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Meissonier had expended over a million francs on his house in the Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, and nearly as much on the country-seat at Poissy. These places were kingly in their appointments and such as only the State should attempt to maintain. For a single man, by the work of his right hand, to keep them up was too much to expect.

Meissonier’s success had been too great. As a collector he had overdone the thing. Only poor men, or those of moderate incomes, should be collectors, for then the joy of sacrifice is theirs. Charles Lamb’s covetous looking on the book when it was red, daily for months, meanwhile hoarding his pay, and at last one Saturday night swooping down and carrying the volume home to Bridget in triumph, is the true type.

But money had come to Meissonier by hundreds of thousands of francs, and often sums were forced upon him as advance payments. He lived royally and never imagined that his hand and brain could lose their cunning, or the public be fickle.

The fact that a “vindication” had been necessary was galling: the great man grew irritable and his mood showed itself in his work: his colors grew hard and metallic, and there were angles in his lines where there should have been joyous curves.

Debts began to press. He painted less and busied his mind with reminiscence–the solace of old age.

And then it was that he dictated to his wife the “Conversations.” The book reveals the quality of his mind with rare fidelity–and shows the power of this second wife fully to comprehend him. Thus did she disprove some of the unkind philosophy given to the world by her liege. But the talk in the “Conversations” is of an old man in whose heart was a tinge of bitterness. Yet the thought is often lofty and the comment clear and full of flashing insight. It is the book of Ecclesiastes over again, written in a minor key, with a little harmless gossip added for filling. Meissonier died in Paris on the Twenty-first of January, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-one, aged seventy-six years.

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The canvas known as “Eighteen Hundred Seven,” which is regarded as Meissonier’s masterpiece, has a permanent home in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The central figure is Napoleon, at whose shrine the great artist loved to linger. The “Eighteen Hundred Seven” occupied the artist’s time and talent for fifteen years, and was purchased by A. T. Stewart for sixty thousand dollars. After Mr. Stewart’s death his art treasures were sold at auction, and this canvas was bought by Judge Henry Hilton and presented to the city of New York.

There are in all about seventy-five pictures by Meissonier owned in America. Several of his pieces are in the Vanderbilt collection, others are owned by collectors in Chicago, Cleveland and Saint Louis.

There are various glib sayings to the effect that the work of great men is not appreciated until after they are dead. This may be so and it may not. It depends upon the man and the age. Meissonier enjoyed full half a century of the highest and most complete success that was ever bestowed upon an artist.

The strong intellect and marked personality of the man won him friends wherever he chose to make them; and it probably would have been better for his art if a degree of public indifference had been his portion in those earlier years. His success was too great: the calm judgment of posterity can never quite endorse the plaudits paid the living man. He is one of the greatest artists the Nineteenth Century has produced, but that his name can rank among the great artists of all time is not at all probable.

William Michael Rossetti has summed the matter up well by saying: “Perfection is so rare in this world that when we find it we must pause and pay it the tribute of our silent admiration. It is very easy to say that Meissonier should have put in this and omitted that. Had he painted differently he would have been some one else. The work is faultless, and such genius as he showed must ever command the homage of those who know by experience the supreme difficulty of having the hand materialize the conceptions of the mind. And yet Meissonier’s conceptions outmatched his brush: he was greater than his work. He was a great artist, and better still, a great man–proud, frank, fearless and conscientious.”