Meissonier

Still other reasons have been given for the great value of this artist’s works in spite of their smallness, or rather because of their smallness. M. Gustave Larroumet has written on this very point a brilliant and ingenious special plea, of which the following is the principal passage:

“There is a certain class of subjects in which amplitude is an error of judgment. If you wish to paint the coronation of Napoleon, the bridge of Tailebourg, or the battle of the Cimbri, you have the right to measure your canvas in proportion to the space which such scenes occupy in reality; on the other hand you might conceive of your subject in such fashion that it could be contained completely within a square metre. But why give to an artistic reproduction more relative importance than the originals have in reality? Supposing you wish to show me a passer-by, on foot or on horseback. How do they interest me in real life? Simply by the rapid impression that they leave upon my eye and mind. I have seen them at a distance, reduced to a few centimetres by perspective. I am satisfied if you show them to me in the same proportion.”

The argument is specious. Perhaps it is more ingenious than it is well founded, and lays itself open to discussion. But it will not do to linger too long over abstract polemics, when we are in the presence of a reality, a type of work, every least portion of which makes its appeal and, by the very fact that it is so full of interest and of life, practically answers the subtle problem that it has raised.

In 1840 more pictures were sent to the Salon: a Reader, a Saint Paul, an Isaiah.

Was the painter beginning to change his manner? Those last two pictures might give reason to fear so. They were life size, yet that did not prevent them from being dull and commonplace in execution. Doubtless, irritated by his critics, Meissonier had wished to prove that he also, if he wanted to, could paint according to the schools. Even the artists who are surest of themselves sometimes come to these hasty and impatient determinations.

Fortunately for him, he made a bad showing, and a painter who had great influence over him, Jules Chenavard, succeeded in recalling him from the false path into which he was trying to force his talent.

On the other hand, the praises bestowed upon his genre painting, The Reader, which was “genuine Meissonier,” could not fail to encourage him to remain true to himself. The Revue des Deux Mondes, in its critical review of the Salon, bestowed upon this picture an enthusiastic tribute, couched in a style that may seem to us today somewhat old-fashioned:

“A Flemish canvas, if there ever was one. Picture to yourself a good old soul, retired from business, his skin as wrinkled as the parchment of his books, ill clad, ill fed, and nevertheless the happiest man in the world: he is a bibliophile, and he is in the midst of old books! You could hardly believe how vividly this noble passion is expressed in that little picture. But where in the world did M. Meissonier come across all those delightful little rarities in books? You can almost smell the adorable odour of old bindings!”

The young artist – he was at that time only twenty-five – was awarded a third-class medal. The following year he obtained a second-class medal, and his painting, The Game of Chess, won him a brilliant triumph: it was purchased by M. Paul Périer. It was a material triumph not to be despised: the picture brought two thousand francs, which at that time was considerable. The moral triumph was even bigger, because Paul Périer was an experienced collector, who acquired only such works as were worthy to take their place in an assemblage where the biggest names of the period were represented by masterpieces.

Henceforth, success after success followed regularly. Each picture that he sent to the Salon won increasing distinction: A Smoker (they are a goodly number, the smokers and the readers that came from Meissonier’s brush!); A Young Man Playing the ’Cello; The Painter in his Studio; The Guard-House; The Young Man Looking at Sketches; The Game of Piquet; The Park at Saint-Cloud. This last picture was done in collaboration; Meissonier painted only the figures, the landscape was the work of Français.

This mounting success, which so quickly turned into glory, was legitimate. The artist had by this time all his resources admirably at command, and was fully imbued with his ideal.

He had learned to give to every face that profundity, to every scene that intensity of action, that constitutes his individual bigness. The arrangement of the milieu, the scrupulous devotion to realism that we noted in the opening lines of this study, the prodigious anxiety to give to every one of his personages such play of physiognomy, such expression, glance, and gesture as would best reveal their character and help us to know them better, – all these things combine and harmonize to produce an effect of remarkable power.

