Wallace Collection Online - A Sentinel: Time of Louis XIII

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(Jean-Louis-) Ernest Meissonier (1815 - 1891) A Sentinel: Time of Louis XIII France: Date: 1851

Object Type: Painting

Medium: Oil on mahogany panel

Image size: 25.3 x 15 cm
Object size: 26.6 x 16.5 cm
Object size: with frame, 42 x 32.5 x 7.5 cm

Inv: P287

Location: West Gallery III

Meissonier had only a brief artistic education and was largely self-taught. His early career was as a book illustrator, but in the late 1830s he also began to establish a reputation as a painter of historical genre scenes. Their small scale, meticulous detail and historical accuracy made them enormously attractive to many collectors. Within a decade he was the most expensive artist in France, his paintings largely the preserve of the financial and social élite. Many of his subjects were taken from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (cavaliers, artists and musicians, gentlemen at leisure), but in the 1860s he turned increasingly to scenes from Napoleon’s military campaigns, some painted on a more ambitious scale than his earlier works. He also produces sculptures, particularly of horses. Much honoured, in 1889 he became the first artist to receive the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. This little panel is a characteristic example of Meissonier's finely crafted scenes with single military figures, as much a fashion plate as insight into 17th-century French military life.

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