Two Soldiers

This panel is about 18 centimetres tall, smaller than a sheet of writing paper, and Meissonier signed it with his monogram and the date 1849 at lower left. Two men in old-fashioned armour wait against a bare wall. The older one, grey-bearded, sits in a steel helmet with a red cloak thrown across his knees. The younger stands by a yellow banner in a breastplate and red sleeves, one hand on his hip, the other spread flat against the plaster. Nothing happens. Meissonier kept his own collection of period costume and arms and dressed his models in it, so that every strap and buckle could be painted from the real thing. Then he worked the surface so smoothly that, as the museum points out, no brushstroke shows even at this tiny size. Photography was ten years old in 1849, and his admirers liked to say his pictures were the next best thing to photographs of the time before photography. The panel was sold from a Dutch collection at the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris in 1875, and it came to the museum in 1929 from the estate of the Boston banker Henry P. Kidder.