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In Feance. 575 Paris, he became a very popular artist, and was much employed in painting royal palaces. He treated history in a theatrical manner, and clothed the ancient Greeks in silk breeches. 2. In the Eighteenth Century. Antoine Watteau (1684 — 1721), the son of a poor thatcher of Valenciennes, was placed with an obscure artist, in his native city, and for a long time painted pictures of & Nicholas for three francs a week and his soup. In 1702, he went to Paris — where the scene- painter, Claude Gillot, introduced him to the green-room of the opera — and there he founded a school of painting. In the hands of his plagiarists, Van Loo, Pater, Lancret, Boucher, and a long train of their followers, art was more and more degraded and dishonoured in ridiculous and licentious paintings of sheepfolds decorated with satin ribbons ; and pictures were merely used as ornaments for boudoirs. Watteau attempted only very small genre subjects ; but he has imparted such elevation and grandeur to them that he will always be considered far above a mere decorator. In the works of this painter of Fetes Galantes, besides the exquisite colouring taken from Rubens, we shall always have to admire his invention, fun, wit and even propriety ; for we feel that he was, as his biographer Gersaint says, a " libertine in mind, though of good morality." Nicolas Lancret (1690 — 1743), a painter of Fetes Galantes, who was born in Paris, took Watteau as his model, and became an ignoble disciple of that master, though in his own time his works were very popular. In the National Gallery is a series of four of his best