In general, French art, however willingly it took to this sphere during the period we are considering, is rich indeed in well-drawn documents, but poor in works which, considered as painting, can bear the most distant comparison with Fragonard and Boucher. The Revolution had put an end to the joyous flesh-painting of French art. At the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century the painter of tender and life-like flesh-colour was not the reformer David, but the despised Prudhon. The former found his ideal in statues, and turned flesh to stone. The latter, a direct descendant of Correggio, gave expression to life with a tender mellowness. Ingres was again, like David, a very mediocre flesh-painter, and the Romanticists entered this sphere but seldom. Delacroix indeed has in his "Massacre" a couple of excellent touches, but they are isolated phenomena in his work. After 1850 the approved system was to give nude female figures the appearance of being made of terra-cotta, biscuit, or ivory. The forgotten art of painting velvety, soft flesh, and of making it vibrate in light, had to be learned over again, and to this meritorious task _Henner_ devoted himself--the modern Correggio from Alsace, who stands to Cabanel in the same relation as Prudhon to David. Even Henner in his later days has become very much a mannerist, and has done some very bad work. To-day he prefers a heavy, pasty, buttery style of painting, with faces which look as if they had been pickled in oil, and have an unreal expression; his contrasts of light and shade, once so delicate, have become raw and forced. Yet beside Cabanel he still appears the true poet of female flesh-painting, the dreamy graceful depicter of refined sensuality. Prudhon's delicate ideal and his language of vibrating tenderness are revived in Henner. His "Nymph resting" in the Luxembourg has the same soft _morbidezza_, the same delightful mystery, in which Prudhon before him had enveloped the sweetness of smiling faces and the beauty of female forms. He too chose the Lombards as his guides. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1858, he sent to the Salon of 1865 a "Susanna," which already shows his ability as a flesh-painter and his relationship to Correggio. And a Lombard he has remained all his life. One could with difficulty find a more delicate and smooth study of the nude than his "Biblis" of 1867. [Illustration: PAUL BAUDRY.]