Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier Oil on canvas (1815-1891) Gentlemen playing Billiards

Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier Oil on canvas (1815-1891) Gentlemen playing Billiards
Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier 62x52 cm Oil on canvas (1815-1891) Gentlemen playing Billiards Provenance: Private Collection. Includes certificate of authenticity. Biography: (Lyon, 1815-Paris, 1891). French painter, illustrator-engraver and sculptor. He studied with Jules Potier and Léon Cogniet and created a personal style with his illustrations. His first works, which anticipate the style that would make him famous, are characterized by being almost miniature compositions that bring together inanimate objects represented with great thoroughness and detail. His sources of inspiration must be sought in the Dutch and Flemish masters of the 17th century, such as Gabriël Metsu and Gérard ter Borch, in French painters and engravers such as Chardin, Greuze and Gravelot, as well as in the designs of the romantic theater of the time. He debuted as a painter at the Salon of 1834 with the work Flemish Citizens, and from then on he specialized in small-format genre scenes, set in the 17th century, defined by the exquisiteness and accuracy in the treatment of costumes and accessories. Although he also made some portraits and paintings with contemporary military themes, he preferred to recreate events from the immediate past, such as the series on the military career of Napoleon Bonaparte. To help him in his work he made wax sculptures of characters and horses that he used as models to compose his history paintings. Starting in the 1840s, his works were increasingly valued among the new bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, bringing him countless successes. He was a member and president of the Academy of Fine Arts; president of the jury of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889 and received the grand cross of the Legion of Honor. However, he also had many detractors among writers such as Baudelaire or Balzac and young artists such as Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec, who saw his work as a paradigm of the bad taste of wealthy elites. These attacks hardened when Meissonier did not allow Courbet to participate in the Salon of 1872, due to his militancy in the Commune the previous year in which he was director of Fine Arts. He progressively withdrew from the Paris Salons, until in 1890 he organized, together with the painter Puvis de Chavannes, a secession from the official Salon, known as the "Independents."