Baschet.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
MEISSONIER.THE MAN AT THE WINDOW.MEISSONIER.A MAN READING.

A picture must either be very big or very small if it is to attract attention amid the bustle of exhibitions. This was probably the consideration which led Meissonier to his peculiar class of subjects, and induced him to come forward with minute Netherlandish cabinet-pieces at the time when the Romanticists were issuing their huge manifestoes. He came of a family of petty tradespeople, and in his youth he is said to have taken over his father’s business, a trade in colonial produce. Every morning at eight o’clock punctual he was at the shop desk, and kept the books and copied business letters, and in this way accustomed himself to that painstaking and uniform carefulness which was characteristic of him to the end of his life. His teacher, Cogniet, was without influence on him. Even in his youth, when there went forth the battle-cry of “A Guelf, a Ghibelline! A Delacroix, an Ingres!” Meissonier sat quietly in the Louvre and copied Jan van Eyck’s Madonna from Autun. And a Netherlandish “little master” did he remain all his days. He first earned his bread as an illustrator, but after 1834 he began to exhibit all manner of pieces from the time of Louis XIV and Louis XV—the “Bourgeois hollandais rendant Visite au Bourgmestre” of 1834, the “Chess Players of Holbein’s Time,” 1835, the “Monk at the Sickbed,” 1838, the “English Doctor” and the “Man Reading,” 1840. The Salon of 1841 was for him what that of 1824 had been for Delacroix and Ingres, and that of 1831 for Delaroche: the cradle of his fame. “The Chess Party” (17 cm. high and 11 cm. broad) was the most celebrated picture of the exhibition. The great Netherlandish “little masters” of the seventeenth century, till then scarcely known and little appreciated, were brought out for comparison. “Has Terborg or Mieris or Meissonier done the greater work?” was the question. People marvelled at the sharpness of this short-sighted eye which had a perception for the smallest details. “Good heavens! look at the way that’s been done,” said the Philistine, taking a magnifying glass; and felt himself a connoisseur if the curator at his elbow called out, “Not too near!” Even his first pictures had an accuracy and finish which defies description. It seemed as if a most admirable Netherlandish painter in miniature scale had arisen. The execution of his design in colours was as slow, careful, and laborious as were his preparatory studies for costume: every touch was altered and altered again; many a picture which was almost ready was thrown aside, scraped out, and completely recast. Not hot-headed enthusiasts, but “connoisseurs,” has Meissonier conquered in this fashion. Those readers, philosophers, card-players, drinkers, smokers, flute-players and violin-players, engravers, painters and amateurs, horsemen and farm-servants, brawlers and bravoes, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which he painted year after year, were soon the most coveted pictures in every superior private collection. In 1884 he was able to celebrate his jubilee as an artist with an exhibition of one hundred and fifty pictures of the kind. And as they would have gone dirt cheap if they had been bought for their weight in gold, the public accustomed itself to buy them for their weight in thousand-franc notes.

The present age no longer looks up to these exercises of patience with the same vast admiration, but it should not therefore be forgotten what Meissonier was for his time.

To begin with, though painted at a time when painting was regarded as an auxiliary, and an invaluable one, to history, his pictures tell no story. These personages of Meissonier’s take part in no comedy; they occupy themselves, some in smoking, some in drinking, others in playing cards, and others again in doing nothing whatever. Whether they made their entry as musketeer or philosophers, as lackeys or gallants, as scholars or bonvivants, they did not pose and had no ambition to seem men of wit and spirit, they plunged into no adventurous deeds and related no anecdotes: they were content to be well painted. And so amongst all the French painters of the historical picture of manners Meissonier was the one who had the secret of giving his works an entirely peculiar cachet of striking and realistic truth to nature. His figures, marvellously painted, and at the same time animated and natural in expression, wear the costume of our ancestors with the utmost self-possession, and fit into their modish rococo surroundings as if they had been poured into a mould. Meissonier reached the truth of nature in the total effect of his pictures by first in reality arranging his interiors, and the still-life they contained, as a congruous whole. The rooms, window niches, and firesides which he reproduced in his pictures were in his own house and his studios, with every detail ready to hand. He bought bronzes, trinkets, and ornaments, genuine productions of the rococo period, by the hundred thousand, and kept them by him. His models were obliged, for weeks and often for months, actually to wear the velvet and silken costumes in which he made use of them; then he painted them with the greatest fidelity to nature, and without troubling himself about anecdotic incident. What he rendered was not a story invented and put together piecemeal, but a wholesome piece of reality, pictorially conceived. And if this was primarily composed of costumes and furniture belonging to the eighteenth century, the transition to the natural treatment of modern life was at the same time made possible, and was accomplished by Meissonier himself, at a later period, in his battle pieces.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.Cassell & Co.
MEISSONIER.READING THE MANUSCRIPT.MEISSONIER.POLCINELLO.

