For Decamps and Marilhat the East was a great, red copper-block beneath a blue dome of steel; a beautiful monster, bright and glittering. Guillaumet has no wish to dazzle. His pictures give one the impression of intense and sultry heat. His light is really "_le frémissement visible des atomes aériens_." Moreover, he did not see the chivalry of the East like Fromentin. The latter was fascinated by the nomad, the pure Arab living in tent or saddle, the true aristocrat of the desert, mounted on his white palfrey, hunting wild beasts through fair blue and green landscapes. Poor folk who never owned a horse are the models of Guillaumet. With their dogs--wild creatures who need nothing--they squat in the sun as if with their own kin: they are the lower, primitive population, the pariahs of the wilderness; tattered men whose life-long siesta is only interrupted by the anguish of death, animal women whose existence flows by as idly as in the trance of opium. After the French Romanticists had shown the way, other nations contributed their contingent to the painters of Oriental subjects. In Germany poetry had discovered the East. Rückert imitated the measure and the ideas of the Oriental lyric, and the Greek war of liberation quickened all that passionate love for the soil of old Hellas which lives in the German soul. _Wilhelm Müller_ sang his songs of the Greeks, and in 1825 _Leopold Schefer_ brought out his tale _Die Persierin_. But just as the Oriental tale was a mere episode in German literature, an exotic grafted on the native stem, so the Oriental painting produced no leading mind in the country, but merely a number of good soldiers who dutifully served in the troops of foreign commanders. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ FROMENTIN. THE CENTAURS.]