The more stiff and sober the antique style of David became, the sooner a counter-current was likely to arise, and the change of taste showed itself first in the circumstance that, from 1810 on, a master came more and more to the front who, already old, had hitherto lived in obscurity, almost despised by his contemporaries. This was the amiable, sympathetic, charming, sweet, and great _Prudhon_, the lineal descendant of Correggio, a solitary painter, the gracefulness of whose art was at first unappreciated, but who, as the orthodox academicians began to be more and more tedious, exercised a correspondingly greater influence over the younger generation. He is the one refreshing oasis in the desert wilderness of the Classical school. What a difference between him and David! When the elegant grace of Watteau fled from the French school, and the new Spartans dreamed of founding a Greek art, David was the hero of this buskined theatrical school of painting. He painted "The Horatii" and "Brutus," and thought to bring ancient Rome back to life by copying the shapes of old Roman chairs and old Roman swords. That was the antique style of his first period. Later, having made the discovery that, compared with the Greeks, the Romans were semi-barbarians, he abandoned the Roman style, and thought to make a great stride forwards by copying Greek statues and carefully transferring them to his pictures. This "pure Grecian character" is represented in his "Rape of the Sabines." Later again, he turned to the more ancient Greeks, and the result was the most academic of his pictures, his "Leonidas." A mixture of dryness and declamatory pathos; diligence without imagination; able draughtsmanship and an absolute incapacity of drawing anything whatever without a model; careful arrangement without the slightest trace of that gift of the inner vision whereby the whole is brought complete and finished before the eye,--these exhaust the list of David's qualities. By means of casting and copying he thought to come near to that art of the antique whose soul he dreamed of embracing, when he held but its skeleton in his hands. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ GÉRARD. CUPID AND PSYCHE.]