In the domain of landscape the Continent produced no one who could be compared with Gainsborough; but here, too, the English influence made itself felt. It can be traced how the same feeling for nature which had given birth to Thomson's _Seasons_ and Gainsborough's landscapes, afterwards found expression in France and Germany, and dissipated the prevailing taste in gardens. The seventeenth century--with the exception of the Dutch--had set nature in order with the garden shears. As Lebrun in his historical compositions endeavoured to outdo the Italians, so Lenôtre's garden style exemplified the perfection and exaggeration of the gardens of the Italian Renaissance, which themselves again were laid out on the plan of the old Roman gardens from existing descriptions. A garden reminded one more of state apartments, which one could only walk through with measured steps, quietly and respectfully, than of nature, where one is, and dares to be, human. Corresponding to this formally planned, correctly measured style of garden there was a school of landscape which improved nature on "artistic" principles, and, by the arrangement of bits of nature, produced a world peculiarly full of style. Landscapes were nicely laid-out parks, which, like the figure pictures, made for an abstract beauty of mass and lines, and which, by means of accessories, such as classical ruins, would turn one's thought to the ancient world. Nature must not, as Batteux taught, be the instructor of the artist, but the artist must select the parts and build up his picture. Out of many leaves he takes only the most perfectly developed, puts only such perfect leaves on one tree, and so obtains a perfect tree. Let the essential of his production be _nature choisie_, a selection of objects that "are capable of producing agreeable impressions"; his aim "_le beau vrai qui est représenté comme s'il existait réellement et avec toutes les perfections qu'il peut recevoir_." The eighteenth century went back from this "noble," improved nature, step by step to the divine beauty of unimproved nature; just as those masters untouched by the Romans, Dürer and Altdorfer, Titian and Rubens, Brouwer and Velasquez, had painted her. The great Watteau, too, was here for the most part in advance of his age, in that, instead of the stiffly designed stage scenery of Poussin, he gave Elysian landscapes,--abodes of love, that now glisten in the sunshine of the young morning, now are suffused with golden light and the misty shadows of the evening twilight. The rose in her young bud is odorous, the nightingale sings, the doves coo, the light boughs whisper to the soft west wind, bright silver rivulets ripple, the wind sighs through the tall branches. Watteau knew nature and loved her, and rendered her in her transparent beauty with the intoxicated eyes of a lover. The spirit of nature, not of humanity, dominates in his pictures. It is only because nature is so lovely that man is so happy.