, whose dreams of rose and blue were the delight of
his age, came away from Rome saying: "Raphael is a woman, Michael Angelo
is a monster; one is paradise, the other is hell; they are painters of
another world; it is a dead language that nobody speaks in our day. We
others are the painters of our own age: we have not common sense, but we
are charming." This account of them was not untrue. They filled up the
space between the grandiose pomp of Le Brun and the sombre
pseudo-antique of David, just as the incomparable grace and sparkle of
Voltaire's lighter verse filled up the space in literature between
Racine and Chenier. They have a poetry of their own; they are cheerful,
sportive, full of fancy, and like everything else of that day, intensely
sociable. They are, at any rate, even the most sportive of them, far
less unwholesome and degrading than the acres of martyrdoms,
emaciations, bad crucifixions, bad pietas, that make some galleries more
disgusting than a lazar-house.[30]

[30] "Si tous les tableaux de martyrs que nos grands peintres ont si
sublimement peints, passaient a une posterite reculee, pour qui nous
prendrait-elle? Pour des betes feroces ou des
anthropophages."--Diderot's _Pensees sur la Peinture_.

For Watteau himself, the deity of the century, Diderot cared very
little. "I would give ten Watteaus," he said, "for one Teniers." This
was as much to be expected, as it was characteristic in Lewis XIV., when
some of Teniers's pictures were submitted to him, imperiously to command
"_ces magots la_" to be taken out of his sight.

Greuze (_b. 1725, d. 1805_) of all the painters of the time was
Diderot's chief favourite. Diderot was not at all blind to Greuze's
faults, to his repetitions, his frequent want of size and amplitude, the
excess of gray and of violet in his colouring. But all these were
forgotten in transports of sympathy for the sentiment. As we glance at a
list of Greuze's subjects, we perceive that we are in the very heart of
the region of the domestic, the moral, "_l'honnete_," the homely pathos
of the common people. The Death of a father of a family, regretted by
his children; The Death of an unnatural father, abandoned by his
children; The beloved mother caressed by her little ones; A child
weeping over its dead bird; A Paralytic tended by his family, or the
Fruit of a Good Education:--Diderot was ravished by such themes. The
last picture he describes as a proof that compositions