Meissonier, Manet, Toulmouche, Leroux

The Revolution of 1848 led to the reign of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as president and then emperor of France (Napoleon III), his rule ending with the loss of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Melville spent an illuminating week in Paris in December 1849, but he did not visit France on the way back to England from Italy in April 1857, passing instead through Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Both his book collection and his print collection do show that he followed developments in French art after moving from Pittsfield to New York City in 1863. We have already seen his prints after Watteau and Boucher that were published in Paris as the revival of their reputations sparked by the Goncourts in the 1860s spread through journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and L’Art. He also collected books about contemporary French painters to the end of his life. After acquiring a book on Meissonier published in 1882, he acquired two books on painters of the Barbizon school published in 1890: one on Corot, Daubigny, and Dupré, the other on Millet, Rosseau, and Diaz (Sealts nos. 360-62). Beginning in 1889 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Melville could see the original painting of one contemporary French work in his print collection: Manet’s Boy with a Sword.

Ernest Meissonier was so famous during Melville’s lifetime that Melville’s copy of John Mollet’s 1882 book about his life and art introduces him simply as M. Meissonier, with no first name. He dominated the art of the Paris Salon for two decades during which many of Edouard Manet’s most innovative works were being rejected for exhibition there. The prints Melville acquired are from relatively early in the careers of each artist, before powerful artistic and political developments would place them on opposite sides of the Parisian artistic divide. By the time of Melville’s death in 1891, paintings by both Meissonier and Manet had become highly desired in New York—as were those of Auguste Toulmouche and Hector Leroux.