Ernest Meissonier

Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891) became the most expensive living painter of his era through sheer obsession with detail. Born in Lyon, the son of a dye factory owner, he resisted the family business and won permission to study art at seventeen. He trained briefly under Léon Cogniet in Paris but was largely self-taught, spending countless hours studying seventeenth-century Dutch masters. His early genre scenes earned him the nickname "the French Metsu." The English critic John Ruskin examined his canvases under a magnifying glass, marveling at the precision.

Meissonier's fame rests on his Napoleonic military paintings. He conceived a cycle of five monumental canvases depicting pivotal moments in Napoleon's career, completing only two: 1807, Friedland and 1814, Campaign of France. To achieve accuracy, he built a miniature railway in his garden so he could observe horses galloping at eye level. 1807, Friedland sold for 380,000 francs in 1875, more than triple the record for any living artist. Along with Gérôme and Cabanel, Meissonier became one of the three most successful painters of the Second Empire. The Académie des Beaux-Arts elected him in 1861, and in 1890 he became the first president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

Meissonier's Academic Art style fell out of fashion after his death, dismissed as too polished and conservative. But his technical mastery remains undeniable. His works hang at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, and the Wallace Collection in London.