Ernest Meissonier, in full Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier was a French painter and illustrator of military and historical subjects, especially of Napoleonic battles. Meissonier studied first under Jules Potier, then in the studio of Léon Cogniet. In his early years Meissonier spent much time making illustrations for the publishers Curmer and Hetzel, but beginning in 1834 (at age 19) he exhibited regularly at the French Salon, and he received the highest official honours from the middle of the 1840s onward. Most of Meissonier’s paintings are on a small scale and are concerned with military subjects or with genre in a historical setting. Meissonier’s minute and scrupulous technique was largely derived from the study of Dutch painters of the 17th century, but the documentary approach of his preparatory study of costume and armour and of his detailed observation of nature links him with the 19th century. Among his major works are Napoleon III at Solferino (1863) and 1814 (1864), both of which celebrate heroic military campaigns, but he also captured the horrors of conflict in works such as Remembrance of Civil War (1848–49), which depicts the moment when the Parisian insurgents of 1848 were slaughtered on barracades by the Republican Guard. Meissonier enjoyed great success in his lifetime, and was acclaimed both for his mastery of fine detail and assiduous craftsmanship. The English art critic John Ruskin examined his work at length under a magnifying glass, “marvelling at Meissonier’s manual dexterity and eye for fascinating minutiae”. Meissonier’s work commanded enormous prices and in 1846 he purchased a great mansion in Poissy, sometimes known as the Grande Maison. The Grande Maison included two large studios, the atelier d’hiver, or winter workshop, situated on the top floor of the house, and at ground level, a glass-roofed annexe, the atelier d’été or summer workshop. Meissonier himself said that his house and temperament belonged to another age, and some, like the critic Paul Mantz for example, criticised the artist’s seemingly limited repertoire. Like Alexandre Dumas, he excelled at depicting scenes of chivalry and masculine adventure against a backdrop of pre-Revolutionary and pre-industrial France, specialising in scenes from seventeenth and eighteenth-century life.