He became famous for his depictions of Napoleon and his military sieges and manoeuvres in paintings acclaimed both for the artist's mastery of fine detail and his assiduous craftsmanship.

The English art critic John Ruskin examined his work at length under a magnifying glass, "marvelling at Meissonier's manual dexterity and eye for fascinating minutiae.

Meissonier himself said that his house and temperament belonged to another age, and some, like the critic Paul Mantz for example, criticised the artist's seemingly limited repertoire.

Following the recommendation of a painter named Potier, himself a second class Prix de Rome, he was admitted to Léon Cogniet's studio.

Working hard for daily bread at illustrations for the publishers Curmer, Hetzel and Dubocherhe, Meissonier also exhibited at the Salon of 1836 with Chess Player and the Errand Boy.

He specialised in scenes from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life, portraying his bonshommes, or goodfellows - playing chess, smoking pipes, reading books, sitting before easels or double basses, or posing in the uniforms of musketeers or halberdiers [-] all executed in microscopic detail.

His triumph was sustained at the Salon of 1857, when he exhibited nine pictures, and drawings; among them the Young Man of the Time of the Regency, The Painter, The Shoeing Smith, The Musician, and A Reading at Diderot's.

[3] When, in the summer of 1859, Emperor Napoleon III, together with Victor Emmanuel II King of Piedmont and Sardinia, tried to oust the Habsburgs from their territories in northern Italy, Meissonier received a government commission to illustrate scenes from the campaign.

[3] In June 1868 Meissonier travelled to Antibes with canvas and easel, together with his wife, son and daughter, and two of his horses, Bachelier and Lady Coningham.

And it is possible that the influence of plein-air landscapists had encouraged Meissonier to abandon for a while his obsession with historical authenticity in favour of something more spontaneous: " of creating eye-catching visual effects by means of a few salient touches of the brush.

If these Antibes landscapes never matched [-] the work of Pissarro, they nonetheless revealed Meissonier as a painter of remarkable versatility whose ambitions were not entirely at odds with those of the École des Batignolles.

Being chosen president of the Great National Exhibition in 1883, he was represented there by such works as The Pioneer, The Army of the Rhine, The Arrival of the Guests, and Saint Mark.

Meissonier was an admirable draughtsman upon wood, his illustrations to Les Conties Rémois (engraved by Lavoignat), to Lamartine's Fall of an Angel to Paul and Virginia, and to The French Painted by Themselves being among the best known.

[8] When the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts was re-vitalized, in 1890, Ernest Meissonier was elected its first chairman, but he died soon; his successor was Puvis de Chavannes.