_François Gérard_ alone, the "King of Painters and Painter of Kings," survives, at least in his portraits. Like David he is redeemed only by his portrait painting, and his successes in that direction eclipse even Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, the amiable, gifted, and graceful painter of Marie Antoinette's days. At the outbreak of the Revolution she had left France. Everywhere extolled and welcomed with open arms, she painted Mme. de Staël in Switzerland, and at Naples Lady Hamilton, the famous beauty of the time of the Directory. But when, in 1810, she returned to Paris, she had been forgotten. The day on which Marie Antoinette picked up her brush for her, as Charles V had done for Titian, was to remain the happiest in her life. She belonged to the Ancien Régime, and although her death did not take place till 1842, at the age of eighty-seven, her work was already over in 1792. In her old age she busied herself in writing memoirs of the splendour of her youthful days, from the famous mythological dinner in the Rue de Cléry, where her husband appeared in the character of Pindar and recited his translation of Anacreon's odes, to the triumphs which accompanied her journey round Europe. Gérard took the place which she had left vacant at her departure, and filled it well, especially in his youth. When, in the Exhibition of Portrait Painting held at Paris in 1885, there appeared the likeness of Mlle. Brongniart, from the collection of Baron Pichon, painted by Gérard in 1795, at the age of twenty-five, there was general astonishment at the familiar and intimate grasp of character it displayed. The portrait of this young girl standing in her white dress, so tranquil and without pose, has in the firmness of its draughtsmanship the austere charm and dignity of a Bronzino. And later none could give to the aristocracy of Europe a nobler or more natural bearing than did Gérard, who became their tried and trusted depicter: yet in his last days he descended into theatrical exaggeration. Endowed as he was with all the captivating qualities of a cultured man of the world, he had from the beginning avoided as the plague the revolutionary politics in which David was for some time engaged, and when at the instance of the elder master he was appointed a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he alleged illness in order to be absent from its sessions. He was a man of the salons, the born painter of the great world, his house the centre of a distinguished circle of society. Not a celebrity, not an emperor or king, but wished to be painted by Gérard. And just as he had been the chosen portrait painter of the Bonaparte family, so after the Restoration he was still the official favourite of the Court. Josephine took the fashionable painter under her high protection, Napoleon's marshals defiled before him, and the aristocracy which returned with Louis XVIII vied with one another for his favour. [Illustration: FRANÇOIS GÉRARD. _L'Art._]