But he had only painted men: the physiognomy of the feminine Sphinx remained for him an eternal riddle. A wide field was here offered to his followers. Fauvelet, Chavet, and Brillouin stepped into Meissonier’s shoes, and gave his rococo fine gentlemen their better halves. The first two made simple imitations. Brillouin devoted himself to the comic genre: he arranged his pictures prettily, was a good observer, and painted tolerably well. The last of these Meissonierists is Vibert, chiefly known in the present day by his cardinals and other scarlet dignitaries, whom he represents in water-colours and oils with a certain touch of malice. He paints them gouty, gluttonising, or tipsy, in one or more cases in every picture—which does not contribute to make his works interesting. But originally he had a sympathetic superior talent, and will always claim a modest place in the group of the modern “little masters.” His “Gulliver Bound,” and also the Spanish and Turkish scenes which occupied him after a tour in the East, are extremely pleasing and delicately painted costume pieces, gleaming in sunlight; and in their sparkling, capricious workmanship they sometimes almost verge on Fortuny.

On the German side of the Rhine Adolf Menzel was the great pioneer of truth. The history of German art must do him honour as one who first had the genius and courage to break away from conventional forms of phrasing, and bring the truth of nature into art: at first, as in the case of Meissonier, it was nature in masquerade; but it was nature seen and rendered with all the sincerity of a man to whom the art of pose was wanting from the very first.

L’Art.
MEISSONIER.A READING AT DIDEROT’S.
(By permission of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, owner of the picture, and of M. Georges Petit, owner of the copyright.)

Even in the thirties, at a time when “The Sorrowing Royal Pair” and the “Leonora” by Lessing, “The Soldier and his Child,” “The Sick Councillor,” and “The Sons of Edward” by Hildebrandt, and “The Lament of the Jews” by Bendemann, together with the works of Cornelius, met with the enthusiastic applause of the million, Menzel looked into the world with a sharp glance, undisturbed by idealism; and what enabled him to do this was his unwavering and thoroughly Prussian healthiness, which knew no touch of sentimentalism—a certain coldness and hardness, that sensible, reflective North German trait, which often expresses itself in these days (when German art has become subtle and superior) by a crude naturalism in the Berlin painting. In the beginning of the century, however, it set the Berlin painting, as art of the healthy human understanding, in salutary contrast to the sickliness of Munich and Düsseldorf. Even eighty years ago the people of Berlin were too acute and practical to be Romanticists. The artists whom Menzel found active and honoured at his arrival were Schadow and Rauch, and beside them, as representatives of the grande peinture, Begas and Wach. But even these, who were most under the influence of the sentimental tendency, were justly recognised by the thorough-going Romanticists on the Rhine as never having given an unqualified homage to their flag. A clear, realistic method was dominant in the art of Berlin. And in this respect it was as much a corrective—and one by no means to be undervalued—against the inflated sentiment of Munich as against the weak and sickly sentimentalism of Düsseldorf, with its knights and monks and noble maidens. Even Cornelius, who had been called to Berlin by Frederick William IV—that King of the Romanticists on the throne of the eminently unromantic Hohenzollerns—found himself helpless against the ruling taste. And here only, in the stronghold of sharply accentuated common sense, where the old Prussian sobriety set bounds to the twilight kingdom of Romanticism, could Adolf Menzel attain to greatness. His Berlinism kept him from lingering in empty space. To the taste of to-day, formed from Fontainebleau, he will seem too much a creature of the understanding and too little a creature of feeling. Boecklin hit him off admirably when, on being asked what he thought of Menzel, he answered: “He is a great scholar.” A comparison between him and Mommsen especially suggests itself—a great scholar, a mordant satirist, and a brilliant journalist. But this sober scepticism, this cool spirit of investigation, this “heartlessness” observing all things with the eye of a judge in a court of judicial inquiry, were what cleared the ground for modern art. No one has done more than Menzel for those rulers in the kingdom of dreams who from pure dreaming have never been able to learn anything. He has helped to set them steadily on their feet, and to accustom their sight, vitiated by idealism, once more to truth and nature.

L’Art.
MEISSONIER.A HALT.