LANDSCAPE FROM 1830

That same Salon of 1822 in which Delacroix exhibited his “Dante’s Bark” brought to Frenchmen a knowledge of the powerful movement which had taken place on the opposite side of the Channel. English water-colour painting was brilliantly represented by Bonington, who sent his “View of Lillebonne” and his “View of Havre.” Copley Fielding, Robson, and John Varley also contributed works; and these easy, spirited productions, with their skies washed in broadly and their bright, clear tones, were like a revelation to the young French artists of the period. The horizon was felt to be growing clear. In 1824, at the time when Delacroix’s “Massacre of Chios” appeared, the sun actually rose, bringing a flood of light. The English had learnt the way to France, and took the Louvre by storm. John Constable was represented by three pictures, and Bonington, Copley Fielding, Harding, Samuel Prout, and Varley were also accorded a place. This exhibition gave the deathblow to Classical landscape painting. Michallon had died young in 1822; and men like Bidault and Watelet could do nothing against such a battalion of colourists. Constable alone passed sentence upon them of eternal condemnation. Familiar neither with Georges Michel nor with the great Dutch painters, the French had not remarked that a landscape has need of a sky expressive of the spirit of the hour and the character of the season. Even what was done by Michel seemed a kind of diffident calligraphy when set beside the fresh strand-pieces of Bonington, the creations of the water-colour artists, bathed as they were in light, and the bold pictures of the Bergholt master, with their bright green and their cloudy horizon. The French landscape painters, who had been so timid until then, recognised that their painting had been a convention, despite all their striving after truth to nature.

Constable had been the first to free himself from every stereotyped rule, and he was an influence in France. The younger generation were in ecstasies over this intense green, the agitated clouds, this effervescent power inspiring everything with life. Though as yet but little esteemed even in England, Constable received the gold medal in Paris, and from that time took a fancy to Parisian exhibitions, and still in 1827 exhibited in the Louvre by the side of Bonington, who had but one year more in which to give admirable lessons by his bright plains and clear shining skies. At the same time Bonington’s friend and compatriot, William Reynolds, then likewise domiciled in Paris, contributed some of his powerful and often delicate landscape studies, the tender grey notes of which are like anticipations of Corot. This influence of the English upon the creators of paysage intime has long been an acknowledged fact, since Delacroix himself, in his article “Questions sur le Beau” in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1854, has affirmed it frankly.

L’Art.
THÉODORE ROUSSEAU.

The very next years announced what a ferment Constable had stirred in the more restless spirits. The period from 1827 to 1830 showed the birth-throes of French landscape painting. In 1831 it was born. In this year, for ever marked in the annals of French, and indeed of European art, there appeared together in the Salon, for the first time, all those young artists who are now honoured as the greatest in the century: all, or almost all, were children of Paris, the sons of small townsmen or of humble artisans; all were born in the old quarter of the city or in its suburbs, in the midst of a desolate wilderness of houses, and destined for that very reason to be great landscape painters. For it is not through chance that paysage intime immediately passed from London, the city of smoke, to Paris, the second great modern capital, and reached Germany from thence only at a much later time.

“Do you remember the time,” asks Bürger-Thoré of Théodore Rousseau in the dedicatory letter to his Salon of 1844,—“do you still recall the years when we sat on the window-ledges of our attics in the Rue de Taitbout, and let our feet dangle at the edge of the roof, contemplating the chaos of houses and chimneys, which you with a twinkle in your eye compared to mountains, trees, and outlines of the earth? You were not able to go to the Alps, into the cheerful country, and so you created picturesque landscapes for yourself out of these horrible skeletons of wall. Do you still recall the little tree in Rothschild’s garden, which we caught sight of between two roofs? It was the one green thing that we could see; every fresh shoot of the little poplar wakened our interest in spring, and in autumn we counted the falling leaves.”

From this mood sprang modern landscape painting with its delicate reserve in subject, and its vigorously heightened love of nature. Up to the middle of the century nature was too commonplace and ordinary for the Germans; and it was therefore hard for them to establish a spiritual relationship with her. Landscape painting recognised its function in appealing to the understanding by the execution of points of geographical interest, or exciting a frigid curiosity by brilliant fireworks. But these children of the city, who with a heartfelt sympathy counted the budding and falling leaves of a single tree descried from their little attic window; these dreamers, who in their imagination constructed beautiful landscapes from the moss-crusted gutters of the roof and the chimneys and chimney smoke, were sufficiently schooled, when they came into the country, to feel the breath of the great mother of all, even where it was but faintly exhaled. Where a man’s heart is full he does not think about geographical information, and no roll of tom-toms is needed to attract the attention of those whose eyes are opened. Their spirit was sensitive, and their imagination sufficiently alert to catch with ecstasy, even from the most delicate and reserved notes, the harmony of that heavenly concert which nature executes on all its earthly instruments, at every moment and in all places.

ROUSSEAU.MORNING.
ROUSSEAU.LANDSCAPE, MORNING EFFECT.

Thus they had none of them any further need for extensive pilgrimage; to seek impulse for work they had not far to go. Croissy, Bougival, Saint-Cloud, and Marly were their Arcadia. Their farthest journeys were to the banks of the Oise, the woods of L’Isle Adam, Auvergne, Normandy, and Brittany. But they cared most of all to stay in the forest of Fontainebleau, which—by one of those curious chances that so often recur in history—played for a second time a highly important part in the development of French art. A hundred years before, it was the brilliant centre of the French Renaissance, the resort of those Italian artists who found in the palace there a second Vatican, and in Francis I another Leo X. In the nineteenth century, too, the Renaissance of French painting was achieved in Fontainebleau, only it had nothing to do with a school of mannered figure painters, but with a group of the most delicate landscape artists. From a sense of one’s duty to art one studies in the palace the elegant goddesses of Primaticcio, the laughing bacchantes of Cellini, and all the golden, festal splendour of the Cinquecento; but the heart is not touched till one stands outside in the forest on the soil where Rousseau and Corot and Millet and Diaz painted. How much may be felt and thought when one saunters of a dreamy evening, lost in one’s own meditations, across the heath of the plateau de la Belle Croix and through the arching oaks of Bas Bréau to Barbizon, the Mecca of modern art, where the secrets of paysage intime were revealed to the Parisian landscape painters by the nymph of Fontainebleau! There was a time when men built their Gothic cathedrals soaring into the sky, after the model of the majestic palaces of the trees. The dim and sacred mist of incense hovered about the lofty pointed arches, and through painted windows the broken daylight shone, inspiring awe; the fair picture of a saint beckoned from above the altar, touched by the gleam of lamps and candles; gilded carvings glimmered strangely, and overwhelming strains from the fugues of Bach reverberated in the peal of the organ throughout the consecrated space. But now the Gothic cathedrals are transformed once more into palaces of trees. The towering oaks are the buttresses, the tracery of branches the choir screen, the clouds the incense, the wind sighing through the boughs the peal of the organ, and the sun the altar-piece. Man is once more a fire-worshipper, as in his childhood; the church has become the world, and the world has become the church.