In this calling many Dutch pictures had passed through his hands, and they suggested to him the unseasonable idea of looking more closely into nature in the neighbourhood than he had done in his youth--nature not as she was in Italy, but in the environs of the city. While Valenciennes and his pupils made so many objections to painting what lay under their eyes, Georges Michel remained in the country, and was the first to light on the idea of placing himself in the midst of nature, and not above her; no longer to arrange and adapt, but to approach her by painting her with directness. If any one spoke of travelling to Italy, he answered: "The man who cannot find enough to paint during his whole life in a circuit of four miles is in reality no artist. Did the Dutch ever run from one place to another? And yet they are good painters, and not merely that, but the most powerful, bold, and ideal artists." Every day he made a study in the precincts of Paris, without any idea that he would count in these times among the forerunners of modern art. He shares the glory of having discovered Montmartre with Alphonse Karr, Gérard de Nerval, and Monselet. After his death such studies were found in the shops of all the second-hand dealers of the Northern Boulevard; they were invariably without a frame, as they had never seemed worth framing, and when they were very dear they were to be had for forty francs. Connoisseurs appreciated his wide horizons, stormy skies, and ably sketched sea-shores. For, in spite of his poverty, Michel had now and then deserted Montmartre and found means to visit Normandy. Painfully precise in the beginning, while he worked with Swebach and Demarne, he had gradually become large and bold, and employed all means in giving expression to what he felt. He was a dreamer, who brought into his studies a unison of lights, and, now and then, beams of sun which would have delighted Albert Cuyp. A genuine offspring of the old Dutch masters--of the grand and broad masters, not of those who worked with a fine brush--already he was aiming at _l'expression par l'ensemble_, and since the Paris Universal Exhibition he has been fittingly honoured as the forerunner of Théodore Rousseau. His pictures, as it seems, were early received in various studios, and there they had considerable effect in setting artists thinking. But as he ceased to date his pictures after 1814 it is, nevertheless, difficult to be more precise in determining the private influence which this Ruysdael of Montmartre exerted on men of the younger generation. [Illustration: _L'Art._ PAUL HUET.]