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.
PLATE VIII.—NAPOLEON III. AT SOLFÉRINO
(Tommy Thierry Bequest, Musée du Louvre)
Under any other hand than Meissonier’s, the group constituting the Imperial Staff would have been banale in the extreme, but thanks to an ability that has no parallel outside of the great Flemish painters, the artist has succeeded in making these miniature figures veritable portraits of the shining military lights of that period.
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.