Description
Trained as a printmaker and book illustrator, Meissonier specialized in small paintings depicting scenes from French history and literature. This painting on wood panel depicts a man dressed like a character from The Three Musketeers (published in 1844) by Alexandre Dumas père. Such paintings, admired for their technical virtuosity and romantic subjects, were immensely popular. Meissonier also painted contemporary military subjects and themes and became an arch-foe of the Realist painter Gustave Courbet.
Provenance
Ernest Secrétan [1836-1899], Paris, France; (Georges Petit Gallery, Paris, France, March 15, 1908, sold to to F. F. van der Doucht, Brussels, Belgium, according to Knoedler sale book no. 7, p. 270, 15 March 1908).; (E. Le Roy & Co., by 1893, according to exh. cat., Georges Petit, 1893). (by 1893); (Le Roy consigned it to Knoedler & Co., Paris, France, stock no. 8878a.); (Knoedler & Co., New York, NY, March 15, 1899, sold to Samuel L. Bronson) (1897-1899); Samuel L. Bronson [1834-1917] New Haven, CT (1899-1901); (Bought back by Knoedler, 8 May 1901 (stock number 9444) and sold 10 March 1908 to Thomas Henry Burchell) (1901-1908); Thomas Henry Burchell [-1942] New York, NY, sold it back to Knoedler, November 3, 1910 (stock number 12199). (1908-1910); (Knoedler Gallery, New York, NY, April 15, 1911, sold to Frederick Gehring) (1910-1911); Clara Louise Gehring Bickford [1903-1985] Cleveland, OH, by bequest to the Cleveland Museum of Art (1986); The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (1986-)
Accession Number
1986.68
Medium
oil on wood panel
Dimensions
Framed: 50.5 x 40 x 8 cm (19 7/8 x 15 3/4 x 3 1/8 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Bequest of Clara Louise Gehring Bickford
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting Panel Painting French
Background & Context
Background Story
On a Terrace is one of Meissonier's most elegant genre paintings, depicting figures on a terrace in a composition that allows him to combine figure painting, architectural rendering, and landscape in a single small-scale work. The terrace setting — a raised platform overlooking a garden or landscape — was a standard subject in 18th-century painting, but Meissonier treats it with 19th-century precision, rendering every surface, texture, and accessory with the exhaustive detail that his patrons expected and his technique demanded. The 1867 date places this in Meissonier's most successful period, when his prices were the highest of any living painter in France.
Cultural Impact
Meissonier's terrace scenes belong to the tradition of intimate genre painting that had been practiced in France since the 18th century, but his approach is fundamentally different from the Rococo terrace scenes of Watteau or Fragonard. Where they suggested atmosphere through loose brushwork, Meissonier builds atmosphere through accumulated detail — each leaf, each fold of fabric, each shadow rendered individually until the total effect transcends the sum of its parts.
Why It Matters
On a Terrace is Meissonier's genre painting at its most refined: figures, architecture, and landscape combined in a small-scale work of exhaustive detail. The terrace is a stage for the kind of intimate social scene that Meissonier rendered better than any other painter of his generation — and that few painters of any generation could match for sheer technical precision.
