PLATE VII.—SOUVENIR D’ITALIECorot at the height of his powers is seen in the “Souvenir d’Italie.” The thousand subtle nuances of exquisite colour in the luminous sky, the refined drawing and firm painting of the trees, and the happy confidence revealed by every brush mark upon the canvas, make it one of the most delightful and, we may say, most “lovable” of its creator’s works.PLATE VII.—SOUVENIR D’ITALIE
Corot at the height of his powers is seen in the “Souvenir d’Italie.” The thousand subtle nuances of exquisite colour in the luminous sky, the refined drawing and firm painting of the trees, and the happy confidence revealed by every brush mark upon the canvas, make it one of the most delightful and, we may say, most “lovable” of its creator’s works.
There were other critics at this same period who were less hampered by preconceived notions, and came to a very different conclusion than those who were able todismiss the whole Nature school with contempt as “pampered humbugs.” Delacroix could see that Corot was not “only a man of landscapes” but “a rare genius,” and he was not alone. Every year, as one masterpiece after another appeared at the Salon from the “mud-dauber’s” brush, the general body of artists and art-lovers were more disposed to give him the rank that was his due.
In 1848 Corot was elected one of the judges for the annual exhibition by his fellow-artists. He himself sent nine pictures, and one of them, a “Site d’Italie,” was purchased by the State. The following year Corot was again one of the judges, and in 1850 he was elected a member of the “Jury de Peinture.” He had become a personage in the art-world of France. Already in 1846 he had been decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honour, to the astonishment of his worthy father, whocould not in the least understand on what grounds such an honour had been done to his failure of a son.
The history of Corot’s following years there is no necessity to follow in detail. Like the years which had gone before, they were fulfilled with happy labour. He journeyed through the length and breadth of France, to Switzerland, and elsewhere, “finding landscapes” with that apprehensive eye of his, and recording them on canvas or on paper, or storing them in the pigeon-holes of a memory that in such matters never failed him. For the rest the record is one of a continually increasing appreciation of his work. It started in a very small circle, extending thence in ever-widening ripples. Almost imperceptibly his fame increased until he became an acknowledged master.
In view of the sums paid for many of them since, the prices he obtained for hispictures seem ridiculously small, but there is no reason to suppose that he was anything but well content with such material rewards as came his way. Indeed, so much to the contrary, for some time he looked upon the increasing prices which purchasers were willing to pay with a mild astonishment and a kind of humorous fear that it was too good to be true.
The slighting of his earlier work and the laudation excited by the later had precisely the same effect upon him—that is none at all. If one had asked him, I think he would have said both alike were out of perspective. And he would have spoken without any taint of bitterness: for, from the very first, he was both confident and humble.
Of the man Corot there are many portraits both in pen and pencil, that help to give an outward shape to the more intimate revelation of personality to be found in his work.
One of the most interesting is a portrait by the artist of himself as a young man. He is sitting, a burly, broad-shouldered figure, before his easel. The face looks out from the canvas square and strong, but the full-lipped mouth is sensitive, almost tremulous, and betrays the nature of the man even more surely than the alert eyes; though these eyes, on the pounce, one may say, and the forehead drawn in the intense endeavour tosee—these also tell their own story.
A pen-portrait of later date by Silvestre describes the artist as “of short but Herculean build; his chest and shoulders are solid as an iron chest; his large and powerful hands could throw the ordinary strong man out of the window. Attacked once, when with Marilhat, by a band of peasants of the Midi, he knocked down the most energetic of them with a single blow, and afterwards, gentle again and sorry, he said,‘It is astonishing; I did not know I was so strong.’ He is very full-blooded, and his face of a high colour. This, with the bourgeois cut of his clothes and the plebeian shape of his shoes, gives him at first sight a look which disappears in a conversation that is nearly always full of point, of wit, and matter. He explains his principles with great ease, and illustrates the method of his art with anything at hand; and that generally is his pipe. He so loves to talk about his practices in painting that, a student told me, he will talk in his shorts and with bare feet for two hours at a stretch without being once distracted by the cold.”
Many photographs are in existence to present to us Corot in his autumn time. Says M. Gustave Geffroy, examining one of these: “The features are clearly marked. The brow, high and bare, crowned with hair in thecoup de ventstyle, is furrowed with lines. His glance goes clear, keen, direct,from beneath the heavy eyelids. The nose, short and fleshy, is attached to the cheeks by two strongly marked creases. There is a smile on the lips, of which the lower is very thick—altogether a good, intelligent, witty face.” In general appearance, I may add, these later portraits of Corot always remind me of the late Mr. Lionel Brough.
