Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, A Man in Black smoking a Pipe

A young man in eighteenth-century costume leans back in his chair, pipe in hand. One leg is placed forwards to display a shapely calf, the other is hooked behind a chair leg. His face is slender and ascetic, his expression dreamy. Perhaps he is a poet, relaxing at an inn between sonnets, but he is well if casually dressed, his hair curls trimly and his baggy white shirt gleams – not quite the stereotypical Romantic poet, perhaps. There is a note of tension in the hand on the table. He presses it down hard on to the knuckles, in a way rather at odds with the rest of his pose.

On the table beside him is a half-empty glass and a pewter jug of ale that glints in the dim light. Directly above him are two unframed popular prints. One appears to depict a couple in seventeenth-century dress, the other perhaps a garden – but they are sketchily painted in a technique quite different from the rest of the picture, and difficult to make out. Even so, their presence suggests that the apparently humble inn is perhaps a little more elegant than those in similar images, where the walls are usually unadorned.

This is one of many genre scenes painted by Meissonier. He admired the seventeenth-century Dutch artists, like Frans van Mieris the Elder, known as fijnschilders (‘fine painters’). They also produced small scale genre paintings using brushstrokes so fine and meticulous they are virtually invisible. A Woman in a Red Jacket feeding a Parrot by van Mieris is also in the National Gallery’s collection.

Like his contemporary, the French author Alexandre Dumas, Meissonier depicted scenes of medieval chivalry but also featured soldiers in the Napoleonic armies, always with a sympathetic eye and a comic, if sentimental, style of storytelling. He also documented military manoeuvres and produced pictures portraying scenes from the life of Napoleon.

The great English art critic John Ruskin examined Meissonier’s work under a magnifying glass and commented on his manual skill and eye for fascinating detail. Others criticised him for his ‘limited repertoire’ but even so, he was enormously successful in his lifetime. He owned a huge mansion in Poissy with two studios, one on the top floor to be used in the winter and the other a conservatory at ground level for the summer. Perhaps that’s why Salvador Dali, the twentieth-century Surrealist painter, is on record as saying he considered Meissonier to be the greatest of all nineteenth-century artists.