"Napoleon before the Pyramids," at the moment when he cries, "Soldiers, from the summit of those monuments forty centuries contemplate your actions," constitutes, in 1810, the coping-stone of the cycle. Gros alone at that time understood the epic grandeur of war. He became, also, the portrait painter of the great men from whom its events proceeded. His picture of General Masséna, with its meditative, slily tenacious expression, is the genuine portrait of a warrior; and how well is heroic, simple daring depicted in the likeness of General Lasalle, without the commonplace device of a mantle puffed out by the wind! His portrait of General Fournier Sarlovèse, at Versailles, has a freshness of colouring, the secret of which no one else possessed in those days except the two Englishmen, Lawrence and Raeburn. Gros was far in advance of his age. A painter of movement rather than of psychological analysis, he brought out character by means of general effect, and gave the essentials in a masterly way. His portraits, just as much as his historical pictures, have a stormy exposition. In David all is calculation; in Gros, fire. Almost alone among his contemporaries, he had studied Rubens, and like him gave colour the place due to it. At times there is in his pictures a natural flesh-colour and an animation which make this warm-hearted man, who has not been sufficiently appreciated, a genuine forerunner of the moderns. Surrounded as he was by orthodox Classicists, he cried in a loud voice what Prudhon had already ventured to say more timidly: "Man is not a statue--not made of marble, but of flesh and bone." [Illustration: PRUDHON. CHRIST CRUCIFIED.]