Meissonier

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Henri Barbusse. Meissonier

INTRODUCTION

EARLY YEARS

FIRST SUCCESS

ETCHINGS

PAINTINGS

MILITARY PAINTINGS

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When Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier was born at Lyons in 1815, under the fading light of an Imperial sunset, these were scarcely the ideas that predominated in the national school of French art. Pictorial art, to confine ourselves to that, had, both before and during the First Empire, achieved at most a lumbering and trammelled flight; and the influence of antiquity, so perceptible in the language as well as in the manners and fashions at the close of the Eighteenth Century, served only to confine the inspiration of artists more strictly within the bounds of classic tradition. Roman characters, Roman costumes, Roman virtues, – such was the ideal to which each debutant who did not revolt openly must make surrender! To be sure, the commanding figure of David gave a magnificent prestige to this rather cold and dishearteningly classic programme. But, like all great artists, David was exceptional; and he stands today as the only one who, in an epoch sadly poor in genius, produced a host of living masterpieces, to swell the lists of a school so artificial that it would now be forgotten, save as an echo of his name. It is true that, by way of ransom, he spent much time in painting vast canvases that today hold but a small place in his life work.

On the threshold of the Nineteenth Century, in 1799, Eugène Delacroix was born. It was he who brought a new spirit into French painting and, single-handed, wrought a great revolution.

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Yet it was not long afterwards, thanks to a dogged persistence, that the lad had overcome paternal opposition and was allowed to do head studies in charcoal, at the studio of a certain Julien Petier, whose slender artistic fame rested solely upon the fact that, once upon a time, he won the grand prix de Rome.

Meissonier very shortly quitted this somewhat dull discipline, and he stayed scarcely longer in the studio of Léon Cogniet, which at that time was quite celebrated. Yet during the four months that he remained under the guidance of the worthy author of The Four Seasons, it must be admitted that he laboured greatly to the profit of his art.

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