3-021-012 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Cavalier", by E. Meissonier, from the winter exhibition, No, 7, Haymarket, 1868. Engraving of a drawing, which is '...like many of the French artist's works, slender of "subject," and merits attention chiefly on account of its workmanship. It is not very particularly interesting or suggestive to be shown the single figure of a cavalier of the seventeenth century, booted and spurred, returned (we may suppose) from some journey, standing moodily warming his toes at the fire-dogs, in some old hall of an ancient chateau. But such art as Meissonier's is almost independent of subject; and this example of it is not the less interesting because shown in the comparatively unfamiliar medium of water colours. The painter's exquisite precision and wonderful force and finish are certainly seen to greater perfection in his completed oil pictures; ...here...we have also a mastery of the means of watercolour painting which many of us would hardly credit to a foreign painter...Whatever the medium, the foreign artist aims at a standard of thoroughness and completeness that is, it must be said, commonly higher than our own'. From "Illustrated London News", 1868.