MEISSONIER.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VII, Issue 16, 18 April 1891, Page 6

MEISSONIER.

France has lost one of her greatest historical and genre painters, in the distinguished person of Jean Louis Meissonier, who died January 31st, of congestion of the lungs, at Paris, in his 76th year. With the exception of Jerome, perhaps, Meissonier was the best known of contemporary French artists to the outside world. Certainly he commanded the most distinguished pi ices—loo guineas a square inch being a mild quotation for some of his marvellously finished microscopic masterpieces. Meissonier, who was a thrifty man, and a hard worker, used to compute—so valuable was his workingtime in hisstudio—that he lost five thousand francs over luncheon time, and nearly double as much whilst engaged on dinner. In bis earlier method he adopted a particular branch of art known to many as the ‘ postagestamp school,’ in which smallness of canvas and minuteness of finish went hand in hand. It was in 1853 that he obtained the unquestioned homage of the Parisian world with

his four ‘ Napoleon cycle ’ pictures, of which the one known as ‘ 1814’—cuirassiers charging before the first Napoleon in a field of oats —is regarded as his masterpiece. What Meissonier deemed the crowning honour ot his life came to him in 1861, when he was elected a member of the ‘ Academy des Beaux Arts.’ It was in the gorgeous laurel-embroidered unifoim of this Academy, with a ferocious looking cockedhat on his head, and a fierce twirl in his big grey moustache, that I remember being introduced to him at the Rubens Tercentenary at Antwerp, whithet he had come with Jerome to uphold the dignity of French art in the jubilant city by the Scheldt. Not quite the greatest, Meissonier was certainly the most successful painter of this or any other epoch. Meissonier’s private life was the life of a grand seigneur. He was in his seventy-third year when he held the collective exhibition of 1884, and for the greater part of his long career he had sold almost for any price he liked to ask. As the millions of francs came in he laid them out—now in a splendid country house at Poissy, in the neighbourhood of Paris, and then in a still more splendid town house in the quarter of the Parc Monceau. All the most successful artists have gathered in a colony there, and Meissonier took the lead among them in the lavish taste of his building, as in everything else. The house was Early Italian in style, and the carved work was from his own designs. He even superintended the laying of the stones—it was to be done as neatly as joiner’s work, and he was content to pay a special price for it. Here was a beautiful turret stair, and there an arcade. There was a big studio and a little studio ; and the little one was almost a hall; and beyond them was a terrace on which he took the air. The very silver for the table was made from his own drawings. Yet it was a lonely splendour; he had a cei tain savage shyness of mankind ; and, besides, he was a great worker, and a perfect miser of his time. His son and his son’s children were his favourite companions, and he cared little for the world. For all that, he once entered so far into the domain of public life as to serve the office of mayor of Poissy. No one exactly knew why. Perhaps it was to express in a jesting way his sense of the littleness of the greatness of all public functions, or his determination to be first, in everything in his village, since in some things, of course, he could only have been second in the capital. He was proud and hot-tempered ; and he had the good qualities which are but the other side of these bad ones—if bad they be. Some of his most considerable pictures were done in wrathful confutation of the dogmatism of critics. When he had painted his quiet single studies for years they said that might be all very well, but he could never manage movements—so the ‘ Rixe ' saw the light ; at another time they assured him that he had no ‘historic’ sense, and he turned out the ‘Diderot.’ The ‘Portrait of the Sergeant,’ again, was to drive them ont of another ditch, wherein, as they conceived, they were unassailable—the assertion that

whatever his success in interiors he eonld not manage outdoor light. He was passionately conscientious ; innumerable sketches preceded the model in wax, as the model in wax preceded the painting ; and sometimes, when the painting was all but done, and eager amateurs were elbowing each other for the first bid, he would scrape the whole thing out with a palette knife before their eyes. His personal appearance was as full of character as his work. He was below the middle height, but very solidly and compactly built, and with his good chest, thin ‘ flanks,’ and muscular legs he had the look of an athlete in miniature. The large head with its flowing white beard was decidedly out of proportion with the rest of the body, but that only heightened the effect of strength, and fromthis the quick bright eyes took nothing away. His emportements were phenomenal, but once he met his match in temper with a woman. In an evil hour the wife of a Californian millionaire in Paris gave him a commission for a portrait, little knowing that in all his works he had almost ignored women, and that no one had ever thought of.tempting him before to become a painter of women of fashion. He executed the commission after many a laborious sitting, and with a photographic fidelity, especially in the treatment'of the face, that revealed every secret of the toilette. The f portrait was sent home, paid for, and at a rather exorbitant figure, without a word, and then immediately destroyed. The conflict that ensued seemed to shake Paris like a revolution.