golden mean was triumphant in politics, literature, and painting. The artists who gave this period its peculiar stamp constitute, as compared with the heaven-assaulting generation of 1830, only, as it were, a collateral female branch of that elder male line of good painting. To reconcile opposite tendencies, to avoid harshness, in short, to bring about an artistic compromise between Ingres and Delacroix, was the end towards which their efforts were chiefly directed. _Jean Gigoux_, a remarkable artist, has the merit of having given the most effective support which Delacroix received in his battle against the _beauté suprême_ of the Classical school. When, in the Universal Exhibition of 1889 at Paris, his picture of "The Last Moments of Leonardo da Vinci," painted in 1835, emerged from the seclusion of a provincial museum, its healthy fidelity to nature was the cause of general astonishment. The personages indeed wear costly costumes, and are surrounded by wealth and magnificence, but they themselves are common, ugly human beings. Here there is no trace of idealism, not even in the sense of Géricault, who, notwithstanding his love of truth, remained faithful to the heroic type. The faces are, with religious devotion, painted exactly after nature by a man who evidently loved the youthful works of Guercino and had zealously studied Dürer. At the same time was exhibited the portrait of the Polish "General Dwernicki," painted in 1833, whom also Gigoux depicts as a man, not as a hero. War has made him not lean but fat, and in Gigoux's picture his red nose and prominent stomach are reproduced with cruel fidelity to nature. It is a declaration of war against every kind of idealism. Even in his religious paintings in Saint Germain l'Auxerrois he held fast to this principle, and this circumstance gives him a place to himself, apart from all the productions of his contemporaries. In a period which, with the solitary exception of Delacroix, was still absolutely devoted to the doctrine _Exagérer la beauté_, his works are of a healthy, soul-refreshing ugliness.