By the time of Ernest Meissonier’ death in 1891, he was among the most famous painters of the nineteenth century, hailed by Delacroix as the “incontestable master of our epoch”. His exquisite genre scenes often set in a romanticized past are characterized by meticulously rendered costumes and accessories, inspired by Dutch and Flemish masters of the seventeenth century. Meissonier also developed a range of military subjects in his paintings, producing both small panels depicting individual guards and cavalrymen and monumental canvases and murals celebrating heroic military campaigns, sometimes capturing the horrors of conflict. From 1840 Meissonier’s paintings received effusive reviews from the art critics, while prominent collectors, including wealthy Americans like William Vanderbilt and William Walters, vied to acquire his works for their collections.

Meissonier was a serious student of military subjects, creating a series of canvases on episodes in the life of Napoleon I. The present work, executed in 1876, is a study for Meissonier’s 1805, The Cuirassiers before the Charge, exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, now in the Musée Condé, Chantilly. In preparation for such grand battle paintings, Meissonier fashioned wax sculptures and made small oil sketches of horses and military figures, such as this cavalryman, known as a cuirassier.

By the 1870s, Meissonier was considered the greatest horse painter, perhaps of all time. Studying equine locomotion, Meissonier strove to portray the gait of the horse and seemed to have perfected his representations. And then, they were revealed as incontrovertibly false, due to a new system of imaging: photography which in a single instant established the arbitrariness of all previous representations. Also interested in the accuracy of the stride of the trotting horse was Eadweard Muybridge. Assembling a series of cameras that made consecutive exposures triggered by the horse’s movement, Muybridge revealed the full range of the horse’s motion. Word of these Californian experiments appeared in the French press in 1878, creating the collapse of a verist standard of artistic truth that had prevailed in Salon painting. Meissonier, confronted with the futility of his own life-long project, at first disputed the veracity of the high-speed photography.[1] Aware of his imminent, posthumous invisibility, he soon embraced Muybridge, hosting an elaborate reception in the photographer’s honor in 1881, complete with a demonstration of a zoopraxiscope, that united graphic versions of the stills into a continuous representation of equine motion. Gradually, Meissonier incorporated Muybridge’s discoveries into his own paintings. 

[1] Marc J. Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation. Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting, Princeton 1996, pp. 155-184