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.

Hanfstaengl.
COROT.THE DANCE OF THE NYMPHS.

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 feels astonishment 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 called planimétrie, 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.

Seemann, Leipzig.
COROT.A DANCE.
J. B. C. COROT.LANDSCAPE.

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:

Hanjstaengl.
COROT.LA ROUTE D’ARRAS.

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 words Camille Corot has 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. Whilst Rousseau never spoke about colour with his pupils, but as ceterum censeo invariably 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.