David on his arrival needed only to shake the tree and the fruit fell ripe into his lap. He entered Flanders like a conqueror, and left the signs of ravage behind him on his triumphal progress. In Brussels a court gathered round him as round a banished king, and a gold medal was struck in memory of his arrival. He took Flemish art in his powerful hands and crushed it. For, needless to say, he saw nothing but barbarism in the genius of Rubens, and inoculated Flemish artists with a genuine horror of their great prince of painters. He continued to teach in Brussels what he had preached in Paris, and became the father-in-law of a deadly tiresome Franco-Belgian school, to which belonged a succession of correct painters; men such as Duvivier, Ducq, Paelinck, Odevaere, and others. For the aboriginal, sturdy, energetic, and carnal Flemish art was prescribed the mathematical regularity of the antique canon. The old Flemish joyousness of colour passed into a consumptive cacophony. And then was repeated in Belgium the tragedy which Classicism had played in France. Everything became a pretext for draperies, stiff poses, sculptural groupings, and plaster heads. Phædra and Theseus, Hector and Andromache, Paris and Helen, were, as in Paris, the most popular subjects. And so great a confusion reigned, that a sculptor from whom a wolf was ordered included the history of Romulus and Remus gratuitously. The only one whose works are still partially enjoyable is _Navez_. He was, like Ingres in France, the last prop of this art, chiselled, as it were, out of stone; and even after the fall of Classicism he remained in esteem, because, like Ingres, he knew how to steer a prudent course between David, the Italians, and a certain independent study of nature. A touch of realism was mingled with his mania for the Greeks; only to a limited extent did he correct "ugly" nature; he would have ventured to represent Socrates with his negro nose and Thersites with his hump, and, again, like Ingres he has left behind him enduring performances as a portrait painter. His correct, cold, and discreet talent grew warm at the touch of human personality, and his drawings, in particular, prove that he had warmth of feeling as an artist. As his biographer tells us, he seldom laid down the sketch-book in which he fixed his impressions as he talked. Every page was filled with sketches of a group, a figure, or a gesture seen in the street and rapidly dashed off, "as realistically as even Courbet could desire." And these he transferred, when he painted in the "noble style."