CHAPTER XXV

LANDSCAPE FROM 1830

That same Salon of 1822 in which Delacroix exhibited his "Dante's Bark"

brought to Frenchmen a knowledge of the powerful movement which had

taken place on the opposite side of the Channel. English water-colour

painting was brilliantly represented by Bonington, who sent his "View of

Lillebonne" and his "View of Havre." Copley Fielding, Robson, and John

Varley also contributed works; and these easy, spirited productions,

with their skies washed in broadly and their bright, clear tones, were

like a revelation to the young French artists of the period. The horizon

was felt to be growing clear. In 1824, at the time when Delacroix's

"Massacre of Chios" appeared, the sun actually rose, bringing a flood of

light. The English had learnt the way to France, and took the Louvre by

storm. John Constable was represented by three pictures, and Bonington,

Copley Fielding, Harding, Samuel Prout, and Varley were also accorded a

place. This exhibition gave the deathblow to Classical landscape

painting. Michallon had died young in 1822; and men like Bidault and

Watelet could do nothing against such a battalion of colourists.

Constable alone passed sentence upon them of eternal condemnation.

Familiar neither with Georges Michel nor with the great Dutch painters,

the French had not remarked that a landscape has need of a sky

expressive of the spirit of the hour and the character of the season.

Even what was done by Michel seemed a kind of diffident calligraphy when

set beside the fresh strand-pieces of Bonington, the creations of the

water-colour artists, bathed as they were in light, and the bold

pictures of the Bergholt master, with their bright green and their

cloudy horizon. The French landscape painters, who had been so timid

until then, recognised that their painting had been a convention,

despite all their striving after truth to nature.

Constable had been the first to free himself from every stereotyped

rule, and he was an influence in France. The younger generation were in

ecstasies over this intense green, the agitated clouds, this

effervescent power inspiring everything with life. Though as yet but

little esteemed even in England, Constable received the gold medal in

Paris, and from that time took a fancy to Parisian exhibitions, and

still in 1827 exhibited in the Louvre by the side of Bonington, who had

but one year more in which to give admirable lessons by his bright

plains and clear shining skies. At the same time Bonington's friend and

compatriot, William Reynolds, then likewise domiciled in Paris,

contributed some of his powerful and often delicate landscape studies,

the tender grey notes of which are like anticipations of Corot. This

influence of the English upon the creators of _paysage intime_ has long

been an acknowledged fact, since Delacroix himself, in his article

"Questions sur le Beau" in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ in 1854, has

affirmed it frankly.

The very next years announced what a ferment Constable had stirred in

the more restless spirits. The period from 1827 to 1830 showed the

birth-throes of French landscape painting. In 1831 it was born. In this

year, for ever marked in the annals of French, and indeed of European

art, there appeared together in the Salon, for the first time, all those

young artists who are now honoured as the greatest in the century: all,

or almost all, were children of Paris, the sons of small townsmen or of

humble artisans; all were born in the old quarter of the city or in its

suburbs, in the midst of a desolate wilderness of houses, and destined

for that very reason to be great landscape painters. For it is not

through chance that _paysage intime_ immediately passed from London, the

city of smoke, to Paris, the second great modern capital, and reached

Germany from thence only at a much later time.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

THÉODORE ROUSSEAU.]

"Do you remember the time," asks Bürger-Thoré of Théodore Rousseau in

the dedicatory letter to his _Salon_ of 1844,--"do you still recall the

years when we sat on the window-ledges of our attics in the Rue de

Taitbout, and let our feet dangle at the edge of the roof, contemplating

the chaos of houses and chimneys, which you with a twinkle in your eye

compared to mountains, trees, and outlines of the earth? You were not

able to go to the Alps, into the cheerful country, and so you created

picturesque landscapes for yourself out of these horrible skeletons of

wall. Do you still recall the little tree in Rothschild's garden, which

we caught sight of between two roofs? It was the one green thing that we

could see; every fresh shoot of the little poplar wakened our interest

in spring, and in autumn we counted the falling leaves."

From this mood sprang modern landscape painting with its delicate

reserve in subject, and its vigorously heightened love of nature. Up to

the middle of the century nature was too commonplace and ordinary for

the Germans; and it was therefore hard for them to establish a

spiritual relationship with her. Landscape painting recognised its

function in appealing to the understanding by the execution of points of

geographical interest, or exciting a frigid curiosity by brilliant

fireworks. But these children of the city, who with a heartfelt sympathy

counted the budding and falling leaves of a single tree descried from

their little attic window; these dreamers, who in their imagination

constructed beautiful landscapes from the moss-crusted gutters of the

roof and the chimneys and chimney smoke, were sufficiently schooled,

when they came into the country, to feel the breath of the great mother

of all, even where it was but faintly exhaled. Where a man's heart is

full he does not think about geographical information, and no roll of

tom-toms is needed to attract the attention of those whose eyes are

opened. Their spirit was sensitive, and their imagination sufficiently

alert to catch with ecstasy, even from the most delicate and reserved

notes, the harmony of that heavenly concert which nature executes on all

its earthly instruments, at every moment and in all places.

[Illustration: ROUSSEAU. MORNING.]

[Illustration: ROUSSEAU. LANDSCAPE, MORNING EFFECT.]

Thus they had none of them any further need for extensive pilgrimage; to

seek impulse for work they had not far to go. Croissy, Bougival,

Saint-Cloud, and Marly were their Arcadia. Their farthest journeys were

to the banks of the Oise, the woods of L'Isle Adam, Auvergne, Normandy,

and Brittany. But they cared most of all to stay in the forest of

Fontainebleau, which--by one of those curious chances that so often

recur in history--played for a second time a highly important part in

the development of French art. A hundred years before, it was the

brilliant centre of the French Renaissance, the resort of those Italian

artists who found in the palace there a second Vatican, and in Francis I

another Leo X. In the nineteenth century, too, the Renaissance of French

painting was achieved in Fontainebleau, only it had nothing to do with a

school of mannered figure painters, but with a group of the most

delicate landscape artists. From a sense of one's duty to art one

studies in the palace the elegant goddesses of Primaticcio, the laughing

bacchantes of Cellini, and all the golden, festal splendour of the

Cinquecento; but the heart is not touched till one stands outside in the

forest on the soil where Rousseau and Corot and Millet and Diaz painted.

How much may be felt and thought when one saunters of a dreamy evening,

lost in one's own meditations, across the heath of the _plateau de la

Belle Croix_ and through the arching oaks of _Bas Bréau_ to Barbizon,

the Mecca of modern art, where the secrets of _paysage intime_ were

revealed to the Parisian landscape painters by the nymph of

Fontainebleau! There was a time when men built their Gothic cathedrals

soaring into the sky, after the model of the majestic palaces of the

trees. The dim and sacred mist of incense hovered about the lofty

pointed arches, and through painted windows the broken daylight shone,

inspiring awe; the fair picture of a saint beckoned from above the

altar, touched by the gleam of lamps and candles; gilded carvings

glimmered strangely, and overwhelming strains from the fugues of Bach

reverberated in the peal of the organ throughout the consecrated space.

But now the Gothic cathedrals are transformed once more into palaces of

trees. The towering oaks are the buttresses, the tracery of branches the

choir screen, the clouds the incense, the wind sighing through the

boughs the peal of the organ, and the sun the altar-piece. Man is once

more a fire-worshipper, as in his childhood; the church has become the

world, and the world has become the church.

How the spirit soars at the trill of a blackbird beneath the leafy roof

of mighty primæval oaks! One feels as though one had been transplanted

into the Saturnian age, when men lived a joyous, unchequered life in

holy unison with nature. For this park is still primæval, in spite of

all the carriage roads by which it is now traversed, in spite of all the

guides who lounge upon the granite blocks of the hollows of Opremont.

Yellowish-green ferns varying in tint cover the soil like a carpet. The

woods are broken by great wastes of rock. Perhaps there is no spot in

the world where such splendid beeches and huge majestic oaks stretch

their gnarled branches to the sky--in one place spreading forth in

luxuriant glory, and in another scarred by lightning and bitten by the

wintry cold. It is just such scenes of ravage that make the grandest,

the wildest, and the most sombre pictures. The might of the great forces

of nature, striking down the heads of oaks like thistles, is felt

nowhere in the same degree.

Barbizon itself is a small village three miles to the north of

Fontainebleau, and, according to old tradition, founded by robbers who

formerly dwelt in the forest. On both sides of the road connecting it

with the charming little villages of Dammarie and Chailly there stretch

long rows of chestnut, apple, and acacia trees. There are barely a

hundred houses in the place. Most of them are overgrown with wild vine,

shut in by thick hedges of hawthorn, and have a garden in front, where

roses bloom amid cabbages and cauliflowers. At nine o'clock in the

evening all Barbizon is asleep, but before four in the morning it awakes

once more for work in the fields.

[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._

ROUSSEAU. THE VILLAGE OF BECQUIGNY IN PICARDY.]

Historians of after-years will occupy themselves in endeavouring to

discover when the first immigration of Parisian painters to this spot

took place. It is reported that one of David's pupils painted in the

forest of Fontainebleau and lived in Barbizon. The only lodging to be

got at that time was in a barn, which the former tailor of the place, a

man of the name of Ganne, turned into an inn in 1823. Here, after 1830,

Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Brascassat, and many others alighted when they

came to follow their studies in Barbizon from the spring to the autumn.

Of an evening they clambered up to their miserable bedroom, and fastened

to the head of the bed with drawing-pins the studies made in the course

of the day. It was only later that Père Copain, an old peasant, who had

begun life as a shepherd with three francs a month, was struck with the

apt idea of buying in a few acres and building upon them small houses to

let to painters. By this enterprise the man became rich, and gradually

grew to be a capitalist, lending money to all who, in spite of their

standing as celebrated Parisian artists, did not enjoy the blessings of

fortune. But the general place of assembly was still the old barn

employed in Ganne's establishment, and in the course of years its walls

were covered with large charcoal drawings, studies, and pictures. Here,

in a patriarchal, easy-going, homely fashion, artists gathered together

with their wives and children of an evening. Festivities also were held

in the place, in particular that ball when Ganne's daughter, a godchild

of Madame Rousseau, celebrated her wedding. Rousseau and Millet were the

decorators of the room; the entire space of the barn served as

ball-room, the walls being adorned with ivy. Corot, always full of fun

and high spirits, led the polonaise, which moved through a labyrinth of

bottles placed on the floor.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

ROUSSEAU. LA HUTTE.]

They painted in the forest. But they did not take the trouble to carry

the instruments of their art home again. They kept breakfast, canvas,

and brushes in holes in the rocks. Never before, probably, have men so

lost themselves in nature. At every hour of the day, in the cool light

of morning, at sunny noon, in the golden dusk, even in the twilight of

blue moonlight nights, they were out in the field and the forest,

learning to surprise everlasting nature at every moment of her

mysterious life. The forest was their studio, and revealed to them all

its secrets.

[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._

ROUSSEAU. EVENING.]

The result of this life _en plein air_ became at once the same as it had

been with Constable. Earlier artists worked with the conception and the

technique of Waterloo, Ruysdael, and Everdingen, and believed themselves

incapable of doing anything without gnarled, heroic oaks. Even Michel

was hard-bound in the gallery style of the Dutch, and for Decamps

atmosphere was still a thing unknown or non-existent. He placed a harsh

light, opaque as plaster, against a background as black as coal. Even

the colours of Delacroix were merely tones of the palette; he wanted to

create preconceived decorative harmonies, and not simply to interpret

reality. Following the English, the masters of Fontainebleau made the

discovery of air and light. They did not paint the world, like the other

Romanticists, in exuberantly varying hues recalling the old masters:

they saw it _entouré d'air_, and tempered by the tones of the

atmosphere. And since their time the "harmony of light and air with that

of which they are the life and illumination" has become the great

problem of painting. Through this art grew young again, and works of art

received the breathing life, the fresh bloom, and the delicate harmony

which are to be found everywhere in nature itself, and which are only

reached with much difficulty by any artificial method of tuning into

accord. After Constable they were the first who recognised that the

beauty of a landscape does not lie in objects themselves, but in the

lights that are cast upon them. Of course, there is also an

articulation of forms in nature. When Boecklin paints a grove with tall

and solemn trees in the evening, when he forms to himself a vision of

the mysterious haunts of his "Fire-worshippers," there is scarcely any

need of colour. The outline alone is so majestically stern that it makes

man feel his littleness utterly, and summons him to devotional thoughts.

