In evaluating the work of Rubens, British critical theorists from Reynolds to Ruskin were forced to respond in some way to an established Continental model; this model privileged drawing ( disegno), as represented by the intellectual Nicolas Poussin, over colour ( colore), as represented by the more purely sensual Rubens. Sir Joshua Reynolds restructured these two modes of expression as the 'grand' and 'ornamental', these being represented by the mutually exclusive aims of the painters of the Roman and Venetian schools. However, he also invented a third category, the 'characteristic', to allow for strongly individualistic artists, which for him surprisingly included both Poussin and Rubens. The various comments made on Rubens in Reynolds' Discourses tend to reveal a compromise between the existing conventional categories and a freer interpretation of them. Reynolds seemed caught between the desire to value the achievement of Rubens and the fear of recommending it too highly to others. Certainly, he revealed his admiration for Rubens more easily through his painting than his theory. (For a more detailed explanation of Reynolds' position, see the editor's introduction to Reynolds, Discourses.) The appointment of Henri Fuseli as Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy in 1799 marked a broad change of sensibility from the Neo-Classicism of Reynolds to Romanticism. However, in his Lectures on Painting (1801), he showed agreement with Reynolds in his assessment of Rubens. In the ninth lecture, Fuseli seemed to revive the position forwarded by Reynolds in his fifth discourse, in synthesising the distinction of drawing/colour (here characterised by Michelangelo/Rubens) with the notion of the highly individual 'characteristic' artist. Then, in 1803, Fuseli delivered 'The Art of the Moderns', a lecture which showed him more able and willing than Reynolds to mark his independence from academic theory. He jettisoned Poussin from the canon and presented Rubens as a 'meteor of art' in the same tradition as, and heir to, Michelangelo. (For a more detailed examination of Fuseli's views, see Carasso, 'A New Image: German and French Thought on Dutch Art, 1775-1860'.) Like Fuseli, the critic William Hazlitt adopted a Romantic position, placing more importance on the role of genius and imagination than on rules and theories. Thus he admired Reynolds' pictures but not his writings, and was better placed than Fuseli to attack them. He did so in a series of essays on the Discourses, published in 1814-15 in the radical Champion. In 'On Genius and Originality', Hazlitt seemed definitively to reject the distinction between drawing (here represented by Claude rather than Poussin) and colour (Rubens). He gave artists, and by extension critics, the freedom to 'consult their own taste and inclinations', so privileging and equating the natural world and human nature. However, while Hazlitt demonstrated that he valued the individualism of Rubens, he did fall back on Reynolds' framework during other discussions of the Flemish artist. For instance, in a passage in 'On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin' (published in Table Talk in 1821) he failed to sustain a rhetoric of Romantic rebellion, not only reviving the contrast between 'prodigies of colour' and 'gracefulness of design', but returning them to the hierarchical relationship they held in academic theory. With the development of Art History as an academic discipline, the vitality of Rubens came to be considered more definitively as a virtue, and was codified as such in public collections and publications. An important contribution to such codification in Britain was made by the German art historian, Gustav Friedrich Waagen. This occurred in 1840 when his monograph of 1833 was translated into English by Mrs Jameson as the Life and Genius of Rubens. It suggests that if Rembrandt, a fellow colourist, was the painter of darkness, Rubens was the painter of light; and though Rembrandt was the leading painter of the Dutch School, Rubens headed the Low Countries as a whole. His praise of Rubens as a painter of nature led Waagen to invert the established association of Rubens and Poussin. As a consequence, Rubens was extensively represented (by thirty-four works) in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 which Waagen curated with Charles Eastlake. The emphasis that Ruskin placed upon Rubens as an old master independent of other Dutch and Flemish painters suggests an echo of the established theoretical tradition. Some of Ruskin's more negative comments about Rubens also touch upon that tradition, as when he yoked Rubens to Reynolds in specifying painters who have failed to do everything thoroughly ( MP I:82). Looking back at this period of writing, from the distance of Praeterita, he would again yoke the practices of these painters, writing 'I was disappointed, and saw for the first time clearly, that my father's joy in Rubens and Sir Joshua could never become sentient of Turner's microscopic touch' ( Works, 35.269). It seems that the jettisoning of Rubens would help him to establish a (modern) taste independent not only of Reynolds but of John James Ruskin, both the father of a tradition and his own physical parent. The figure of Rubens would signify in a similarly negative fashion when he wished to mark his independence from the contemporary artistic establishment represented by Eastlake and Waagen.