Hitherto, women had certainly banished themselves into the domain of portrait or still-life painting, that is to say, they had done little that was not sheer copying. But, little by little, under the influence of the lesser Dutch masters, who had been passionately appreciated since the close of the previous reign, and thanks to the opening of the Royal Collections at the Luxembourg Palace, where they could be studied and copied, the women-painters, following the example of the masters who gained inspiration therefrom, began to devote themselves to landscape and to _genre_. They sought out little touching subjects, which very frequently bordered on the ridiculous. For example, "the child's bed catches fire through the carelessness of the nurse who has fallen asleep, and the dog attempts to waken her." Mlle. Lescot cut herself adrift from all these insipidities. The opportunity came for her to spend several years in Rome. She was struck by the popular customs of the country, by its colour and that singular and picturesque charm which Granet had been the first to discover--the charm which, after her own time, was to be made further known by the paintings of the well-known Léopold Robert. As a matter of fact, she was practically the creator of the type of exotic subjects borrowed from Italy, to which numerous artists in France devoted themselves--Hébert, Bonnat and Jules Lefebvre, to name but a few of the most important of them. In choosing her _motifs_ she displayed wit and inventiveness, and at times a delicate grace, notably in her first pictures, before the desire to satisfy a daily increasing connection had driven her into unduly hurried work. Her technique, too, was brisk, yet careful, as it should be in small works such as hers. Her lightly-touched lithographs, together with those which she did "after" her own pictures, contributed to popularise her special subjects and her name. The novelty of these paintings, devoted to the cult of "local colour," caused them to be adopted as "romantic." It was the same with Schnetz and Léopold Robert, who shared the popularity. But the real "Young romantic" among artists was Mlle. de Fauveau. What one discovers with regard to her is that she is not a painter but a sculptor. The Royal Academy of the 17th century had already boasted certain wood carvings by _la demoiselle_ Massé. Also, there was Mme. Falconet. But the great and austere art was cultivated only as a rare exception by woman. Mlle. Félicie de Fauveau was the first pre-Raphaelite, although the return to the primitive Italian masters of the 16th century dates further back, but with cropped head under a velvet toque, after the style of Raphael himself, she unceasingly uttered curses against that noble personality, whose brush produced the highest incarnation of the art of painting.