Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/19

 should follow the same method as the builder. In the same way he would draw men from the feet upwards, saying that they must always be planted firmly on their feet before they began to do anything. Le Petit Pont well illustrates another peculiarity of his practice in drawing architecture. He deliberately renounced any competition with the camera of the photographer, and claimed the right to arrange the different parts of what he drew in the manner best calculated to convey a certain impression, while preserving the utmost exactness in the representation of detail in each part. It has been observed, by those who know the spot well, that the towers of Notre-Dame, which dominate the whole composition, are much too high in the etching in regard to their actual dimensions and to the laws of perspective. After taking a drawing from very low down, near the edge of the water, Meryon drew the towers again from the level of the street, as the passer-by would habitually see them, and fitted this drawing with great skill into the former one, constructing by this combination a composition which produced the desired effect of impressive and majestic height, all the details being absolutely accurate, though on reflection it might be discovered that they could not all be seen at once.

Le Petit Pont is the first of his mature works, and marks an astonishing advance upon the exercises in copying other etchers which, with the exception of a few important portraits, are all that had preceded it. "Unimportant," his own portrait, seated before an easel, could never have been, at least as a document, though it may have been immature, but we cannot judge of its quality, for Meryon destroyed it and preserved no proofs, and we only know of its existence from his own statement recorded by Burty. The only proof of his portrait of Eugène Bléry was destroyed by Bléry's wife because she did not like it. Thus the only portrait of his quite early time which is actually extant is that of Edmond de Courtives, and of this only one impression, formerly in the Macgeorge collection, can actually be traced. It is a little medallion con-