became pregnant by Meryon, and returned to Paris with Fanny, Dr Meryon having left for Florence.  Charles Meryon was born in the rue Rameau, round the corner from the then site of the Opera. 
  His father, Dr Meryon, had been working at St Thomas' Hospital at this time, but had spent the years 1810 to 1817 in the Middle East as (at that point unqualified) doctor to the aristocratic traveller Lady Hester Stanhope, who he was later to visit in Lebanon three times, seeing her for the last time in 1838.  He continued to correspond with Pierre-Narcisse, and pay maintenance for his son, probably of 600 francs a year.  The letters became increasingly uncomfortable, and she only found out about his marriage, which had been in 1823, by accident in 1831.  Equally, Pierre-Narcisse was supported by Lowther, who saw her and Fanny when he was in Paris, but she was keen to keep him unaware of the existence of Charles, although the two fathers were acquaintances in London.  Both fathers apparently continued to know her under her stage name of "Narcisse Gentil". 
  Charles was registered at birth as a "Chaspoux", and eventually (in 1829) baptised in the Church of England by the chaplain of the British Embassy in Paris. In 1824 his father legally acknowleged paternity, and he was re-registered as "Meryon", although apparently usually known as "Gentil" as a child.  For over a year after his birth he lived with friends of his mother some 20 kilometres outside Paris, visited not very frequently by his mother, sister and grandmother.  He could walk at 9 months.  He was moved back to Paris in January 1823, and from late 1825 Fanny was at a boarding school.
caption: Le Stryge (The Gargoyle or The Vampire), 1853. Now Meryon's most famous print.
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