Without punning, the free air and freedom meant to them the same thing. Landscape furnished them with the means of renewing their acquaintance with Nature. Under a completely Faust-like impulse, they struggled out of the _atelier_, where, “in reek and decay, only the skeletons of brutes and dead men’s bones” surrounded them, “into the far country.” Their appearance about the time of the July Revolution was the Easter-morning walk after brooding in the Gothic studio. The David tradition held painting in thrall. The master’s greatest pupil, Baron Gros, and, with him, the gifted Géricault, sought to overcome the stiff mummifiedness and dryness of forms, the staginess of subject of this art, which found its triumph in the “Rape of the Sabine Women” and the “Coronation at Notre Dame.” But Géricault, misjudged and undervalued, died early a conquered man, and Gros, going astray in uncertain sounding of himself, returned, after his short revolt, to the tin and paste formulary of his first epoch, recognised in alarm its hollowness, and, by voluntary death in the Seine, got rid of the pains of the sceptic who has lost his faith and his ideal. The then young generation, warned and shaken by the tragedy of this seeker who found nothing, broke with the dominant rule, and sat down at the feet of Nature, to learn from her. The country is the great master-workshop. There Nature speaks her most eloquent language of form. There she finds the tones that awaken the loudest echo in the soul of the genuine born painter. The creation of a pictorial artist is, like each of the higher mental activities, very complicated; the most opposed organs of the brain have a variously graded and mixed share in it. The vivid reception and rendition of a phenomenon at rest, of the expressive line of one in motion, is an exercise of the motor centres. In the representation of man, or what pertains to man, which is, directly or indirectly, through the awakening of anthropomorphic ideas, to seize on our minds, trains of thought, reason, and judgment play a part by the side of the emotions growing out of the unconscious. But the real and essential element in painting is neither the motorial production of the drawing, nor the travail of thought in the composition, but is ever the giving of light and colour. Now what counts in landscape is the effect of light and colour. Here the painter stands before the magic changes of lights and the alluring colour-mysteries of Nature, which excite him most keenly; for they stimulate his optical centre, of which the extraordinary development and particular susceptibility of light is the psycho-physical basis and preliminary condition of the primitive, impulsive gift of painting. Ever when men of talent feel the stiffened traditions of the schools to be intolerable, and want to follow their own inward impulse, they flee to the country in order, in its free light, to wash themselves clean from the dust of the schools, and bathe