Those among Meissonier’s contemporaries who had assured taste and artistic insight were impressed by the number of qualities revealed in such limited space. Let us listen to Théophile Gautier:

“Meissonier,” he wrote in an article published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, “composes his pictures with a science unknown to the Flemish masters to whom he is compared. Take, for example, a Smoker! The manner in which he is placed in the centre of the picture, one elbow resting on the table, one leg crossed over the other, one hand hanging idly by his side, his body sunk within his gaping waistcoat, his head bowed forward in revery, or jovially thrown backward, – all this forms a composition which, while not so apparent to the eye as some dramatic scene, nevertheless works its effect upon the spectator. The accessories cleverly play their part to throw more light upon the character of the central figure. Here is a Smoker, for instance, who is a worthy man, no doubt of it; clad in an ample coat of ancient cut, and of a modest gray, with a well brushed cocked hat upon his head; one foot swings free, encased in a good, stout shoe, with silver buckle; and, with the tranquillity of an honest conscience, he draws in a deep breath of tobacco smoke, which he allows to escape again in little clouds, wishing, thrifty man that he is, to make the pleasure last. Close at hand, upon a table with spiral legs, he has placed side by side a flagon and a pewter-lidded tankard of beer. An intimate satisfaction radiates from his face, which is furrowed by deep lines, a face expressive of foresight, orderly habits, and rigid probity. One could trust him with one’s cash-box and account books. Here is another Smoker, clad in red; he also holds a pipe and performs apparently the same action; but his disordered garments, violently rumpled, buttoned askew, his three-cornered hat jammed down upon his eyebrows, his cuffs and frilled shirt crumpled by nervous fingers, his whole attitude expressive of feverish anxiety, his twitching lip straining around the clay stem of his pipe, his hand thrust angrily into an empty pocket, – all these details proclaim the adventurer or the gambler in hard luck. He is evidently saying to himself: ‘Where the deuce could I borrow a louis or even a crown?’ Even the background, if we consult it, gives further enlightenment. In this case we no longer have neat plastering of modest gray and substantial brown woodwork, but battered and dirty walls stained with smoke and grease, reeking of tap-room foulness and unclean lodgings. And that shows how far one smoker may fall short of resembling another!”

It is precisely this difference between one human being and another, in other words, this quality of individuality, that constitutes the creative gift of the real artist and proves that the honour of this title is really deserved by a painter whose pictures are animated groups, among whom a spectator may wander, studying them with growing interest, and then afterwards call to mind the various types, episodes, scenes, dramas that he has actually seen.

One can never grow tired of quoting Gautier apropos of an artist whose brush always had something in common with his pen. This masterly art critic has described for us, sketched in words, so to speak, still another picture: “A man standing before a window through which the daylight streams flecking his face with silver; in his hand he holds a book which absorbs his entire attention, – this is not a complicated theme, but it grips us like life itself. We want to know the contents of that volume, it seems as though we could almost conjecture it. Plenty of other artists have painted marquises and marchionesses, sleek abbés and shameless beauties of the Eighteenth Century, thanks to the aid of powder and patches and paint, rosettes, paniers, bespangled coats, silken stockings, red-heeled shoes, fans, screens, cameos, crackled porcelain, bonbonnières and other futilities. Meissonier rediscovered the decent folk of that period, which was not made up exclusively of mighty lords and fallen women, and of which we get, through Chardin, a glimpse on its honest, settled bourgeois side. Meissonier introduces us into modest interiors, with woodwork of sober gray, furniture without gilding, the homes of worthy folk, simple and substantial, who read and smoke and work, look over prints and etchings, or copy them, or chat sociably, with elbows on table, separated only by a bottle brought out from behind the faggots.”

And who can ever forget, in The Confidence (the picture which passed from the gallery of M. Chauchard to that of the Louvre), how tense and attentive the face of the listener is, even in repose, while the relaxation of the body is revealed by his posture, as he leans against the wall with an elbow on the table, – and how naïve the face of his friend – younger and better looking – as he reads the letter: naïve, excited, even somewhat simple, with a nose slightly exceeding the average length and a forehead just a trifle too low.

