e love-making, scenes from the opera, fetes, balls, and the
like. All his characters played at life in parks and groves that never
grew, and most of his color was beautifully unreal; but for all that
the work was original, decorative, and charming. Moreover, Watteau was
a brushman, and introduced not only a new spirit and new subject into
art, but a new method. The epic treatment of the Italians was laid
aside in favor of a genre treatment, and instead of line and flat
surface Watteau introduced color and cleverly laid pigment. He was a
brilliant painter; not a great man in thought or imagination, but one
of fancy, delicacy, and skill. Unfortunately he set a bad example by
his gay subjects, and those who came after him carried his gayety and
lightness of spirit into exaggeration. Watteau's best pupils were
Lancret (1690-1743) and Pater (1695-1736), who painted in his style
with fair results.

After these men came Van Loo (1705-1765) and Boucher (1703-1770), who
turned Watteau's charming fetes, showing the costumes and manners of
the Regency, into flippant extravagance. Not only was the moral tone
and intellectual stamina of their art far below that of Watteau, but
their workmanship grew defective. Both men possessed a remarkable
facility of the hand and a keen decorative color-sense; but after a
time both became stereotyped and mannered. Drawing and modelling were
neglected, light was wholly conventional, and landscape turned into a
piece of embroidered background with a Dresden china-tapestry effect
about it. As decoration the general effect was often excellent, as a
serious expression of life it was very weak, as an intellectual or
moral force it was worse than worthless. Fragonard (1732-1806)
followed in a similar style, but was a more knowing man, clever in
color, and a much freer and better brushman.

A few painters in the time of Louis XV. remained apparently
unaffected by the court influence, and stand in conspicuous isolation.
Claude Joseph Vernet (1712-1789) was a landscape and marine painter of
some repute in his time. He had a sense of the pictorial, but not a
remarkable sense of the truthful in nature. Chardin (1699-1779) and
Greuze (1725-1805), clung to portrayals of humble life and sought to
popularize the _genre_ subject. Chardin was not appreciated by the
masses. His frank realism, his absolute sincerity of purpose, his play
of light and its effect upon color, and his charming handling of
textures were