_Diaz_ (French: 1809-1876).
Narciso Virgilio Diaz de la Peña, one of the members of "the
Barbizon School" (see p. 698), was born, of Spanish extraction,
at Bordeaux. Left an orphan at the age of ten, he was adopted
by a Protestant clergyman, living at Bellevue, near Sèvres.
He was of a truant disposition, and sleeping once upon the
grass in the woods he was bitten by a viper; the accident
cost him his left leg, and he had to go through life with
a wooden one, which he called his _pilon_. In after years,
when his pictures were rejected at the Salon, he would make a
hole in the canvas with his wooden leg, saying with a laugh
"what's the use of being rich? I can't have my _pilon_ set in
diamonds." His early years were of uncertain fortune, spent in
earning a precarious living, sometimes as a painter on china
at Sèvres, sometimes as an errand-boy in the streets. But he
had confidence in his talent, and gradually found a market for
his pictures. These were at first of figures, flowers, or other
_genre_. A meeting in 1830 with Théodore Rousseau sent him to
Fontainebleau and nature. For Rousseau, he entertained the most
profound admiration, the story of "the toast of Diaz," is well
known. Diaz had been preferred to Rousseau in admission to the
Legion of Honour. In attending a dinner given in 1851 to the
new _officiers_, Diaz rose and invited the company to drink "À
Rousseau, notre maître oublié!" Of his figure-subjects, one of
the best "La Fée aux Perles" is in the Louvre, but it is on his
landscapes that his fame chiefly rests. "Go into the forest,"
it has been said, "lose yourself among its trees, and you can
only say 'À Diaz'." To him, however, the forest was not, as
to some others of the school, or as to Ruysdael, sombre or
serious. It was a keyboard on which to play colour-fantasies.
"You paint stinging-nettles," he said to Millet, "I prefer
roses." "Pearls," said Théophile Gautier of his pictures,
"brilliant as precious stones, prismatic gems and rainbow
jewels." His pictures have been called not so much landscapes,
as "tree-scapes." "Have you seen my last stem?" he used to say
himself to his visitors. But it was the play of sunlight on
the stems that he chiefly loved. Diaz is the colourist of the
Barbizon School.
The acquisition of this sparkling little picture of a glade in the
forest of Fontainebleau, lit by the afternoon sun, marked somewhat
of an era in the history of the National Gallery. It was the first
illustration on its walls of the modern French school of landscape.