in expressive landscapes in the sense in which, at that time, people delighted in expressive heads. This one-sidedness hindered his success. When he appeared in the twenties his pictures were thought bizarre and melancholy. And later, when he achieved greater simplicity, he was treated by the critics merely with the respect that was paid to the Old Guard, for now a pleiad of much brighter stars beamed in the sky. [Illustration: TURNER. A SHIPWRECK.] [Illustration: J. M. W. TURNER. THE OLD TÉMÉRAIRE.] But we must not forget that Michel and Huet showed the way. Rousseau and his followers left them far behind, as Columbus threw into oblivion all who had discovered America before him, or Gutenberg all who had previously printed books. The step on which these initiators had stood was more or less that of Andreas Achenbach and Blechen. They are good and able painters, but they still kept the Flemish and Dutch masters too much in their memory. It is easy to detect in them reminiscences of Ruysdael and Hobbema and the studies of gallery pictures grown dim with age. They still coloured objects brown, and made spring as mournful as winter, and morning as gloomy as evening; they had yet no sense that morning means the awakening of life, the youth of the sun, the springtide of the day. They still composed their pictures and finished and rounded them off for pictorial effect. The next necessary step was no longer to look at Ruysdael and Cuyp, but at nature--to lay more emphasis on sincerity of impression, and therefore the less upon pictorial finish and rounded expression--to paint nature, not in the style of galleries, but in its freshness and bloom. And the impulse to this last step, which brought French landscape painting to its highest perfection, was given by England. [Illustration: _L'Art._ TURNER. DIDO BUILDING CARTHAGE.] The most highly gifted work produced in this province between the years 1800 and 1830 is of English origin. At the time when landscape painting was in France and Germany confined in a strait-waistcoat by Classicism, the English went quietly forward in the path trodden by Gainsborough in the eighteenth century. In these years England produced an artist who stands apart from all others as a peculiar and inimitable phenomenon in the history of landscape painting, and at the same time it produced a school of landscape which not only fertilised France, but founded generally the modern conception of colour.