Seven cities of Greece vied for the glory of having been Homer's birthplace; several publishers today claim the honor of having encouraged the debut of M. Meissonier. For us, the question is not in doubt. Despite the picturesque little stories that have blossomed in the imagination of M. P.-J. Stahl, it is, until further notice, M. L. Curmer who enjoyed the first fruits of this ingenious and firm pencil.
And yet, one day, in the early years of the last reign, at the instigation of the artist Trimolet, M. Meissonier went to knock on the door of a publisher on the rue Saint-Jacques. He brought with him four small sepia drawings intended—in his dreams—to illustrate a fairy tale in some Magasin des Enfants (Children's Magazine). The publisher, a man of sense, found the drawings charming but balked at the costs that engraving would have required. With a thousand courtesies, he dismissed the young artist.
The Wood Engravings
The first wood engravings whose date we have been able to confirm are therefore those found in the Bible de Royaumont, published in 1835 by M. L. Curmer. They appear alongside compositions by Wattier, C. Rogier, Devéria, and Levasseur, without, however, distinguishing themselves by any particular quality. At that time, it was Gérard Séguin who kept M. Meissonier from sleeping!
The woodcuts designed by M. Meissonier since that period are numerous. All of them display the same qualities of knowledge and conscientiousness, but Paul et Virginie and La Chaumière indienne (The Indian Cottage) are particularly interesting because they date from the master's youth. They show him already rendering nature in a completely personal way; it is as if one were leafing through his sketchbook. They speak of his long sessions in the greenhouses of the Jardin des Plantes or before the shops of the bric-à-brac dealers that once lined the entrance to the Louvre.
How well his scrupulous sketches served him when he had to render, in a decorated initial, a lily broken by a storm, or a collection of Indian arms and musical instruments! How many precious notes have since found their place in his best canvases, and what a fine lesson this ever-attentive study of nature provides! If the publisher assigned him "the attributes of labor," M. Meissonier would pile books on his table and naively copy, with their slightest tonal values, the ribs on the spine and the small piece of paper left as a bookmark at the interrupted page.
One of these miniature vignettes is less than four centimeters high, yet one can distinguish two engravings glued to the wall: one represents the Pariah thinking of the English doctor, the other the English Doctor thinking of the pariah. Between them, suspended from a nail, are "the leather pipe from England, whose mouthpiece was of yellow amber, and that of the pariah, whose stem was of bamboo and whose bowl was of terracotta." A label, attached below with two pins, attests that they are from the collection of M. Meissonier. I truly cannot doubt it, so probable is it that the artist had these illustrious pipes before his very eyes to render their minuscule details.