Mention should be made, before passing on to the military paintings,
of just a few other genre paintings: _The Reading at Diderot's_, _The
Amateurs_, _The Flute Players_.
But it is the military pictures that loom up largely amongst the
artist's prolific output:--_1807_, the portrayal of the Imperial
Apotheosis, the army passing by at a gallop, eagerly acclaiming the
Emperor, as he answers with a salute; _1814_, the decline, the retreat
from Russia; _1815_, the cuirassiers of Waterloo before the charge.
This picture, which formed part of the Duc d'Aumale's collection, was
purchased for 250,000 francs, but afterwards twice resold: the first
time for 275,000 francs, the second for 400,000 francs.
Yet it may be said that the artist fully earned what some of these
military paintings brought him. Although he mounted successively all
the rungs of official honours (he was made Knight of the Legion of
Honour at the age of thirty, Officer at forty-one, Commander at
fifty-two, received the grand golden medal at the Exposition
Universelle of 1855, and became a member of the Academy of Fine Arts
in 1861), Meissonier nevertheless always led a singularly active and
industrious life. Not only did he paint a prodigious number of
pictures (in 1886, four hundred were already catalogued), but he took
part in the Italian campaign of 1859 and in the Franco-Prussian war!
In 1859 he was, at his own request, attached to the Imperial Staff of
the French army, dreaming, as he had himself acknowledged, of becoming
"the Van der Meulen" of the campaign. At all events, he got out of it
one of his best canvases: _Napoleon III. at Solférino_, which never
left the Musée du Luxembourg until it was transferred to the Musée du
Louvre.
He himself has related, with a delightful sense of humour, the
machiavelian intrigues to which he resorted in order to secure the
Emperor's consent to pose. For the idea of painting a figure, and
especially the central figure, without a sitting, was a heresy that he
could not even contemplate. Let us hear his own account:
"Would Napoleon III. pose for Solférino? That was what weighed on my
mind most of all. You know my love for exactitude. I had revisited
Solférino, in order to get the landscape and the battle-field direct
from nature. You can understand how essential it was for me to have
the Emperor give me a sitting, if only for five minutes. I managed
things, I think, rather cleverly. I began by blocking in my picture
roughly; then I invited an officer whom I happened to know, to come
and give me his advice on certain military details. This officer, as I
was aware, had served at Solférino. I led him on to tell the part he
had played in the combat, and when the iron was hot I proposed that he
should let me include him among the figures in my picture. He
consented eagerly. When the portrait was successfully finished, he
talked of it to other officers, who came to see it and, in their turn,
offered to serve me as models. One of them was acquainted with
Maréchal Magnan, and it was he who brought me Fleury, who in his turn
brought me Leboeuf.
"The latter undertook to show my painting to the Emperor, and to that
end secured me an invitation to go to Fontainebleau. Napoleon III.
received me cordially, and after spending a long time in studying my
picture, in which only one figure was now lacking, he inquired who,
according to my idea, that missing figure should be. 'Why, you, Sire.'
'Then you are going to paint my portrait?' he remarked. 'How will you
do that?' 'From memory, and with the help of published documents.'
'But all that is not equal to a single sitting,' replied the Emperor.
'Do you not agree with me, M. Meissonier?' 'Undoubtedly, Sire, but--'
'Very well, nothing is simpler, let us both mount our horses, and go
for a short ride, and while we chat, you can study me at your
leisure.'
"Overjoyed at the opportunity afforded, I rapidly formed a most
mephistophelian plot. As it happened, it was precisely at
Fontainebleau that my old friend Jadin had his studio. I manoeuvred to
guide our course in the direction of that studio, and when we were at
his very door, I boldly proposed to the Emperor that we should pay a
visit to the good Jadin. He laughingly consented, and thereupon the
two of us descended upon Jadin who, unprepared for either of us, was
in his painter's blouse, smoking his pipe. The Emperor, greatly amused
by this adventure, refused to let Jadin disturb himself. He rolled a
cigarette and, taking his seat astride of a chair, entered into
conversation. Meanwhile I had seized the first pencil that came to
hand, and fell to sketching. The unforeseen sitting lasted for a good
half-hour. It served me not only for the completion of Solférino, but
for another picture besides, a little panel."
A fine example of artistic perseverance and diplomacy,--greatly aided,
it must be admitted, by the complaisance of the interested Emperor.
Eleven years later--the year of terror--the artist, in spite of his
fifty-six years, undertook active service. Yielding, however, to the
entreaties of his friends, he left the army near Sedan, the night
before the battle of Borny, and set forth alone, on horseback. His
journey back to Paris was a veritable Odyssey. Along the road to
Verdun he was constantly taken for a spy and halted. At Etain, he was
taken prisoner, and owed his release solely to the universal renown of
his name. It took him three days to reach Poissy, where he had his
country home; and once there, he organized a national guard. But at
the news of the investment of Paris, Meissonier hastened to make his
way into the besieged capital.
