The Barricade

historical

As an artillery captain in the National Guard, Ernest Meissonier had witnessed the massacre of insurgents on a barricade of the rue de l'Hôtel de Ville during the confrontations of June 1848. This watercolour, depicting the outcome of the fight, was always considered, by both the artist and his contemporaries, as a remarkable and unusual work. Almost fifty years after the events, Meissonier described his deep attachment to this work in a letter to the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens: "I am not modest about this drawing, and I am not afraid to say that if I were rich enough to buy it back, I would do so immediately [...

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About the Artist

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier

1815 – 1891

French painter, etcher, lithographer, and sculptor. He was immense1y successful with his trite and nigglingly detailed historical paintings and historical genre pieces (particularly scenes from the Napoleonic campaigns) and from the 1840s received the highest official honours, including the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour - he was the first painter to win this award. Astonishingly conceited as well as mean-spirited, he cultivated a huge white beard and liked to be photographed or painted in attitudes of fiercely profound thought, as in his self-portrait of 1889 in the Musée d'Orsay. He had a personal enmity for Courbet and may have been instrumental in inducing the government to impose a fine on him after the suppression of the Commune. Meissonier did his best work when he was at his least pretentious. His landscapes are attractive descriptive exercises and his Rue de la Martellerie (Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1848), which shows a corpse-strewn street during the revolutionary events of 1848, has genuine pathos and impressed Delacroix. There are large collections of Meissonier's work in the Musée d'Orsay and in the Wallace Collection, London.

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