These are two powerful and genuine pictures, two pre-eminent works which will endure. Gros stands far above David and all his rivals in his power of perception. The elder painter is now out of date, while Gros remains ever fresh, because he painted under the impulse given by real events, and not under the ban of empty theories. A realist through and through, he did not shrink from representing the horrible, which antique art preferred to avoid. In an epoch when Rome and Greece were the only sources of inspiration he had the courage to paint a hospital, with its sick, its dying, and its dead. When in the Egypto-Syrian campaign the plague broke out after the storming of Jaffa, Napoleon, accompanied by a few of his officers, undertook, on 7th March 1799, to visit the victims of the pestilence. This act deserved to be celebrated in a commemorative picture. Gros took it in hand, and represented Napoleon, in the character of consoler, amid the agonising torments of the dying; deviating from historical accuracy only so far as to transfer the scene from the wretched wards of the lazaretto to the courtyard of a pillared mosque. In the shadows of the airy halls sick and wounded men twist and writhe, stare before them in despair, rear themselves up half-naked in mortal pain, or turn to gaze upon the Commander-in-Chief, a splendid apparition full of youthful power, who is tranquilly feeling the plague boils of one of their comrades. Here and there Orientals move in picturesque costumes, distributing the food which negro lads are bringing in. And beyond, over the battlements of the Moorish arcades, one sees the town with its fortifications, its flat roofs and slender minarets, over which flutter the victorious banners of the French. On one side lies the distant, glittering blue sea, and over all stretches the clear, glowing southern sky. Like a new gospel, like the first gust of wind preceding the storm of Romanticism, this picture standing in the Louvre, surrounded by its stiff Classical contemporaries, excites a sensation of pleasure. [Illustration: PRUDHON. LES PETITS DÉVIDEURS.]