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.
M. Phillippe Burty, his contemporary and his first biographer, explains to us that, while at Cogniet’s, young Meissonier did not work like the other students, from casts or nude models: “He passed his days in an enclosure adjoining the studio, where the master was engaged upon his ceiling painting for the Louvre, the Expedition into Egypt, and hired by the day soldiers in republican uniform, dragoons, artillerymen and their horses.” In the midst of this resurrection of a past that was still quite recent, in the very presence of the stage setting, the reproduction of the Napoleonic Epic, he suddenly conceived of it as the greatest of all subjects that might tempt his accurate artist fingers. It must have seemed to him, later on, that he himself had witnessed its close.
PLATE III.—THE CONFIDENCE
(Chauchard Bequest, Musée du Louvre)
This painting, given to the Louvre in 1908 by M. Chauchard, is one of the most beautiful in that famous collection, owing to the incomparable naturalness of the attitudes, as well as to the finished art of its composition.
But while waiting to achieve his dream, he had to achieve a living. This was not easy. His father spared him an allowance of fifteen francs a month, not counting the privilege of dining at home once a week, and from time to time allowed himself to be cajoled into buying a small aquarelle.
Be one’s tastes never so modest, it is difficult under such conditions to make both ends meet, and there was many a day of sacrifice and privation for the future painter of canvases destined later to sell at a hundred thousand francs per square decimeter. He shared his poverty light-heartedly with a chosen circle of friends whose fame in after years has made their names familiar: among others Daumier, the caricaturist, and Daubigny, the great landscape painter, with whom, it is told, Meissonier collaborated in manufacturing for the export trade canvases that were generously paid for at five francs a meter!
He was unable to enter the classes of Paul Delaroche, the monthly charge for admission to the studio from which The Princes in the Tower had issued reaching the exorbitant sum of twenty francs! He had to content himself with frequenting the Louvre.
Unlooked-for windfall: in company with his friend Trimolet, a needy artist who succumbed to poverty before his real talent had had time to ripen, he obtained an opportunity to decorate fans. Then, some religious figures and emblems of saints for certain publishers in the Rue Saint-Jacques. This meant the assurance of an honest living; they could go to a restaurant twice a day, every day in the week, and proudly pass the paint-shop knowing their account was paid.