One after the other they began to declare the Italian pilgrimage to be unnecessary. They buried themselves as hermits in the villages around the capital. The undulating strip of country, rich in wood and water, which borders on the heights of Saint-Cloud and Ville d'Avray, is the cradle of French landscape painting. In grasping nature they proceeded by the most various ways, whilst they drew everything scrupulously and exactly which an observing eye may discern, or wedded their own temperament with the moods of nature. [Illustration: _Baschet._ HUET. THE INUNDATION AT ST. CLOUD.] That remarkable artist _Charles de la Berge_ seems like a forerunner of the English Pre-Raphaelite school. He declared the ideal of art to consist in painting everything according to nature, and overlooking nothing; in carrying drawing to the most minute point, and yet preserving the impression of unison and harmony in the picture--which is as easy to say as it is difficult to perform. His brief life was passed in this struggle. His pictures are miracles of patience: to see that it is only necessary to know the "Sunset" of 1839, in the Louvre. There is something touching in the way this passionate worker had branches and the bark of trees brought to his room, even when he lay on his deathbed, to study the contortions of wood and the interweaving of fibres with all the zeal of a naturalist. The efforts of de la Berge have something of the religious devotion with which Jan van Eyck or Altdorfer gazed at nature. But he died too young to effect any result. He copied the smallest particulars of objects with the utmost care, and in the reproduction even of the smallest aimed at a mathematical precision, neutralising his qualities of colour, which were otherwise of serious value, by such hair-splitting detail.