Ingres, a pupil of David, taught his students that draughtsmanship was of more importance than colour. “A thing well drawn,” he said, “is always well enough painted.” Such teaching was bound to provoke dissent, and the germs of the coming revolution were to cross from England. Byron and Scott were the sources of the literary revolution which swept across Europe. British artists showed the way in the fight against tradition and form, which resulted in the School of Barbizon, and its great successor, the School of Impressionism. Excluding the miniaturists, and such foreign masters as Holbein, Vandyck, Kneller, and Lely, English art could hardly boast one hundred consecutive years of history when its landscape artists first exhibited in the Paris Salon. The French School could not forget Italy and its own past. Even to this day the entrance to the École des Beaux-Arts is guarded by two colossal busts of Poujet and Poussin, and the supreme prize in its gift is the Prix de Rome. But English art has never been trammelled excessively by its own past, simply because it did not possess one, and, with insular pride, refused to accept that of the Continent. [Illustration: _Photo by W. A. Mansell & Co._ PETWORTH PARK · J. M. W. TURNER ] [Illustration: _Photo by W. A. Mansell & Co._ THE CORN FIELD · J. CONSTABLE ] Hogarth is a case in point. His education was slight and desultory; he did not indulge in the Grand Tour; he professed a truly British scorn for foreigners, uttering “blasphemous expressions against the divinity even of Raphael, Correggio, and Michelangelo.” He took his subjects from the life which daily surged under his windows in Leicester Square, and when he attempted a classical composition he utterly failed, and was promptly told so by his numerous enemies. His canvases form historical records of the men and women of the early Georgian era, in much the same manner as Edouard Manet represents the “noceurs” and “cocottes” who wrecked the Second Empire and reappeared during the first decade of the Third Republic.