But the subtle essence by which nature appeals either joyously or

sorrowfully to the spirit depends still more on the light or gloom in

which she is bathed; and this mood is not marked by an inquisitive eye:

the introspective gaze, the imagination itself, secretes it in nature.

And here a second point is touched.

[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._

ROUSSEAU. SUNSET.]

The peculiarity of all these masters, who on their first appearance were

often despised as realists or naturalists, consists precisely in this:

they never represented, at least in the works of their later period in

which they thoroughly expressed themselves,--they never represented

actual nature in the manner of photography, but freely painted their own

moods from memory, just as Goethe when he stood in the little house in

the Kikelhahn near Ilmenau, instead of elaborating a prosaic description

of the Kikelhahn, wrote the verses _Ueber allen Wipfeln ist Ruh_. In

this poem of Goethe one does not learn how the summits looked, and there

is no allusion to the play of light, and yet the forest, dimly

illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, is presented clearly to the

inward eye. Any poet before Goethe's time would have made a broad and

epical description, and produced a picture by the addition of details;

but here the very music of the words creates a picture of rest and

quietude. The works of the Fontainebleau artists are Goethe-like poems

of nature in pigments. They are as far removed from the æsthetic

aridness of the older landscape of composition, pieced together from

studies, as from the flat, prosaic fidelity to nature of that "entirely

null and void, spuriously realistic painting of the so-called guardians

of woods and waters." They were neither concerned to master nature and

compose a picture from her according to conventional rules, nor

pedantically to draw the portrait of any given region. They did not

think of topographical accuracy, or of preparing a map of their country.

A landscape was not for them a piece of scenery, but a condition of

soul. They represent the victory of lyricism over dry though inflated

prose. Impressed by some vision of nature, they warm to their work and

produce pictures that could not have been anticipated. And thus they

fathomed art to its profoundest depths. Their works were fragrant poems

sprung from moods of spirit which had risen in them during a walk in the

forest. Perhaps only Titian, Rubens, and Watteau had previously looked

upon nature with the same eyes. And as in the case of these artists, so

also in that of the Fontainebleau painters, it was necessary that a

genuine realistic art, a long period of the most intimate study of

nature, should have to be gone through before they reached this height.

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

ROUSSEAU. THE LAKE AMONG THE ROCKS AT BARBIZON.]

[Illustration: _L'Art._

ROUSSEAU. A POND, FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU.]

In the presence of nature one saturates one's self with truth; and after

returning to the studio one squeezes the sponge, as Jules Dupré

expressed it. Only after they had satiated themselves with the knowledge

of truth, only after nature with all her individual phenomena had been

interwoven with their inmost being, could they, without effort, and

without the purpose of representing determined objects, paint from

personal sentiment, and give expression to their humour, in the mere

gratification of impulse. Thence comes their wide difference from each

other. Painters who work according to fixed rules resemble one another,

and those who aim at a distinct copy of nature resemble one another no

less. But each one of the Fontainebleau painters, according to his

character and his mood for the time being, received different

impressions from the same spot in nature, and at the same moment of

time. Each found a landscape and a moment which appealed to his

sentiment more perceptibly than any other. One delighted in spring and

dewy morning, another in a cold, clear day, another in the threatening

majesty of storm, another in the sparkling effects of sportive sunbeams,

and another in evening after sundown, when colours have faded and forms

are dim. Each one obeyed his peculiar temperament, and adapted his

technique to the altogether personal expression of his way of seeing

and feeling. Each one is entirely himself, each one an original mind,

each picture a spiritual revelation, and often one of touching

simplicity and greatness: _homo additus naturæ_. And having dedicated

themselves, more than all their predecessors, to personality creating in

and for itself, they have become the founders of the new creed in art.

That strong and firmly rooted master _Théodore Rousseau_ was the epic

poet, the plastic artist of the Pleïades. "_Le chêne des roches_" was

one of his masterpieces, and he stands himself amid the art of his time

like an oak embedded in rocks. His father was a tailor who lived in the

Rue Neuve-Saint Eustache, Nr. 4 _au quatrième_. As a boy he is said to

have specially devoted himself to mathematics, and to have aimed at

becoming a student at the Polytechnic Institute. Thus the dangerous,

doctrinaire tendency, which beset him in his last years, of making art

more of a science than is really practicable, and of referring

everything to some law, lay even in his boyish tastes. He grew up in the

studio of the Classicist Lethière, and looked on whilst the latter

painted both his large Louvre pictures, "The Death of Brutus" and "The

Death of Virginia." He even thought himself of competing for the _Prix

de Rome_. But the composition of his "historical landscape" was not a

success. Then he took his paint-boxes, left Lethière's studio, and

wandered over to Montmartre. Even his first little picture, "The

Telegraph Tower" of 1826, announced the aim which he was tentatively

endeavouring to reach.

[Illustration: _L'Art._ CAMILLE COROT.]

At the very time when Watelet's metallic waterfalls and zinc trees were

being drawn up in line, when the pupils of Bertin hunted the Calydonian

boar, or drowned Zenobia in the waves of the Araxes, Rousseau, set free

from the ambition of winning the _Prix de Rome_, was painting humble

plains within the precincts of Paris, with little brooks in the

neighbourhood which had nothing that deserved the name of waves.

His first excursion to Fontainebleau occurred in the year 1833, and in

1834 he painted his first masterpiece, the "Côtés de Grandville," that

picture, replete with deep and powerful feeling for nature, which seems

the great triumphant title-page of all his work. A firm resolve to

accept reality as it is, and a remarkable eye for the local character of

landscape and for the structure and anatomy of the earth--all qualities

revealing the Rousseau of later years--were here to be seen in their

full impressiveness and straightforward actuality. He received for this

work a medal of the third class. At the same time his works were

excluded from making any further appearance in the Salon for many years

to come. Concession might be made to a beginner; but the master seemed

dangerous to the academicians. Two pictures, "Cows descending in the

Upper Jura" and "The Chestnut Avenue," which he had destined for the

Salon of 1835, were rejected by the hanging committee, and during twelve

years his works met with a similar fate, although the leading critical

intellects of Paris, Thoré, Gustave Planché, and Théophile Gautier,

broke their lances in his behalf. Amongst the rejected of the present

century, Théodore Rousseau is probably the most famous. At that period

he was selling his pictures for five and ten louis-d'or. It was only

after the February Revolution of 1848, when the Academic Committee had

fallen with the _bourgeois_ king, that the doors of the Salon were

opened to him again, and in the meanwhile his pictures had made their

way quietly and by their unassisted merit. In the sequestered solitude

of Barbizon he had matured into an artistic individuality of the highest

calibre, and become a painter to whom the history of art must accord a

place by the side of Ruysdael, Hobbema, and Constable.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

COROT. THE BRIDGE OF ST. ANGELO, ROME.]

He painted everything in Barbizon--the plains and the hills, the river

and the forest, all the seasons of the year and all the hours of the

day. The succession of his moods is as inexhaustible as boundless nature

herself. Skies gilded by the setting sun, phases of dewy morning, plains

basking in light, woods in the russet-yellow foliage of autumn: these

are the subjects of Théodore Rousseau--an endless procession of poetic

effects, expressed at first by the mere instinct of emotion and later

with a mathematical precision which is often a little strained, though

always irresistibly forcible. Marvellous are his autumn landscapes with

their ruddy foliage of beech; majestic are those pictures in which he

expressed the profound sentiment of solitude as it passes over you in

the inviolate tangle of the forest, inviting the spirit to commune with

itself; but especially characteristic of Rousseau are those plains with

huge isolated trees, over which the mere light of common day rests

almost coldly and dispassionately.

[Illustration: COROT AT WORK.]

It is an artistic or psychological anomaly that in this romantic

generation a man could be born in whom there was nothing of the

Romanticist. Théodore Rousseau was an experimentalist, a great worker, a

restless and seeking spirit, ever tormented and unsatisfied with itself,

a nature wholly without sentimentality and impassionless, the very

opposite of his predecessor Huet. Huet made nature the mirror of the

passions, the melancholy and the tragic suffering which agitate the

human spirit with their rage. Whilst he celebrated the irresistible

powers and blind forces, the elemental genii which rule the skies and

the waters, he wanted to waken an impression of terror and desolation in

the spirit of the beholder. He piled together masses of rock, lent

dramatic passion to the clouds, and revelled with delight in the

sharpest contrasts. Rousseau's pervasive characteristic is absolute

plainness and actuality. Such a simplicity of shadow had never existed

before. Since the Renaissance artists had systematically heightened the

intensity of shadows for the sake of effect; Rousseau relied on the true

and simple doctrine that may be formulated in the phrase: the more light

there is the fainter and more transparent are the shadows, not the

darker, as Decamps and Huet painted them. Or, to speak more generally,

in nature the intensity of shadows stands in an inverse relation to the

intensity of the light.

[Illustration: COROT. DAPHNIS AND CHLOE.]

Rousseau does not force on the spectator any preconceived mood of his

own, but leaves him before a picture with all the freedom and capacity

for personal feeling which he would have received from the spectacle of

nature herself. The painter does not address him directly, but lets

nature have free play, just as a medium merely acts as the vehicle of a

spirit. So personal in execution and so absolutely impersonal in

conception are Rousseau's pictures. Huet translated his moods by the

assistance of nature; Rousseau is an incomparable witness, confining

himself strictly to the event, and giving his report of it in brief,

virile speech, in clear-cut style. Huet puts one out of humour, because

it is his own humour which he is determined to force. Rousseau seldom

fails of effect, because he renders the effect which has struck him,

faithfully and without marginal notes. Only in the convincing power of

representation, and never in the forcing of a calculated mood, does the

"mood" of his landscape lie. Or, to take an illustration from the

province of portrait painting, when Lenbach paints Prince Bismarck, it

is Lenbach's Bismarck; as an intellectual painter he has given an

entirely subjective rendering of Bismarck, and compels the spectator so

to see him. Holbein, when he painted Henry VIII, proceeded in the

opposite way: for him characterisation depended on his revealing his own

character as little as possible; he completely subordinated himself to

his subject, surrendered himself, and religiously painted all that he

saw, leaving it to others to carry away from the picture what they

pleased. And Théodore Rousseau, too, was possessed by the spirit of the

old German portrait painter. He set his whole force of purpose to the

task of letting nature manifest herself, free from any preconceived

interpretation. His pictures are absolutely without effective point, but

there is so much power and deep truth, so much simplicity, boldness, and

sincerity in his manner of seeing and painting nature, and of feeling

her intense and forceful life, that they have become great works of art

by this alone, like the portraits of Holbein. More impressive tones,

loftier imagination, more moving tenderness, and more intoxicating

harmonies are at the command of other masters, but few had truer or more

profound articulation, and not one has been so sincere as Théodore

Rousseau. Rousseau saw into the inmost being of nature, as Holbein into

Henry VIII, and the impression he received, the emotion he felt, is a

thing which he communicates broadly, boldly, and entirely. He is a

portrait painter who knows his model through and through; moreover, he

is a connoisseur of the old masters who knows what it is to make a

picture. Every production of Rousseau is a deliberate and

well-considered work, a cannon-shot, and no mere dropping fusilade of

small arms; not a light _feuilleton_, but an earnest treatise of strong

character. Though a powerful colourist, he works by the simplest means,

and has at bottom the feeling of a draughtsman; which is principally the

reason why, at the present day, when one looks at Rousseau's pictures,

one thinks rather of Hobbema than of Billotte and Claude Monet.

