The movement was so universal amongst the painters that it is difficult at the present time to perceive the special part that each individual played in the great drama. This is especially true of _Georges Michel_, a genius long misunderstood, a painter first made known in wider circles by the World Exhibition in 1889, and known to the narrower circle of art lovers only since his death in 1843. At that time a dealer had bought at an auction the works left behind by a half-famished painter--pictures with no signature, and only to be identified because they collectively treated motives from the surroundings of Paris. A large, wide horizon, a hill, a windmill, a cloudy sky were his subjects, and all pointed to an artist schooled by the Dutch. Curiosity was on the alert, inquiry was made, and it was found that the painter was named Georges Michel, and had been born in 1763; that at twelve years of age he had shirked school to go drawing, had run away with a laundress at fifteen, was already the father of five children when he was twenty, had married again at sixty-five, and had worked hard to his eightieth year. Old men remembered that they had seen early works of his in the Salon. It was said that Michel had produced a great deal immediately after the Revolution, but exceedingly tedious pictures, which differed in no respect from those of the other Classicists; for instance, from Demarne and Swebach, garnished with figures. It was only after 1814 that he disappeared from the Salon; not, as has been now discovered, because he had no more pictures to exhibit, but because he was rejected as a revolutionary. During his later years Michel had been most variously employed: for one thing, he had been a restorer of pictures. [Illustration: _Baschet._ CABAT. LE JARDIN BEAUJON.]