In the Game of Cards, a soldier and a civilian are seated opposite each other, in the midst of a contest. The soldier has a dogged air and he is losing. Apparently, he is not a strong adversary, for the man of questionable age who faces him, his small, narrow, foxy head surmounted by a three-cornered hat, his lean body lost in the depths of a huge greatcoat, his thin ankle showing beneath the white stocking, belongs to the race of weaklings who live at the expense of the strong.

In The Etcher, just as in The Man at the Window– two of his most celebrated pictures (the former brought 272,000 francs, even during Meissonier’s lifetime) – the interest of the principal – and only – figure is heightened and singularly beautified by a delicate effect of light, forming an aureole, in the very centre of the picture, respectively around the face of the worker and of the dreamer.

Note, in A Song, the moist eye of the musketeer playing the guitar, and in Pascuale the half stupid, half poetic air of the central figure engaged in the same occupation; note also in The Alms-giving the frowning brow of the horseman as he searches in his pocket; and in The Visit to the Chateau– an ostentation of coaches and gentry – and in The Inn– three cavaliers who have halted for the moment and are grouped around the serving-maid, as they drink – the reconstruction of an entire epoch with its pomps and its idylls, that justifies us in calling these pictures veritable “stage settings taken from life.”

One might spend a long time in analyzing the various shades in the gamut of expressions on the faces of the principal and secondary figures in the Game of Piquet, who, scattered all nine of them around the two sides of the tavern table, follow either amusedly or critically or with feverish interest the changing fortunes of the game. And in the Portrait of the Sergeant, what a magnificent collection of different degrees of attention: that of the portrait painter as he studies his model standing in front of him on the pavement, in his finest uniform and his finest pose; that of the model intent only upon doing nothing to disturb his ultra-martial bearing, his gaze menacing, staring, fixed; that of the spectators, some of them drawing near, fascinated, another who casts an amused glance at the picture as he passes by, with some sarcastic remark on his lips; another who no doubt has just been looking, and for the moment, with pipe between his teeth, is thinking of something else as he sits on a bench with his back to the wall and his legs extended in front of him.

The Quarrel, with all the feverish violence that drives the two bravos at each other’s throats, has perhaps more amplitude and less realism than any of the previously mentioned works. It is Meissonier’s one romantic painting, and he professed a great admiration for it, ranking it as one of his four best canvases. It is recorded that the master said one day to a friend:

“I have seen my Quarrel at Secretan’s. I looked at it as though I had never seen the picture before. Well, do you know, it is really a fine thing!”

MILITARY PAINTINGS

Mention should be made, before passing on to the military paintings, of just a few other genre paintings: The Reading at Diderot’s, The Amateurs, The Flute Players.

But it is the military pictures that loom up largely amongst the artist’s prolific output: —1807, the portrayal of the Imperial Apotheosis, the army passing by at a gallop, eagerly acclaiming the Emperor, as he answers with a salute; 1814, the decline, the retreat from Russia; 1815, the cuirassiers of Waterloo before the charge. This picture, which formed part of the Duc d’Aumale’s collection, was purchased for 250,000 francs, but afterwards twice resold: the first time for 275,000 francs, the second for 400,000 francs.

Yet it may be said that the artist fully earned what some of these military paintings brought him. Although he mounted successively all the rungs of official honours (he was made Knight of the Legion of Honour at the age of thirty, Officer at forty-one, Commander at fifty-two, received the grand golden medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, and became a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1861), Meissonier nevertheless always led a singularly active and industrious life. Not only did he paint a prodigious number of pictures (in 1886, four hundred were already catalogued), but he took part in the Italian campaign of 1859 and in the Franco-Prussian war!

In 1859 he was, at his own request, attached to the Imperial Staff of the French army, dreaming, as he had himself acknowledged, of becoming “the Van der Meulen” of the campaign. At all events, he got out of it one of his best canvases: Napoleon III. at Solférino, which never left the Musée du Luxembourg until it was transferred to the Musée du Louvre.

