Encouraged by the success of his first essay, Scheffer continued to paint a series of small pictures, representing simple and affecting scenes from common life, some of which are familiar to all.  “The Soldier’s Widow,” “The Conscript’s Return,” “The Orphans at their Mother’s Tomb,” “The Sister of Charity,” “The Fishermen before a Storm,” “The Burning of the Farm,” and “The Scene of the Invasion in 1814,” are titles which give an idea of the range of his subjects and the tenor of his thoughts at this time.  The French have long excelled in the art of composition.  It is this quality which gives the greatest value to the works of Le Sueur and Poussin.  Scheffer possessed this power in a remarkable degree, but it was united to a directness and truth of feeling which made his art the perfection of natural expression.  A very charming little engraving, entitled “The Lost Children,” which appeared in “The Token” for 1830, is probably from a picture of this period.  A little boy and girl are lost in a wood.  Wearied with their fruitless attempts to find a path, the boy has at length sunk down upon a log and buried his face in his hands; while the little girl, still patient, still hopeful, stands, with folded hands, looking earnestly into the wood, with a sweet, sad look of anxiety, but not of despair.  The contrast in the expression of the two figures is very touching and very true to Nature;—­the boy was hopeful so long as his own exertions offered a chance of escape, but the courage of the girl appears when earthly hope is most dim and faint.  The sweet unconsciousness of this early picture has hardly been surpassed by any subsequent work.  “Naturalness and the charm of composition,” says a French critic, “are the secrets of Scheffer’s success in these early pictures, to which may be added a third,—­the distinction of the type of his faces, and especially of his female heads,—­a kind of suave and melancholy ideal, which gave so new a stamp to his works.”

These small pictures were very successful in winning popular favor; but this success, far from intoxicating the young artist, only opened his eyes to his own faults.  He applied himself diligently to repairing the deficiencies which he recognized in his work, by severe studies and labors.  He knew the danger of working too long on small-sized pictures, in which faults may be so easily hidden.  About the year 1826 he turned resolutely from his “pretty jewels,” as he called them, and commenced his “Femmes Suliotes,” on a large canvas, with figures the size of life.  M. Vitet describes the appearance of the canvas when Scheffer had already spent eight days “in the fire of his first thought.”  It seemed to him rather like a vision than a picture, as he saw the dim outlines of those heroic women, who cast themselves from the rock to escape slavery by death.  He confesses that the finished picture never moved him as did the sketch.  Three years earlier Scheffer had sent to the Saloon of 1824, in