_Le Petit Pont_ is the first of his mature works, and marks an astonishing advance upon the exercises in copying other etchers which, with the exception of a few important portraits, are all that had preceded it. “Unimportant,” his own portrait, seated before an easel, could never have been, at least as a document, though it may have been immature, but we cannot judge of its quality, for Meryon destroyed it and preserved no proofs, and we only know of its existence from his own statement recorded by Burty. The only proof of his portrait of Eugène Bléry was destroyed by Bléry’s wife because she did not like it. Thus the only portrait of his quite early time which is actually extant is that of Edmond de Courtives, and of this only one impression, formerly in the Macgeorge collection, can actually be traced. It is a little medallion containing the head, reduced from an etching which according to Meryon’s own account was originally a half length, in which a violin and some chemical apparatus were introduced beside the sitter. It was an original etching, based on a drawing from life by Meryon himself.
All the other portraits are of much later date, one belonging to the year 1856, the rest to 1861 or 1862 (plate 47). None of them are original etchings; they are founded on drawings by others, old prints or photographs, in one case on a medallion by David d’Angers; they are quite insignificant and we shall have no need to mention them again. The other etchings of 1849-50 would have no interest for us if anyone else but Meryon had etched them. It is only the four oblong subjects of Paris and its vicinity after Zeeman that count for something more, because they show very plainly on what Meryon formed his taste, and anticipate, in the proportions and _ordonnance_ of the plate and in the treatment of river boats and of the little figures on the banks of the Seine that we see in _Le Pavillon de Mademoiselle_ and in _La Rivière de Seine et l’angle du Mail_, habits that we shall soon come to regard, when we consider the original etchings of Paris, as specially characteristic of Meryon himself.
But when we come to _Le Petit Pont_ (plate 7), etched in the same year as these copies after Zeeman, and exhibited in the Salon of 1850, we are aware of quite a different vision, a different order of intellect, as well as greater perfection of technical skill. It is becoming difficult for us after the lapse of seventy years, in which so many other etchers have been working on Meryon’s lines, to realise how new, how epoch-making in the strict sense of the word, was such an etching as _Le Petit Pont_ in 1850. There had been fine engravers and etchers of architecture before Meryon; there had been Hollar, there had been Canale, Piranesi and Rossini. But they in their different degrees were facile and fluent, rhetorical, diffuse, commercial, in comparison with the severe, tense, concentrated style of Meryon. In his “Eaux-Fortes sur Paris,” which extend in date from 1850 to 1854, he achieved a body of work which led the way in what is called the modern revival of etching and in its own special style has never been surpassed, though other etchers have triumphed in other styles of etching which were entirely outside Meryon’s limited compass. Not only was he in advance of all the other notable etchers of his generation, but he had finished this series of masterpieces before the others had begun to produce anything of importance. Millet began to etch in 1855; Whistler’s Paris set dates from 1858; Haden, though he had etched in the forties, did little that really counts till about 1858. Jacque and Daubigny were working before Meryon, but they are hardly in the same class. It was consonant with Meryon’s brooding, introspective temperament that he took the work of etching very seriously. He acquired a profound knowledge of the technique of the art and applied it, in the case of all his important etchings, with conscientious thoroughness. Disdaining anything like a sketchy treatment of his subject, he built up the whole design laboriously, painfully, with tireless perseverance, after making the most conscientious studies of detail. He was, in fact, by habit and temperament more an engraver than an etcher, though he used the etching process instead of attacking the copper with a burin.