The name of M. Meissonier, already famous in 1849, has since become glorious. There is perhaps no other that foreign nations envy us more; universal admiration has consecrated it. Today, as he celebrates, it has been said, his golden wedding anniversary with painting—displaying, not without legitimate pride, fifty years of work and artistic conscientiousness—criticism must bow respectfully before so much labor and so much honorably acquired glory. Once this duty is fulfilled, it will take advantage of this unique opportunity to follow the artist's career from its beginnings to its crowning achievement. It is a chance to analyze the particular ideal that these works, gathered for a day from so many different collections, reveal in their intimate development, and to capture, before they are dispersed once more, the lessons they offer us. This will be the best way to pay the master the homage he is due, and to articulate the reasons, nuances, and limits of our admiration.
An Unwavering Vision
What is first striking is the unity of the work and the continuity of effort toward an invariable goal. There is not a single hour of hesitation; from the very first step, he knows where he wants to go. This is a great superiority, the condition for a methodical and sustained production, for a sure path toward a dreamed-of perfection. His ideal is uncomplicated—which does not mean it is easy to achieve. It was formulated in his very first painting (1834). Three Dutch burghers are seated in a salon, near a table on which a stoneware pot and glasses have been placed. All the mastery that M. Meissonier would later achieve is not yet there, far from it; but one can say that he is already entirely present, with his concern for detail, his search for character, and his taste for small pictures.
As the verse suggests, he would make them "very small, to make them with care."
The drawing does not yet have the relief and nerve of his mature works, but it clearly states what it wants. His brush, skilled at making the touch felt even in miniature, is guided by a patient hand and obeys a calm, settled, and determined mind. He would spend his life seeking the perfect expression of what is announced here.
Viewed as a whole, at this distance, at the threshold of this gallery, placed at the beginning of these fifty years of production whose completed cycle one can now embrace, these three conversing burghers take on the proportions of venerable ancestors, of protective household deities. They are like the familiar spirits who presided over the master's work. One can almost hear them discoursing slowly on common sense as a virtue, on precision as a beauty, on order as a form of poetry. Prudent and virtuous men, they are wary of the restless curiosities of the mind, the excitement of ardent souls, and the fever of imagination. They would fear these unruly impulses for their sons. In their knowledge of life, in their experience, in their somewhat selfish well-being, in their solid wisdom, they possess the benefit of certainty; they know that time and endurance belong to the methodical and the laborious. They are of the school of common sense.
