The Vernets have been a family of painters during four generations. The great-grandfather of Horace was a well-known artist at Avignon, a hundred and fifty years ago. His son and pupil, Claude Joseph Vernet, was the first marine painter of his time; and occupies, with his works alone, an entire apartment of the French Gallery at the Louvre, besides great numbers of sea-pieces and landscapes belonging to private galleries. He died in 1789, but his son and pupil, Antoine Charles Horace Vernet, who had already during two years sat by his side in the Royal Academy, continued the reputation of the family during the Consulate and Empire. He was particularly distinguished for cavalry-battles, hunting scenes, and other incidents in which the horse figured largely as actor. In some of these pictures the hand of the son already joined itself to that of the father, the figures being from the pencil of Horace; and before the death of the father, which took place in 1836, he had already seen the artistic reputation of the family increased and heightened by the fame of his son. Horace Vernet was born at the Louvre on the 30th June, 1789, the year of the death of his grandfather, who, as painter to the king, had occupied rooms at the Louvre, where his father also resided; so that Horace not only inherited his art from a race of artist-ancestors, but was born amid the _chef d' oeuvres_ of the entire race of painters. Of course, his whole childhood and youth were surrounded with objects of Art; and it was scarcely possible for him not to be impressed in the most lively manner by the unbroken artist-life in which he was necessarily brought up. It would appear that from his childhood he employed himself in daubing on walls, and drawing on scraps of paper all sorts of little soldiers.