The mention of JEAN BAPTISTE SIMEON CHARDIN among this brilliant and frivolous galaxy seems almost out of place. "He is not so much an eighteenth-century French artist," Lady Dilke says of him, "as a French artist of pure race and type. Though he treated subjects of the humblest and most unpretentious class, he brought to their rendering not only deep feeling and a penetration which divined the innermost truths of the simplest forms of life, but a perfection of workmanship by which everything he handled was clothed with beauty." That the Wallace Collection includes no work from his hand is perhaps regrettable, but truly Chardin was someone apart from all the magnificence that dazzles us there. His was the treasure of the humble. The effects of the Revolution upon French painting were as surprising as they were great. That the gay and frivolous art of Boucher and Fragonard should have suddenly ceased might have been considered inevitable; but whereas in Holland, when the Spanish yoke had been thrown off, and a Republic proclaimed, a vigorous democratic school arose under Frans Hals; and in England during the Commonwealth the artistic influence which was beginning to be spread by Charles I. and Buckingham utterly ceased; in France an artistic Dictator arose, as we may well call him, in the person of JACQUES LOUIS DAVID, who not only made painting a part of the revolutionary propaganda, but succeeded under the Emperor Napoleon also in maintaining his position as painter to the Government, and thereby imposing on his country a style of art which had a great influence on the whole course of French painting for many years to come. But the most remarkable thing was that it was to the classics that this revolutioniser went for inspiration. The explanation is to be found in the fact that he was bitterly aggrieved by the attitude of the Academy to him as a young man, and in the accident of his famous picture of Brutus synchronising with the events of 1789. He was at once hailed as a deliverer, and made, as it were, painter to the Revolution. [Illustration: PLATE XXXVI.--FRAGONARD L'ETUDE _Louvre, Paris_]