Still, the subject matter of Meissonier's works accounted only partly for their extraordinary success. What astounded the critics and the public alike was his mastery of fine detail and almost inconceivably punctilious craftsmanship. "It is impossible to comprehend that our clumsy hands could achieve such a degree of delicacy," enthused Gautier.
20
Meissonier's paintings, most of which were small in size, rewarded the closest and most prolonged observation. After purchasing one of his works, the English art critic John Ruskin would examine it at length under a magnifying glass, marveling at Meissonier's manual dexterity and eye for fascinating minutiae. A critic once joked that Meissonier was capable of putting the Prophets of the Sistine Chapel on the setting of a ring.
21
No one in the history of art, it was said, ever possessed such a superlative and unerring touch with his brush. "The finest Flemish painters, the most meticulous Dutch," claimed Gautier, "are slovenly and heavy next to Meissonier."
22
Despite his great success, Meissonier was not, however, immune to criticism. By 1863 an undertone of murmuring had begun to accompany his seemingly endless parade of chess players and musketeers. The art critic Paul de Saint-Victor had bemoaned this seemingly limited repertoire, complaining that Meissonier's
bonshommes,
however well executed, did little more than read, write and puff their pipes. Another critic, Paul Mantz, inquired: "Would it be too demanding to ask this talented artist to renew his choice of subjects a little?"
23
Most critical of all, though, was Meissonier himself. His minute paintings of eighteenth-century officers and gentlemen may have brought him wealth and fame, but for all of that he claimed to despise them as beneath his talents. "Nothing can express adequately my horror at going about making
bonshommes
for a living!" he declared.
24
These elegant little paintings were not, he insisted, the true expression of his genius. Posterity would celebrate him, he believed, for something quite different.
"An artist cannot be hampered by family cares," Meissonier once wrote. "He must be free, able to devote himself entirely to his work."
25
Yet Meissonier seemed always to have been hampered by family cares. His father, Charles, had been a successful businessman, the proprietor of a factory in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, that produced dyes for the textile industry. Though possessed of an artistic temperament—he played the flute, sang ballads and danced the quadrille at parties—Charles Meissonier did not contemplate with enthusiasm the prospect of a painter in the family. He was a strict, practical man who subscribed to the theory that children should be toughened up by means of exposure to the cold. And, not unnaturally, he expected Ernest, the eldest of his two sons, to follow him into the dye business. When young Ernest indicated his distaste for such a career, relations between father and son deteriorated, all the more so after Madame Meissonier died and Charles had a liaison, and subsequently a daughter, with a laundress, whom he duly married. Ernest was then sent, at age seventeen, to work in a druggist's shop in the Rue des Lombards. His days were spent preparing bandages and sweeping the floor, while at night he sketched in secret and dreamed of launching his artistic career. Only a dogged show of determination and a threat to run away to Naples convinced Charles Meissonier to apprentice his son to Léon Cogniet, a well-known history painter who had studied in Rome and received important public commissions such as a mural for the ceiling of a gallery in the Louvre.
Meissonier had proved a precocious talent. A fellow artist later observed that he seemed to have been born a master, free from the clumsiness and uncertainty that marked the early careers of other artists.
26
The talented young Meissonier set his sights high, aiming to become a history painter like Cogniet, who had first made his name in 1817 with a sandal-and-toga scene entitled
Helen Delivered by Her Brothers Castor and Pollux.
The depiction of these grand historical scenes was believed to be the most noble task a painter could set for himself in the nineteenth century. History painting occupied the summit in the strict hierarchy endorsed by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the prestigious institution charged with shaping the destiny of French art. Landscapes, portraits and still lifes were all thought inferior because, unlike history paintings, they could not impart moral precepts to the spectator—and the teaching of moral lessons was, for most members of the Académie, the whole point of a work of art. The ideal painting, according to this wisdom, was one in which well-known characters from the Bible, national history or classical mythology performed heroic deeds and, in so doing, provided cogent moral inspiration for the viewers. One of the most celebrated examples was Jacques-Louis David's
The Oath of the Horatii,
painted in Rome in 1784, a thirteen-foot-wide canvas featuring a band of toga-clad brothers pledging an oath to their father to defend Rome against its enemies.
