ladies, since it was seldom found in real life. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ CHASSERIAU. APOLLO AND DAPHNE.] Alongside of this Overbeck, endowed with greater artistic powers than his German congener, there stands as the French Cornelius _Paul Chenavard_, a man who revolved in his fertile brain philosophical conceptions deeper almost than those of the German master. He dreamed of broad, symbolical, decorative pieces, embracing all time and all space, wherein all the cosmogonies of the universe should be united. Like Cornelius, he wished to be a Michael Angelo, but he succeeded no better than the German. He spent fifteen years in the churches and museums of Italy, pencil in hand, accumulating a vast collection of studies, from which his great painted history of the world was to be built up. But when he went back to Paris his materials from the old masters had grown upon him to such an extent that he never recovered his individuality. For four years he worked with feverish diligence, and completed eighteen cartoons, each six metres in height and four in breadth, intended for the walls of the Pantheon. So far as colour is concerned, they have attained no greater success than the Campo Santo frescoes of Cornelius. Chenavard could draw much better than the German, but was not much better as a painter; the works of both have a literary rather than an artistic value. Brief and brilliant was the career of _Théodore Chassériau_, who shot across the heavens of art like a gleaming meteor, first as a devotee of form, in Ingres' sense of the word, and afterwards, like Delacroix, as an enthusiastic lover of sunshine and the clear light of Africa. Born in 1819 at St. Domingo, he followed his teacher Ingres in 1834 to the Villa Medici; but even in his first picture, the "Susanna" of 1839, now in the Louvre, he proved himself by no means an orthodox pupil. "He has not the least understanding for the ideas or the changes which have entered into art in our time, and knows absolutely nothing of the poets of recent days. He will live on as a reminiscence and a reproduction of certain ages in the art of the past, without having created anything to hand down to the future. My wishes and my ideas do not in the least correspond with his." In these words Chassériau has himself pointed out what it was that distinguished him from Ingres. Unfortunately he produced but little. Personally a very elegant, _blasé_ gentleman, he plunged on his return from Italy into the whirlpool of Parisian life. He was remarkably ugly; but his black, piercing eyes made him the idol of the ladies, and he hurried through life with such haste that he broke down altogether at the age of thirty-six. Beyond various decorative paintings for the church of Saint Méry and for the Salle des Comptes in the Palais d'Orsay, only a few Eastern pictures, and, best and most characteristic, a couple of lithographs, remain to represent his work.