_Hippolyte Flandrin_ was the French counterpart of the German Nazarenes. He is an example of how Ingres' teaching resulted in stiff conventionality. Ingres was a dangerous master to follow. His pupils formed round him a small, faithful, and submissive band, swore like those of Cornelius by the master's doctrines, and for that very reason never attained to any distinctive character of their own. None of them possessed Ingres' many-sided talent. His empire, like that of Alexander the Great, was divided among his successors, each of whom governed his own little realm with greater or less ability. Hippolyte Flandrin devoted himself to religious painting, which in his hands for the first time regained a greater importance in French art; but he followed much more slavishly than Ingres in the paths of the Italian masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This painter, worthy of respect, full of conviction, learned and of sterling worth, but colourless and cold, who decorated the churches of St. Vincent de Paul and St. Germain des Prés, has enriched the history of art by no new gift. An indefatigable worker, but endowed with little intellectual power, he went no further than to follow out strictly the rules which Ingres taught his pupils and had himself acquired from the old masters. After Flandrin, as winner of the Prix de Rome in 1831, had become intimately acquainted with the art treasures of Italy, he seldom met with any difficulty. His cartoons are flowingly and correctly executed with a firm hand, like the fair copy of a school essay. Of draughtsmanship he knew all that is to be learned; he remembered much, arranged his reminiscences, and thought little for himself. He was a miniature copy of his master, at once more poorly endowed and more fanatical, a purely mathematical genius; his art is a cold geometrical knowledge, the adaptation of anatomical studies to conventional forms, an arrangement of groups and draperies in strict accordance with celebrated exemplars. Had not the primitive Italian masters, the painters of the ancient Christian catacombs, the saintly Fra Angelico, and the mosaic artists of Ravenna done their work long before him, Flandrin's paintings would never have seen the light, any more than those of the Nazarene school. In both cases one can assign almost every face and figure to its original in the pictures of the Italian masters. Only a certain blond, tender, slightly melancholy, modern face of a Christian maiden is Flandrin's peculiar property. He transferred these same ascetic and pure principles to portrait painting, and thereby acquired for himself a large practice as the painter of the _femme honnête_. These women conversed with him and blushed in his presence; in his pictures we find grace and delicacy, eyes sparkling or meek, tenderness and mocking laughter, all translated into a nun-like, unapproachable appearance, which under the Second Empire gained the greater approbation among