Presently, however, Moreau was to be led away from the very sentiment of the scenes he had understood the best. His individuality was lessened, his flexibility arrested by the journey to Italy, undertaken with Dumont, the architect, in 1786. And his association with David--‘le peintre de Marat assassiné et le membre de la Convention’--operated to make more certain his style’s divorce from all the natural grace and flowing sentiment and homely unheroic dignity with which it had lived so fruitfully for more than twenty years. The illustrator of Rousseau was already less happy as the illustrator of Voltaire; and in 1791 Moreau was received into the Academy; the drawing which procured him the distinction being that of ‘Tullie faisant passer son char sur le corps de son père.’ Wille, the engraver, writes, in his published journal, how he went to the Academical Assembly when Moreau was received. ‘There was an Academician to receive: it was Monsieur Moreau, draughtsman and engraver. He had begged me to be his sponsor, and I presented him to the Assembly with a great deal of pleasure.’ But Moreau’s entrance into the Academy was the signal for his exit from the regions of his native art. The bibliophile may seek with avidity for the editions of Renouard, which years afterwards Moreau illustrated. But his verve had deserted him; his talent was gone; his originality had yielded up the ghost. And somehow, too, in his last years, and in his old age, poverty overtook him. In February 1814, he wrote to M. Renouard that he was penniless--‘Je n’ai pas le sou.’ Friends he had, though; and one of the first acts of Louis XVIII. was to reappoint him to the old office--‘draughtsman to the King.’ He held the place for but a short time; for on the 30th November, in the same year, Moreau died. With his later style both he and his daughter, and the group, too, by whom they were surrounded, were content--no one assailed it then or looked back regretfully to the earlier--but it is by the work of the first half of his career as an artist that Moreau finally takes rank as one of the most precise and flexible of draughtsmen, and as the closest possible observer of the gay, great world that he portrayed. (_The Art Journal_, 1885.) GAINSBOROUGH AT THE GROSVENOR GALLERY