We have thought it advisable to follow this development of the art of painting down to its close, just as in treating of the older periods we have proceeded, not upon chronological principles, but upon those of historical style. Now that the old art has been followed to the grave, it will be all the easier, later on, to perceive clearly how the new arose slowly out of its invisible depths. And as France since 1830 has become the high school of art for other nations, those paths have at the same time been indicated along which the art of painting was proceeding during these years in other countries. [Illustration: HENRI REGNAULT GENERAL PRÍM] CHAPTER XIII THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL OF PAINTING IN BELGIUM Belgian art had gone through the same history as French art since David. When the French patriarch came to Brussels to pass the remainder of his days there in honour, he found the ground already well prepared. The Classicists had long since made their way into art, and the old Flemish tradition was dying out. Lens and Herreyns are the last colourists in the sense of the good old time, but they are associated with the good old time only through the qualities of their colouring. As a degenerate descendant of Van Dyck, _Lens_ painted with a feeble brush sweet, insipid, sugary work for boudoirs and _prie-dieu_ chairs; and had lost his feeling for nature to such a degree that he gave the aged the same flesh tint as children, and men the full breasts of hermaphrodites. _Herreyns_, appointed director of the Antwerp Academy in 1800, was more masculine; and although likewise conventional and wanting in individuality, he was none the less a painter of breadth and boldness. He was most enraptured with a model with a copper-coloured skin and knotted muscles, or with pretty and ruddy children, and fat nurses with swelling breasts. This bold worker embodied in his own person the art of a great epoch, but did nothing to renew it. These painters, indeed, only mixed for a new hash the crumbs fallen from the table at which giants had once sat. They looked backwards instead of around them, and lighted their modest little lamp at the sun of Rubens. France was the only country where art followed the great changes of culture in the age. Hence Flemish painting had been crossed with French elements long before David's arrival. And Paris was for the artists of 1800 what Italy had been for those of 1600. They made their pilgrimage in troops to the studio of Suvée, who had originally come from Bruges, but had lived since 1771 on the Seine. There, and there only, recipes for the composition of great figure pictures were to be obtained. And thus art completed what the Empire had in a political sense begun. The artistic barriers fell as the geographical ones had done before, and the Belgian painters went back to Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges as men annexed by France.