His absolute mastery over drawing even induced him in his last years to

abandon painting altogether. He designated it contemptuously as

falsehood, because it smeared over the truth, the anatomy of nature.

[Illustration: COROT. VUE DE TOSCANE.]

In Rousseau there was even more the genius of a sculptor than of a

portrait painter. His spirit, positive, exact, like that of a

mathematician, and far more equipped with artistic precision than

pictorial qualities, delighted in everything sharply defined, plastic,

and full of repose: moss-grown stones, oaks of the growth of centuries,

marshes and standing water, rude granite blocks of the forest of

Fontainebleau, and trees bedded in the rocks of the glens of Opremont.

In a quite peculiar sense was the oak his favourite tree--the mighty,

wide-branching, primæval oak which occupies the centre of one of his

masterpieces, "A Pond," and spreads its great gnarled boughs to the

cloudy sky in almost every one of his pictures. It is only Rembrandt's

three oaks that stand in like manner, firm and broad of stem, as though

they were living personalities of the North, in a lonely field beneath

the hissing rain. To ensure the absolute vitality of organisms was for

Rousseau the object of unintermittent toil.

[Illustration: COROT. AT SUNSET.]

Plants, trees, and rocks were not forms summarily observed and clumped

together in an arbitrary fashion; for him they were beings gifted with a

soul, breathing creatures, each one of which had its physiognomy, its

individuality, its part to play, and its distinction of being in the

great harmony of universal nature. "By the harmony of air and light with

that of which they are the life and the illumination I will make you

hear the trees moaning beneath the North wind and the birds calling to

their young." To achieve that aim he thought that he could not do too

much. As Dürer worked seven times on the same scenes of the Passion

until he had found the simplest and most speaking expression, so

Rousseau treated the same motives ten and twenty times. Restless are his

efforts to discover different phases of the same subject, to approach

his model from the most various points of view, and to do justice to it

on every side. He begins an interrupted picture again and again, and

adds something to it to heighten the expression, as Leonardo died with

the consciousness that there was something yet to be done to his

"Joconda." Sometimes a laboured effect is brought into his works by this

method, but in other ways he has gained in this struggle with reality a

power of exposition, a capacity of expression, a force of appeal, and

such a remarkable insight for rightness of effect that every one of his

good pictures could be hung without detriment in a gallery of old

masters; the nineteenth century did not see many arise who could bear

such a proximity in every respect. His landscapes are as full of sap as

creation itself; they reveal a forcible condensation of nature. The only

words which can be used to describe him are strength, health, and

energy. "It ought to be: in the beginning was the Power."

[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._

COROT. THE RUIN.]

From his youth upwards Théodore Rousseau was a masculine spirit; even as

a stripling he was a man above all juvenile follies--one might almost

say, a philosopher without ideals. In literature Turgenief's conception

of nature might be most readily compared with that of Rousseau. In

Turgenief's _Diary of a Sportsman_, written in 1852, everything is so

fresh and full of sap that one could imagine it was not so much the work

of a human pen as a direct revelation from the forest and the steppes.

Though men are elsewhere habituated to see their joys and sorrows

reflected in nature, the sentiment of his own personality falls from

Turgenief when he contemplates the eternal spectacle of the elements. He

plunges into nature and loses the consciousness of his own being in

hers; and he becomes a part of what he contemplates. For him the majesty

of nature lies in her treating everything, from the worm to the human

being, with impassiveness. Man receives neither love nor hatred at her

hands; she neither rejoices in the good that he does nor complains of

sin and crime, but looks beyond him with her deep, earnest eyes because

he is an object of complete indifference to her. "The last of thy

brothers might vanish off the face of the earth and not a needle of the

pine branches would tremble." Nature has something icy, apathetic,

terrible; and the fear which she can inspire through this indifference

of hers ceases only when we begin to understand the relationship in

which we are to our surroundings, when we begin to comprehend that man

and animal, tree and flower, bird and fish, owe their existence to this

one Mother. So Turgenief came to the same point as Spinoza.

[Illustration: COROT. EVENING.]

And Rousseau did the same. The nature of Théodore Rousseau was devoid of

all excitable enthusiasm. Thus the world he painted became something

austere, earnest, and inaccessible beneath his hands. He lived in it

alone, fleeing from his fellows, and for this reason human figures are

seldom to be found in his pictures. He loved to paint nature on cold,

grey impassive days, when the trees cast great shadows and forms stand

out forcibly against the sky. He is not the painter of morning and

evening twilight. There is no awakening and no dawn, no charm in these

landscapes and no youth. Children would not laugh here, nor lovers

venture to caress. In these trees the birds would build no nests, nor

their fledglings twitter. His oaks stand as if they had so stood from

eternity.

"Die unbegrieflich hohen Werke

Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag."

Like Turgenief, Rousseau ended in Pantheism.

[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._

COROT. AN EVENING IN NORMANDY.]

He familiarised himself more and more with the endless variety of plants

and trees, of the earth and the sky at the differing hours of the day:

he made his forms even more precise. He wished to paint the organic life

of inanimate nature--the life which heaves unconsciously everywhere,

sighing in the air, streaming from the bosom of the earth, and vibrating

in the tiniest blade of grass as positively as it palpitates through the

branches of the old oaks. These trees and herbs are not human, but they

are characterised by their peculiar features, just as though they were

men. The poplars grow like pyramids, and have green and silvered leaves,

the oaks dark foliage and gnarled far-reaching boughs. The oaks stand

fixed and immovable against the storm, whilst the slender poplars bend

pliantly before it. This curious distinction in all the forms of nature,

each one of which fulfils a course of existence like that of man, was a

problem which pursued Rousseau throughout his life as a vast riddle.

Observe his trees: they are not dead things; the sap of life mounts

unseen through their strong trunks to the smallest branches and shoots,

which spread from the extremity of the boughs like clawing fingers. The

soil works and alters; every plant reveals the inner structure of the

organism which produced it. And this striving even became a curse to him

in his last period. Nature became for him an organism which he studied

as an anatomist studies a corpse, an organism all the members of which

act one upon the other according to logical laws, like the wheels of a

machine; and for the proper operation of this machine the smallest

plants seemed as necessary as the mightiest oaks, the gravel as

important as the most tremendous rock.

[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._

COROT. THE DANCE OF THE NYMPHS.]

Convinced that there was nothing in nature either indifferent or without

its purpose, and that everything had a justification for its existence

and played a part in the movement of universal life, he believed also

that in everything, however small it might be, there was a special

pictorial significance; and he toiled to discover this, to make it

evident, and often forgot the while that art must make sacrifices if it

is to move and charm. In his boundless veneration for the logical

organism of nature he held, as a kind of categorical imperative, that it

was right to give the same importance to the infinitely small as to the

infinitely great. The notion was chimerical, and it wrecked him. In his

last period the only things that will preserve their artistic reputation

are his marvellously powerful drawings. No one ever had such a feeling

for values, and thus he knew how to give his drawings--quite apart from

their pithy weight of stroke--an effect of light which was forcibly

striking. Just as admirable were the water-colours produced under the

influence of Japanese picture-books. The pictures of petty detail which

belong to these years have only an historical interest, and that merely

because it is instructive to see how a great genius can deceive himself.

One of his last works, the view of Mont Blanc, with the boundless

horizon and the countless carefully and scrupulously delineated planes

of ground, has neither pictorial beauty nor majesty. In the presence of

this bizarre work one feels astonishment at the artist's endurance and

strength of will, but disappointment at the result. He wanted to win the

secret of its being from every undulation of the ground, from every

blade of grass, and from every leaf; he was anxiously bent upon what he

called _planimétrie_, upon the importance of horizontal planes, and he

accentuated detail and accessory work beyond measure. His pantheistic

faith in nature brought Théodore Rousseau to his fall. Those who did not

know him spoke of his childish stippling and of the decline of his

talent. Those who did know him saw in this stippling the issue of the

same endeavours which poor Charles de la Berge had made before him, and

of the principles on which the landscape of the English Pre-Raphaelites

was being based about this time. If one looks at his works and then

reads his life one almost comes to have for him a kind of religious

veneration. There is something of the martyr in this insatiable

observer, whose life was one long struggle, and to whom the study of the

earth's construction and the anatomy of branches was almost a religion.

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

COROT. A DANCE.]

[Illustration: J. B. C. COROT. LANDSCAPE.]

At first he had to struggle for ten years for bread and recognition. It

seems hardly credible that his landscapes, even after 1848, when they

had obtained entry into the Salon, were a source of irritation there for

years, simply because they were green. The public was so accustomed to

brown trees and brown grass, that every other colour in the landscape

was an offence against decency, and before a green picture the

Philistine immediately cried out, "Spinage!" "_Allez, c'était dur

d'ouvrir la brêche_," said he, in his later years. And at last, at the

World Exhibition of 1855, when he had made it clear to Europe who

Théodore Rousseau was, the evening of his life was saddened by pain and

illness. He had married a poor unfortunate creature, a wild child of the

forest, the only feminine being that he had found time to love during

his life of toil. After a few years of marriage she became insane, and

whilst he tended her Rousseau himself fell a victim to an affection of

the brain which darkened his last years. Death came to his release in

1867. As he lay dying his mad wife danced and trilled to the screaming

of her parrot. He rests "_dans le plain calme de la nature_" in the

village churchyard at Chailly, near Barbizon, buried in front of his

much-loved forest. Millet erected the headstone--a simple cross upon an

unhewn block of sandstone, with a tablet of brass on which are inscribed

the words:

[Illustration: _Hanjstaengl._

COROT. LA ROUTE D'ARRAS.]

THÉODORE ROUSSEAU, PEINTRE.

"_Rousseau c'est un aigle. Quant à moi, je ne suis qu'une alouette qui

pousse de petites chansons dans mes nuages gris._" With these words

_Camille Corot_ has indicated the distinction between Rousseau and

himself. They denote the two opposite poles of modern landscape. What

attracted the plastic artists, Rousseau, Ruysdael, and Hobbema--the

relief of objects, the power of contours, the solidity of forms--was not

Corot's concern. Whilst Rousseau never spoke about colour with his

pupils, but as _ceterum censeo_ invariably repeated, "_Enfin, la forme

est la première chose à observer_," Corot himself admitted that drawing

was not his strong point. When he tried to paint rocks he was but

moderately effective, and all his efforts at drawing the human figure

were seldom crowned with real success, although in his last years he

returned to the task with continuous zeal. Apart from such peculiar

exceptions as that wonderful picture "The Toilet," his figures are

always the weakest part of his landscapes, and only have a good effect

when in the background they reveal their delicate outlines, half lost in

rosy haze. He was not much more felicitous with his animals, and in

particular there often appear in his pictures great heavy cows, which

are badly planted on their feet, and which one wishes that he had left

out. Amongst trees he did not care to paint the oak, the favourite tree

with all artists who have a passion for form, nor the chestnut, nor the

elm, but preferred to summon, amid the delicate play of sunbeams, the

aspen, the poplar, the alder, the birch with its white slender stem and

its pale, tremulous leaves, and the willow with its light foliage. In

Rousseau a tree is a proud, toughly knotted personality, a noble,

self-conscious creation; in Corot it is a soft tremulous being rocking

in the fragrant air, in which it whispers and murmurs of love and joy.

