If we cast one more glance back to the road which art had travelled since the commencement of the century, we can have no doubt as to the end which was proportionately aimed at in all countries. Until quite recently a courtly, aristocratic art had shed its light upon the whole of Europe. In the seventeenth century the Dutch alone had maintained their isolation. They who entered fresh into art, and had to break with no tradition, gave at that time the first expression to the new spirit, in that they resolutely recalled art from its courtly surroundings to the humbler dwellings of the middle classes. They _painted_ what Dürer and the "little masters" had only graved upon wood blocks and copper plates. Still, they wished to paint these things less for their own sakes than because so intimate a light was shed upon them. Through elements of light they contrived to cast over everyday moments a sort of fairy inspiration. Watteau and his successors made a further advance in the conquest of the visible world, in that they desired to paint their age, for its own sake, in all its grace; and by the middle of the century we find this new, intimate, familiar art, independent of ancient tradition, triumphing all along the line. "Sublime" painting is more and more forsaken. Art becomes more and more indigenous to her world and age. Aristocratic Watteau is succeeded by Hogarth, Greuze, Chardin, and Chodowiecki, who treat the Third Estate no longer in the Dutch _chiaroscuro_, but in all its heavy reality as a valid object of art. Instead of that lofty, majestic, vainglorious painting of mere representations, which was the outcome of Cinquecento, and which at the expiration of the seventeenth century had sunk, through abstraction, into something uniform, trivial, and tedious, there appeared on all sides an art which was simple and sincere, which plunged into the life of every day, observed man in his relations with nature, with his fellows, with his faithful animals, and with his household goods--an art which created the variety of its representations out of its own experience. So with landscape, the most modern branch of art; it reached in the schools of all nations a greater significance--at least, in extent--than it had ever possessed in the history of art. And this development proceeded without its being established that any one country had direct influence on any other. The ideas hung in the atmosphere; they were the ideas of the century. It is as though the departing age would hold a mirror before us--a magic mirror--which foretells the future; as though it would point out that nineteenth century art, advancing further along this road, should be domestic-human, and that it should find in landscape its most appropriate expression.