After these great masters had opened up the path a tribe of landscape painters set themselves to render, each in his own way, the vigorous power, the tender charm, and the plaintive melancholy of the earth. Some loved dusk and light, the simple reproduction of ordinary places in their ordinary condition; others delighted in the struggle of the elements, the violent scudding of clouds, the parting glance of the sun, the sombre hours when nature shrouds her face with the mourning veil of a widow. Although he never tasted the pleasures of fame, _Antoine Chintreuil_ was the most refined of them all--an excessively sensitive spirit, who seized with as much delicacy as daring swiftly transient effects of nature, such as seldom appear: the moment when the sun casts a fleeting radiance in the midst of clouds, or when a shaft of light quivers for an instant through a dense mist; the effect of green fields touched by the first soft beams of the sun, or that of a rainbow spanning a fresh spring landscape. His pupil _Jean Desbrosses_ was the painter of hills and valleys. _Achard_ followed Rousseau in his pictures of lonely, austere, and mournful regions. _Français_ painted familiar corners in the neighbourhood of Paris with grace, although more heavily than Corot, and without the shining light which is poured through the works of that rare genius. The pictures of _Harpignies_ are rather dry, and betray a heavy hand. He is rougher than his great predecessors, less seductive and indeed rather staid, but he has a convincing reality, and is loyal and simple. He is valuable as an honest, genial artist, a many-sided and sure-footed man of talent, somewhat inclined to Classicism. _Émile Breton_, the brother of Jules, delighted in the agitation of the elements, wild, out-of-the-way regions, and harsh climate. His execution is broad, his tones forcible, and he has both simplicity and largeness. Apart from his big, gloomy landscapes, _Léonce Chabry_ has also painted sea-pieces, with dark waves dashing against the cleft rocks. [Illustration: VAN MARCKE. LA FALAISE.] The representation of grazing animals plays a great part in the art of almost all of these painters. Some carried the love of animal painting so far that they never painted a landscape without introducing into the foreground their dearly loved herds of cows or flocks of sheep. The key of the landscape, the cheerful and sunny brilliancy of colour or the still melancholy of the evening dusk, is harmoniously repeated in the habits and being of these animals. Thus, too, new paths were opened to animal painting, which had suffered, no less than landscape, from the yoke of conventionality.