During the seventeenth century France had not an art of her own. The native painters derived their pictures from Roman or Grecian traditions. They shut their eyes upon the beauties of Nature, painted tedious repetitions of other people's notions, and could not so much as paint their own King, Louis XIV., except as Cyrus or as Alexander! This period of dulness, pomposity, and general boredom was succeeded by one of light and gaiety, when the joy and the colour of life received recognition. To this consummation the supreme genius of Watteau contributed some of the most exquisite and poetical pictures of all time, and delivered France "from the oppressive yoke of the Italian tradition." Watteau had many imitators, and his style dominated art for many years, but eventually freedom degenerated into license, and even into sheer obscenity. Count Henry Costa, visiting Paris during this period, wrote in a letter to his parents in Savoy: "Greuze, I think, is not partial to Boucher; and rightly loathes the filthiness in fashion now, which desecrates art and ruins morality." Boucher he described as {46} "an old worldling, more dissipated and done up than you can imagine." It is in the writings of Diderot that one can see, as well as in any other place, an indication that towards the end of the eighteenth century influential people in France were growing more and more studious and serious. The ideas of Rousseau were taking possession of the minds of other people. The nation must study Nature, and discover her laws. Prejudices, authority, tradition, must all be examined in the light of this new idea. Vice must be subdued, artificiality, insincerity, luxury, false refinements, must be swept away, and the people must return to a life of greater simplicity. Man, by nature moral, had been corrupted by civilization, and it was therefore the least civilized who were the least corrupt. Ideas like these, set forth with the power and the burning zeal of Rousseau, and with the deftness of Diderot, had prepared the minds of the Parisians to receive the _genre_ pictures of Greuze, for to some extent he is an advocate of these ideas in his pictures, seeing that virtues are attributed in a generous measure to the poor and downtrodden of the people. It is thus that, breaking away from the style of the painters who did little more than pander to the French Court, the pictures of Greuze mark with perfect clearness the beginning of a new tendency which was making itself felt in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adding to the great store of _fêtes {47} galantes_, and the triumphs of love of the time, Greuze looked for his subjects upon the quays, and boulevards, and market-places, and in the cottages of humble people.