Meissonier

By Henri Barbusse

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• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Sep 4, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547226758

Henri Barbusse

Henri Barbusse (1873-1935) was a novelist and member of the French Communist Party. Born in Asnières-sur-Seine, he moved to Paris at 16. There, he published his first book of poems, Pleureuses (1895) and embarked on a career as a novelist and biographer. In 1914, at the age of 41, Barbusse enlisted in the French Army to serve in the First World War, for which he would earn the Croix de guerre. His novel Under Fire (1916) was inspired by his experiences in the war, which scarred him and influenced his decision to become a pacifist. In 1918, he moved to Moscow, where he joined the Bolshevik Party and married a Russian woman. Barbusse briefly returned to France, joining the French Communist Party in 1923, before moving back to Russia to work as a writer whose purpose was to support Bolshevism, illuminate the dangers of capitalism, and inspire revolutionary movements worldwide. In addition to his writing, Barbusse took part in the World Committee Against War and Fascism and the International Youth Congress, as well as worked as an editor for Monde, Progrès Civique, and L’Humanité. His final work was a biography of Joseph Stalin, which appeared in 1936 after his death from pneumonia in Moscow. Buried in Paris, his funeral was attended by a half million mourners. Among his many friends and colleagues were Egon Kisch, Albert Einstein, and Romain Rolland.

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Henri Barbusse

Meissonier

EAN 8596547226758

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

EARLY YEARS

FIRST SUCCESS

ETCHINGS

PAINTINGS

MILITARY PAINTINGS

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INTRODUCTION

Table of Contents

ONE day—it was neither in war time nor during manoeuvres—on a July morning, with the sun shining radiantly, a squadron of cuirassiers passed at full gallop across a magnificent field of ripening grain, in the neighbourhood of Poissy, although on every side there were wide reaches of fallow land and pasture.

When this hurricane of horses and men had, like a blazing meteor, devastated and laid low the splendid gold of the crops, two men remained behind, surveying the scene with visible satisfaction and undisguised interest.

One of the two was tall and the other short. The tall man was Colonel Dupressoir, who had directed the manoeuvre. The other, an elderly man, short of leg, and ruddy of complexion, with a long beard, white and silken, and a singularly expressive eye, was the painter, Meissonier. The latter had achieved his object. Thanks to long insistence and the payment of indemnities, he had brought about the passage of cavalry across that field, in order that he might make studies from nature, needed for a painting then in hand, 1807, of how standing grain looks after it has been crushed and trampled by the onrush of a charge.

The whole artist, whose work we are about to study side by side with his life, is summed up in this anecdote. It reveals one of the most typical sides of his temperament, and, consequently, of his talent: a constant and scrupulous endeavour, maintained even at the price of sacrifices that would seem excessive to the layman, to interpret nature precisely as she is. It was this noble ambition—and we shall find other examples of it in the course of an artistic career in which it was the dominant note—that made him say to his pupils, with a conviction that commanded respect: If I should sketch a horse from memory I should feel that I had been guilty of an insult to nature!

PLATE II.—LES ORDONNANCES

(Tommy Thierry Collection, Musée du Louvre)

Every one of Meissonier’s pictures is a document which may be profitably consulted if one wished to decide a detail of costume or armament. His consciousness in this regard has become proverbial.

And it is because he conceived his ideal after this fashion that this unerring painter of so many military types and scenes never attempted to picture skirmishes or battles. It was