For as yet all these _genre_ painters were the children of Hogarth; their productions were the outcome of the same spirit, plebeian and alien to art, which had come into painting when the middle classes began to hold a more important position in society. Yet their artistic significance ought not to be and cannot be contested. In an age which was prouder of its antiquarian knowledge than of its own achievements, which recognised the faithful imitation of the method of all past periods, the mere performance of a delicate task, as the highest aim of art, these _genre_ painters were the first to portray the actual man of the nineteenth century; the first to desert museums and appeal to nature, and thus to lay the foundation of modern painting. They wandered in the country, looked at reality, sought to imitate it, and often displayed in their studies a marvellous directness of insight. But these vigorous initial studies were too modest to find favour and esteem with a public as yet insufficiently educated for the appreciation of art. Whilst in England the exhibitions of the Royal Academy and in France those of the Paris Salon created, comparatively early, a certain ground for the comprehension of art, the _genre_ painters of other countries worked up to and into the sixties without the appropriate social combinations. After 1828 the Art Unions began to usurp the position of that refined society which had formerly played the Mæcenas as the leading dictators of taste. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ BRETON. THE RETURN OF THE REAPERS.]