To-day his praise cannot be sounded so high. The place to which he aspired, by the side of the great masters of the Renaissance, will not fall to Baudry's lot; he is hardly to be reckoned even among the great French masters of the nineteenth century. To rise even so far he lacked the first and most essential gift--originality. He was a model pupil in his youth, and a pupil he remained all his life. He always saw nature through the medium of art, and never had the courage to take a fresh breath and plunge into its fountain of youth. Between him and reality there was ever the prism of the old pictures that he loved; brush in hand, he devoted himself, turn by turn, and with equal enthusiasm, to Michael Angelo, Titian, Correggio, Bronzino, and even Ingres. As soon as he returned from Italy for the first time, as holder of the Prix de Rome, he exhibited several pictures which were altogether Titian in colouring, altogether Raphael in style. Each of them, even the most important, calls some other painting to one's mind. His "Fortune and the Child" is a variation upon Titian's "Divine and Earthly Love"; his "Death of a Vestal Virgin" a reminiscence of the "Death of Peter Martyr"; his "Warrior" in the Opera House is the painted double of Rude's "Marseillaise." How many gestures, attitudes, and figures could, by a close analysis, be shown to be borrowed in turn from Veronese, Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, or Raphael! His works are a synthesis of the favourite forms of the Cinquecento; they are the testament of the Cinquecento masters. He was a Parisian Primaticcio, a posthumous member of the old school of Fontainebleau. In him was embodied the last smile of the Renaissance, the results of which he assimilated and reduced to formulæ. He lacked creative imagination, and his pictures are wanting in individual character. The nervous movement and sinewy stretchings of his young men's bodies would never have been painted but for Donatello's "David." Of his women, the powerful and muscular are descended from Michael Angelo's "Eve," the more slender and elegant come down from Rosso. His palette, with its blue and white tints, is bright and flowery, but it is no less artificial than his composition. [Illustration: _Baschet._ BAUDRY. THE PEARL AND THE WAVE. (_By permission of Mr. W. H. Stewart, the owner of the picture._)]