[37] "Édit de Saint Jean-de-Luz," 1660. [38] Claude, it is true, was still alive in 1667; but after his second installation in Rome (1627), he never saw France again. [39] Vitet: "Eustache Lesueur." [40] It is said that Lebrun one day proclaimed that Audran had "improved his pictures." It is possible he may have said, "that he had not spoilt them." Such an expression in the mouth of such a man is quite modest enough; but it is difficult to imagine Lebrun so far humbling himself in public. [41] We said that Edelinck was born at Antwerp; but as he was very young when he took up his abode in France, and as he never returned to his native country, we may be allowed to include him in the French school with as much right as his countryman, Philippe de Champaigne. [42] Amongst Audran's most distinguished scholars, we need only mention the following names: Gaspard Duchange; Dorigny, summoned to London by Queen Anne; Louis Desplaces; and Nicolas Henri Tardieu, founder of a family of clever engravers, the last of whom died in 1844, worthy of the name he bore. [43] Engraver of the "Assumption" of Philippe de Champaigne. He must not be confused with another Bartholomew Kilian, his ancestor, and the head of a family in which there are no less than twenty engravers. [44] Some of these little unpretentious amateur prints are not without charm; some even show a certain amount of talent in the execution, and the portraits drawn and engraved by Carmontelle, the author of the "Proverbes," deserve, amongst others, to be mentioned on that account. [45] In his landscapes, Woollett makes use of etching, line, and the dry-point, all three. Philippe Le Bas was the first to make use of dry-point to render the misty tones of distances and the clearness of skies. This mode of engraving, improved by Vivarès, was carried to its highest perfection by Woollett. Certain English artists of the same period tried to apply the process of mezzotint to landscape engraving; but the landscapes engraved in this way by Watson and Brookshaw, after the German Kobell, will not bear comparison with Woollett's. [46] In a work dedicated to Pitt, "On the Origin of Trade and its History to the Present Times" (London, 1790), we read that the prints exported from England at that time were, as compared with those imported from France, in the proportion of "five hundred to one by the most exact computation," and that the trade in English engravings, far from being restricted to one or two countries, extended all over Europe. [47] The credit of the invention is really due to Jean Charles François, born at Nancy in 1717. But the application that François made of his discovery was--if we consider the improvements introduced soon afterwards by Demarteau--still so incomplete that it seems only fair to attribute to the latter a principal share in the original success.