But as with Prudhon, so with Gros. This man, of exaggerated nervousness, was lacking in that capacity for persistence which belongs to a strong will conscious of its aim; he lacked confidence in himself and in the initiative he had taken. So long as the great figure of Napoleon kept his head above water he was an artist; but when his hero was taken from him he sank. The Empire had made Gros great, its fall killed him. The incubus of David's antique manner began once more to press upon him, and when David after his banishment (in 1816) committed to him the management of his studio in Paris, Gros undertook the office with pious eagerness, on nothing more anxiously intent than as a teacher once more to impose the fetters of the antique upon that Art which he had set free by his own works. "It is not I who am speaking to you," he would say to the pupils, "but David, David, always David." The latter had blamed him for having taken the trouble to paint the battles of the Empire, "worthless occasional pieces," instead of venturing upon those of Alexander the Great, and thus producing genuine "historical works." "Posterity requires of you good pictures out of ancient history. Who, she will cry, was better fitted to paint Themistocles? Quick, my friend! turn to your Plutarch." To depict contemporary life, which lies open before our eyes, was, he held, merely the business of minor artists, unworthy the brush of an "historical painter." And Gros, who reverenced his master, was so weak as to listen to his advice: he believed in him rather than in his own genius, in the strength of others rather than his own. He searched his Plutarch, and painted nothing more without a previous side-glance towards Brussels; introduced allegory into his "Battle of the Pyramids"; composed in homage to David a "Death of Sappho"; and painted the cupola of the Pantheon with stiff frescoes; while between times, when he looked Nature in the face, he was now and then producing veritable masterpieces. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ PRUDHON. MADAME COPIA.]