and stoops forward to take a ball of wool out of her basket. Next she sits before the fire in a cosy corner against a folding screen. A half-opened book rests in her hand, a tea-cup stands close by, a homely atmosphere of the living room hovers round her. Then, like a true housewife, she takes up her house-keeping book, or goes into the kitchen to help the cook, while she scrapes carrots or scrubs the cooking utensils or brings in the meat from the larder. It is all rendered with such truth and simplicity that one acquires an affection for Chardin, who with his art got to the root of family life and bestowed upon it the subtlest gifts of observation and generous comprehension, while none the less his domesticity never became commonplace. [Illustration: DANIEL CHODOWIECKI.] His contemporary, _Étienne Jeurat_, painted scenes at country fairs, and _Jean Baptiste le Prince_ pictures of guardrooms and similar subjects. In Holland _Cornelis Troost_ went on parallel lines with him. He depicted the life of his age and of his nation--comic scenes, banquets, weddings, and the like--in pastels or water colours, and that without seeking inspiration from any of the Dutch classics, but with a vivid, intelligent comprehension. Even Italian art ended in two "_genre_ painters," the Venetians Rotari and Pietro Longhi, who have bequeathed to us such charming little pictures of the life of that age--fortune-tellers, dancing-masters, tailors, apothecaries, little boys and girls at play or at their tasks. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ CHODOWIECKI. THE FAMILY PICTURE.] Germany presented no such great manifestation as Chardin, although there too the tendency was the same. There too, after the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, a moral, active _bourgeoisie_ had at last sprung up that was prepared to take up the line which had been already laid down by the English. Lessing was the first in this magnificent struggle for evolution. He wrote, in his _Miss Sarah Sampson_, the first German tragedy without the support of great mythical or historical heroes, and without the stiff ponderousness of the Alexandrine. He declared, like Moore, that helmets and diadems do not make tragic heroes; he even in his _Minna_ set vividly before the eyes of his contemporaries something in the immediate present, the Seven Years' War. And just as Lessing liberated the German drama from the jurisdiction of Boileau, so art began to mutiny against the classicism which had come in through the medium of France, and which had been inherited from the age when it was the pride of German courts to be small copies of Versailles.