His favourite season was not the autumn, when the turning leaves, hard

as steel, stand out with firm lines, quiet and motionless, against the

clear sky, but the early spring, when the farthest twigs upon the boughs

deck themselves with little leaves of tender green, which vibrate and

quiver with the least breath of air. He had, moreover, a perfectly

wonderful secret of rendering the effect of the tiny blades of grass and

the flowers which grow upon the meadows in June; he delighted to paint

the banks of a stream with tall bushes bending to the water, and he

loved water itself in undetermined clearness and in the shifting glance

of light, leaving it here in shadow and touching it there with

brightness; the sky in the depths beneath wedded to the bright border of

the pool or the vanishing outlines of the bank, and the clouds floating

across the sky, and here and there embracing a light shining fragment of

the blue. He loved morning before sunrise, when the white mists hover

over pools like a light veil of gauze, and gradually disperse as the sun

breaks through, but he had a passion for evening which was almost

greater: he loved the soft vapours which gather in the gloom, thickening

until they become pale grey velvet mantles, as peace and rest descend

upon the earth with the drawing on of night.

[Illustration: _L'Art._ JULES DUPRÉ.]

In contradistinction from Rousseau his specialty was everything soft and

wavering, everything that has neither determined form nor sharp lines,

and that, by not appealing too clearly to the eye, is the more conducive

to dreamy reveries. It is not the spirit of a sculptor that lives in

Corot, but that of a poet, or still better, the spirit of a musician,

since music is the least plastic of the arts. It is not surprising to

read in his biography that, like Watteau, he had almost a greater

passion for music than for painting, and that when he painted he had

always an old song or an opera aria upon his lips, that when he spoke of

his pictures he had a taste for drawing comparisons from music, and that

he had a season-ticket at the _Conservatoire_, never missed a concert,

and played upon the violin himself. Indeed, there is something of the

tender note of this instrument in his pictures, which make such a

sweetly solemn appeal through their delicious silver tone. Beside

Rousseau, the plastic artist, Père Corot is an idyllic painter of

melting grace; beside Rousseau, the realist, he seems a dreamy musician;

beside Rousseau, the virile spirit earnestly making experiments in art,

he appears like a bashful schoolgirl in love. Rousseau approached nature

in broad daylight, with screws and levers, as a cool-headed man of

science; Corot caressed and flattered her, sung her wooing love-songs

till she descended to meet him in the twilight hours, and whispered to

him, her beloved, the secrets which Rousseau was unable to wring from

her by violence.

[Illustration: _L'Art._ THE HOUSE OF JULES DUPRÉ AT L'ISLE-ADAM.]

_Corot_ was sixteen years senior to Rousseau. He still belonged to the

eighteenth century, to the time when, under the dictatorship of David,

Paris transformed herself into imperial Rome. David, Gérard, Guérin, and

Prudhon, artists so different in talent, were the painters whose works

met his first eager glances, and no particular acuteness is needed to

recognise in the Nymphs and Cupids with which Corot in after-years,

especially in the evening of his life, dotted his fragrant landscapes,

the direct issue of Prudhon's charming goddesses, the reminiscences of

his youth nourished on the antique. He, too, was a child of old Paris,

with its narrow streets and corners. His father was a hairdresser in the

Rue du Bac, number 37, and had made the acquaintance of a girl who lived

at number 1 in the same street, close to the Pont Royal, and was

shop-girl at a milliner's. He carried on his barber's shop until 1778,

when Camille, the future painter, was two years old. Then Madame Corot

herself undertook the millinery establishment in which she had once

worked. There might be read on the front of the narrow little house,

number 1 of the Rue du Bac, _Madame Corot, Marchande de Modes_. M.

Corot, a polite and very correct little man, raised the business to

great prosperity. The Tuileries were opposite, and under Napoleon I

Corot became Court "modiste." As such he must have attained a certain

celebrity, as even the theatre took his name in vain. A piece which was

then frequently played at the Comédie Française contains the passage: "I

have just come from Corot, but could not speak to him; he was locked up

in his private room occupied in composing a new spring hat."

[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._

DUPRÉ. THE SETTING SUN.]

Camille went to the high school in Rouen, and was then destined,

according to the wish of his father, to adopt some serious calling "by

which money was to be made." He began his career with a yard-measure in

a linen-draper's establishment, ran through the suburbs of Paris with a

book of patterns under his arm selling cloth--_Couleur olive_--and in

his absence of mind made the clumsiest mistakes. After eight years of

opposition his father consented to his becoming a painter. "You will

have a yearly allowance of twelve hundred francs," said old Corot, "and

if you can live on that you may do as you please." At the Pont Royal,

behind his father's house, he painted his first picture, amid the

tittering of the little dressmaker's apprentices who looked on with

curiosity from the window, but one of whom, Mademoiselle Rose, remained

his dear friend through life. This was in 1823, and twenty years went

by before he returned to French soil in the pictures that he painted.

Victor Bertin became his teacher; in other words, Classicism, style, and

coldness. He sought diligently to do as others; he drew studies,

composed historical landscapes, and painted as he saw the academicians

painting around him. To conclude his orthodox course of training it only

remained for him to make the pilgrimage to Italy, where Claude Lorrain

had once painted and Poussin had invented the historical landscape. In

1825--when he was twenty-eight--he set out with Bertin and Aligny,

remained long in Rome, and came to Naples. The Classicists, whose circle

he entered with submissive veneration, welcomed him for his cheerful,

even temper and the pretty songs which he sang in fine tenor voice.

Early every morning he went into the Campagna, with a colour-box under

his arm and a sentimental ditty on his lips, and there he drew the ruins

with an architectural severity, just like Poussin. In 1827, after a

sojourn of two years and a half in Italy, he was able to make an

appearance in the Salon with his carefully balanced landscapes. In 1835

and 1843 he stayed again in Italy, and only after this third pilgrimage

were his eyes opened to the charms of French landscape.

[Illustration: _L'Art._ THE BRIDGE AT L'ISLE-ADAM.]

One can pass rapidly over this first section of Corot's work. His

pictures of this period are not without merit, but to speak of them with

justice they should be compared with contemporary Classical productions.

Then one finds in them broad and sure drawing, and can recognise a

powerful hand and notice an astonishing increase of ability. Even on his

second sojourn in Italy he painted no longer as an ethnographical

student, and no longer wasted his powers on detail. But it is in the

pictures of his last twenty years that Corot first becomes the

Theocritus of the nineteenth century. The second Corot has spoilt one's

enjoyment for the first. But who would care to pick a quarrel with him

on that score! Beside his later pictures how hard are those studies from

Rome, which the dying painter left to the Louvre, and which, as his

maiden efforts, he regarded with great tenderness all through his life.

How little they have of the delicate, harmonious light of his later

works! The great historical landscape with Homer in it, where light and

shadow are placed so trenchantly beside each other, the landscape

"Aricia," "Saint Jerome in the Desert," the picture of the young girl

sitting reading beside a mountain stream, "The Beggar" with that team in

mad career which Decamps could not have painted with greater

virtuosity,--they are all good pictures by the side of those of his

contemporaries, but in comparison with real Corots they are like the

exercises of a pupil, in their hard, dry painting, their black, coarse

tones, and their chalky wall of atmosphere. There is neither breeze nor

transparency nor life in the air; the trees are motionless, and look as

if they were heavily cased in iron.

[Illustration: _Baschet._

DUPRÉ. NEAR SOUTHAMPTON.

(_By permission of M. Jules Beer, the owner of the picture._)]

Corot was approaching his fortieth year, an age at which a man's ideas

are generally fixed, when the great revolution of French landscape

painting was accomplished under the influence of the English and of

Rousseau. Trained in academical traditions, he might have remained

steadfast in his own province. To follow the young school he had

completely to learn his art again, and alter his method of treatment

with the choice of subjects, and this casting of his slough demanded

another fifteen years. When he passed from Italian to French landscape,

after his return from his third journey to Rome in 1843, his pictures

were still hard and heavy. He had already felt the influence of

Bonington and Constable, by the side of whose works his first exhibited

picture had hung in 1827. But he still lacked the power of rendering

light and air, and his painting had neither softness nor light. Even in

the choice of subject he was still undecided, returning more than once

to the historical landscape and working on it with unequal success. His

masterpiece of 1843, "The Baptism of Christ," in the Church of Saint

Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, is no more than a delicate imitation of

the old masters. The "Christ upon the Mount of Olives" of 1844, in the

Museum of Langres, is the first picture which seems like a convert's

confession of faith. In the centre of the picture, before a low hill,

Christ kneels upon the ground praying; His disciples are around Him, and

to the right, vanishing in the shadows, the olive trees stretch their

gnarled branches over the darkened way. A dark blue sky, in which a star

is flickering, broods tremulously over the landscape. One might pass the

Christ over unobserved; but for the title He would be hard to recognise.

But the star shining far away, the transparent clearness of the night

sky, the light clouds, and the mysterious shadows gliding swiftly over

the ground,--these have no more to do with the false and already

announce the true Corot. From this time he found the way on which he

went forward resolute and emancipated.

[Illustration: DUPRÉ. THE PUNT.]

For five-and-twenty years it was permitted to him to labour in perfect

ripeness, freedom, and artistic independence. One thinks of Corot as

though he had been a child until he was fifty and then first entered

upon his adolescence. Up to 1846 he took from his father the yearly

allowance of twelve hundred francs given him as a student, and in that

year, when he received the Cross of the Legion of Honour, M. Corot

doubled the sum for the future, observing: "Well, Camille seems to have

talent after all." About the same time his friends remarked that he went

about Barbizon one day more meditatively than usual. "My dear fellow,"

said he to one of them, "I am inconsolable. Till now I had a complete

collection of Corots, and it has been broken to-day, for I have sold one

for the first time." And even at seventy-four he said: "How swiftly

one's life passes, and how much must one exert one's self to do anything

good!" The history of art has few examples to offer of so long a spring.

Corot had the privilege of never growing old; his life was a continual

rejuvenescence. The works which made him Corot are the youthful works of

an old man, the matured creations of a grey-headed artist, who--like

Titian--remained for ever young; and for their artistic appreciation it

is not without importance to remember this.

[Illustration: _Baschet._

DUPRÉ. SUNSET.

(_By permission of M. Jules Beer, the owner of the picture._)]

Of all the Fontainebleau painters Corot was the least a realist: he was

the least bound to the earth, and he was never bent upon any exact

rendering of a part of nature. No doubt he worked much in the open air,

but he worked far more in his studio; he painted many scenes as they lay

before him, but more often those which he only saw in his own mind. He

is reported to have said on his deathbed: "Last night I saw in a dream a

landscape with a sky all rosy. It was charming, and still stands before

me quite distinctly; it will be marvellous to paint." How many

landscapes may he not have thus dreamed, and painted from the

recollected vision!

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DUPRÉ. THE HAY-WAIN.]

For a young man this would be a very dangerous method. For Corot it was

the only one which allowed him to remain Corot, because in this way no

unnecessary detail disturbed the pure, poetic reverie. He had spent his

whole life in a dallying courtship with nature, ever renewed. As a child

he looked down from his attic window upon the wavering mists of the

Seine; as a schoolboy in Rouen he wandered lost in his own fancies along

the borders of the great river; when he had grown older he went every

year with his sister to a little country-house in Ville d'Avray, which

his father had bought for him in 1817. Here he stood at the open window,

in the depth of the night, when every one was asleep, absorbed in

looking at the sky and listening to the plash of waters and the rustling

of leaves. Here he stayed quite alone. No sound disturbed his reveries,

and unconsciously he drank in the soft, moist air and the delicate

vapour rising from the neighbouring river. Everything was harmoniously

reflected in his quick and eager spirit, and his eyes beheld the

individual trait of nature floating in the universal life. He began not

merely to see nature, but to feel her presence, like that of a beloved

woman, to receive her very breath and to hear the beating of her heart.

