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 great triumphant 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 the bourgeois king, 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.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COROT.THE BRIDGE OF ST. ANGELO, ROME.

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, woods in 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.

COROT AT WORK.COROT.DAPHNIS AND CHLOE.

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.

COROT.   VUE DE TOSCANE.

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 Henry VIII, 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 Théodore Rousseau. Rousseau saw into the inmost being of nature, as Holbein into Henry VIII, 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 light feuilleton, 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. To ensure the absolute vitality of organisms was for Rousseau the object of unintermittent toil.