From brigands he made a transition to the girls of Sorrento, Frascati, Capri, and Procida, and to shepherd lads, fishers, pilgrims, hermits, and _pifferari_. Early in the twenties, when he made an exhibition of a number of these little pictures in Rome, it effectually prepared the way for his fame; and when he sent a succession of larger pictures to the Paris Salon in 1824-31 he was held as one of the most brilliant masters of the French school, to whom Romanticists and Classicists paid the same honour. In the first of these pictures, painted in 1824, he had represented a number of peasants listening to a Neapolitan fisherman improvising to the accompaniment of a harmonica. "The Return from a Pilgrimage to the Madonna dell' Arco" of 1827 is the painting of a triumphal waggon yoked with oxen. Upon it are seated lads and maidens adorned with foliage, and in their gay Sunday best. An old _lazzarone_ is playing the mandolin, and girls are dancing with tambourines, whilst a young man springs round clattering his castanets, and a couple of boys, to complete the seasons of life, head the procession. His third picture, "The Coming of the Reapers to the Pontine Marshes," was the chief work in the Salon of 1831 after the "Freedom" of Delacroix. Heine accorded him a classical passage of description, and the orthodox academical critics were liberal with most unmerited praise, treating the painter as a dangerous revolutionary who was seducing art into the undignified naturalism of Ribera and Caravaggio. Robert, the honest, lamblike man, who strikes us now as being a conscientious follower of the school of David! [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ LEOPOLD ROBERT.]