Greuze lives on the fame bestowed on him by the grateful Diderot. He was enthusiastic for Diderot’s tearful _bourgeois_ tragedy, and Diderot repaid him with enthusiasm for his painting; but we have no longer any grounds, I suppose, for regarding him with Diderot’s eyes. When he paints his eternal model of the “Broken Pitcher” in the Louvre, and of his sundry counterparts of it in the Century Exhibition, he is pitilessly pretty. When he sets great dramatic scenes in the Diderot style on the stage—the “Village Betrothal,” the “Father’s Curse,” etc.—he is depressingly melodramatic. His young maiden is marvellously pretty and tame, and will always delight childlike spectators with the charm of her blooming girlhood. He suffered himself to be infected in Italy by Guido Reni’s sweetness, and only transplanted his soft beauties, rolling their eyes, from paradise to the middle-class earth. He is simply the Bouguereau of his age. That name comprises all that can be said of him in praise or blame. Greuze is Bouguereau’s superior in so far as he paints more vigorously, and forms his pretty _ingénues_ of real flesh—not, like Bouguereau, of alabaster and sugar-candy. Beside the softness of Greuze, Madame Vigée-Lebrun seems a man and a fighter. In a century of gallantry she alone was not gallant. She painted women’s likenesses, and did not pay court to her models; but she elevated them, and gave them meaning. Where the male painters of the period saw only beauty-patches, she suspected she saw a soul. If we look at these women with curiously poised heads, gazing boldly out of their frames, they say proudly and calmly: “I am no trying-on hand; I am no creature of luxury; I am no flesh for lust; I am a personage.” At a distance of a hundred years Vigée-Lebrun is a forerunner of the now innumerable American painters of emancipated womanhood. This brave woman, who was beautiful, and did not overprize, nay, hardly prized her beauty, was an asserter of women’s rights long before the word or the thing was invented. Prudhon was represented by a “Zephyr,” which has the same peculiarities as his “Crucifixion” and “Crime and Punishment” in the Louvre. He models a human body so that one must take one’s hat off to it. He has the infallible feeling of the great Spaniards for the value of light and shade; but what will always stand in the way of his being loved and not merely respected is his hatred of colour. He confines himself to a strict black and white style, which banishes all gladness and discourages the most willing admiration.