The young Meissonier had begun a number of these high-minded paintings, including
The Siege of Calais
and
Peter the Hermit Preaching the Crusade
—works that were intended, he later wrote, "to express great thoughts, devotion, noble examples."
27
But his style of painting was to change, and instead of executing these grand visions with their lofty moral lessons he soon found himself illustrating books and dashing off more modest scenes that were exported to America and brought him five francs per square meter.
The main reason for this less exalted style was that in 1838, at the age of twenty-three, Meissonier had married a rather austere Protestant woman from Strasbourg named Emma Steinheil, the sister of one of his artistic companions. His father then presented him with a set of silver cutlery, paid a year's rent on his lodgings, and promptly terminated his slender allowance. "It is now quite evident that you want nothing further from me," Charles Meissonier announced. "When people set up house together they must consider themselves capable of providing for themselves."
28
Two children were born in due course, Therese and Charles. On the birth registration of his daughter, born in 1840, Meissonier boldly declared his occupation as "painter of history."
29
But grandiose history paintings—no matter how revered by the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts—did not sell as readily as smaller canvases such as landscapes or portraits, which fit more easily onto the walls of Paris apartments. So the saints, heroes and angels disappeared from Meissonier's easel and the little
bonshommes,
the products of economic necessity, began appearing under his brush. He quickly became known as the "French Metsu," a reference to the seventeeth-century Dutch painter Gabriel Metsu, who specialized in miniature scenes of bourgeois domestic life.
30
By 1863 Meissonier had been producing his charming little paintings, and enjoying his extravagant success, for more than two decades. "I resigned myself to their creation," he later wrote wistfully of his
bonshommes,
"dreaming the while of other things."
31
Meissonier was dreaming of these other things, presumably, on that winter day in 1863 when, dressed in the cocked hat and gray riding coat of Napoléon, he climbed to the top of the Grande Maison.
Outside on his balcony, Meissonier swung into a saddle cinched to a wooden horse and, in imitation of the famous gesture, tucked one hand inside the gray riding coat. Then, examining his reflection in a mirror, he took up his paintbrush and, as the snow drifted down from the winter sky, began painting his own somber image on the wooden panel placed on the easel before him—a study for a historical work, then well under way, called
1814: The Campaign of France?
32
"On how many nights did Napoléon haunt me in my sleep!" Meissonier once declared.
33
He had been born, ironically enough, in 1815, the year of Waterloo. More than four decades after Napoléon's death on Saint-Helena, his legend was still very much alive, not least thanks to vigorous promotion by his nephew, Napoléon III, who came to power in 1848. Each year on the fifth of May, the anniversary of his death, a Mass was performed in the chapel of the Invalides and wreaths were laid at the foot of the Vendôme Column. Each year on the fifteenth of August, the anniversary of his birth, a national holiday was observed: soldiers paraded in the Place de la Concorde, clowns frolicked along the Champs-Elysees, fireworks crackled overhead, and more wreaths appeared at the base of the Vendôme Column.
Everywhere in Paris, it seemed, Napoléon was venerated. Brought back from Saint-Helena with much pomp in 1840, his bones resided in a magnificent porphyry tomb beneath the dome of the Invalides. His statues presided over the city from atop the Vendôme Column and the Arc de Triomphe, while streets and bridges, such as Rivoli, Wagram and Austerlitz, bore the names of his military victories. He was the subject of numerous biographies, and the biggest-selling book in France after
The Three Musketeers
was Adolphe Thiers's
History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoléon,
of which twenty volumes had been churned out between 1845 and 1862.
34
Napoléon was also kept alive in novels by Stendhal and Balzac, and in poems by Victor Hugo. Beranger celebrated his name in patriotic songs, and Berlioz composed a cantata,
The Fifth of May,
in his honor. His valet, his secretary, his doctor, his chamberlain, and his wife's lady-in-waiting—all wrote about him at length in their memoirs. His sword from the Battle of Austerlitz and the harness of his favorite horse, Marengo, were cherished as holy relics. The Château de Mal-maison, his house near Paris, had been turned into a museum dedicated to his legend, and all over France willows grew from cuttings taken from the tree that had sheltered his tomb on Saint-Helena.
