In a review of Lord Lindsay's 'History of Christian Art' (1847) Ruskin identified modern French painters as sensualists who lacked awareness of colour:
Lord Lindsay says... that the most sensual as well as the most religious painters have always loved the brightest colours. Not so; no painters ever were more sensual than the modern French, who are alike insensible to, and incapable of colour - depending altogether on morbid gradation, waxy smoothness of surface, and lusciousness of line, the real elements of sensuality wherever it eminently exists. ( Works, 12.211)