Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier

In the second half of the 19th century the most expensive living painter in France was a man who worked very small and very precisely, Ernest Meissonier. His speciality was cabinet-sized scenes of soldiers, cavaliers, and card players, every button and boot buckle exact, that collectors fought over at record prices.

His great theme became Napoleon. In the painting called 1814 he showed the Emperor riding at the head of a beaten army through the winter mud of the failing French campaign, the whole tragedy compressed into a picture you could hold in two hands. To get the horses right he studied their motion obsessively, even building a little railway track to watch a trotting horse from alongside.

He was showered with honours and ran the official art world. Within a generation of his death the Impressionists he had outsold and outranked eclipsed him almost entirely, and his jewel-like battle pieces went quiet in the museums.