Jasper County Democrat, Volume 7, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 July 1904 — Meissonier as a Portrait Painter. [ARTICLE]

Meissonier as a Portrait Painter.

Melssouler admitted that he would not have made a good portraitist by profession, for with few exceptions he bad succeeded only with sitters whom he liked and knew well. He was not satisfied with painting things as he saw them; he had to understand how they came to have such or such an appearance. Though he claimed to remember every drawing that he had ever made, he also claimed that he did not reduce his knowledge to general formulae. “Before nature, I know nothing in advance”—not even, It appears, wliat size he was going to make his picture or how much he was going to include In It This is the reason that many of his drawings and some of his paintings have been extended in one direction or another by bands of paper or canvas glued on. Meissonier had a strong dramatic Imagination and an 'uncommon sense of harmony, yet they were both occasionally smothered by this devotion to literal fact.