The morning after the Fourth of September, he besought the Minister of
War, Léon Gambetta, for an appointment as prefect in one of the
departments that were either invaded or menaced. His patriotism was
only partly satisfied; he was appointed Colonel in the staff of the
National Guard. "The populace of Paris," says a witness, "when they
saw that little man with florid face and long gray beard, and legs
encased in tight leathern breeches, passing back and forth along the
boulevards, often cheered him, mistaking him for the major-general of
artillery."
The painter planned to commemorate the defence of Paris in a picture
of colossal size. The project never got beyond the stage of an outline
sketch, of deep and tragic interest.
Have we cause to regret this? Meissonier was an allegorical painter,
and nowhere more than in his military pictures--both scenes and
types--do his powerful and delicate qualities of penetrating
observation reveal themselves. Every one of his soldiers,--trooper,
musketeer, French guard, Grenadier of the guard,--in full uniform or
in fatigue, or even in the disarray of the barrack-room, has his own
personal physiognomy, and manner and temperament; they one and all
_live_, and in them lives the conscientious and brilliant artist who
laboured so faithfully to create them and succeeded so well.
Is it not because of this expressive relief both of figures and
gestures that people were able to compare Meissonier to Marmot, and to
say that "Meissonier was worthy to paint the stories of Marmot, and
Marmot worthy to furnish stories to Meissonier"?
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.
[Illustration: 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.
Of this artistic virtue there are abundant examples. We have already
cited one in the opening pages; we will cite another by way of
conclusion: one of his friends called upon Meissonier at Poissy: "The
concierge told me," this friend relates, "'Meissonier is in the studio
opening on the court.' I found my way into that huge studio cumbered
with sketches of every sort, with studies of horses modelled in wax
and standing on pedestals. I waited a while, and then in trying to
discover where a beam of vivid light found its way in through some
crack in a door, I discovered, in the little court adjoining the
châlet, Meissonier out in the blazing sunlight astride of a bench that
did duty for a horse; heavy boots, breeches of white cashmere, uniform
of grenadier of the Imperial guard, decorations on his breast, and,
last of all, the 'gray redingote.' He was seated on a saddle lent to
him by the son of Prince Jerome. In his hand he held a tablet on which
was fastened a sheet of white paper, and he was carefully sketching
himself, studying his reflection in a mirror. It was the middle of
summer and the heat was atrocious. 'My model can't pose as Napoleon,'
he told me, 'but I have exactly Napoleon's legs.'"
Is it necessary to say after this that no painter ever informed
himself with such religious zeal in regard to costumes and
accessories? Of the heroic Imperial Epoch which he worshipped above
all others, he sought and gathered together all sorts of relics: not
content with the possession of a white horse closely resembling that
of Napoleon I., he used to point with pride, both in his collection
and in his paintings, to a complete set of trappings that had once
served the Emperor; and one of the greatest rages that he ever felt in
his life was produced by the respectful but firm refusal of the
Beaux-Arts to lend him the "Gray Redingote."
His "working library," as he called it, contained incomparable riches.
It included breeches, hats, helmets, boots, shoes, pumps, buckles,
walking-sticks, and jewelry. He would have been able, by rummaging
there, to clothe from top to toe whole generations of bourgeoise,
nobles, and labourers, from any epoch of French history, to say
nothing of the various regiments and the staff officers! He quite
literally bought out the stock of second-hand dealers in the Temple
market, which up to the middle of the nineteeth century was the sales
place of old clothes once worn by our great-grandparents and their
ancestors.
And we know,--his fine passion for the truth was always cropping
out,--that he actually suffered because he could not clothe his models
with genuine old linen. At the end of some very conscientious
researches that he had pursued in the Imperial Library, he considered
that he had made a discovery that was useful to his art, when he read
in the _Encyclopedia_ that in the eighteenth century linen was cut on
the bias, and not straight across, as it is today. We must not smile!
For herein lay the secret of greater suppleness in the folds.
And when, detail by detail, his documentation had been completed, what
endless sketches, experiments, rough drafts had to follow! For a
single painting he acknowledged that he had to make whole "cubic
metres" of preliminary studies.
In spite of all this, when the picture was finished and more than
finished, it did not always please him. The same friend whose personal
testimony we have already cited, informs us that one day, in his
presence, the artist violently slashed up a painting which everybody
else had pronounced perfect, while at that very moment a purchaser was
waiting for it in the vestibule: "I don't know how to paint!" cried
the artist in despair, "I shall never learn my craft."
There we have an impulse and a sacrifice which few painters would be
capable of making in sincerity, and which define better than the
longest dissertations could do, the soul of Meissonier, his talent and
his glory.