The record of modern French illustration goes back to the day when political caricature and the Napoleonic legend divided between them the triumphs of early lithography. The illustrators of France at that period were also her greatest artists. Of the historical and romantic school were D. Raffet, Nicholas J. Charlet, Géricault, Delacroix, J. B. Isabey and Achille Devéria, many of whose works appeared in _L'Artiste_, a paper founded in 1831 as the official organ of the romanticists; while the realists were led in the direction of caricature by two artists of such enormous force as Gavarni and Honoré Daumier, whose works, appearing in _La Lithographie Mensuelle_, _Le Charivari_ and _La Caricature_, ran the gauntlet of political interference and suppression during a troubled period of French politics--which was the very cause of their prosperity. Behind these men lay the influence of the great Spanish realist Goya. Following upon the harsh satire and venomous realism of this famous school of pictorial invective, the influence of the Barbizon school came as a milder force; but the power of its artists did not show in the direction of original lithography, and far more value attaches to the few woodcuts of J. F. Millet's studies of peasant life. In these we see clearly the tendency of French illustrative art to keep as far as possible the authentic and sketch-like touch of the artist; and it was no doubt from this tendency that so many of the great French illustrators retained lithography rather than commit themselves to the middleman engraver. Nevertheless, from about the year 1830 many French artists produced illustrations which were interpreted upon the wood for the most part by English engravers. Cunier's editions of _Paul et Virginie_ and _La Chaumière Indienne_, illustrated by Huet, Jacque, Isabey, Johannot and Meissonier, were followed by Meissonier's more famous illustrations to _Contes rémois_. After Meissonier came J. B. E. Detaille and Alphonse M. de Neuville and, with a voluminous style of his own, L. A. G. Doré. By the majority of these artists the drawing for the engraver seems to have been done with the pen; and the tendency to penmanship was still more accentuated when from Spain came the influence of M. J. Fortuny's brilliant technique; while after him, again, came Daniel Vierge, to make, as it were, the point of the pen still more pointed. During the middle period of the 19th century the best French illustration was serious in character; but among the later men, when we have recognized the grave beauty of Grasset's _Les Quatre Fils d'Aymon_ (in spite of his vicious treatment of the page by flooding washes of colour through the type itself), and the delicate grace of Boutet de Monvel's _Jeanne d'Arc_, also in colours, it is to the illustrators of the comic papers that we have to go for the most typical and most audacious specimens of French art.