These æsthetics produced _Victor Bertin_ and _Xavier Bidault_, admired by their contemporaries for "richness of composition and a splendid selection of sites." Their methodical commonplaces, their waves and valleys and temples, bear the same relation to nature as the talking machine of Raimundus Lullus does to philosophy. The scholastic landscape painter triumphed; a school it was which nourished itself on empty formulas, and so died of anæmia. Bidault, who in his youth made very good studies, is, with his stippled leaves and polished stems, his grey skies looking sometimes like lead and sometimes like water, the peculiar essence of a tiresome Classicism; and he is the same Bidault who, as president of the hanging committee, for years rejected the landscapes of Théodore Rousseau from the Salon. It is only the figure of _Michallon_, who died young, that still survives from this group. He too belongs to the school of Valenciennes, through his frigid, meagre, and pedantically correct style; but he is distinguished from the rest, for he endeavoured to acquire a certain truth to nature in the drawing of plants, and was accounted a bold innovator at the time. He did not paint "the plant in itself," but burs, thistles, dandelions, everything after its kind, and through this botanical exactness he acquired in the beginning of the century a fame which it is now hard to understand. In the persons of _Jules Cogniet_ and _Watelet_ the gates of the school were rather more widely opened to admit reality. Having long populated their classic valleys with bloodless, dancing nymphs and figurants of divine race, they abandoned historical for picturesque landscape, and "dared" to represent scenes from the environs of Paris, castles and windmills. But as they clung even here to the classical principles of composition, it is only nature brushed and combed, trimmed and coerced by rules, that is reflected in their painting. Even in 1822, when Delacroix exhibited his "Dante's Bark," the ineffable Watelet shone in his full splendour. Amongst his pictures there was a view of Bar-sur-Seine, which the catalogue appropriately designated not simply as a _vue_, but as a _vue ajustée_. Till his last breath Watelet was convinced that nature did not understand her own business, and was always in need of a painter to revise her errors and correct them.