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Updated: June 5, 2025
Just pay them compliments, nothing but compliments, always compliments; in that way, if you say anything foolish it will be overlooked. Do you know Meissonier's paintings?" "I should say I do." "Have you read the Rougon-Macquart series?" "From first to last." "That's enough. Mention a painting from time to time, speak of a novel here and there and add: "'Superb! Extraordinary!
After dinner these jottings remained as a valuable memorial of his visit. Perhaps if they were all collected, these slight affairs might bring enough at auction to pay for all the dinners to which the prudent host had invited the artist. The world of subjects included in Meissonier's art was a very narrow one, and was not calculated to interest men and women in general.
There is old-fashioned solid comfort in the way of furniture; and pictures, a Dürer engraving, some Prouts and Turners, a couple of old Venetian heads, and Meissonier's "Napoleon," over the fireplace a picture which Ruskin bought for one thousand guineas, showed for a time at Oxford, and hung up here in a shabby little frame to be out of the way.
Admirers of "the little master of little pictures" will find among the twenty-six Meissonier's, which the Chauchard bequest brings to the Louvre, two of the most famous of his works: 87, The Napoleonic picture, Campaign of France, 1814; and 80, Amateurs of Painting.
Chippendale, of course, must bear the chief part of the charge of over-elaboration, and he frankly says that he thinks "much enrichment is necessary." He copied Meissonier's designs and had a great love for gilding, but the display of rococo taste is not in all his work by any means, nor was it so excessive as that of the French.
I never hesitate about scraping out the work of days, and beginning afresh, so as to satisfy myself, and try to do better. Ah! that "better" which one feels in one's soul, and without which no true artist is ever content! Others may approve and admire; but that counts for nothing, compared with one's own feeling of what ought to be. Meissonier's Conversations
Nevertheless Meissonier's statue is in the garden of the Louvre, Meissonier is extolled as a master, while Fortuny is usually described in patronising terms as a facile trifler. The reverse is the truth. No one has painted sunlight with more intensity; he was an impressionist before the word was coined.
It gives a truly international look to the exposition to see one of Vernet's battle-pieces or Meissonier's microscopic gems of color jostled by a package of hides from the Parana or a bale of India-rubber. Yet more expressive was the medley upon the covered platforms for the reception of freight.
For a single man, by the work of his right hand, to keep them up was too much to expect. Meissonier's success had been too great. As a collector he had overdone the thing. Only poor men, or those of moderate incomes, should be collectors, for then the joy of sacrifice is theirs.
The rise in value of a small sketch of a single figure, from $500 to $5,000, in fifteen years, is no greater in proportion than has happened in the case of every one of Meissonier's pictures, drawings, studies, and even his slight sketches, on some of which originally he would have placed no value at all.
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