_Charles Marchal_, too, was no painter, but an anecdotist, with a bias towards the humorous or sentimental; and so very refined and superior was he that he saw none but pretty peasant girls, who might easily be mistaken for "young ladies," if they exchanged their kerchiefs and bodices for a Parisian toilette. His chief picture was "The Hiring Fair" of 1864: pretty peasant girls are standing in a row along the street, bargaining with prospective masters before hiring themselves out. [Illustration: GRÜTZNER. TWELFTH NIGHT.] The most famous of this group of artists is _Jules Breton_, who after various humorous and sentimental pieces placed himself in 1853 in the front rank of the French painters of rustics by his "Return of the Reapers" (Musée Luxembourg). His "Gleaners" in 1855, "Blessing the Fields" in 1857, and "The Erection of the Picture of Christ in the Churchyard" were pretty enough to please the public, and sufficiently sound in technique not to be a stumbling-block to artists. After 1861 he conceived an enthusiasm for sunsets, and was never weary of depicting the hour when the fair forms of peasant maidens stand gracefully out against the quiet golden horizon. Jules Breton wrote many poems, and a vein of poetry runs through his pictures. They tell of the sadness of the land when the fields sleep dreamily beneath the shadows of the evening, touched by the last ray of the departing sun; but they tell of it in verses where the same rhymes are repeated with wearisome monotony. Breton is a charming and sympathetic figure, but he never quite conquered Classicism. His gleaners moving across the field in the evening twilight bear witness to an attentive, deliberate study of the works of Leopold Robert; and unfortunately much of the emphasis and classical style of Robert has been transmitted to Breton's rustic maidens. They have most decidedly a lingering weakness for pose, and a sharp touch of the formula of the schools. There is an affectation of style in their garb, and their hands are those of _bonnes_ who have never even handled a rake. Breton, as Millet said of him, paints girls who are too beautiful to remain in the country. His art is a well-bred, idyllic painting, with gilt edges; it is pleasing and full of delicate figures which are always elegant and always correct, but it is a little like flat lemonade; it is monotonous and only too carefully composed, destitute of all masculinity and seldom avoiding the reef of affectation. Norway and Sweden were fructified from Düsseldorf immediately. When Tidemand had shown the way, the academy on the Rhine was the high school for all the sons of the North during the fifties. They set to translating Knaus and Vautier into Swedish and Norwegian, and caught the tone of their originals so exactly that they almost seem more Düsseldorfian than the Düsseldorfers themselves.