One knows the marvellous letter in which he describes the day of a

landscape painter to Jules Dupré: "_On se lève de bonne heure, à trois

heures du matin, avant le soleil; on va s'asseoir au pied d'un arbre, on

regarde et on attend. On ne voit pas grand'chose d'abord. La nature

ressemble à une toile blanchâtre où s'esquissent à peine les profils de

quelques masses: tout est embaumé, tout frisonne au souffle fraîchi de

l'aube. Bing! le soleil s'éclaircit ... le soleil n'a pas encore déchiré

la gaze derrière laquelle se cachent la prairie, le vallon, les collines

de l'horizon.... Les vapeurs nocturnes rampent encore commes des flocons

argentés sur les herbes d'un vert transi. Bing!... Bing!... un premier

rayon de soleil ... un second rayon de soleil.... Les petites fleurettes

semblent s'éveiller joyeuses.... Elles out toutes leur goutte de rosée

qui tremble ... les feuilles frileuses s'agitent au souffle du matin ...

dans la feuillée, les oiseaux invisibles chantent.... Il semble que ce

sont les fleurs qui font la prière. Les Amours à ailes de papillons

s'ébattent sur la prairie et font onduler les hautes herbes.... On ne

voit rien ... tout y est. Le paysage est tout entier derrière la gaze

transparente du brouillard, qui, au reste ... monte ... monte ... aspiré

par le soleil ... et laisse, en se levant, voir la rivière lamée

d'argent, les prés, les arbres, les maisonettes, le lointain fuyant....

On distingue enfin tout ce que l'on divinait d'abord._"

[Illustration: _Baschet._

DUPRÉ. THE OLD OAK.]

At the end there is an ode to evening which is perhaps to be reckoned

amongst the most delicate pages of French lyrics: "_La nature s'assoupit

... cependant l'air frais du soir soupire dans les feuilles ... la rosée

emperle le velours des gazons.... Les nymphes fuient ... se cachent ...

et désirent être vues.... Bing! une étoile du ciel qui pique une tête

dans l'étang.... Charmante étoile, dont le frémissement de l'eau

augmente le scintillement, tu me regardes ... tu me souris en clignant

de l'oeil.... Bing! une seconde étoile apparaît dans l'eau; un second

oeil s'ouvre. Soyez les bienvenues, fraîches et charmantes étoiles....

Bing! Bing! Bing! trois, six, vingt étoiles.... Toutes les étoiles du

ciel se sont donné rendez-vous dans cet heureux étang.... Tout

s'assombrit encore.... L'étang seul scintille.... C'est un fourmillement

d'étoiles.... L'illusion se produit.... Le soleil étant couché, le

soleil intérieur de l'âme, le soleil de l'art se lève.... Bon! voilâ mon

tableau fait_."

[Illustration: DUPRÉ. THE POOL.]

Any one who has never read anything about Corot except these lines may

know him through them alone. Even that little word "Bing" comprises and

elucidates his art by its clear, silvery resonance. The words vibrate

like the strings of a violin that have been gently touched, and they

want Mozart's music as an accompaniment. I do not know any one who has

described all the feminine tenderness of nature, the dishevelled leaves

of the birches, the heaving bosom of the air, the fresh virginity of

morning, the weary, sensuous charm of evening, with such seductive

tenderness and such highly strung feeling, so voluptuously and yet so

coyly.

To these impressions of Rouen, Ville d'Avray, and Barbizon were added

finally those of Paris. For Corot was born in Paris, and, often as he

left it, he always came back; he passed the greatest part of his life

there, and there it was, perhaps, that in his last period he created his

most poetic works. In these years he had no more need of actual

landscapes; he needed only a sky and they rose before him. Every evening

after sundown he left his studio just at the time when the dusk fell

veiling everything. He raised his eyes to the sky, the only part of

nature which remained visible. And how often does this twilight sky of

Paris recur in Corot's pictures! At the end of his life he could really

give himself over to a dream. The drawings and countless studies of his

youth bear witness to the care, patience, and exactitude of his

preparation. They gave him in after-years, when he was sure of his

hand, the right to simplify, because he knew everything thoroughly. Thus

Boecklin paints his pictures without a model, and thus Corot painted his

landscapes. The hardest problems are solved apparently as if he were

improvising; and for that very reason the sight of a Corot gives such

unspeakable pleasure, such an impression of charming ease. It is only a

hand which has used a brush for forty years that can paint thus. All

effects are attained with the minimum expenditure of strength and

material. The drawing lies as if behind colour that has been blown on to

the canvas; it is as if one looked through a thin gauze into the

distance. Whoever has studied reality so many years, with patient and

observant eye, as Corot did, whoever has daily satiated his imagination

with the impressions of nature, may finally venture on painting, not

this or that scenery, but the fragrance, the very essence of things, and

render merely his own spirit and his own visions free from all earthly

and retarding accessories. There is a temptation to do honour to Corot's

pictures merely as "the confessions of a beautiful soul."

[Illustration: _L'Art._ NARCISSE DIAZ.]

But Corot was as great and strong as a Hercules. In his blue blouse,

with his woollen cap and the inevitable short Corot pipe in his mouth--a

pipe which has become historical--one would have taken him for a carter

rather than a celebrated painter. At the same time he remained during

his whole life--a girl: twenty years senior to all the great landscape

painters of the epoch, he was at once a patriarch in their eyes and

their younger comrade. His long white hair surrounded the innocent face

of a ruddy country girl, and his kind and pleasant eyes were those of a

child listening to a fairy-tale. In 1848, during the fighting on the

barricades, he asked with childish astonishment: "What is the matter?

Are we not satisfied with the Government?" And during the war in 1870

this great hoary-headed child of seventy-four bought a musket, to join

in fighting against Germany. Benevolence was the joy of his old age.

Every friend who begged for a picture was given one, while for money he

had the indifference of a hermit who has no wants and neither sows nor

reaps, but is fed by his Heavenly Father. He ran breathlessly after an

acquaintance to whom, contrary to his wont, he had refused five thousand

francs: "Forgive me," he said; "I am a miser, but there they are." And

when a picture-dealer brought him ten thousand francs he gave him the

following direction: "Send them," he said, "to the widow of my friend

Millet; only, she must believe that you have bought pictures from

_him_." His one passion was music, his whole life "an eternal song."

Corot was a happy man, and no one more deserved to be happy. In his

kind-hearted vivacity and even good spirits he was a favourite with all

who came near him and called him familiarly their Papa Corot. Everything

in him was healthy and natural; his was a harmonious nature, living and

working happily. This harmony is reflected in his art. And he saw the

joy in nature which he had in himself.

[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._

DIAZ. THE DESCENT OF THE BOHEMIANS.]

Everything that was coarse or horrible in nature he avoided, and his own

life passed without romance or any terrible catastrophes. He has no

picture in which there is a harassed tree vexed by the storm. Corot's

own spirit was touched neither by passions nor by the strokes of fate.

There is air in his landscapes, but never storm; streams, but not

torrents; waters, but not floods; plains, but not rugged mountains. All

is soft and quiet as his own heart, whose peace the storm never

troubled.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DIAZ. AMONG THE FOLIAGE.]

No man ever lived a more orderly, regular, and reasonable life. He was

only spendthrift where others were concerned. No evening passed that he

did not play a rubber of whist with his mother, who died only a little

before him, and was loved by the old man with the devoted tenderness of

a child. From an early age he had the confirmed habits which make the

day long and prevent waste of time. The eight years which he passed in

the linen-drapery establishment of M. Delalain had accustomed him to

punctuality. Every morning he rose very early, and at three minutes to

eight he was in his studio as punctually as he had been in earlier years

at the counter, and went through his daily task without feverish haste

or idleness, humming with that quietude which makes the furthest

progress.

For that reason he had also an aversion to everything passionate in

nature, to everything irregular, sudden, or languid, to the feverish

burst of storm as to the relaxing languor of summer heat. He loved all

that is quiet, symmetrical, and fresh, peaceful and blithe, everything

that is enchanting by its repose: the bright, tender sky, the woods and

meadows tinged with green, the streamlets and the hills, the regular

awakening of spring, the soft, quiet hours of evening twilight, the dewy

laughing morning, the delicate mists which form slowly the over surface

of still waters, the joy of clear, starry nights, when all voices are

silent and every breeze is at rest; and the cheerfulness of his own

spirit is reflected in everything.

[Illustration: DIAZ. A TREE TRUNK.]

One might go further, and say that Corot's goodness is mirrored in his

pictures. Corot loved humanity and wished it well, and he shrank from no

sacrifice in helping his friends. And even so did he love the country,

and wished to see it animated, enlivened, and blest by human beings.

That is the great distinction between him and Chintreuil, who is

otherwise so like him. Chintreuil also painted nature when she quivers

smiling beneath the gentle and vivifying glance of spring, but figures

are wanting in his pictures. As a timid, fretful, unsociable man, he

imagined that nature also felt happiest in solitude. The scenery in

which Chintreuil delighted was thick, impenetrable copse, lonely haunts

in the tangle of the thicket, from which now and then a startled hind

stretches out its head, glancing uneasily. Corot, who could not endure

solitude, being always the centre of a cheery social gathering, made

nature a sociable being. Men, women, and children give animation to his

woods and meadows. And at times he introduces peasants at work in the

fields, but how little do they resemble the peasants of Millet! The

rustics of the master of Gruchy are as hard and rough as they are

actual; the burden of life has bowed their figures and lined their faces

prematurely; they are old before their time, and weary every evening.

Corot's labourers never grow weary: lightly touched in rather than

painted, dreamt of rather than seen, they carry on an ethereal existence

in the open air, free and contented; they have never suffered, just as

Corot himself knew no sufferings. But as a rule human beings were

altogether out of place in the happy fields conjured up by his fairy

fantasy; and then came the moment when Prudhon lived again. The nymphs

and bacchantes whom he had met as a youth by the tomb of Virgil visited

him in the evening of life in the forest of Fontainebleau and in the

meadows of Ville d'Avray.

[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._

DIAZ. FOREST SCENE.]

In his pictures he dreamed of pillars and altars near which mythical

figures moved once more, dryads sleeping by the stream, dancing fauns,

_junctæque nymphis gratiæ decentes_ in classical raiment. In this sense

he was a Classicist all his life. His nymphs, however, are no mere

accessories; they have nothing in common with the faded troop of classic

beings whose old age in the ruins of forsaken temples was so long tended

by the Academy. In Corot they are the natural habitants of a world of

harmony and light, the logical complement of his visions of nature: in

the same way Beethoven at the close of the Ninth Symphony introduced the

human voice. No sooner has he touched in the lines of his landscapes

than the nymphs and tritons, the radiant children of the Greek idyllic

poets, desert the faded leaves of books to populate Corot's groves, and

refresh themselves in the evening shadows of his forests.

[Illustration: CHARLES FRANÇOIS DAUBIGNY.]

For the evening dusk, the hour after sunset, is peculiarly the hour of

Corot; his very preference for the harmonious beauty of dying light was

the effluence of his own harmonious temperament. When he would, Corot

was a colourist of the first order. The World Exhibition of 1889

contained pictures of women by his hand which resembled Feuerbach in

their strict and austere beauty of countenance, and which recalled

Delacroix in the liquid fulness of tone and their fantastic and

variously coloured garb. But, compared with the orgies of colour

indulged in by Romanticism, his works are generally characterised by the

most delicate reserve in painting. A bright silvery sheet of water and

the ivory skin of a nymph are usually the only touches of colour that

hover in the pearly grey mist of his pictures. As a man Corot avoided

all dramas and strong contrasts; everything abrupt or loud was repellent

to his nature. Thus it was that the painter, too, preferred the clear

grey hours of evening, in which nature envelops herself as if in a

delicate, melting veil of gauze. Here he was able to be entirely Corot,

and to paint without contours and almost without colours, and bathe in

the soft, dusky atmosphere. He saw lines no longer; everything was

breath, fragrance, vibration, and mystery. "_Ce n'est plus une toile et

ce n'est plus un peintre, c'est le bon Dieu et c'est le soir._" Elysian

airs began to breathe, and the faint echo of the prattling streamlet

sounded gently murmuring in the wood; the soft arms of the nymphs clung

round him, and from the neighbouring thicket tender, melting melodies

chimed forth like Æolian harps--

"Rege dich, du Schilfgeflüster;

Hauche leise, Rohrgeschwister;

Säuselt, leichte Weidensträuche;

Lispelt, Pappelzitterzweige

Unterbroch'nen Träumen zu."

