t Pierrelay
in 1838, and died in Paris, 1891, carried somewhat the same qualities
to excess. His pictures, though undeniably excellent, are marred by
the dangerous facility which degenerates into mere virtuosity.
Charles Jacque, who was born in 1813, and lived until 1894, was of the
original group living for many years in Barbizon. He was, perhaps, of
less original mind than any of the others, but was gifted with a power
of assimilation which enabled him to form an eclectic style that is
now recognized as his own. His pictures are many in number and varied
in character, though his somewhat stereotyped pictures of sheep, done
in the later years of his life, are best known.

The limits of space render it difficult to make even a summary
enumeration of certain tendencies in figure painting which marked the
years of the growth of this great landscape school. Gustave Courbet
(born at Ornans in 1819, died in Switzerland, 1877), who might be
classed both as a figure and a landscape painter, would demand by
right a longer consideration than can be here given. Of his career as
a champion of realism, as a past master in the peculiarly modern art
of keeping one's self before the public, culminating in his connection
with the Commune in Paris in 1871, and the destruction of the column
in the Place Vendome, there could be much to say. Courbet was, as
a painter, a powerful individuality; of more force, however, as a
painter of the superficial envelope than of the deeper qualities which
nature makes pictorial at the bidding of one of finer fibre. His claim
to be considered modern can be contested, inasmuch as it was only in
subject that his work was novel. In manner of painting he was of a
time long past, of a school of greater masters than he showed himself
to be. With this reserve, however, as a vigorous painter, both of the
figure and landscape, he is interesting; and as one of the first to
look about him and find his subjects in our daily life, his work will
live.

Curiously enough, the revival of the art of another epoch in the case
of Saint Bonvin remained absolutely modern. By nature or by choice
this painter (born at Vaugirard, near Paris, in 1817, and dying at
St. Germain-en-Laye in 1887) is a modern Pieter de Hooghe; and as
the Dutch masters addressed themselves to a painstaking and sincere
representation of the life about them, in like manner Bonvin, bringing
to his work much the same qualities, choosing as his subjects q