He himself has related, with a delightful sense of humour, the machiavelian intrigues to which he resorted in order to secure the Emperor’s consent to pose. For the idea of painting a figure, and especially the central figure, without a sitting, was a heresy that he could not even contemplate. Let us hear his own account:

“Would Napoleon III. pose for Solférino? That was what weighed on my mind most of all. You know my love for exactitude. I had revisited Solférino, in order to get the landscape and the battle-field direct from nature. You can understand how essential it was for me to have the Emperor give me a sitting, if only for five minutes. I managed things, I think, rather cleverly. I began by blocking in my picture roughly; then I invited an officer whom I happened to know, to come and give me his advice on certain military details. This officer, as I was aware, had served at Solférino. I led him on to tell the part he had played in the combat, and when the iron was hot I proposed that he should let me include him among the figures in my picture. He consented eagerly. When the portrait was successfully finished, he talked of it to other officers, who came to see it and, in their turn, offered to serve me as models. One of them was acquainted with Maréchal Magnan, and it was he who brought me Fleury, who in his turn brought me Leboeuf.

“The latter undertook to show my painting to the Emperor, and to that end secured me an invitation to go to Fontainebleau. Napoleon III. received me cordially, and after spending a long time in studying my picture, in which only one figure was now lacking, he inquired who, according to my idea, that missing figure should be. ‘Why, you, Sire.’ ‘Then you are going to paint my portrait?’ he remarked. ‘How will you do that?’ ‘From memory, and with the help of published documents.’ ‘But all that is not equal to a single sitting,’ replied the Emperor. ‘Do you not agree with me, M. Meissonier?’ ‘Undoubtedly, Sire, but – ’ ‘Very well, nothing is simpler, let us both mount our horses, and go for a short ride, and while we chat, you can study me at your leisure.’

“Overjoyed at the opportunity afforded, I rapidly formed a most mephistophelian plot. As it happened, it was precisely at Fontainebleau that my old friend Jadin had his studio. I manoeuvred to guide our course in the direction of that studio, and when we were at his very door, I boldly proposed to the Emperor that we should pay a visit to the good Jadin. He laughingly consented, and thereupon the two of us descended upon Jadin who, unprepared for either of us, was in his painter’s blouse, smoking his pipe. The Emperor, greatly amused by this adventure, refused to let Jadin disturb himself. He rolled a cigarette and, taking his seat astride of a chair, entered into conversation. Meanwhile I had seized the first pencil that came to hand, and fell to sketching. The unforeseen sitting lasted for a good half-hour. It served me not only for the completion of Solférino, but for another picture besides, a little panel.”

A fine example of artistic perseverance and diplomacy, – greatly aided, it must be admitted, by the complaisance of the interested Emperor.

Eleven years later – the year of terror – the artist, in spite of his fifty-six years, undertook active service. Yielding, however, to the entreaties of his friends, he left the army near Sedan, the night before the battle of Borny, and set forth alone, on horseback. His journey back to Paris was a veritable Odyssey. Along the road to Verdun he was constantly taken for a spy and halted. At Etain, he was taken prisoner, and owed his release solely to the universal renown of his name. It took him three days to reach Poissy, where he had his country home; and once there, he organized a national guard. But at the news of the investment of Paris, Meissonier hastened to make his way into the besieged capital.

The morning after the Fourth of September, he besought the Minister of War, Léon Gambetta, for an appointment as prefect in one of the departments that were either invaded or menaced. His patriotism was only partly satisfied; he was appointed Colonel in the staff of the National Guard. “The populace of Paris,” says a witness, “when they saw that little man with florid face and long gray beard, and legs encased in tight leathern breeches, passing back and forth along the boulevards, often cheered him, mistaking him for the major-general of artillery.”

The painter planned to commemorate the defence of Paris in a picture of colossal size. The project never got beyond the stage of an outline sketch, of deep and tragic interest.