To my mind there is something more in these photographs than M. Geffroy has called attention to. They are the portraits of a very happy man. A deep spiritual happiness and content make the old, wrinkled face a beautiful one. It is the face of one who, to use a lovely old phrase, “walked with God,” and of whom it was said, “c’est le Saint Vincent de Paul de la peinture.”
As one of his friends said, Corot was “adorably good.” He was a good son, for all that he found himself unable to fall in with his father’s desire to make him a successful draper: and the fact that “at home” his outstanding abilities were never recognised, could not in the least abate the warmth of his family affections. And he was a good friend. He never forgot a kindness done to him either in word or deed, although his memory seemed to be singularly incapable of retaining a record of anything done to his hurt. It has been said, and the argument could be powerfully supported, that the same qualities that go to the making of a good friend make a bad enemy. Very likely it is true in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred: if so the case of Corot was the hundredth. He seemed to have a natural incapacity to bear malice or retain a sense of injury. Perhaps he was too simple or too wise; or, maybe, both.
Not less characteristic of Corot than his manner of going about always with a song on his lips, was his incurable habit of giving. The wonder is that he everhad anything at all left for himself, that even shoes and soup did not follow after francs. And very reprehensibly, of course, he gave to almost every one who had recourse to him, as well as to many who did not. His generosity was all but indiscriminate, and conducted in a manner that, it may be supposed, would drive a charity organisation society to distraction. He was victimised often and knew it, but the knowledge never dulled the edge of an insatiable appetite. To give was at once a luxury and a necessity to him, as appears, and he was never so gay as when he had been indulging himself in this direction rather more recklessly than usual. “He would paint” (I quote from Meynell), “saying to himself, ‘Now I am making twice what I have just given.’ Or, again, having just emptied his cash drawer, he would take up his easel, saying: ‘Now we will paint great pictures. Now we will surprise thenations.’” Rather a foolish fellow evidently: but “one of God’s fools,” as I heard an old priest say of a somewhat similar example.
PLATE VIII.—VUE DU COLISÉEThe “Vue du Colisée” is a reminiscence of Corot’s first visit to Rome. It plainly shows that even in those early days he had obtained a great mastery of his medium, and could set down with distinction what he so clearly saw. Though the subject is a big one, it is handled in such a fashion that simple dignity is its outstanding characteristic. The “Vue du Colisée” was one of the paintings that first gained for Corot the high consideration of the more discerning among his artist friends.PLATE VIII.—VUE DU COLISÉE
The “Vue du Colisée” is a reminiscence of Corot’s first visit to Rome. It plainly shows that even in those early days he had obtained a great mastery of his medium, and could set down with distinction what he so clearly saw. Though the subject is a big one, it is handled in such a fashion that simple dignity is its outstanding characteristic. The “Vue du Colisée” was one of the paintings that first gained for Corot the high consideration of the more discerning among his artist friends.
Notwithstanding the love that made the keynote of his character, all the investigations of the curious have not discovered an “affair of the heart” in Corot’s life story. It is a story to all intents and purposes without a woman in it: or, if that is saying too much, certainly without a heroine. There has been some attempt to exalt his relations with “Mademoiselle Rose” to the level of a romance, but it has failed completely for want of materials. Mademoiselle Rose was one of his mother’s work girls, and in those early days, when he was but newly emancipated from the bondage of drapery, she used to come to see him at his painter-work. She never married, and thirty-five years later Corot still counted her among his friends, andshe visited him from time to time. It is a little romance of friendship, if you like, it may have been on the part of Mademoiselle Rose something more—who knows?—but it cannot count as a Corot love-affair on the evidence that is available.
As far as is known this is the nearest approach to a “love interest” in the life of the artist. It may have been that he looked upon women too much with the eye of an artist ever to be able to see them merely as a man; more probably it was the element of austerity in him that kept him immune from passion.
With all his intense delight in life and in living, Corot was always detached; always preserved, as by a religious habit, from actual contact with the world around him. Through the midst of the follies, the extravagances, and the vices of Romanticist circles in Paris of the thirties, he passed without coming to any harm, and characteristically enough, without losing his regard for some of the wildest of a wild company. He took part in much of the “fun” that was going on, but though often in the set he was never of it, and so far as can be judged it did not influence him, or colour his outlook upon life, in the slightest degree.
