Deep red--that was the colour of the Romantic school; the flourishing of trumpets and the blare of brass its note. Flashes of passion and ferocity, rivers of sulphur, showers of fire, glowing deserts, decaying corpses in horrible phosphorescence, seas at night-time in which ships are sinking, landscapes over which roaring War shakes his brand, and where maddened nations fall furiously upon one another--such are the subjects, resonant with shout of battle and song of victory, which held sway over French Romanticism. At the very time when at Düsseldorf the young artists of Germany were painting with the milk of pious feeling their lachrymose, susceptible, sentimental pictures, utterly tame and respectable; when the Nazarene school were holding their post-mortem on the livid corpse of old Italian art, and seeking to galvanise it, and with it the Christian piety of the Middle Ages, into life again; at that very time there arose in France a young generation boiling over with fervour, who had for their rallying cry Nature and Truth, but demanded at the same time, and before all else, contrast, pictorial antithesis, and passion at once lofty and of tiger-like ferocity. In those very years, when in Germany, the cartoon style of Carstens having died away, progress was limited to a timid and unsuccessful pursuit of that revelry of colour which marked the Quattrocentisti, the French took at once, as with the seven-leagued boots of the fairy-tale, the great stride onward towards the Flemings. Through Napoleon, France had grown richer, not only in glory, but in art treasures, gathered together from all countries into Paris, as trophies of the victorious general. The abundant collections thus accumulated brought to bear upon that generation the quickening influence of the best that had been done in the art of painting. Nowhere could one study either the Venetian colourists or Rubens to greater advantage than in the Louvre, and it was by virtue of this unrestrained intercourse with the masters who represent the most perfect blossom of colouring that the Byronic spirits of 1830 succeeded in giving full expression to the glowing full-coloured life of things which hovered before their heated imagination. It is unnecessary to say that this was accompanied by a great widening of the range of subjects treated. The Romantic school showed that there were other heroes in history and poetry besides the Greeks and Romans. They painted everything, if only it possessed colour and character, flame, passion, and exotic perfume. Romanticism was the protest of painting against the plastic in art, the protest of liberty against the academic teaching of the Classical school, the revolution of movement against stiffness. [Illustration: GÉRICAULT. THE WOUNDED CUIRASSIER.]