Baschet.
BOILLY.THE MARIONETTES.

In its striving after movement and colour, Romanticism put forward the picturesque and passionate Middle Ages in opposition to the stiff and frigid neo-Greek or neo-Roman ideal; but it joined with Classicism in despising the life of the present. Even the political excitement at the close of the Restoration and the Revolution of July had but little influence on the leading spirits of the time. Accustomed to look for the elements of pictorial invention in religious myths, in the fictions of poets, or in the events of older history, they paid no attention to the mighty social drama enacted so near to them. The fiery spirit of Delacroix certainly led him to paint his picture of the barricades, but he drew his inspiration from a poet, from an ode of Auguste Barbier, and he gave the whole an air of romance and allegory by introducing the figure of Liberty. He lived in a world of glowing passions, amid which all the struggles of his age seemed to have for him only a petty material interest. For that reason he has neither directly nor indirectly drawn on what he saw around him. He painted the soul, but not the life of his epoch. He was attracted by Teutonic poets and by the Middle Ages. He set art free from Greek subject-matter and Italian form, to borrow his ideas from Englishmen and Germans and his colour from the Flemish school. He is inscrutably silent about French society in the nineteenth century.

Queen Charlotte.George III.
GILLRAY.AFFABILITY.
“Well, Friend, where a’ you going, hay?—what’s your name, hay?—whered’ye live, hay?—hay?”

And this alienation from the living world is even more noticeable in Ingres. His “Mass of Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel” is the only one of his many works which deals with a subject of contemporary life, and it was blamed by the critics because it deviated so far from the great style. As an historical painter, and when better employed as a painter of portraits, Ingres has crystallised all the life and marrow of the past in his icy works, and he appears in the midst of the century like a marvellous and sterile sphinx. Nothing can be learnt from him concerning the needs and passions and interests of living men. His own century might writhe and suffer and struggle and bring forth new thoughts, but he knew nothing about them, or if he did he never allowed it to be seen.

CRUICKSHANK.MONSTROSITIES OF 1822.

Delaroche approached somewhat nearer to the present, for he advanced from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century; and the historical picture, invented by him, virtually dominated French art under Napoleon III, in union with the dying Classicism. Even then there was no painter who yet ventured to portray the manners and types of his age with the fresh insight and merciless observation of Balzac. All those scenes from the life of great cities, their fashion and their misery, which then began to form the substance of drama and romance, had as yet no counterpart in painting.

ROWLANDSON.HARMONY.