Meissonier by Henri Barbusse — Read

And then, in the words of one of his contemporaries: "The first rays of fame that caressed him streamed from those admirable and diminutive drawings for "The Indian Cabin". He had done much sketching in the Jardin des Plantes, in the conservatories, where the flora of the tropics expanded opulently; also, before the windows of those shops of bric-a-brac, abounding in exotic objects, which in those bygone days stretched in a row facing the entrance to the Louvre, on the Place du Carrousel. All that he had to do was to rummage among those sketches in order to give his composition an inimitable stamp of truth, such as was seldom attempted by illustrators of his nation. It was a simple thing to convert into an ornamental letter a storm-broken lily, a group of Indian weapons, some Javanese musical instruments. If the text called for the 'emblems of mental toil,' the young artist heaped his table with volumes bound in parchment or full calf, acquired for a few sous from the stands along the quays, and he had only to copy, with all the naivete of the Primitives, the gleam of the edges, the bands on the backs, the slips of paper alternating with the silken bookmarks."

And the critic proceeds to cite an example of that "prodigious finish" which Theophile Gautier subsequently recognized as the most "popular" characteristic, so to speak, of his noble talent: "In two of these miniature vignettes, measuring less than four centimetres, two engravings can be made out, hanging upon a library wall; one of them interprets quite scrupulously "The Pariah thinking of the English Doctor", and the other "The English Doctor thinking of the Pariah". Between these engravings can be made out, hanging on a nail, and possessing all the characteristics described in the text, "the pipe of English leather, the mouthpiece of which was of yellow amber, and that of the Pariah, the stem of which was of bamboo and the bowl of terra-cotta"."