I think it was this temperamental detachment, and possibly a sense, unexpressed even to himself, of being vowed to one particular service, that prevented Corot from ever “falling in love,” as the phrase goes. Or, to put it another way, his life was so full of his art, that there was no room within its limits for another dominating interest.
Simple and single-minded, happily pursuing the occupation that of all others he would have chosen, he made his life a work of art more lovely than the most beautiful of his paintings. No one can live in such a world as this for the allotted span andmore without becoming acquainted with grief, but Corot knew none of those searing sorrows which scorch their way into heart and brain, until they make existence a burden hardly to be borne. His faith in “the good God,” to whom he looked up with so childlike a confidence, was so complete that sorrow for him could hold no bitterness; nor, deeply sympathetic as he was, had it power over an impregnable content and an unfailing serenity.
And he died as he had lived. A few days before his death it is recorded “that he told one of his friends how in a dream he had seen ‘a landscape with a sky all roses, and clouds all roses too. It was delicious,’ he said; ‘I can remember it quite well. It will be an admirable thing to paint.’ The morning of the day he died, the 22nd of February, 1875, he said to the woman servant who brought him some nourishment, ‘Le père Corot is lunching up there to-day.’”
“It will be hard to replace the artist; the man can never be replaced,” was one fine tribute to his memory; and another, “Death might have had pity and paused before cutting short so sweet a life-work.”
A sale of some 600 of Corot’s works took place in the May and June following his death. It realised nearly two million francs, or £80,000. This is, of course, not a fraction of the sum that would be realised were the same pictures to be put up to auction to-day; but it shows that his achievement was beginning to be estimated at something approaching its true value.
Corot’s work, of which at one time he was able to boast he had a “complete collection,” is now scattered to the four corners of the earth. Paris possesses some splendid examples at the Louvre, and there are many not less admirable distributed among the provincial galleries of France. America holds a large number in public and privategalleries, and there are in private ownership in this country Corots sufficient to make a magnificent collection. Lately the National Gallery has been enriched, by the Salting bequest, with seven fine paintings from the master’s hand, eloquent witnesses alike to his individuality and variety.
To me it is an added joy, when I stand before a Corot picture, to think of the gracious personality of its creator. It is almost as if his eager, happy voice were pointing out the manifold beauties of the miraculously bedaubed canvas, and recalling the “moment,” so certainly made permanent there.
It is always a “moment” that is seized in Corot’s paintings, with the exception of some of the earliest. Nature is surprised with her fairest charms unveiled, in a passing emotion, of laughter or of tears. There is life, movement, the tremble of being, in everything set down. The air is palpitantwith colour, rainbows are dissolved in an atmosphere that clothes everything in magic and mystery.
Beneath the gay confidence of the painting, subserving the emotion of the moment, what knowledge is shown in these pictures! These tree forms, bold and delicate, with such wonderful subtleties of drawing in them, give more than externals. They reveal a very psychology of trees, the soul that the artist so plainly saw in everything around him. He was concerned to set down far more than the details of the scene before him, not in the least satisfied to be but a reporter. The higher, or, if you like, deeper verities were what he strove for, and the universal verdict to-day is that he did not strive in vain.
The figure-painting of Corot is comparatively little known, and it is a subject of too much importance to attempt to deal with adequately in small space. An enthusiastic critic claims that it includes the artist’s “absolute masterpieces,” but I doubt if many would agree, beautiful as some of these figures are. They show the same faculty of apprehending a sudden revelation of beauty as is shown by the more familiar landscapes, the same exquisite sense of graces in form and colour, which elude the eyes of most of us. But it is still in landscape that Corot is supreme.
I have already stated my conviction that he was not greatly influenced by other artists, his predecessors, or contemporaries. Perhaps Constable, to mention but one name, helped to open his eyes, but once open he used them as his own. Again, the classicism which surrounded him in his youth left gentle memories that in his age were never quite forgotten; but it was worn as sometimes an elderly gentleman wears a bunch of seals, and had about as much to do with the essential personality of the wearer.
He was always true to himself. His equipment was simple faith, definite purpose, and unflagging zeal. A clear eye, a dream-haunted brain, and a great loving heart—that was Corot.
The plates are printed byBemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and LondonThe text at theBallantyne Press, Edinburgh