It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that this connection with the life of the present and the soil at home was lost to the art of painting. It cannot be supposed that later generations will be able to form a conception of life in the nineteenth century from pictures produced in this period, or that these pictures will become approximately such documents as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries possess in the works of Dürer, Bellini, Rubens, or Rembrandt. The old masters were the children of their age to the very tips of their fingers. They were saturated with the significance, the ideals, and the aims of their time, and they saturated them with their own aims, ideals, and significance. On the other hand, if any one enters a modern picture gallery and picks out the paintings produced up to 1850, he will often receive the impression that they belong to earlier centuries. They are without feeling for the world around, and seem even to know nothing of it. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BOILLY. THE TOILETTE.] Even David, the first of the moderns, has left no work, with the exception of his "Marat," which has been baptized with the blood of the French Revolution. To express the sentiment of Liberty militant he made use of the figures of Roman heroes. The political freedom of the people, so recently won, so fresh in men's minds, he illustrated by examples from Roman history. At a later time, when the allied forces entered Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, he made use of the story of Leonidas at Thermopylæ. Only in portrait painting was any kind of justice done to modern life by the painters in "the grand style." True it is that there lived, at the time, a few "little masters" who furtively turned out for the market modest little pictures of the life around them, paintings of buildings and kitchen interiors. The poor Alsatian painter _Martin Drolling_, contemptuously designated a "dish painter" by the critics, showed in his kitchen pictures that, in spite of David, something of the spirit of Chardin and the great Dutchmen was still alive in French art. But he has given his figures and his pots and pans and vegetables the pose and hard outline of Classicism. A few of his portraits are better and more delicate, particularly that of the actor Baptiste, with his fine head, like that of a diplomatist. At the exhibition of 1889, this picture, with its positive and firmly delineated characterisation, made the appeal of a Holbein of 1802. Another "little master," _Granet_, painted picturesque ruins, low halls, and the vaults of churches; he studied attentively the problem of light in inner chambers, and thereby drew upon himself the reproach of David, that "his drawing savoured of colour." In _Leopold Boilly_ Parisian life--still like that of a country town--and the arrival of the mail, the market, and the busy life of the streets, found an interpreter,--_bourgeois_ no doubt, but true to his age.