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Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier

Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier



Birth	21 February 1815 Lyon
Deaths	21 January 1891 Paris
Nationality	French
Activity (s)	Painter
Master	Leon Cogniet
Students	Charles Meissonier , Lucien Gros , Edward Detaille , Maurice Courant , Alphonse Moutte , Daniel Ridgway Knight , George Bretegnier
Artistic movement	academic painter
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Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, born in Lyon on 21 February 1815 and died in Paris on 21 January 1891 , is a painter and sculptor French, specializing in military history painting. Very detail-oriented painter authentic, he enrolled in the movement of realism history that appears in the visual arts under the Second Empire.

Biography

Early on, Meissonier demonstrated a talent for drawing. Teenager, he heads in charcoal drawing and blurring in some Julien Potier, painter Prix de Rome. He entered the studio of painter Lon Cogniet where he attended including the preparation of painting a ceiling of the Louvre , representing the Egyptian expedition , a pageant that allows him to have his first contacts with military painting.

It's 16 years as Meissonier exhibited for the first time at the Salon of 1834. He was successively painter of fans and religious images for the editors of Rue Saint-Jacques , then tried to illustration with talent for the publisher Curmer, including the publication of Paul and Virginia and La Chaumiere Indian Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. His friends at the time are Daumier and Daubigny.

Ernest Meissonier began his career as a painter in a more conventional, with genre scenes of everyday life: card players, chess players, a man waiting at her window smoking bowlers. It gets increasingly popular, so much so that even comes to look at the Flemish masters to whom he is also himself strongly attached.

But in painting military scenes that the artist gets official honors (Officer of the Legion of Honor at 41, commander to 52 years). He was elected member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1861. Among his heroic paintings include the Imperial Apotheosis, the Retreat from Russia, Cuirassiers in Waterloo.

Messonier systematically applies the same meticulous historian in all the preparatory work of his works, making it a benchmark of uniformology.

In 1886, this prolific painter had a record of some 400 paintings. He had a pupil Sangston Gaylord Truesdell an American.

The work

Campaign in France in 1814 . From a small format unusual for a military history painting, the painting shows its know-how clever and careful. Despite the small size, the vast expanse of desolate plains and the heavy gray skies give breadth to the scene, just as the prospect of expanded around the central figure of the Emperor, magnified by a point of view slightly sunken. The smallest details are rendered with care. The Principal of the School of Fine Arts, Charles Blanc , also said that Meissonier's "painted greatly small."

In 1890, Meissonier participated, along with Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , Carolus-Duran , Felix Bracquemond , Jules Dalou , Auguste Rodin and Carrier-Belleuse , to restart the activities of the National Society of Fine Arts , which elected him president with Dalou as vice president. The company began to organize annual exhibitions at the Salon de Champ de Mars, traditionally a fortnight after the official Salon of the Champs-Elysees, organized by the Society of French artists.

When he died the following year, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes succeeded with Auguste Rodin as vice president. He is buried at Poissy , where he lived from 1846 and he was mayor.

Trivia

He was the uncle of the painter Adolphe Steinheil.

In his interview with Denise Glaser , Salvador Dali made the apology of the painter .

He was a staunch opponent of the painting of Edouard Manet, who served with him during the War of 1870 .

Works

The Bourgeois Flemings, 1836 ( Wallace Collection (museum) , London)
Napoleon III at Solferino, 1863 ( Muse du Louvre , Paris)
The Campaign of France, 1814, 1864, ( Muse d'Orsay , Paris)
Friedland, 1807, 1875 ( Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York)
Heavily armed soldiers of 1805, before the fight, 1878, ( Chateau de Chantilly , Chantilly)
The Seine at Poissy, 1884 ( Philadelphia Museum of Art , Philadelphia)