HWttNHMÜ 
°° ART EDÜCATJON. 
also the drawing-schools, or, raore generally speaking, instruction 
in art, by means of which a direct influence can be brought to bear 
upon the productions of art and of art industry. In England and 
in Austria, these means for the reform of taste are in successful 
Operation. In France, museums and eollections have, of course, 
been in existence all along, but they were only called to mind again, 
as a means of art-industrial education, by the Opposition which 
used them as a basis of operations in its warfare against inherited 
French traditions in matters of art. The energetic efforts lately 
made in France to exert a purifying influence upon the education 
of taste, by instruction in drawing, cannot be mistaken. But little 
value was formerly attached in the French drawing-schools to the 
cultivation or the perfection of any definite tendency in style. 
The celebrated national art of the French was brilliant only in 
technical dexteritj', in the facility of imitation, in exterioj' qualities, 
in all of which it Stands unsurpassed, even to-day. Henceforth, 
however, the position of their industry will depend upon the measure 
of success with which they may apply their technical skill to 
scientific and purely artistic efforts. Undoubtedly the competition 
at the Exhibition of 1873 has again exercised a far-reaching 
influence upon France. 
The fact that the external qualities — the easy and the graceful 
on the one hand, the pompous and the theatrical on the other 
sliould have principally developed themselves in the art of France, 
while deeper feeling and psychical qualities are wanting, will find 
its explanation in the history of French art itself. Instead of 
having its sourees in the poetical necessities of the peoplc, it was 
trained by the courts in the Service of luxury. It i3 characteristic, 
that, even in the period of the Renaissance, only thoso clcments of 
the Renaissance style found entrance through the South of France, 
which, in the shape of Ornament, were nothing but the wanton out- 
growth of the noble forms of that brilliant epoch. 
The enthusiasm for the grand Creations of grave art found no 
reflection in France. The graceful and elegant decorative cle- 
ments alone were accepted; and these, being without a firm 
basis, soon grew shallow and degenerated. Fontainebleau may be 
said to mark the beginning of specific peculiarities in French art, 
which afterwards, during the period of the Buroque style, devel-