Meissonier, his life and his art . Tin: HfRDV-CUKDY PLAYER. (Pencil Sketch.) I have been asked to send somedrawinofs and sketches to the Ex-position des Beaux Arts. I amwriting to Gerome as follows :— Itwas no idle fancy which made meclose my poor portfolio yesterday,after having made it over to you-SO unconditionally the day before. I have always held a strict opinionthat what a man should show in his lifetime is his finished work, andnot that which shows how he did it. I hesitated long, before I madeup my mind. . But you pressed me, and hating as I did, torefuse, I gave you over all those od
Meissonier, his life and his art . Tin: HfRDV-CUKDY PLAYER. (Pencil Sketch.) I have been asked to send somedrawinofs and sketches to the Ex-position des Beaux Arts. I amwriting to Gerome as follows :— Itwas no idle fancy which made meclose my poor portfolio yesterday,after having made it over to you-SO unconditionally the day before. I have always held a strict opinionthat what a man should show in his lifetime is his finished work, andnot that which shows how he did it. I hesitated long, before I madeup my mind. . But you pressed me, and hating as I did, torefuse, I gave you over all those odds and ends of sketch(;s,—done onanything, w^ith any tools that came to hand,-to be used at yourdiscretion. HIS PROFESSION 219 Doctor, your attitude has altered insensibly: that always hap[)enswith a portrait. It is the same with a picture, no model gives me quitewhat I want at first, and I begin again and again until the pose is When I hold my brush quite horizontally, I see my subject squared,as it were, for reduction. I can see how far the figure extendsbeyond the line of sur-rounding objects. I have always beenmuch struck by the aphor-ism (which I read in thisform, I know not where)that elegance and absur-dity are divided one fromanother only by a hairsbreadth. Nothing couldbe truer. . It is not generally un-derstood that painting ona reduced scale is a pro-cess prescribed to us, as itwere, by Nature herselfLook through a picture-frame,—the human fip-ure O seems to be naturally squared for reduction. All objects, in fact, are reduced, directly we look at them from a distance. PEN SKETCH. I have painted on this scale with the impression of drawing fromnature in pencil ; only pencil work is too slow for me. I gain timeto study my figures while I paint them. But when I have to indicate MEISSONIER
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