Having made a success in 1829 with an imaginary picture of the East, he had a wish to see how far the reality corresponded with his ideas of Turkey, and in the same year--therefore before Delacroix--he went on that journey to the Greek Archipelago, Constantinople, and Asia Minor which became a voyage of discovery for French painting. In the Salon of 1831 was exhibited his "Patrol of Smyrna," which at once made him one of the favourite French painters of the time. Soon afterwards came the picture of the "Pasha on his Rounds," accompanied by a lean troop of running and panting guards, that of the great "Turkish Bazaar," in which he gave such a charming representation of the gay and noisy bustle of an Oriental fair, those of the "Turkish School," the "Turkish Café," "The Halt of the Arab Horsemen," and "The Turkish Butcher's Shop." In everything which he painted from this time forward--even in his Biblical pictures--he had before his eyes the East as it is in modern times. Like Horace Vernet, he painted his figures in the costume of modern Arabs and Egyptians, and placed them in landscapes with modern Arab buildings. But the largeness of line in these landscapes is expressive of something so patriarchal and Biblical, and of such a dreamy, mystical poetry, that, in spite of their modern garb, the figures seem like visions from a far distance. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ DECAMPS. THE SWINEHERD.] Decamps' painting never became trivial. All his pictures soothe and captivate the eye, however much they disappoint, on the first glance, the expectations which the older descriptions of them may have excited. Fifty years ago it was said that Delacroix painted with colour and Decamps with light; that his works were steeped in a bath of sunshine. This vibrating light, this transparent atmosphere, which contemporaries admired, is not to be found in Decamps' pictures. Their brilliancy of technique is admirable, but he was no painter of light. The world of sunshine in which everything is dipped, the glow and lustre of objects in shining, liquid, and tremulous air, is what Gustave Guillaumet first learnt to paint a generation later. Decamps attained the effect of light in his pictures by the darkening of shadows, precisely in the manner of the old school. To make the sky bright, he threw the foreground into opaque and heavy shade. And as, in consequence of the ground of bole used to produce his beautiful red tones, the dark parts of his pictures gradually became as black as pitch, and the light parts dead and spotty, he will rather seem to be a contemporary of Albert Cuyp than of Manet.