iritual wing sufficient to fit her to be his companion. There
is a minor key of loneliness and heart hunger running through his whole
career. Possibly, in the wisdom of Providence, this was just what he
needed to urge him on to higher and nobler ends. He never knew peace, and
the rest for which he sighed slipped him at the very last. "I'm tired, so
tired," he sighed again and again in those later years, when he had
reached the highest pinnacle.

And still he worked--it was his only rest! Meissonier painted very few
pictures of women, and in some miraculous way skipped that stage in
esthetic evolution wherein most artists affect the nude. In his whole
career he never produced a single "Diana," nor a "Susanna at the Bath."
He had no artistic sympathy with "Leda and the Swan," and once when
Delaroche chided him for painting no pictures of women, he was so
ungallant as to say, "My dear fellow, men are much more beautiful than
women!"

During the last decade of his life Meissonier painted but one portrait of
a woman, and to America belongs the honor. The sitter was Mrs. J. W.
Mackay, of California.

As all the world knows, Mrs. Mackay refused to accept the canvas. She
declared the picture was no likeness, and further, she would not have it
for a gift.

"So you do not care for the picture?" asked the great artist.

"Me? Well, I guess not--not that picture!"

"Very well, Madam. I think--I think I'll keep it for myself. I'll place
it on exhibition!" And the great artist looked out of the window in an
absent-minded way, and hummed a tune.

This put another phase on the matter. Mrs. Mackay winced, and paid the
price, which rumor says was somewhere between ten and twenty-five
thousand dollars. She took the little canvas in her carriage and drove
away with it, and what became of the only portrait of a woman painted by
Meissonier during his later years, nobody knew but Mrs. Mackay, and Mrs.
Mackay never told.

Meissonier once explained to a friend that his offense consisted in
producing a faithful likeness of the customer.

The Mackay incident did not end when the lady paid the coin and accepted
the goods. Meissonier, by the haughtiness of his manner, his artistic
independence, and most of all, by his unpardonable success, had been
sowing dragons' teeth for half a century. And now armed enemies sprang
up, and sided with the woman from California. They made it an
international episode: less excuses have involved nations in