After Cox and de Wint cameCreswick, more laborious, more patient, more studious of detail, furnished perhaps with a sharper eye for the green tones of nature, though with less feeling for atmosphere. It cannot be said that he advanced art, but merely that he added a regard for light and sunshine, unknown to the period before 1820, to the study of Hobbema and Waterloo. With those who would not have painted as they did but for Constable,Peter GrahamandDawsonmay be likewise ranked; and these artists peculiarly devoted themselves to the study of sky and water. Henry Dawson painted the most paltry and unpromising places—a reach of the Thames close to London, or a quarter in the smoky precincts of Dover, or Greenwich; but he painted them with a power such as only Constable possessed. In particular he is unequalled in his masterly painting of clouds. Constable had seldom done this in the same way. He delighted in an agitated sky, in clouds driven before the wind and losing their form in indeterminate contours; in nature he saw merely reflections of his own restless spirit, striving after colour and movement. Dawson painted those clouds which stand firm in the sky like piles of building—cloud-cathedrals, as Ruskin has called them. There are pictures of his consisting of almost nothing but great clouds. But that wide space, the earth, which our eyes regard as their own peculiar domain, is wanting. Colours andforms are nowhere to be seen, but only clouds and undulating yellowish mist in which objects vanish like pallid spectres.John Linnellcarried the traditions of this great era on to the new period: at first revelling in golden light, in sunsets and rosy clouds of dusk, and at a later time, in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, bent on the precise execution of bodily form.
The young master, who died at twenty-seven,Richard Parkes Bonington, unites these English classic masters with the French. An Englishman by birth and origin, but trained as a painter in France, where he had gone when fifteen years of age, he seems from many points of view one of the most gracious products of the Romantic movement in France, though at the same time he has qualities over which only the English had command at that period, and not the French. He entered Gros’s studio in France, which was then the favourite meeting-place of all the younger men of revolutionary tendencies, but repeated journeys to London did not allow him to forget Constable. In Normandy and Picardy he painted his first landscapes, following them up with a series of Venetian sea-pieces and little historical scenes. Then consumption seized him and took but a brief time in striking him down. On 23rd September 1828 he died in London, whither he had gone to consult a specialist. In consequence of his early death his talent never ripened, but he was a simple, natural, pure, and congenial artist for all that. “I knew him well and loved him much. His English composure, which nothing could disturb, robbed him of none of the qualities which make life pleasant. When I first came across him I was myself very young, and was making studies in the Louvre. It was about 1816 or 1817. He was in the act of copying a Flemish landscape—a tall youth who had grown rapidly. He had already an astonishing dexterity in water-colours, which were then an English novelty. Some which I saw later at a dealer’s were charming, both in colour and composition. Other modern artists are perhaps more powerful and more accurate than Bonington, but no one in this modern school, perhaps no earlier artist, possessed the ease of execution which makes his works, in a certain sense, diamonds by which the eye is pleased and fascinated, quite independently of the subject and the particular representation of nature. And the same is true of the costume pictures which he painted later. Even here I could never grow weary of marvelling at his sense of effect, and his great ease of execution. Not that he was quickly satisfied; on the contrary, he often began over again perfectly finished pieces which seemed wonderful to us. But his dexterity was so great that in a moment he produced with his brush new effects, which were as charming as the first.” With these words his friend and comrade, the great Eugène Delacroix, drew the portrait of Bonington. Bonington was at once the most natural and the most delicate in that Romantic school in which he was one of the first to make an appearance. He had a fine eye for the charm of nature, saw grace and beauty in her everywhere, and represented the spring and the sunshine in bright and clear tones. No Frenchman before him has so painted the play of light on gleaming costumes andsucculent meadow grasses. Even his lithographs from Paris and the provinces are masterpieces of spirited, impressionist observation—qualities which he owed, not to Gros, but to Constable. He was the first to communicate the knowledge of the great English classic painters to the youth of France, and they of Barbizon and Ville d’Avray continued to spin the threads which connect Constable with the present.
CHAPTER XXV
LANDSCAPE FROM 1830
Thatsame 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 ofpaysage intimehas long been an acknowledged fact, since Delacroix himself, in his article “Questions sur le Beau” in theRevue des Deux Mondesin 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 thatpaysage intimeimmediately 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.
“Do you remember the time,” asks Bürger-Thoré of Théodore Rousseau in the dedicatory letter to hisSalonof 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 thereforehard 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.
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 FrancisIanother LeoX. 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 theplateau de la Belle Croixand through the arching oaks ofBas Bréauto Barbizon, the Mecca of modern art, where the secrets ofpaysage intimewere 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 overwhelmingstrains 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.
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.
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 everlastingnature at every moment of her mysterious life. The forest was their studio, and revealed to them all its secrets.
The result of this lifeen plein airbecame 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 itentouré 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 anarticulation 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.
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 versesUeber 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 broadand 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.
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 expressionof 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 masterThéodore Rousseauwas 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. 4au 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 thePrix 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.
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 thePrix 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 greattriumphant 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 thebourgeoisking, 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.
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, woodsin 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.
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.
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 HenryVIII, 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 ThéodoreRousseau. Rousseau saw into the inmost being of nature, as Holbein into HenryVIII, 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 lightfeuilleton, 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.
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. Toensure the absolute vitality of organisms was for Rousseau the object of unintermittent toil.
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 withoutdetriment 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.”
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’sDiary 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 pinebranches 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.
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 WerkeSind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.”
“Die unbegrieflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.”
Like Turgenief, Rousseau ended in Pantheism.
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.
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 feelsastonishment 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 calledplanimétrie, 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.
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:
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 wordsCamille Corothas 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. WhilstRousseau never spoke about colour with his pupils, but asceterum censeoinvariably 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.
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 theConservatoire, 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.
Corotwas 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 shehad 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 NapoleonICorot 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.”
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 twentyyears 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.
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 sojournin 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.
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 hisart 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.
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.
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, butmore 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!
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 abeloved 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.”
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’œil.... Bing! une seconde étoile apparaît dans l’eau; un second œil s’ouvre. Soyez les bienvenues, fraîches et charmantes étoiles.... Bing! Bing! Bing! trois, six, vingtétoiles.... 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.”