His end was as harmonious as his life and his art. "_Rien ne trouble sa

fin, c'est le soir d'un beau jour._" His sister, with whom the old

bachelor had lived, died in the October of 1874, and Corot could not

endure loneliness. On 23rd February 1875--when he had just completed his

seventy-ninth year--he was heard to say as he lay in bed drawing with

his fingers in the air: "_Mon Dieu_, how beautiful that is; the most

beautiful landscape I have ever seen." When his old housekeeper wanted

to bring him his breakfast he said with a smile: "To-day Père Corot will

breakfast above." Even his last illness robbed him of none of his

cheerfulness, and when his friends brought him as he lay dying the medal

struck to commemorate his jubilee as an artist of fifty years' standing,

he said with tears of joy in his eyes: "It makes one happy to know that

one has been so loved; I have had good parents and dear friends. I am

thankful to God." With those words he passed away to his true home, the

land of spirits--not the paradise of the Church, but the Elysian fields

he had dreamt of and painted so often: "_Largior hic campos æther et

lumine vestit purpureo._"

[Illustration: _L'Art._

DAUBIGNY. SPRINGTIME.]

When they bore him from his house in the Faubour-Poissonière and a

passer-by asked who was being buried, a fat shopwoman standing at the

door of her house answered: "I don't know his name, but he was a good

man." Beethoven's Symphony in C minor was played at his funeral,

according to his own direction, and as the coffin was being lowered a

lark rose exulting to the sky. "The artist will be replaced with

difficulty, the man never," said Dupré at Corot's grave. On 27th May

1880 an unobtrusive monument to his memory was unveiled at the border of

the lake at Ville d'Avray, in the midst of the dark forest where he had

so often dreamed. He died in the fulness of his fame as an artist, but

it was the forty pictures collected in the Centenary Exhibition of 1889

which first made the world fully conscious of what modern art possessed

in Corot: a master of immortal masterpieces, the greatest poet and the

tenderest soul of the nineteenth century, as Fra Angelico was the

tenderest soul of the fifteenth, and Watteau the greatest poet of the

eighteenth.

[Illustration: _Baschet._

DAUBIGNY. A LOCK IN THE VALLY OF OPTEVOZ.]

_Jules Dupré_, a melancholy spirit, who was inwardly consumed by a

lonely existence spent in passionate work, stands as the Beethoven of

modern painting beside Corot, its Mozart. If Théodore Rousseau was the

epic poet of the Fontainebleau school, and Corot the idyllic poet, Dupré

seems its tragic dramatist. Rousseau's nature is hard, rude, and

indifferent to man. For Corot God is the great philanthropist, who

wishes to see men happy, and lets the spring come and the warm winds

blow only that children may have their pleasure in them. His soul is, as

Goethe has it in _Werther_, "as blithe as those of sweet spring

mornings." Jules Dupré has neither Rousseau's reality nor Corot's

tenderness; his tones are neither imperturbable nor subdued. "_Quant

derrière un tronc d'arbre ou derrière une pierre, vous ne trouvez pas un

homme à quoi ça sert-il de faire du paysage._" In Corot there is a charm

as of the light melodies of the _Zauberflöte_; in Dupré the ear is

struck by the shattering notes of the _Sinfonie Eroica_. Rousseau looks

into the heart of nature with widely dilated pupils and a critical

glance. Corot woos her smiling, caressing, and dallying; Dupré courts

her uttering impassioned complaint and with tears in his eyes. In him

are heard the mighty fugues of Romanticism. The trees live, the waves

laugh and weep, the sky sings and wails, and the sun, like a great

conductor, determines the harmony of the concert. Even the two pictures

with which he made an appearance in the Salon in 1835, after he had left

the Sèvres china manufactory and become acquainted with Constable

during a visit to England--the "Near Southampton" and "Pasture-land in

the Limousin"--displayed him as an accomplished master. In "Near

Southampton" everything moves and moans. Across an undulating country a

dark tempest blusters, like a wild host, hurrying and sweeping forward

in the gloom, tearing and scattering everything in its path, whirling

leaves from the slender trees. Clouds big with rain hasten across the

horizon as if on a forced march. The whole landscape seems to partake in

the flight; the brushwood seems to bow its head like a traveller. In the

background a few figures are recognisable: people overtaken by the storm

at their work; horses with their manes flying in the wind; and a rider

seeking refuge for himself and his beast. A stretch of sluggish water

ruffles its waves as though it were frowning. Everything is alive and

quaking in this majestic solitude, and in the mingled play of confused

lights, hurrying clouds, fluttering branches, and trembling grass.

[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._

DAUBIGNY. ON THE OISE.]

[Illustration: _S. Low & Co._

DAUBIGNY. SHEPHERD AND SHEPHERDESS.]

"Pasture-land in the Limousin" had the same overpowering energy; it was

an admirable picture in 1835, and it is admirable still. The fine old

trees stand like huge pillars; the grass, drenched with rain, is of an

intense green; nature seems to shudder as if in a fever. And through his

whole life Dupré was possessed by the lyrical fever of Romanticism. As

the last champion of Romanticism he bore the banner of the proud

generation of 1830 through well-nigh two generations, and until his

death in 1889 stood on the ground where Paul Huet had first placed

French landscape; but Huet attained his pictorial effects by combining

and by calculation, while Dupré is always a great, true, and convincing

poet. Every evening he was seen in L'Isle Adam, where he settled in

1849, wandering alone across the fields, even in drenching rain. One of

his pupils declares that once, when they stood at night on the bridge of

the Oise during a storm, Dupré broke into a paroxysm of tears at the

magnificent spectacle. He was a fanatic rejoicing in storms, one who

watched the tragedies of the heaven with quivering emotion, a passionate

spirit consumed by his inward force, and, like his literary counterpart

Victor Hugo, he sought beauty of landscape only where it was wild and

magnificent. He is the painter of nature vexed and harassed, and of the

majestic silence that follows the storm. The theme of his pictures is at

one time the whirling torture of the yellow leaves driven before the

wind in eddying confusion; tormented and quivering they cleave to the

furrows in the mad chase, fall into dykes, and cling against the trunks

of trees, to find refuge from their persecutor. At another time he

paints how the night wind whistles round an old church and whirls the

screaming weather-cock round and round, how it moans and rattles with

invisible hand against the doors, forces its way through the windows,

and, once shut in its stony prison, seeks a way out again, howling and

wailing. He paints sea-pieces in which the sea rages and mutters like

some hoarse old monster; the colour of the water is dirty and pallid;

the howling multitude of waves storms on like an innumerable army before

which every human power gives way. Stones are torn loose and hurled

crashing upon the shore. The clouds are dull and ghostly, here black as

smoke, there of a shining whiteness, and swollen as though they must

burst. He celebrates the commotion of the sky, nature in her angry

majesty, and the most brilliant phenomena of atmospheric life.

Rousseau's highest aim was to avoid painting for effect, and Corot only

cared for grace of tone; a picture of his consists "of a little grey and

a certain _je ne sais quoi_." Jules Dupré is peculiarly the colour-poet

of the group, and sounds the most resonant notes in the romantic

concert. His light does not beam in gently vibrating silver tones, but

is concentrated in glaring red suns. "_Ah, la lumière, la lumière!_"

Beside the flaming hues of evening red he paints the darkest shadows. He

revels in contrasts. His favourite key of colour is that of a ghostly

sunset, against which a gnarled oak or the dark sail of a tiny vessel

rises like a phantom.

Trembling and yet with ardent desire he looks at the tumult of waters,

and hears the roll and resonance of the moon-silvered tide. He delights

in night, rain, and storm. Corot's gentle rivulets become a rolling and

whirling flood in his pictures, a headlong stream carrying all before

it. The wind no longer sighs, but blusters across the valley, spreading

ruin in its path. The clouds which in Corot are silvery and gentle, like

white lambs, are in Dupré black and threatening, like demons of hell. In

Corot the soft morning breeze faintly agitates the tender clouds in the

sky; in Dupré a damp, cold wind of evening blows a spectral grey mist

into the valley, and the hurricane tears apart the thunderclouds.

"Wenn ich fern auf nackter Haide wallte,

Wo aus dämmernder Geklüfte Schooss

Der Titanensang der Ströme schallte

Und die Nacht der Wolken mich umschloss,

Wenn der Sturm mit seinen Wetterwogen

Mir vorüber durch die Berge fuhr

Und des Himmels Flammen mich umflogen,

Da erscheinst du, Seele der Natur."

[Illustration: DAUBIGNY. LANDSCAPE: EVENING.]

[Illustration: _Baschet._

CHINTREUIL. LANDSCAPE: MORNING.]

The first of the brilliant pleiad who did not come from Paris itself is

_Diaz_, who in his youth worked with Dupré in the china manufactory of

Sèvres. Of noble Spanish origin--Narciso Virgilio Diaz de la Peña ran

his high-sounding name in full--he was born in Bordeaux in 1807, after

his parents had taken refuge from the Revolution across the Pyrenees,

and in his landscapes, too, perhaps, his Spanish blood betrays him now

and then. Diaz has in him a little of Fortuny. Beside the great genius

wrestling for truth and the virile seriousness of Rousseau, beside the

gloomy, powerful landscapes of Dupré with their deep, impassioned

poetry, the sparkling and flattering pictures of Diaz seem to be rather

light wares. For him nature is a keyboard on which to play capricious

fantasies. His pictures have the effect of sparkling diamonds, and one

must surrender one's self to this charm without asking its cause;

otherwise it evaporates. Diaz has perhaps rather too much of the talent

of a juggler, the sparkle of a magic kaleidoscope. "You paint stinging

nettles, and I prefer roses," is the characteristic expression which he

used to Millet. His painting is piquant and as iridescent as a peacock's

tail, but in this very iridescence there is often an unspeakable charm.

It has the rocket-like brilliancy and the glancing chivalry which were

part of the man himself, and made him the best of good company, the

_enfant terrible_, the centre of all that was witty and spirited in the

circle of Fontainebleau.

He, too, was long acquainted with poverty, as were his great

brother-artists Rousseau and Dupré. Shortly after his birth he lost his

father. Madame Diaz, left entirely without means, came to Paris, where

she supported herself by giving lessons in Spanish and Italian. When he

was ten years old the boy was left an orphan alone in the vast city. A

Protestant clergyman in Bellevue then adopted him. And now occurred the

misfortune which he was so fond of relating in after-years. In one of

his wanderings through the wood he was bitten by a poisonous insect, and

from that time he was obliged to hobble through life with a wooden leg,

which he called his _pilon_. From his fifteenth year he worked, at first

as a lame errand boy, and afterwards as a painter on china, together

with Dupré, Raffet, and Cabat, in the manufactory of Sèvres. Before long

he was dismissed as incompetent, for one day he took it into his head to

decorate a vase entirely after his own taste. Then poverty began once

more. Often when the evening drew on he wandered about the boulevards

under cover of the darkness, opened the doors of carriages which had

drawn up at the pavement, and stretched out his hand to beg. "What does

it matter?" he said; "one day I shall have carriages and horses, and a

golden crutch; my brush will win them for me." He exhibited a picture on

speculation at a picture-dealer's, in the hope of making a hundred

francs; it was "The Descent of the Bohemians," that picturesque band of

men, women, and children, who advance singing, laughing, and shouting by

a steep woodland road, to descend on some neighbouring village like a

swarm of locusts. A Parisian collector bought it for fifteen hundred

francs. Diaz was saved, and he migrated to the forest of Fontainebleau.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

HARPIGNIES. MOONRISE.]

