Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/120

 •274 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS probaby also copies, to be sent into the country and hung up in the parish churches. Although this may have seemed like hardship at the time, yet there is no doubt it was good practice, for among artists we are told it is an accepted doctrine that in order to paint on a small scale really well, you must be able to paint on a larger. And it is said that Meissonier was in the habit all his life of making life-size studies in order to keep his style from falling into pettiness. So, after all, the painting of these big pictures may have been a useful ordeal for the artist who for the next sixty years was to reap fame by painting small ones. While he was earning a scanty living by this hack-work, Meissonier found time to paint two pictures which he sent to the Salon of 1836. One of these attracted the attention of a clever artist, Tony Johannot, who introduced him to L6on Cogniet, with whom he studied for a time, but from whom he learned but little. The mechanism of his art he had pretty well mastered already, as was shown by the Salon accepting his early pictures, and the chief advantage he gained from his stay in Cogniet's studio was a wider acquaintance with the world of artists ; for Cogniet was a favorite teacher, and had a great many pupils, not a few of whom became distinguished painters. But his style of painting was not one to attract Meissonier, who was ambitious to paint like the old Dutch artists, Terburg, Metzu, Mieris, and others, who have the charm that their pictures are finished with the most exquisite minuteness, and yet treated in such a large way that, after awhile, we forget the microscopic wonder of the performance and think only of the skill the artist has shown in painting character. Meissonier was the first artist to bring back into favor the Dutch school of painting of the seventeenth century. Louis XIV., who set the fashion in everything in his day, had set the fashion of despising the Dutch painters, and the French people had never unlearned the lesson. It was Meissonier who brought back the taste, and taught the public to admire these small panels where interest in the subject is for the most part lost in the exquisite beauty of the painting and where the Dutch painters of similar subjects are successfully met on their own ground and equalled in every respect except in the charm of color. There is an old saying: " Imitation is the sincerest mode of flattery ; " and Meissonier's immediate success with the public was the signal for a bevy of imi- tators to try to win a like success by like methods.' Some of these artists were very clever, but an imitator is but an imitator after all, and is more apt to call attention to his model than to himself. It must be admitted that Meissonier himself has suffered somewhat in the same way : the evident fact that his meth- ods of painting were inspired by the study of the Dutch masters has led to his being called an imitator, and his pictures are often compared, and not to their advantage, with those of his models. Meissonier is, however, very much more than an imitator ; he was inspired by the Dutch painters, but he soon found a way of his own, and he has put so much of himself into his work, that the charge of imitation long since ceased to be brought against him. While he was still not much known to the public, the Duke of Orleans bought of him, for six hundred francs, a picture that to-day is worth thirty thou-