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Updated: April 30, 2025
In the late half of the preceding century Meissonier received $66,000 for his "Friedland," a picture which cost him the best part of two years to paint, and the expenditure of many thousands of francs, notably the expense attendant upon the trampling down of a field of growing wheat by a drove of horses that he might study the action and the effect the better.
Meissonier died in Paris on the Twenty-first of January, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-one, aged seventy-six years. The canvas known as "Eighteen Hundred Seven," which is regarded as Meissonier's masterpiece, has a permanent home in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The central figure is Napoleon, at whose shrine the great artist loved to linger.
They had in them the capacity for success they could have succeeded at anything they undertook, and they were too sensible to undertake a thing at which they could not succeed. They always saw light through at the other end. "I have success tied to the leg of my easel by a blue ribbon," said Meissonier.
There are academic painters influenced by Corot or Monticelli, as well as by David, Gros, or Meissonier. The "academic" Rodin has appeared in contemporary sculpture; the great Frenchman found for himself his formula, and the lesser men have appropriated it to their own uses.
To this analysis Maupassant brought a facile and dramatic pen, a penetration as searching as a probe, and a power of psychological vision that in its minute detail, now pathetic, now ironical, in its merciless revelation of the hidden springs of the human heart, whether of aristocrat, bourgeois, peasant, or priest, allow one to call him a Meissonier in words.
So he fitted up his little Chelsea rooms in his own economically sumptuous fashion with some bits of wall paper, a few jugs and vases, and an etching or two after Meissonier; planted the Progenitor down comfortably in a large easy-chair, with a melodious fiddle before him; and set to work himself to do what he could towards elevating the British stage and pocketing a reasonable profit on his own account from that familiar and ever-rejuvenescent process.
During the last decade of his life Meissonier painted but one portrait of a woman, and to America belongs the honor. The sitter was Mrs. J. W. Mackay, of California. As all the world knows, Mrs. Mackay refused to accept the canvas. She declared the picture was no likeness, and further, she would not have it for a gift. "So you do not care for the picture?" asked the great artist. "Me?
At the Stewart Gallery the attendant was accustomed to offer the visitor a magnifying glass with which to examine the lustre of a horse’s eye or the buckles upon Napoleon’s saddle, in the “Review of Cuirassiers at the Battle of Friedland” by Meissonier.
When it was not possible to get the actual dress worn by the person he was painting, Meissonier spared no pains nor money to obtain an exact copy. This coat, Meissonier had copied by a tailor, with the minutest accuracy, and it was then worn by the model while he was painting the picture.
When the great schism occurred several years ago which rent the art world of France, Carolus-Duran was elected vice-president of the new school under Meissonier, to whose office he succeeded on that master’s death; and now directs and presides over the yearly exhibition known as the Salon du Champ de Mars.
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