Have we cause to regret this? Meissonier was an allegorical painter, and nowhere more than in his military pictures – both scenes and types – do his powerful and delicate qualities of penetrating observation reveal themselves. Every one of his soldiers, – trooper, musketeer, French guard, Grenadier of the guard, – in full uniform or in fatigue, or even in the disarray of the barrack-room, has his own personal physiognomy, and manner and temperament; they one and all live, and in them lives the conscientious and brilliant artist who laboured so faithfully to create them and succeeded so well.

Is it not because of this expressive relief both of figures and gestures that people were able to compare Meissonier to Marmot, and to say that “Meissonier was worthy to paint the stories of Marmot, and Marmot worthy to furnish stories to Meissonier”?

It would be only just, before leaving him, to defend the artist – who after enjoying a vogue that was perhaps a trifle too enthusiastic, has fallen, quite unjustly into slight disfavour – from two criticisms that have frequently been passed upon him. Too much stress has been laid on his lack of the gift of colour and the gift of grace.

To be sure, he is not a colourist in the grand, resplendent sense in which the word is associated with the names of Titian or Paolo Veronese; but it has been said with a good deal of reason, that he had a colour sense “suited to his range of vision.” In view of the realistic and palpable clearness with which he saw things, he must needs adapt a soberly exact scheme of colour; for in any one of his works the dazzling and magnificent orgies indulged in by lyric poets of the palette would have been as out of place as a character from Shakespeare would be in the midst of a prosaic scene in our modern literal-minded drama. The colourists use their tints to paint dreams, transposing into a resplendent and intense register the tranquil harmony of the actual colours; they produce something different from what the rest of the world sees; something more, if you choose, but at any rate something different. The impeccable truthfulness of a Meissonier stubbornly adheres to that modest harmony which the others leave behind them in a soaring flight that sometimes verges on folly. One might prefer to have had him totally different; but, granting the serious forethought in his choice of subject and conception of structure, his colouring could not have been different from what it was.

As to his lack of charm and grace, that is a reproach which for the most part he took little trouble to avoid, for he hardly ever painted women; but it was a reproach which he in no way deserved when he did transfer them to his canvases. We need to offer no further proof of this than his adorable studies of Mme. Sabatier and the portrait that he made of her. The strange attraction of that beautiful face, so full of intelligence and fascination, the delicate and matchless suppleness of posture, all blend together in a compelling yet mysterious radiance with which only a great artist could illuminate his paper or his canvas.

Accordingly one should guard against any judgment too absolute, too definitely peremptory regarding a talent so rich in resources; but undeniably Meissonier greatly preferred to paint musketeers or grenadiers, to say nothing of horses.

Horses, by the way, were one of Meissonier’s weaknesses. He owned some beautiful ones, and used them not only as models but also for riding. He spoke on many occasions of the incomparable pleasure that he found in directing “those admirable machines,” which he defined as “the stupidest of all intelligent animals.” But that in no way detracted from their beauty of form. “What a pleasure it is to make their mechanism work!” he confided to one of his distinguished friends. “Just think that the slightest movement of the rider, the slightest motion of hand or leg, the slightest displacement of the body have their immediate effect upon the horse’s movements, and that a true horseman plays upon his mount as a musician plays upon his instrument. For the painter a horse is a whole gamut of lights and of colours. Its eye, now calm and now excited, the quivers of its coat and undulations that run through it, the variety of its lines and the infinite beauty of their combinations afford material for a whole lifetime of study.”

And here again we meet, as in everything that he said and thought, that same love of detail, that meticulous admiration for reality and that cult of patient labour which is the secret of all that he achieved.

Furthermore, there was no moment in his remarkable career – which was destined to be crowned by an apotheosis when the artists of the entire world united in choosing him as president of the Exposition Universelle des Beaux-Arts in 1889 – there was no moment in his career when he sacrificed the sacred principle of exactitude and of documentation which were the foundation of his splendid honesty.