And now the great deluge breaks in, and, like a sea-god David emerges over the raging waves. It is really with him that the century begins, for what preceded him was the art of the _ancien régime_ and of the Trianon. He had at the Exhibition a “Distribution of the Colours,” an “Ugolino,” some portraits; all of the most genuine David in choice of subject as well as treatment. Everywhere the capricious “seeing yellow” which seems to have been a peculiarity of his eye; everywhere the grandly imposing, professorial infallibility of drawing which knows no first trying, no anxious searching, no hot struggle with the never quite attainable Nature. David compels with an imperious Medusa-glance the ever-stirring, the ever-flowing, so that it becomes fixed, and he can shackle the now immovable vision in brazen outlines. So his human beings appear statues, or mimes, which maintain a pose, and his most blameless anatomies acquire a tendency towards the artificial. David’s mood is always uniformly high-pitched. Good-humoured people, who would like to see the majestic man in shirt sleeves for once, lurk in vain for him to unbutton himself. He never forsakes the decoration and costume of high tragedy. At first he sought the drama in ancient history or world-famed poetry. Afterwards, he found it in his immediate surroundings. Fate vouchsafed him the favour of living in a time, the pathos of which was mightier than that of Athens, Sparta, or Rome. He satisfied his deepest longings when, in the “Sabine Women,” he preached to the murderous factions among his people reconciliation and brotherly love, and, in “The Distribution of the Colours” and the “Coronation,” he made Napoleon the equal of the heroes of mythology. He is, therefore, always genuine, even when he may seem to the superficial gaze theatrical. It is the difference between a tone naturally sustained during moments of life at high pressure, and declamation learnt from a teacher of rhetoric. His pupils, imitators, and rivals have, on the contrary, not succeeded in avoiding declamation. Gérard, Gros, Riesener, and Drolling were, consciously or unconsciously, the greatest flatterers that ever painted portraits. Because David represented Napoleon in the character of an Alexander of Macedon, or an ancient god of war, the others, the smaller painters, in their portraits gave to even the ordinary men of the period the deportment of Olympian gods. Only Gérard’s “Letitia,” who, too, bore apotheosis most easily, is a good modest human being. All the other women are Juno or Pallas Athene; all the men Mars or Achilles. The contrast between the commonplace physiognomies and the magnificence of their appearance is now and then so violent that one is led to surmise that the painter wanted to make fun of his models. “Charles X. in his Coronation Robes,” by Ingres, seems, for example, virtually a parody of David’s “Coronation of Napoleon.”