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 hispreparation. 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.”
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 fromhim.” 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.
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.
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 itsrepose: 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.
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.
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 decentesin 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.
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 thenymphs 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, PappelzitterzweigeUnterbroch’nen Träumen zu.”
“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.”
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 theworld 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.
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 inWerther, “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 theZauberflöte; in Dupré the ear is struck by the shattering notes of theSinfonie 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 andbecome 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.
“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 eddyingconfusion; 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 certainje 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 SchoossDer Titanensang der Ströme schallteUnd die Nacht der Wolken mich umschloss,Wenn der Sturm mit seinen WetterwogenMir vorüber durch die Berge fuhrUnd des Himmels Flammen mich umflogen,Da erscheinst du, Seele der Natur.”
“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.”
The first of the brilliant pleiad who did not come from Paris itself isDiaz, 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, theenfant 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 hispilon. From his fifteenth year he worked, at first as a lame errand boy, and afterwardsas 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.
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 themaster 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 thesfumatoof 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 mypilon!” 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.
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.
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 Boucherand 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.
Diaz belongs to the same category as Isabey and Fromentin, a fascinating artist, a greatcharmeur, 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 magnificentfoliage 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 slighterrôle, 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.
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 aplace 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.
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 Chintreuilwas 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 pupilJean Desbrosseswas the painter of hills and valleys.Achardfollowed Rousseau in his pictures of lonely, austere, and mournful regions.Françaispainted 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 ofHarpigniesare 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, andharsh climate. His execution is broad, his tones forcible, and he has both simplicity and largeness. Apart from his big, gloomy landscapes,Léonce Chabryhas also painted sea-pieces, with dark waves dashing against the cleft rocks.
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 theancien régimeexpired 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 doubtgiven 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.Brascassatwas 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.
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, soConstant Troyonrises 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, amaître peintreof 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 Bonheursought 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 byamateursto 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 onlyknown 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 Parisianmanèges, 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 wasÉmile 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.
Jadinis 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 ofEugène Lambert, the painter of cats, andPalizzi, 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 throwinga 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, wasCharles Jacque, the Troyon of sheep. He has been compared with therageurof 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.