DELAROCHE AND SCHEFFER
Among the painters who were influenced by Delacroix, and whose name was associated with the Romanticist movement, none rose to greater fame than Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), a pupil of Gros, and the Dutchman Ary Scheffer (1795–1858), who, like Delacroix, studied under Guérin. But neither of these artists managed wholly to shake off the trammels of the academic tradition, and both became popular for the very reasons for which a more critical generation has denied them the right to figure among the world’s great artists: Delaroche for the theatricality of his historical anecdotes, of which The Death of Queen Elizabeth (No. 216) and The Princes in the Tower (No. 217) are typical examples; and Scheffer for the sickly sentimentality displayed in such pictures as St. Augustine and St. Monica (No. 841).
Contemporary with the fighters in the great battle between the Romanticists and the Classicists were a group of able painters who were not connected with either of these main currents of artistic thought, but drew their inspiration from the Dutch genre painters. The Arrival of a Diligence at the Messageries (No. 28), by Louis Leopold Boilly (1761–1845), and The Interior of a Kitchen (No. 261), by Martin Drolling (1752–1817), may be quoted as characteristic instances of these “small masters” without possessing the luminosity of their Dutch exemplars.