His biography explains a great deal in the character of the painter's

art. His works are unequal. In his picture "Last Tears," which appeared

in the World Exhibition of 1855, and which stands to his landscapes as a

huge block of copper to little ingots of gold, he entered upon a course

in which he wandered long without any particular artistic result. He

wanted to be a figure-painter, and with this object he concocted a style

of painting by a mixture of various traditions, seeking to unite

Prudhon, Correggio, and Leonardo. From the master of Cluny he borrowed

the feminine type with a snub nose and long almond-shaped eyes, treated

the hair like da Vinci, and placed over it the _sfumato_ of Allegri. His

drawing, usually so pictorial in its light sweep, became weak in his

effort to be correct, and his colouring grew dull and monotonous by its

imitation of the style of the Classicists. But during this period Diaz

made a great deal of money, sold his pictures without intermission, and

avenged himself, as he had determined to do, upon his former poverty.

He, who had begged upon the boulevards, was able to buy weapons and

costumes at the highest figure, and build himself a charming house in

the Place Pigalle. In all that concerns his artistic position these

works, which brought him an income of fifty thousand francs, and, for a

long time, the fame of a new Prudhon, are nevertheless without

importance. Faltering between the widely divergent influences of the old

masters, he did not get beyond a wavering eclecticism, and was too weak

in drawing to attain results worth mentioning. It is as a landscape

painter that he will be known to posterity. He is said to have been the

terror of all game as long as he was the house-mate of Rousseau and

Millet in Fontainebleau, and wandered through the woods there with a gun

on his arm to get a cheap supper. It is reported, too, that when his

pictures were rejected by the Salon in those days he laughingly made a

hole in the canvas with his wooden leg, saying: "What is the use of

being rich? I can't have a diamond set in my _pilon_!" It was however in

the years before 1855, when he had nothing to do with any

picture-dealer, that the immortal works of Diaz were executed.

[Illustration: _L'Art._ CONSTANT TROYON.]

The mention of his name conjures up before the mind the recesses of a

wood, reddened by autumn, a wood where the sunbeams play, gilding the

trunks of the trees; naked white forms repose amid mysterious lights, or

on paths of golden sand appear gaily draped odalisques, their rich

costume glittering in the rays of the sun. Few have won from the forest,

as he did, its beauty of golden sunlight and verdant leaves. Others

remained at the entrance of the forest; he was the first who really

penetrated to its depths. The branches met over his head like the waves

of the sea, the blue heaven vanished, and everything was shrouded. The

sunbeams fell like the rain of Danaë through the green leaves, and the

moss lay like a velvet mantle on the granite piles of rock. He settled

down like a hermit in his verdant hollow. The leaves quivered green and

red, and covered the ground, shining like gold in the furtive rays of

the evening sun. Nothing was to be seen of the trees, nothing of the

outline of their foliage, nothing of the majestic sweep of their boughs,

but only the mossy stems touched by the radiance of the sun. The

pictures of Diaz are not landscapes, for the land is wanting; they are

"tree scapes," and their poetry lies in the sunbeams which dance playing

round them. "Have you seen my last stem?" he would himself inquire of

the visitors to his studio.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

TROYON. IN NORMANDY: COWS GRAZING.]

These woodland recesses were the peculiar specialty of Diaz, and he but

seldom abandoned them to paint warm, dreamy pictures of summer. For,

like a true child of the South, he only cared to see nature on beautiful

days. He knows nothing of spring with its light mist, and still less of

the frozen desolation of winter. The summer alone does he know, the

summer and the autumn; and the summers of Diaz are an everlasting song,

like the springs of Corot. Beautiful nymphs and other beings from the

golden age give animation to his emerald meadows and his sheltered woods

bathed in the sun: here are little, homely-looking nixies, and there are

pretty Cupids and Venuses and Dianas of charming grace. And none of

these divinities think about anything or do anything; they are not

piquant, like those of Boucher and Fragonard, and they know neither

coquetry nor smiles. They are merely goddesses of the palette; their

wish is to be nothing but shining spots of colour, and they love nothing

except the silvery sunbeams which fall caressingly on their naked skin.

If the painter wishes for more vivid colour they throw around them

shining red, blue, yellowish-green, or gold-embroidered clothes, and

immediately are transformed from nymphs into Oriental women, as in a

magic theatre. A fragment of soft silk, gleaming with gold, and a red

turban were means sufficient for him to conjure up his charming and

fanciful land of Turks. Sometimes even simple mortals--wood-cutters,

peasant girls, and gipsies--come into his pictures, that the sunbeams

may play upon them, while their picturesque rags form piquant spots of

colour.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

TROYON. CROSSING THE STREAM.]

Diaz belongs to the same category as Isabey and Fromentin, a fascinating

artist, a great _charmeur_, and a feast to the eyes.

When in the far South, amid the eternal summer of Mentone, he closed his

dark, shining eyes for ever, at dawn on 18th November 1876, a breath of

sadness went through the tree-tops of the old royal forest of

Fontainebleau. The forest had lost its hermit, the busy woodsman who

penetrated farthest into its green depths; and it preserves his memory

gratefully. Only go, in October, through the copse of Bas Bréau, lose

yourself amid the magnificent foliage of these century-old trees that

glimmer with a thousand hues like gigantic bouquets, dark green and

brown, or golden and purple, and at the sight of this brilliant gleam of

autumn tones you can only say, A Diaz!

The youngest of the group, _Daubigny_, came when the battle was over,

and plays a slighter _rôle_, since he cannot be reckoned any longer

among the discoverers; nevertheless he has a physiognomy of his own, and

one of peculiar charm. The others were painters of nature; Daubigny is

the painter of the country. If one goes from Munich to Dachau to see the

apple trees blossom and the birches growing green, to breathe in the

odour of the cow-house and the fragrance of the hay, to hear the tinkle

of cow-bells, the croaking of frogs, and the hum of gnats, one does not

say, "I want to see nature," but "I am going into the country." Jean

Jacques Rousseau was the worshipper of nature, while Georges Sand, in

certain of her novels, has celebrated country life. In this sense

Daubigny is less an adorer of nature than a man fond of the country. His

pictures give the feeling one has in standing at the window on a country

excursion, and looking at the laughing and budding spring. One feels no

veneration for the artist, but one would like to be a bird to perch on

those boughs, a lizard to creep amongst this green, a cockchafer to fly

humming from tree to tree.

[Illustration: _L'Art._

TROYON. THE RETURN TO THE FARM.]

[Illustration: _L'Art._

TROYON. A COW SCRATCHING HERSELF.]

Daubigny, possibly, has not the great and free creative power of the

older artists, their magnificent simplicity in treating objects: the

feminine element, the susceptibility to natural beauty, preponderates in

him, and not the virile, creative power of embodiment, which at once

discovers in itself a telling force of expression for the image received

from nature. He seeks after no poetic emotions, like Dupré; he has not

the profound, penetrative eye for nature, like Rousseau; in his charm

and amiability he approaches Corot, except that mythological beings are

no longer at home in his landscapes. They would take no pleasure in this

odour of damp grass, the smell of the cow-byres, and the dilapidated old

skiffs which rock, in Daubigny's pictures, fastened to a swampy bank.

Corot, light, delicate, and simple as a boy, sitting on a school-bench

all his life, is always veiled and mysterious. Daubigny, heavier and

technically better equipped, has more power and less grace; he dreams

less and paints more. Corot made the apotheosis of nature: his silvery

grey clouds bore him to the Elysian fields, where nothing had the

heaviness of earth and everything melted in poetic vapour. Daubigny,

borne by no wings of Icarus, seems like Antæus beside him; he is bodily

wedded to the earth. Dupré made the earth a mirror of the tears and

passions of men. Corot surprised her before the peasant is up of a

morning, in the hours when she belongs altogether to the nymphs and the

fairies. In Daubigny the earth has once more become the possession of

human beings. It is not often that figures move in his pictures. Even

Rousseau more often finds a place in his landscapes for the rustic, but

nature in him is hard, unapproachable, and deliberately indifferent to

man. She looks down upon him austerely, closing and hardening her heart

against him. In Daubigny nature is familiar with man, stands near him,

and is kindly and serviceable. The skiffs rocking at the river's brink

betray that fishers are in the neighbourhood; even when they are empty

his little houses suggest that their inhabitants are not far off, that

they are but at work in the field and may come back at any moment. In

Rousseau man is merely an atom of the infinite; here he is the lord of

creation. Rousseau makes an effect which is simple and powerful, Dupré

one which is impassioned and striking, Corot is divine, Diaz charming,

and Daubigny idyllic, intimate, and familiar. He closed a period and

enjoyed the fruits of what the others had called into being. One does

not admire him--one loves him.

He had passed his youth with his nurse in a little village, surrounded

with white-blossoming apple trees and waving fields of corn, near L'Isle

Adam. Here as a boy he received the impressions which made him a painter

of the country, and which were too strong to be obliterated by a sojourn

in Italy. The best picture that he painted there showed a flat stretch

of land with thistles. A view of the island of St. Louis was the work

with which he first appeared in the Salon in 1838.

Daubigny is the painter of water, murmuring silver-grey between ashes

and oaks, and reflecting the clouds of heaven in its clear mirror. He is

the painter of the spring in its fragrance, when the meadows shine in

the earliest verdure, and the leaves but newly unfolded stand out

against the sky as bright green patches of colour, when the limes

blossom and the crops begin to shoot. A field of green corn waving

gently beneath budding apple trees in the breeze of spring, still rivers

in which banks and bushy islands are reflected, mills beside little

streams rippling in silvery clearness over shining white pebbles,

cackling geese, and washerwomen neatly spreading out their linen, are

things which Daubigny has painted with the delicate feeling of a most

impressionable lover of nature. At the same time he had the secret of

shedding over his pictures the most marvellous tint of delicate,

vaporous air; especially in those representations, at once so poetic and

so accurate, of evening by the water's edge, or of bright moonlight

nights, when all things are sharply illuminated, and yet softly shrouded

with a dream-like exhalation. His favourite light was that of cool

evening dusk, after the sun and every trace of the after-glow has

vanished from the sky. Valmandois, where he passed his youth, and

afterwards the Oise, with its green banks and vineyards and hedged

gardens, the most charming and picturesque river in North France, are

most frequently rendered in his pictures. Every day, when nature put on

her spring garb, he sailed along the banks in a small craft, with his

son Charles. His most vigorous works were executed in the cabin of this

vessel: spirited sketches of regions delicately veiled in mist and bound

with a magical charm of peace, regions with the moon above them,

shedding its clear, silver light--refined etchings which assure him a

place of honour in the history of modern etching. The painter of the

banks of the Oise saw everything with the curiosity and the love of a

child, and remained always a naïve artist in spite of all his dexterity.

[Illustration: ROSA BONHEUR. THE HORSE-FAIR.

(_By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, the owner of the copyright._)]

[Illustration: ROSA BONHEUR. PLOUGHING IN NIVERNOIS.]

After these great masters had opened up the path a tribe of landscape

painters set themselves to render, each in his own way, the vigorous

power, the tender charm, and the plaintive melancholy of the earth. Some

loved dusk and light, the simple reproduction of ordinary places in

their ordinary condition; others delighted in the struggle of the

elements, the violent scudding of clouds, the parting glance of the sun,

the sombre hours when nature shrouds her face with the mourning veil of

a widow.

