of Louis Quinze art. It
is simple and natural, and entirely free from the besetting sins of so
slight a picture triviality, affectation, empty prettiness, or simply
silliness. In its way it is perfect, and for that perfection is for ever
reserved the popularity which we find temporarily accorded to pictures
like Frith's _Dolly Varden_ or Millais' _Bubbles_.

Another of the Hertford House examples, the portrait of a Boy as
Pierrot, is equally entitled to be popular for all time, and like
Reynolds's _Strawberry Girl_, might well be called "one of the
half-dozen original things" which no artist ever exceeded in his life's
work. A comparison between the two pictures, which were probably painted
within a few years of each other, will serve to show the difference
between the English and French Schools at this period. On the one
hand--to put it very shortly indeed--we see Fragonard influenced by
Tiepolo, France, and Louis XV.; on the other, Sir Joshua, influenced by
Michelangelo and Raphael, England, and George III.

The mention of JEAN BAPTISTE SIMEON CHARDIN among this brilliant and
frivolous galaxy seems almost out of place. "He is not so much an
eighteenth-century French artist," Lady Dilke says of him, "as a French
artist of pure race and type. Though he treated subjects of the
humblest and most unpretentious class, he brought to their rendering not
only deep feeling and a penetration which divined the innermost truths
of the simplest forms of life, but a perfection of workmanship by which
everything he handled was clothed with beauty." That the Wallace
Collection includes no work from his hand is perhaps regrettable, but
truly Chardin was someone apart from all the magnificence that dazzles
us there. His was the treasure of the humble.

The effects of the Revolution upon French painting were as surprising as
they were great. That the gay and frivolous art of Boucher and Fragonard
should have suddenly ceased might have been considered inevitable; but
whereas in Holland, when the Spanish yoke had been thrown off, and a
Republic proclaimed, a vigorous democratic school arose under Frans
Hals; and in England during the Commonwealth the artistic influence
which was beginning to be spread by Charles I. and Buckingham utterly
ceased; in France an artistic Dictator arose, as we may well call him,
in the person of JACQUES LOUIS DAVID, who not only made painting a part
of the revolutionary propaganda, but succeeded under the Emp