It is this breath of realism which gives their attractiveness to Baudry's pictures in the Paris Opera House. He cannot indeed be ranked as a truly great master of decorative painting, as the Fragonard of the nineteenth century; he was too eclectic. The five years, from 1851 to 1856, which as winner of the Prix de Rome he spent in the Villa Medici, were the happiest of his life. He saw in the Italian galleries neither Holbein nor Velasquez, neither Rembrandt nor Botticelli nor Caravaggio. He saw nothing and revered nothing save the pure tradition of the Cinquecento, which was to him the Alpha and Omega of art. He dreamed of great decorative works which should place him on an equality with those old masters. It was therefore joyful news to him when, at the suggestion of his old comrade Charles Garnier, he was commissioned to adorn the Opera House. Baudry was then thirty-five years old, in possession of his full powers, and yet he thought it necessary to go back to Italy to interrogate the masters of the Renaissance anew. For a full year he worked ten hours daily in the Sistine Chapel. As soon as he knew Michael Angelo by heart, he betook himself to England to copy Raphael's cartoons, and then in 1870 for the third time to Italy, before he felt himself capable of covering the five hundred square metres of canvas. The task took him four years, and when it was exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1874, prior to being placed in its final resting-place, there was general astonishment at a single man's power to produce so much and such great work. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BAUDRY. TRUTH.]