This is actually the first part of a much longer book (via Archive.org) containing Lazarille de Tormes illustrated by Meissonier, which is then followed the much larger Gil Blas de Santillane with hundreds of illustrations by Jean Gigoux and others. Stay tuned for those illustrations to be posted in two parts shortly.

A catalogue of Meissonier’s works can be found here, in Octave Gréard’s Meissonier, His Life and Works (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1897).

Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815 — 1891) became an artist in defiance of the wishes of his father, a dye manufacturer who wanted his sons to follow him into that business. From a young age he liked to draw, though he was otherwise an undistinguished student. The early death of his mother affected Meissonier throughout his life; she had learned of her son’s inclination towards drawing and encouragd him to pursue the trade before her passing.

Meissonier first came into the public eye when the publisher Henri Leon Curmer commissioned him to co-illustrate an edition of Bernardin de Sainte-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie in 1838 with Tony Johannot. Of this performance, Gréard writes:

In the Paul et Virginie, Meissonier was only a collaborator with Tony Johannot, though a collaborator, be it said, of marked superiority. Johannot, as he himself admitted, was worn out, dosgusted. His compositions lack variety; their elegance is trivial, their grace insipid; landscape and figures melt into each other in a sort of languid sweetness; … The forty-seven vignettes furnished by Meissonier are distinguished by the precision and sobriety of their design.”

Even more impressive was the follow-up, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s La Chaumière indienne, which Meissonier was the main illustrator on and which gave “some little share of fame” to the artist. Gréard writes:

The luxuriance of fancy here displayed seemed marvellous. From every line, almost from every word of the text sprang a profusion of ornamental letters, scenes, views, images of every sort, fecund and vivid as tropical nature herself.

The ten vignettes of Lazarille de Tormes belong to the mid-1840s, a time when “Scarcely any illustrated book was published by Curmer, Hetzel, Delloye, Dubochet, or Pagnerre throughout these years, in which his collaboration was not invited.” Greard says only that “His Lazarillo is an admirable conception … He has been accused by critics of denationalizing our eyes by borrowing the costumes of a bygone age, and it has almost seemed at last that he would have found difficulty in depicting the men of his own times in the realism of ordinary dress.”

Ornaments and Initials

Vignettes by Meissonier