Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/608

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578 Painting the same as that of Desportes, became in his turn the his- torian of the hunts of Louis XV. His works, which are very numerous in the Louvre — Hunts of stags, wolves, boars, pheasants and partridges — show that he had neither the invention nor the movement of Snyders, nor the exquisite skill and touch of Fyt or Weenix. Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin (1699 — 1779), the rival of Willem Kalf, the painter of kitchens, was a powerful colourist, who emulated the Dutch school in the vigour of his tints, until then unknown in the French school. " Oh, Chardin !" said Diderot, "it is not colours alone that you mix on your palette; it is the very substance of the objects, it is the air and the light with which you paint." Charles Andre, called C&rle, van Loo (1705 — 1765), the younger brother of Jean Baptiste, although the best of the four painters in his family, showed to what a depth of decay an artist, endowed by nature with good qualities, may be led by the bad taste of his age. He attempted history and sacred subjects, and failed utterly. Claude Joseph Yernet (1714—1789), the celebrated marine painter, was born at Avignon. A whole room in the Louvre is devoted to his works, which are ranged on the walls round his bust in marble. These are, in the first place, Views of the principal French Seaports, painted in 1754 to 1765, by order of Louis XV. ; an ungrateful task, which would have required a mind inexhaustible in its resources. Then, a large number of Marine Pieces properly so called, in which he has represented the sea in all its aspects, in the south and the north, in the morning and in the evening, with the sun and the moon, in rain and in fine weather, in calm and tempest, but they do not possess the intoxicating poetry of Claude. He may be