Although he never tasted the pleasures of fame, _Antoine Chintreuil_ was

the most refined of them all--an excessively sensitive spirit, who

seized with as much delicacy as daring swiftly transient effects of

nature, such as seldom appear: the moment when the sun casts a fleeting

radiance in the midst of clouds, or when a shaft of light quivers for an

instant through a dense mist; the effect of green fields touched by the

first soft beams of the sun, or that of a rainbow spanning a fresh

spring landscape. His pupil _Jean Desbrosses_ was the painter of hills

and valleys. _Achard_ followed Rousseau in his pictures of lonely,

austere, and mournful regions. _Français_ painted familiar corners in

the neighbourhood of Paris with grace, although more heavily than Corot,

and without the shining light which is poured through the works of that

rare genius. The pictures of _Harpignies_ are rather dry, and betray a

heavy hand. He is rougher than his great predecessors, less seductive

and indeed rather staid, but he has a convincing reality, and is loyal

and simple. He is valuable as an honest, genial artist, a many-sided and

sure-footed man of talent, somewhat inclined to Classicism. _Émile

Breton_, the brother of Jules, delighted in the agitation of the

elements, wild, out-of-the-way regions, and harsh climate. His

execution is broad, his tones forcible, and he has both simplicity and

largeness. Apart from his big, gloomy landscapes, _Léonce Chabry_ has

also painted sea-pieces, with dark waves dashing against the cleft

rocks.

[Illustration: VAN MARCKE. LA FALAISE.]

The representation of grazing animals plays a great part in the art of

almost all of these painters. Some carried the love of animal painting

so far that they never painted a landscape without introducing into the

foreground their dearly loved herds of cows or flocks of sheep. The key

of the landscape, the cheerful and sunny brilliancy of colour or the

still melancholy of the evening dusk, is harmoniously repeated in the

habits and being of these animals. Thus, too, new paths were opened to

animal painting, which had suffered, no less than landscape, from the

yoke of conventionality.

Up to the close of the eighteenth century French artists had contented

themselves with adapting to French taste the light and superficial art

of Nicolaus Berghem. Demarne, one of the last heirs of this Dutch

artist, brought, even in the period of the Revolution, a little

sunshine, blitheness, and country air amongst the large pictures in the

classical manner. The animal painting of the _ancien régime_ expired in

his arms, and the "noble style" of Classicism obstructed the rise of the

new animal painting. The fact that the great Jupiter, father of gods and

men, assumed the form of a four-footed creature when he led weak,

feminine beings astray had no doubt given a certain justification to

the animal picture during the reign of the school of David. But the

artists preferred to hold aloof from it, either because animals are hard

to idealise in themselves, or because the received antique sculpture of

animals was difficult to employ directly in pictures. In landscapes,

which gods and heroes alone honoured with their presence, idealised

animals would have been altogether out of place. Only animals which are

very difficult to draw correctly, such as sphinxes, sirens, and winged

horses--beings which the old tragedians were fond of turning to

account--are occasionally allowed to exist in the pictures of Bertin and

Paul Flandrin. _Carle Vernet_, who composed cavalry charges and hunting

scenes, had not talent enough seriously to make a breach, or to find

disciples to follow his lead. _Géricault_, the forerunner of

Romanticism, was likewise the first eminent painter of horses; and

although his great "Raft of the Medusa" is heavily fettered by the

system of Classicism, his jockey pictures and horse races are as fresh,

as vivid, and as unforced as if they had been painted yesterday instead

of seventy years ago. In dashing animation, verve, and temperament

Géricault stands alone in these pictures; he is the very opposite of

Raymond Brascassat, who was the first specialist of animal pieces with a

landscape setting, and was much praised in the thirties on account of

his neat and ornamental style of treatment. _Brascassat_ was the

Winterhalter of animal painting, neither Classicist nor Romanticist nor

Realist, but the embodiment of mediocrity; a man honestly and sincerely

regarding all nature with the eyes of a Philistine. His fame, which has

so swiftly faded, was founded by those patrons of art who above all

demand that a picture should be the bald, banal reproduction of fact,

made with all the accuracy possible.

[Illustration: CHARLES JACQUE. THE RETURN TO THE BYRE (ETCHING).

(_By permission of M. Frédéric Jacque, the owner of the copyright._)]

[Illustration: _L'Art._

CHARLES JACQUE. A FLOCK OF SHEEP ON THE ROAD.

(_By permission of M. Frédéric Jacque, the owner of the copyright._)]

It was only when the landscape school of Fontainebleau had initiated a

new method of vision, feeling, and expression that France produced a new

great painter of animals. As Dupré and Rousseau tower over their

predecessors Cabat and Flandrin in landscape, so _Constant Troyon_ rises

above Brascassat in animal painting. In the latter there may be found a

scrupulous pedantic observation in union with a thin, polished,

academic, and carefully arranged style of painting; in the former, a

large and broad technique in harmony with wild nature, and a directness

and force of intuition without parallel in the history of art.

Brascassat belongs to the same category as Denner, Troyon to that of

Frans Hals and Brouwer.

There would be no purpose in saying anything of his labours in the china

manufactory of Sèvres, of his industrial works, and of the little

classical views with which he made a first appearance in the Salon in

1833, or of the impulse which he received from Roqueplan. He first found

his own powers when he made the acquaintance of Théodore Rousseau and

Jules Dupré, and migrated with them into the forest of Fontainebleau. At

the headquarters of the new school his ideas underwent a revolution.

Here, in the first instance, as a landscape painter, he was attracted by

the massive forms of cattle, which make such a harmonious effect of

colour in the atmosphere and against verdure, and the philosophic

quietude of which gives such admirable completion to the dreamy spirit

of nature. A journey to Holland and Belgium in 1847, in the course of

which he became more familiar with the old animal painters, confirmed

him in the resolve of devoting himself exclusively to this province. He

was captivated not so much by Paul Potter as by Albert Cuyp, with his

rich and powerful colouring, and his technique, which is at once so

virile and so easy. But above all Rembrandt became his great ideal, and

filled him with wonder. In his first masterpiece of 1849, "The Mill,"

the influence of the great Dutch artist is clearly recognisable, and

from that time up to 1855 it remained dominant. In this year, during a

prolonged sojourn in Normandy, he became Troyon, and painted "Oxen going

to their Work," that mighty picture in the Louvre which displays him in

the zenith of his creative power. Till then no animal painter had

rendered with such a combination of strength and actuality the long,

heavy gait, the philosophical indifference, and the quiet resignation of

cattle, the poetry of autumnal light, and the mist of morning rising

lightly from the earth and veiling the whole land with grey, silvery

hues. The deeply furrowed smoking field makes an undulating ascent, so

that one seems to be looking at the horizon over the broad face of the

earth. A primitive, Homeric feeling rests over it.

Troyon is perhaps not so correct as Potter, nor so lucid as Albert Cuyp,

but he is more forcible and impressive than either. No one has ever

seized the poetry of these heavy masses of flesh, with their strong

colour and largeness of outline, as he has done. What places him far

above the old painters is his fundamental power as a landscapist, a

power unequalled except in Rousseau. His landscapes have always the

smell of the earth, and they smack of rusticity. At one time he paints

the atmosphere, veiling the contours of objects with a light mist

recalling Corot, and yet saturated with clear sunshine; at another he

sends his heavy, fattened droves in the afternoon across field-paths

bright in the sunlight and dark green meadows, or places them beneath a

sky where dense thunderclouds are swiftly rolling up. Troyon is no poet,

but a born painter, belonging to the irrepressibly forceful family of

Jordaens and Courbet, a _maître peintre_ of strength and plastic genius,

as healthy as he is splendid in colour. His "Cow scratching Herself" and

his "Return to the Farm" will always be counted amongst the most

forcible animal pictures of all ages.

When he died in 1865, after passing twelve years with a clouded

intellect, _Rosa Bonheur_ sought to fill the place which he had left

vacant. She had already won the sympathies of the great public, as she

united in her pictures all the qualities which were missed in Troyon,

and had the art of pleasing where he was repellent. For a long time

Troyon's works were held by _amateurs_ to be wanting in finish. They did

not acknowledge to themselves that "finish" in artistic creations is,

after all, only a work of patience, rather industrial than artistic, and

at bottom invented for the purpose of enticing half-trained

connoisseurs. Rosa Bonheur had this diligence, and is indebted to it for

the spread of her fame through all Europe, when Troyon was only known

as yet to the few. The position has now been altered. Without doubt it

is a pleasure to look at her fresh and sunny maiden picture of 1840,

"Ploughing in Nivernois," with its yoke of six oxen, its rich red-brown

soil turned up into furrows, and its wide, bright, simple, and laughing

landscape beneath the clear blue sky. She had all the qualities which

may be appreciated without one's being an epicure of art--great

anatomical knowledge, dexterous technique, charming and seductive

colouring. And it is an isolated fact in the history of art that a woman

has painted pictures so good as the "Hay Harvest in Auvergne" of 1853,

with its brutes which are almost life-size, or the "Horse Fair" of 1855,

which is perhaps her most brilliant work, and for which she made

studies, going in man's clothes for eighteen months, at all the Parisian

_manèges_, amongst stable-boys and horse-dealers. Until her death, from

the Château By, between Thomery and Fontainebleau, she carried on an

extensive transpontine export, and her pictures are by no means the

worst of those which find their way from the Continent to England and

America. She was perhaps the only feminine celebrity of the century who

painted her pictures, instead of working at them like knitting. But

Troyon is a strong master who suffers no rival. His landscapes, with

their deep verdure, their powerful animals, and their skies traversed by

heavy clouds, are the embodiment of power. Rosa Bonheur is an admirable

painter with largeness of style and beauty of drawing, whose artistic

position is between Troyon and Brascassat.

Troyon's only pupil was _Émile van Marcke_, half a Belgian, who met the

elder master in Sèvres, and for a long time worked by his side at

Fontainebleau. He united the occupation of a painter with that of a

landed proprietor. The cattle which he bred on an extensive scale at his

property, Bouttencourt in Normandy, had a celebrity amongst French

landowners, as he had the reputation of rearing the best fat cattle. He

too had not the impressiveness of Troyon, though he was, none the less,

a healthy and forcible master. His animals have no passions, no

movement, and no battles. They seem lost in endless contemplation,

gravely and sedately chewing the cud. Around them stretch the soft green

Norman pastures, and above them arches the wide sky, which at the

horizon imperceptibly melts into the sea.

_Jadin_ is a painter of horses and dogs who had once a great reputation,

though to-day his name is almost, if not entirely forgotten. He was fond

of painting hunting scenes, and is not wanting in life and movement; but

he is too impersonal to play a part in the history of painting. Having

named him, some mention must likewise be made of _Eugène Lambert_, the

painter of cats, and _Palizzi_, who painted goats. Lambert, who was fond

of introducing his little heroes as the actors of comical scenes, is by

admission the chief amongst all those who were honoured amongst the

different nations with the title of "Raphaels of the Cat." Palizzi, an

incisive master of almost brutal energy, a true son of the wild Abruzzo

hills, delighted, like his compatriots Morelli and Michetti, in the

blazing light of noon, shining over rocky heights, and throwing a

dazzle of gold on the dark green copse. _Lançon_, a rather arid painter,

though a draughtsman with a broad and masculine stroke, was the greatest

descendant of Delacroix in the representation of tigers, lions, bears,

and hippopotamuses. An unobtrusive artist, though one of very genial

talent, was _Charles Jacque_, the Troyon of sheep. He has been compared

with the _rageur_ of Bas Bréau, the proud oak which stands alone in a

clearing. A man of forcible character, over whom age had no power, he

survived until 1894 as the last representative of the noble school of

Barbizon. He has painted sheep in flocks or separately, in the pasture,

on the verge of the field-path, or in the fold; and he loved most of all

to paint them in the misty hours of evening twilight, at peace and amid

peaceful nature. But in spirited etchings he has likewise represented

old weather-beaten walls, the bright films of spring, the large outlines

of peasant folk, the tender down of young chickens, the light play of

the wind upon the sea, murmuring brooks, and quiet haunts of the wood.

Like Millet, he had in an eminent degree the gift of simplification, the

greatest quality that an artist can have. With three or four strokes he

could plant a figure on its feet, give life to an animal, or construct a

landscape. He was the most intimate friend of Jean François Millet, and

painted part of what Millet painted also.