had no gifts as an erotic artist. Nowadays,
though he was still short of thirty, these subjects struck him as dating
from an immemorial antiquity. He saw in them the degradation wrought by
Monarchy, the shameful effects of the corruption of Courts. He blamed
himself for having practised so contemptible a style and prostituted his
genius to the vile arts of slavery. Now, citizen of a free people, he
occupied his hand with bold charcoal sketches of Liberties, Rights of
Man, French Constitutions, Republican Virtues, the People as Hercules
felling the Hydra of Tyranny, throwing into each and all his
compositions all the fire of his patriotism. Alas! he could not make a
living by it. The times were hard for artists. No doubt the fault did
not lie with the Convention, which was hurling its armies against the
kings gathered on every frontier, which, proud, unmoved, determined in
the face of the coalesced powers of Europe, false and ruthless to
itself, was rending its own bosom with its own hands, which was setting
up terror as the order of the day, establishing for the punishment of
plotters a pitiless tribunal to whose devouring maw it was soon to
deliver up its own members; but which through it all, with calm and
thoughtful brow, the patroness of science and friend of all things
beautiful, was reforming the calendar, instituting technical schools,
decreeing competitions in painting and sculpture, founding prizes to
encourage artists, organizing annual exhibitions, opening the Museum of
the Louvre, and, on the model of Athens and Rome, endowing with a
stately sublimity the celebration of National festivals and public
obsequies. But French Art, once so widely appreciated in England, and
Germany, in Russia, in Poland, now found every outlet to foreign lands
closed. Amateurs of painting, dilettanti of the fine arts, great
noblemen and financiers, were ruined, had emigrated or were in hiding.
The men the Revolution had enriched, peasants who had bought up National
properties, speculators, army-contractors, gamesters of the
Palais-Royal, durst not at present show their wealth, and did not care a
fig for pictures, either. It needed Regnault's fame or the youthful
Gerard's cleverness to sell a canvas. Greuze, Fragonard, Houin were
reduced to indigence. Prud'hon could barely earn bread for his wife and
children by drawing subjects which Copia reproduced in stippled
engravings. The patriot painters Hennequin, Wicar, Topino-Lebrun were