When Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier was born at Lyons in 1815, under the
fading light of an Imperial sunset, these were scarcely the ideas that
predominated in the national school of French art. Pictorial art, to
confine ourselves to that, had, both before and during the First
Empire, achieved at most a lumbering and trammelled flight; and the
influence of antiquity, so perceptible in the language as well as in
the manners and fashions at the close of the Eighteenth Century,
served only to confine the inspiration of artists more strictly within
the bounds of classic tradition. Roman characters, Roman costumes,
Roman virtues,--such was the ideal to which each debutant who did not
revolt openly must make surrender! To be sure, the commanding figure
of David gave a magnificent prestige to this rather cold and
dishearteningly classic programme. But, like all great artists, David
was exceptional; and he stands today as the only one who, in an epoch
sadly poor in genius, produced a host of living masterpieces, to swell
the lists of a school so artificial that it would now be forgotten,
save as an echo of his name. It is true that, by way of ransom, he
spent much time in painting vast canvases that today hold but a small
place in his life work.
On the threshold of the Nineteenth Century, in 1799, Eugène Delacroix
was born. It was he who brought a new spirit into French painting and,
single-handed, wrought a great revolution.
Such is not destined to be the rôle of Meissonier! His was neither so
tragic a struggle, nor so immense a triumph. Unlike Delacroix, he did
not restore the Beautiful nor hand down new forms to glory. He
succeeded none the less in inscribing his name in modest yet precise
characters--that will long remain legible--upon the marble of the
temple.
How did the artist get his start? According to the monotonous and
mournful formula, "after a hard struggle." The lives of all beloved
and admired artists have this in common with fairy tales: they always
begin badly and end happily (unluckily, they sometimes end a long time
after the death of the principal hero!).
The father of Meissonier was a dealer in colonial products and
chemicals, and kept a drug and provision shop in the Rue des Ecouffes.
Beneath the low ceiling of this shop and between walls lined with
drawers, bearing strange labels, the childhood of Jean-Louis-Ernest
was passed. His mother was a fragile woman. We are told further that
she was sensitive to music and that she had learned to paint on
porcelain and to make miniatures.
Are we at liberty to attribute to the tender and brief contact of that
mother, who died so young, with the life of her child, the origin of
his artistic vocation? It is pleasant at least to fancy so and to try
to believe it, even though we are told that parents bequeath to their
children, not a vocation--a mysterious gift, of unknown origin--but
rather a certain number of necessary aptitudes and qualities, which
will enable them to profit by the gift, if perchance it falls to them
from Heaven.
Yet the fact remains that in the depths of a cupboard, in the house on
the Rue des Ecouffes, there lay the paint-box which Mme. Meissonier
once used, while taking miniature lessons from the authoritative hands
of Mme. Jacottot. As joyously as other children would have
appropriated a jar of jam, the boy possessed himself of the magic box,
and on that selfsame day entered, with stumbling fingers, upon the
laborious mission which was destined to cease only with his life.
He was not a very good student. A report has been preserved of his
standing in a school in the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, at Paris, where
his later childhood was passed. In this document the proper
authorities alleged that the pupil, Ernest Meissonier, showed "too
marked a tendency to draw sketches in his copy-books, instead of
paying attention to his teachers."
The said tendency did not fail to awaken anxiety in M. Meissonier, the
father. It should be remembered that, for some years previous, the
question of painting in France had been taking on a rather bitter
tone. The romantic school was entering boldly into the lists, and
among its champions were some who distinguished themselves less by
their works than by their long beards and the public challenge they
flung at their traditional enemy, the phalanx of David's pupils. And
among the latter, it must be owned, the majority made no answer beyond
a disdainful silence and some mediocre paintings,--with just one
single exception: the admirable, undoubted, impeccable exception of
the great Jean-Dominique Ingres.
The press, the art clubs, not to mention the salons, were all more or
less divided between the romantics and the classicists, the innovators
and the traditionalists, and fanned the flames of a quarrel which, in
view of the worth of the two leaders--one of whom spelled genius and
the other perfection--was destined to appear without sanction to the
eyes of posterity.
But, as may be imagined, these tumultuous polemics were not calculated
to reassure a thoroughly pacific bourgeois, already much alarmed to
find that he had begotten an artist. And just at this crisis another
damnatory report exploded, this time from a master of the eighth form
in a school on the Rue de Jouy: "Ernest has a decided talent for
drawing. The mere sight of a picture often takes our attention from
our serious duties." This diagnosis, so categoric underneath its
familiar form and somewhat faulty grammar, sounded a serious cry of
alarm. It was promptly heeded by the father, and young Ernest was
forthwith entered as a druggist's apprentice, in a house on the Rue
des Lombards.
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.
[Illustration: 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.
When only sixteen years of age, Meissonier exhibited for the first
time. As a matter of fact his name appears in the Salon catalogue of
1834, accredited with _A Visit to the Burgomaster_. In this picture
one may find, I will not say _in miniature_ (since all his paintings
were destined to be contained in narrow limits) but in a youthful way,
an indication of those qualities of relief and of realism which so
energetically stamped his productions later on.
Is there any need of saying that the public failed to distinguish a
work which did not sufficiently distinguish itself?
The first connoisseurs to pay attention to the newcomer were editors,
the severe and imposing editors.
Not quite at the start, naturally; and the first instalment of
illustrations that he offered to a magazine then famous, the name of
which is now forgotten--four little sepia drawings--was curtly
rejected. But he refused to be discouraged, and not long afterwards
deliberately made his way to the celebrated art-publisher, Curmer.
This bold venture went badly at the start. The publisher, rendered
distrustful by so youthful and importunate a face, assured the young
man and the friend who had introduced him, that "for the time being he
had nothing for him."
But by a providential hazard, the short conversation which followed as
a matter of civility before leave-taking touched upon the subject of
life-masks. At that time life-masks happened to be quite the rage:
people had their faces moulded in plaster just as nowadays they sit
for a photograph; and young Meissonier related, not without vanity,
that on the preceding Sunday he had taken the mask of the Johannot
brothers, and he added that he knew those two princes of engraving
quite intimately.
Famous acquaintances are always useful; the proof of this is that M.
Curmer accepted an invitation to go the following Sunday to
Meissonier's studio, to sit for his life-mask,--and, once there, it
was impossible for him not to order an aquarelle.
The door of this publishing house, however, was as yet only half-way
open to the artist; for when his friend Marville, "an etcher in
soft-ground, mediocre but prolific," talked of having him collaborate
on the Curmer edition of _Paul and Virginia_, the publisher, a prey
once more to his original distrust, entrusted him to begin with,--with
just one of the special illustrations,--to re-engrave!
Meissonier acquitted himself brilliantly of this half-task, with the
result that he was entrusted with several other illustrations for the
celebrated edition of _Paul and Virginia_, of which no bibliophile can
ever speak without enthusiasm. But, on the other hand, he had an
entire series to make for an edition, no less sumptuous, of _The
Indian Cabin_, also a work of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.