The most talented of these new artists, Boucher-Desnoyers, when working at his "Belle Jardinière," after Raphael, or his "Vierge aux Rochers," after Leonardo, probably thought much less of contemporary work than of the French engravers of the seventeenth century; while on their part Bervic and Tardieu, who had long before given proof of their power, faithfully maintained the great traditions: the one in an austerity of execution and a firmness of touch hereditary in his family, the other in his scientific ease of handling. These three were of the race of the older masters, and their work, unjustly forgotten some years later during the rage for the English manner, deserves a better fate than to be confounded with the cold and formal prints published in the France of the First Empire. The engravings after David, by popularising his work, obtained some success in their day, but have failed to secure a lasting reputation. The fault, however, is not altogether with the engravers: in spite of the apparent conscientiousness of the painter, his real indecision of method must count for something in the mediocre achievements of his interpreters. Free to impose his own system on all other artists, David might have enforced his artistic authority on his contemporaries; and even if it were beyond his power to restore the French school of engraving, he might at least have regenerated its principles, and, combining separate efforts under the synthesis of his own personal conception, have breathed into it a fresh spirit of unity. This he never attempted; and it is even hard to guess at what he expected from his engravers. It might be supposed that his own fondness for precision of form would have led him to require from them insistence as to the drawing, and not much attention to colour and effect; yet most of the prints after his pictures--amongst others those by Morel and Massard--are heavy in tone and feeble in drawing. There is in them no trace either of the precise manner of David, or of the large method of the old school; it is therefore not in these commonplace works, and still less in the barren engravings composing the great "Commission d'Égypte," that we must look for signs of such talent as then existed in France. [Illustration: FIG. 94.--ALEXANDER TARDIEU. The Earl of Arundel. After Van Dyck.]