The result of this life en plein air became at once the same as it had been with Constable. Earlier artists worked with the conception and the technique of Waterloo, Ruysdael, and Everdingen, and believed themselves incapable of doing anything without gnarled, heroic oaks. Even Michel was hard-bound in the gallery style of the Dutch, and for Decamps atmosphere was still a thing unknown or non-existent. He placed a harsh light, opaque as plaster, against a background as black as coal. Even the colours of Delacroix were merely tones of the palette; he wanted to create preconceived decorative harmonies, and not simply to interpret reality. Following the English, the masters of Fontainebleau made the discovery of air and light. They did not paint the world, like the other Romanticists, in exuberantly varying hues recalling the old masters: they saw it entouré d’air, and tempered by the tones of the atmosphere. And since their time the “harmony of light and air with that of which they are the life and illumination” has become the great problem of painting. Through this art grew young again, and works of art received the breathing life, the fresh bloom, and the delicate harmony which are to be found everywhere in nature itself, and which are only reached with much difficulty by any artificial method of tuning into accord. After Constable they were the first who recognised that the beauty of a landscape does not lie in objects themselves, but in the lights that are cast upon them. Of course, there is also an articulation of forms in nature. When Boecklin paints a grove with tall and solemn trees in the evening, when he forms to himself a vision of the mysterious haunts of his “Fire-worshippers,” there is scarcely any need of colour. The outline alone is so majestically stern that it makes man feel his littleness utterly, and summons him to devotional thoughts. But the subtle essence by which nature appeals either joyously or sorrowfully to the spirit depends still more on the light or gloom in which she is bathed; and this mood is not marked by an inquisitive eye: the introspective gaze, the imagination itself, secretes it in nature. And here a second point is touched.

Cassell & Co.
ROUSSEAU.SUNSET.

The peculiarity of all these masters, who on their first appearance were often despised as realists or naturalists, consists precisely in this: they never represented, at least in the works of their later period in which they thoroughly expressed themselves,—they never represented actual nature in the manner of photography, but freely painted their own moods from memory, just as Goethe when he stood in the little house in the Kikelhahn near Ilmenau, instead of elaborating a prosaic description of the Kikelhahn, wrote the verses Ueber allen Wipfeln ist Ruh. In this poem of Goethe one does not learn how the summits looked, and there is no allusion to the play of light, and yet the forest, dimly illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, is presented clearly to the inward eye. Any poet before Goethe’s time would have made a broad and epical description, and produced a picture by the addition of details; but here the very music of the words creates a picture of rest and quietude. The works of the Fontainebleau artists are Goethe-like poems of nature in pigments. They are as far removed from the æsthetic aridness of the older landscape of composition, pieced together from studies, as from the flat, prosaic fidelity to nature of that “entirely null and void, spuriously realistic painting of the so-called guardians of woods and waters.” They were neither concerned to master nature and compose a picture from her according to conventional rules, nor pedantically to draw the portrait of any given region. They did not think of topographical accuracy, or of preparing a map of their country. A landscape was not for them a piece of scenery, but a condition of soul. They represent the victory of lyricism over dry though inflated prose. Impressed by some vision of nature, they warm to their work and produce pictures that could not have been anticipated. And thus they fathomed art to its profoundest depths. Their works were fragrant poems sprung from moods of spirit which had risen in them during a walk in the forest. Perhaps only Titian, Rubens, and Watteau had previously looked upon nature with the same eyes. And as in the case of these artists, so also in that of the Fontainebleau painters, it was necessary that a genuine realistic art, a long period of the most intimate study of nature, should have to be gone through before they reached this height.

Seemann, Leipzig.
ROUSSEAU.THE LAKE AMONG THE ROCKS AT BARBIZON.

L’Art.
ROUSSEAU.A POND, FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU.

In the presence of nature one saturates one’s self with truth; and after returning to the studio one squeezes the sponge, as Jules Dupré expressed it. Only after they had satiated themselves with the knowledge of truth, only after nature with all her individual phenomena had been interwoven with their inmost being, could they, without effort, and without the purpose of representing determined objects, paint from personal sentiment, and give expression to their humour, in the mere gratification of impulse. Thence comes their wide difference from each other. Painters who work according to fixed rules resemble one another, and those who aim at a distinct copy of nature resemble one another no less. But each one of the Fontainebleau painters, according to his character and his mood for the time being, received different impressions from the same spot in nature, and at the same moment of time. Each found a landscape and a moment which appealed to his sentiment more perceptibly than any other. One delighted in spring and dewy morning, another in a cold, clear day, another in the threatening majesty of storm, another in the sparkling effects of sportive sunbeams, and another in evening after sundown, when colours have faded and forms are dim. Each one obeyed his peculiar temperament, and adapted his technique to the altogether personal expression of his way of seeing and feeling. Each one is entirely himself, each one an original mind, each picture a spiritual revelation, and often one of touching simplicity and greatness: homo additus naturæ. And having dedicated themselves, more than all their predecessors, to personality creating in and for itself, they have become the founders of the new creed in art.

L’Art.
CAMILLE COROT.

That strong and firmly rooted master Théodore Rousseau was the epic poet, the plastic artist of the Pleïades. “Le chêne des roches” was one of his masterpieces, and he stands himself amid the art of his time like an oak embedded in rocks. His father was a tailor who lived in the Rue Neuve-Saint Eustache, Nr. 4 au quatrième. As a boy he is said to have specially devoted himself to mathematics, and to have aimed at becoming a student at the Polytechnic Institute. Thus the dangerous, doctrinaire tendency, which beset him in his last years, of making art more of a science than is really practicable, and of referring everything to some law, lay even in his boyish tastes. He grew up in the studio of the Classicist Lethière, and looked on whilst the latter painted both his large Louvre pictures, “The Death of Brutus” and “The Death of Virginia.” He even thought himself of competing for the Prix de Rome. But the composition of his “historical landscape” was not a success. Then he took his paint-boxes, left Lethière’s studio, and wandered over to Montmartre. Even his first little picture, “The Telegraph Tower” of 1826, announced the aim which he was tentatively endeavouring to reach.

At the very time when Watelet’s metallic waterfalls and zinc trees were being drawn up in line, when the pupils of Bertin hunted the Calydonian boar, or drowned Zenobia in the waves of the Araxes, Rousseau, set free from the ambition of winning the Prix de Rome, was painting humble plains within the precincts of Paris, with little brooks in the neighbourhood which had nothing that deserved the name of waves.