IV
But quite aside from the group of poetic painters which stamped its
impress so deeply upon the romantic movement at the outset, that to this
day it is Delacroix and Millet, Decamps and Corot whom we think of when
we think of the movement itself, the classic tradition was preserved all
through the period of greatest stress and least conformity by painters
of great distinction, who, working under the romantic inspiration and
more or less according to what may be called romantic methods,
nevertheless possessed the classic temperament in so eminent a degree
that to us their work seems hardly less academic than that of the
Revolution and the Empire. Not only Ingres, but Delaroche and Ary
Scheffer, painted beside Gericault and Delacroix. Ary Scheffer was an
eloquent partisan of romanticism, yet his "Dante and Beatrice" and his
"Temptation of Christ" are admirable only from the academic point of
view. Delaroche's "Hemicycle" and his many historical tableaux are
surely in the classic vein, however free they may seem in subject and
treatment by contrast with the works of David and Ingres.
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