In contradistinction from Rousseau his specialty was everything soft and wavering, everything that has neither determined form nor sharp lines, and that, by not appealing too clearly to the eye, is the more conducive to dreamy reveries. It is not the spirit of a sculptor that lives in Corot, but that of a poet, or still better, the spirit of a musician, since music is the least plastic of the arts. It is not surprising to read in his biography that, like Watteau, he had almost a greater passion for music than for painting, and that when he painted he had always an old song or an opera aria upon his lips, that when he spoke of his pictures he had a taste for drawing comparisons from music, and that he had a season-ticket at the Conservatoire, never missed a concert, and played upon the violin himself. Indeed, there is something of the tender note of this instrument in his pictures, which make such a sweetly solemn appeal through their delicious silver tone. Beside Rousseau, the plastic artist, Père Corot is an idyllic painter of melting grace; beside Rousseau, the realist, he seems a dreamy musician; beside Rousseau, the virile spirit earnestly making experiments in art, he appears like a bashful schoolgirl in love. Rousseau approached nature in broad daylight, with screws and levers, as a cool-headed man of science; Corot caressed and flattered her, sung her wooing love-songs till she descended to meet him in the twilight hours, and whispered to him, her beloved, the secrets which Rousseau was unable to wring from her by violence.

Corot was sixteen years senior to Rousseau. He still belonged to the eighteenth century, to the time when, under the dictatorship of David, Paris transformed herself into imperial Rome. David, Gérard, Guérin, and Prudhon, artists so different in talent, were the painters whose works met his first eager glances, and no particular acuteness is needed to recognise in the Nymphs and Cupids with which Corot in after-years, especially in the evening of his life, dotted his fragrant landscapes, the direct issue of Prudhon’s charming goddesses, the reminiscences of his youth nourished on the antique. He, too, was a child of old Paris, with its narrow streets and corners. His father was a hairdresser in the Rue du Bac, number 37, and had made the acquaintance of a girl who lived at number 1 in the same street, close to the Pont Royal, and was shop-girl at a milliner’s. He carried on his barber’s shop until 1778, when Camille, the future painter, was two years old. Then Madame Corot herself undertook the millinery establishment in which she had once worked. There might be read on the front of the narrow little house, number 1 of the Rue du Bac, Madame Corot, Marchande de Modes. M. Corot, a polite and very correct little man, raised the business to great prosperity. The Tuileries were opposite, and under Napoleon I Corot became Court “modiste.” As such he must have attained a certain celebrity, as even the theatre took his name in vain. A piece which was then frequently played at the Comédie Française contains the passage: “I have just come from Corot, but could not speak to him; he was locked up in his private room occupied in composing a new spring hat.”

S. Low & Co.
DUPRÉ.THE SETTING SUN.

Camille went to the high school in Rouen, and was then destined, according to the wish of his father, to adopt some serious calling “by which money was to be made.” He began his career with a yard-measure in a linen-draper’s establishment, ran through the suburbs of Paris with a book of patterns under his arm selling cloth—Couleur olive—and in his absence of mind made the clumsiest mistakes. After eight years of opposition his father consented to his becoming a painter. “You will have a yearly allowance of twelve hundred francs,” said old Corot, “and if you can live on that you may do as you please.” At the Pont Royal, behind his father’s house, he painted his first picture, amid the tittering of the little dressmaker’s apprentices who looked on with curiosity from the window, but one of whom, Mademoiselle Rose, remained his dear friend through life. This was in 1823, and twenty years went by before he returned to French soil in the pictures that he painted. Victor Bertin became his teacher; in other words, Classicism, style, and coldness. He sought diligently to do as others; he drew studies, composed historical landscapes, and painted as he saw the academicians painting around him. To conclude his orthodox course of training it only remained for him to make the pilgrimage to Italy, where Claude Lorrain had once painted and Poussin had invented the historical landscape. In 1825—when he was twenty-eight—he set out with Bertin and Aligny, remained long in Rome, and came to Naples. The Classicists, whose circle he entered with submissive veneration, welcomed him for his cheerful, even temper and the pretty songs which he sang in fine tenor voice. Early every morning he went into the Campagna, with a colour-box under his arm and a sentimental ditty on his lips, and there he drew the ruins with an architectural severity, just like Poussin. In 1827, after a sojourn of two years and a half in Italy, he was able to make an appearance in the Salon with his carefully balanced landscapes. In 1835 and 1843 he stayed again in Italy, and only after this third pilgrimage were his eyes opened to the charms of French landscape.

L’Art.
THE BRIDGE AT L’ISLE-ADAM.

One can pass rapidly over this first section of Corot’s work. His pictures of this period are not without merit, but to speak of them with justice they should be compared with contemporary Classical productions. Then one finds in them broad and sure drawing, and can recognise a powerful hand and notice an astonishing increase of ability. Even on his second sojourn in Italy he painted no longer as an ethnographical student, and no longer wasted his powers on detail. But it is in the pictures of his last twenty years that Corot first becomes the Theocritus of the nineteenth century. The second Corot has spoilt one’s enjoyment for the first. But who would care to pick a quarrel with him on that score! Beside his later pictures how hard are those studies from Rome, which the dying painter left to the Louvre, and which, as his maiden efforts, he regarded with great tenderness all through his life. How little they have of the delicate, harmonious light of his later works! The great historical landscape with Homer in it, where light and shadow are placed so trenchantly beside each other, the landscape “Aricia,” “Saint Jerome in the Desert,” the picture of the young girl sitting reading beside a mountain stream, “The Beggar” with that team in mad career which Decamps could not have painted with greater virtuosity,—they are all good pictures by the side of those of his contemporaries, but in comparison with real Corots they are like the exercises of a pupil, in their hard, dry painting, their black, coarse tones, and their chalky wall of atmosphere. There is neither breeze nor transparency nor life in the air; the trees are motionless, and look as if they were heavily cased in iron.

Baschet.
DUPRÉ.NEAR SOUTHAMPTON.
(By permission of M. Jules Beer, the owner of the picture.)

Corot was approaching his fortieth year, an age at which a man’s ideas are generally fixed, when the great revolution of French landscape painting was accomplished under the influence of the English and of Rousseau. Trained in academical traditions, he might have remained steadfast in his own province. To follow the young school he had completely to learn his art again, and alter his method of treatment with the choice of subjects, and this casting of his slough demanded another fifteen years. When he passed from Italian to French landscape, after his return from his third journey to Rome in 1843, his pictures were still hard and heavy. He had already felt the influence of Bonington and Constable, by the side of whose works his first exhibited picture had hung in 1827. But he still lacked the power of rendering light and air, and his painting had neither softness nor light. Even in the choice of subject he was still undecided, returning more than once to the historical landscape and working on it with unequal success. His masterpiece of 1843, “The Baptism of Christ,” in the Church of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, is no more than a delicate imitation of the old masters. The “Christ upon the Mount of Olives” of 1844, in the Museum of Langres, is the first picture which seems like a convert’s confession of faith. In the centre of the picture, before a low hill, Christ kneels upon the ground praying; His disciples are around Him, and to the right, vanishing in the shadows, the olive trees stretch their gnarled branches over the darkened way. A dark blue sky, in which a star is flickering, broods tremulously over the landscape. One might pass the Christ over unobserved; but for the title He would be hard to recognise. But the star shining far away, the transparent clearness of the night sky, the light clouds, and the mysterious shadows gliding swiftly over the ground,—these have no more to do with the false and already announce the true Corot. From this time he found the way on which he went forward resolute and emancipated.

DUPRÉ.THE PUNT.