undoubtedly inferior to Claude Lorraine in producing bold and luminous
effects, he was quite equal to that great painter in rendering the
effects of vapor, and superior to him in the invention of scenes, in
designing figures, and in the variety of his incidents."

At a later period, Diderot compared his favorite painter to the Jupiter
of Lucian, who, tired of listening to the lamentable cries of mankind,
rose from table and exclaimed: 'Let it hail in Thrace!' and the trees
were immediately stripped of their leaves, the heaviest cut to pieces,
and the thatch of the houses scattered before the wind: then he said,
"Let the plague fall on Asia!" and the doors of the houses were
immediately closed, the streets were deserted, and men shunned one
another; and again he exclaimed: 'Let a volcano appear here!' and the
earth immediately shook, the buildings were thrown down, the animals
were terrified, and the inhabitants fled into the surrounding country;
and on his crying out: 'Let this place be visited with a death!' the old
husbandman died of want at his door. Jupiter calls that governing the
world, but he was wrong. Vernet calls it painting pictures, and he is
right.

It was with reference to the twenty-five paintings exhibited by Vernet,
in 1765, that Diderot penned the foregoing lines, which formed the
peroration to an eloquent and lengthy eulogium, such as it rarely falls
to a painter to be the subject of. Among other things, the great critic
there says: "There is hardly a single one of his compositions which any
painter would have taken not less than two years to execute, however
well he might have employed his time. What incredible effects of light
do we not behold in them! What magnificent skies! what water! what
ordonnance! what prodigious variety in the scenes! Here, we see a child
borne off on the shoulders of his father, after having been saved from a
watery grave; while there, lies a woman dead upon the beach, with her
forlorn and widowed husband weeping at her side. The sea roars, the wind
bowls, the thunder fills the air with its peals, and the pale and
sombre glimmers of the lightning that shoots incessantly through the
sky, illuminate and hide the scene in turn. It appears as if you heard
the sides of the ship crack, so natural does it look with its broken
masts and lacerated sails; the persons on deck are stretching their
hands toward heaven, while others have thrown themselves into the sea.
The latter are