The Revolution, so far from freeing art in France, brought about, under David--excellent as he was as a painter of portraits--a reaction to a "barren, wearisome classicism," represented by pictures which are now absolutely without attraction. Instead of studying Nature, the painters studied the statues and the friezes of the ancients. They became antiquaries and geometricians, and left the open air to weary themselves in musty libraries, in the pursuit of archæological accuracy. Formulas and conventions, traditions and self-constituted authority were once more exalted upon pedestals, and the century which opened with the "pipes and timbrels" of Watteau closed with the prosing of the most tedious bores. So successfully did David put back the clock, that it was not until the nineteenth century was nearly thirty years of age that the artists of France, inspired, as we love to think, by our own John Constable, issued from the house of bondage to study Nature in the forest of Fontainebleau. {50} OUR ILLUSTRATIONS _The Kiss_ (_Le Baiser Jeté_).--Although this work has not been reproduced so many times as _La Cruche Cassée_, it yet ranks with that painting as one of the most fascinating of the works of Greuze. A young woman looks from the window of her room. She has received a letter from the hands of her lover, to whom she throws a kiss as he departs. In his treatment of this subject Greuze has shown that it was not a lack of capacity that caused him sometimes to lapse into melodrama. His acute feeling for what is beautiful has been expressed on this canvas with remarkable skill. Writing of the painting in 1765, Diderot called it "a charming picture," and Charles Normand, in giving a description of the work, has written: "The eighteenth century, amorous and unrestrained, has been made to live again in that woman, who, her eyes full of longing, her mouth partly opened, her throat scarcely veiled by a light gauze, throws from her window a kiss to her lover. The seductive shapeliness of her neck, the expression of love, the hand carried tenderly to her lips, the whole effect of her beautiful figure, which palpitates at the sight of her lover, justifies the title of _La {51} Voluptueuse_ which the painter has also given to the picture." A copy of this painting, by C. Turner, was sold in London in 1902 for £136. [Illustration: THE KISS. (Le Baiser Jeté.)]