So far back as in 1833, Charles Lenormant wrote of the school of David: "Even the great painter Ingres was not able to rejuvenate a school which was breaking up from old age, or to restore their full resonance to the slackened and worn-out chords; his only office was to give the old synagogue honourable burial. Take away this last scion of the Classical school, and the curtain may fall--the farce is ended." He might have said the same thing forty years later, for with Cabanel and Bouguereau Classicism has limped on, almost unchanged, to our own days. Its art was a correct, conventional picture-stencilling, which might just as well have flourished a generation earlier. Classicism--which in David was hard and Spartan, in Ingres cold and correct--has become pretty in Cabanel and Bouguereau, and is completely dissolved in the scent of roses and violets. Only a certain perfume of the _demi-monde_ brings the persons who appear as Venus, as naiads, as Aurora or Diana, into complete accord with the epoch which produced them. For Ingres the female body itself was the exclusive canon of beautiful form; now the swelling limbs begin to stretch themselves voluptuously forth. Ingres still treats the human eye as it was treated in ancient sculpture, as something animal, soulless, and dead; now it begins to twinkle provocatively. A modern refined taste plays round the classical scheme. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ CABANEL. THE SHULAMITE.] [Illustration: BOUGUEREAU. BROTHERLY LOVE.]