And afterwards, during the early years of the reign of Louis Philippe, when the tendency became once more latent, the Revolution of February worked out what the Revolution of July had begun. Mediocre painters like _Antigna_ became famous because they bewailed the sorrows of the "common man" in small and medium-sized pictures. Others began to display a greater interest in rustics, and to take them more seriously than they had done in earlier works. _Adolphe Leleux_ made studies in Brittany, and discovered earnest episodes in the daily life of the peasant, which he rendered with great actuality. And after sliding back into Romanticism, as he did with his Arragon smugglers, he enjoyed his chief success in 1849 with that picture at the Luxembourg to which he was incited by the sad aspect of the streets of Paris during the rising of 1848. The men who, driven by hunger and misery, fought upon the barricades may be found in Leleux's "Mot d'Ordre." After the _coup d'état_ of 1851 even _Meissonier_, till then exclusively a painter of _rococo_ subjects, encroached on this province. In his picture of the barricades (2 December 1851) heaps of corpses are lying stretched out in postures which could not have been merely invented. The execution, too, has a nervous force which betrays that even so calculating a spirit as Meissonier was at one time moved and agitated. In his little smokers and scholars and waiting-men he is an adroit but cold-blooded painter: here he has really delivered himself of a modern epic. His "Barricade" (formerly in the Van Praet Collection) is the one thrilling note in the master's work, which was elsewhere so quiet. _Alexandre Antigna_, originally an historical painter, turned from historical disasters to those which take place in the life of the lower strata of the people. A dwelling of a poor family is struck by lightning; poor people pack up their meagre goods with the haste of despair on the outbreak of fire; peasants seek refuge from a flood upon the roof of their little house; petty shopkeepers are driving with their wares across the country, when their nag drops down dead in the shafts; or an old crone, cowering at the street corner, receives the pence which her little daughter has earned by playing on the fiddle. [Illustration: _L'Art._ OCTAVE TASSAERT.]