The background, too, that colonnade "leading nowhither," is characteristic of the change in the manner of regarding things. The older schools of painting had, in the case of portraits, managed the treatment of the background in two different ways. The old Dutch and Germans--Jan van Eyck and Holbein--aimed at showing a man, not only portrayed with the subtlest fidelity to truth, but also in the surroundings in which he was usually or by preference to be found. The Italians renounced all representation of such scenes, and gave only a quiet, neutral tone to the background. Gorgeous decorative scenery was introduced by the court painter Van Dyck, and since the second half of the seventeenth century had continually risen in popular favour. Mignard, Lebrun, and Rigaud had brought into fashion, for portraits of princely personages, that stately pillared architecture, with broad velvet curtains swelling and descending in ample folds, which at that time was so remarkably in keeping with the whole cut of the costumes, with the enormous full-bodied wigs and the theatrical attitudinising of that epoch. For the likenesses of generals and warlike princes the favourite background was one which represented, by means of a number of small figures, entire battles, marches, sieges, and so forth. Both these methods, and, together with them, that of an ideal, lightly indicated park landscape, were put an end to by the Revolution, under the influence of which all extravagant pomp, not only in life, but even in portrait painting, was replaced by an ascetic sobriety. Gérard, the Court painter of the Bourbons, who on their return had "learnt nothing and forgotten nothing," reintroduced the gorgeous pillar decoration, which still remained the authoritative style under Stieler and Winterhalter, and has only in the _bourgeois_ era of to-day given way to the simple, neutral-toned background of the Italians. David, by the way, never forgave Mme. Récamier for having preferred his pupil to himself. When, in 1805, after the completion of Gérard's likeness of her, she approached David on the subject of finishing his, he answered drily: "Madame, artists have their caprices as well as women; now it is _I_ who will not." As an historical painter Gérard was an imitator of the mannerist Girodet. Paintings such as "Daphnis and Chloe," or the famous "Psyche" receiving Cupid's first kiss (1798), made indeed a great sensation among the ladies, who for some time afterwards painted their faces white, to resemble the gentle Psyche; but from the artistic point of view they do not rise above the ordinary level of the Classical school. As an historical painter he took much the same course as David; he began as a Revolutionist in 1795 with the usual "Belisarius," and ended as a Royalist with a "Coronation of Charles X." [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ GÉRARD. MADAME VISCONTI.]