Napoléon was also an inspiration for artists. "The life of Napoléon is our country's epic for all the arts," announced Delacroix, whose father had served as Napoléon's Foreign Minister.
35
No figure except Christ had been so ubiquitous in French art. Every episode in his career was commemorated in paint. The Paris Salons teemed with military imagery as his exploits from Italy to Egypt were illustrated in scores of paintings and lithographs. At one Salon, nine different canvases showed the Battle of Wagram; another boasted eighteen of Austerlitz. His coronation as Emperor had been memorialized by Jacques-Louis David, his windswept tomb on Saint-Helena by Horace Vernet, who reverentially draped his canvas in black when he exhibited the painting. In 1855 Vernet, perhaps the greatest of all the battle painters, was paid 50,000 francs for a canvas of Napoléon surrounded by his marshals and generals on the field of battle. But even this gargantuan sum was dwarfed when, five years later, a wealthy banker named Gaston Delahante commissioned his own Napoleonic scene for 85,000 francs. The subject was to be Napoléon's last days as Emperor. The painter was to be Meissonier.
The saddle on which Meissonier posed for
The Campaign of France,
his commission from Delahante, was completely authentic. It had been lent to him by one of Napoléon's nephews, Prince Napoléon-Jerome. The riding coat was likewise authentic, or nearly so: Meissonier had borrowed the original from the Musée des Souverains, where various Napoleonic relics were housed, and then had it copied by a tailor, stitch by stitch, right down to its frays and creases. He had been donning this coat and climbing into the saddle for much of the previous year, making endless studies of the way in which, for instance, the coat draped over the crupper of the wooden horse or—as on that snowy afternoon—how the winter light fell across his face.
Meissonier had selected himself as the model for Napoléon because he believed his own short, powerful physique perfectly matched the Emperor's. "I have exactly his thighs!" he boasted one hot summer day when a visiting art critic discovered him wearing the gray riding coat and perspiring heavily as he painted his self-portrait.
36
Another visitor, the playwright Émile Augier, was treated to an even more arresting sight. Meissonier had taken to making sketches of himself in the nude, the better to portray, he believed, the physique of the Emperor on horseback. He was in this compromising state when Augier surprised him in his studio, naked but for a
suspensoir,
a truss used to support the scrotum in cases of hernia and gonorrhea. Augier inquired whether the bandage meant Meissonier was suffering from a medical condition, to which the artist enthusiastically replied: "No, but you see the Emperor wore a
suspensoir.
"
37
The subject to be rendered with such historical accuracy—right down to the
suspensoir
—was Napoléon's retreat across France in the early months of 1814, in the face of a massive attack by the British, Prussian, Austrian, Swedish and Russian armies. The episode would end with the invasion of Paris and Napoléon's abdication and subsequent exile on Elba. These events were recounted in comprehensive detail in the seventeenth volume of Thiers's best-selling
History,
which had been published in 1860, the year Meissonier received his commission from Delahante. Meissonier kept this book beside his pillow and on occasion played
boules
and discussed politics and history with the short, bespectacled Thiers, a regular visitor to the Grande Maison. Thiers had been Minister of the Interior under King Louis-Philippe, and in this capacity he arranged for the return of Napoléon's body from Saint-Helena and oversaw the installation of the statue on the Vendôme Column. His greatest tribute to Napoléon, though, was his
History,
in volume seventeen of which he reserved the highest praise for the bravura with which the doomed Emperor conducted himself in the face of the invading armies. In a desperate war against an enemy outnumbering his own troops by as much as five to one, Napoléon "added to all the brilliance, daring and fertility of resource exhibited on his former campaigns," Thiers contended, "one quality that he had still to display—and which he then displayed even to a miracle—unchangeable constancy in misfortune."
38