For that reason he had also an aversion to everything passionate in nature, to everything irregular, sudden, or languid, to the feverish burst of storm as to the relaxing languor of summer heat. He loved all that is quiet, symmetrical, and fresh, peaceful and blithe, everything that is enchanting by its repose: the bright, tender sky, the woods and meadows tinged with green, the streamlets and the hills, the regular awakening of spring, the soft, quiet hours of evening twilight, the dewy laughing morning, the delicate mists which form slowly the over surface of still waters, the joy of clear, starry nights, when all voices are silent and every breeze is at rest; and the cheerfulness of his own spirit is reflected in everything.

One might go further, and say that Corot’s goodness is mirrored in his pictures. Corot loved humanity and wished it well, and he shrank from no sacrifice in helping his friends. And even so did he love the country, and wished to see it animated, enlivened, and blest by human beings. That is the great distinction between him and Chintreuil, who is otherwise so like him. Chintreuil also painted nature when she quivers smiling beneath the gentle and vivifying glance of spring, but figures are wanting in his pictures. As a timid, fretful, unsociable man, he imagined that nature also felt happiest in solitude. The scenery in which Chintreuil delighted was thick, impenetrable copse, lonely haunts in the tangle of the thicket, from which now and then a startled hind stretches out its head, glancing uneasily. Corot, who could not endure solitude, being always the centre of a cheery social gathering, made nature a sociable being. Men, women, and children give animation to his woods and meadows. And at times he introduces peasants at work in the fields, but how little do they resemble the peasants of Millet! The rustics of the master of Gruchy are as hard and rough as they are actual; the burden of life has bowed their figures and lined their faces prematurely; they are old before their time, and weary every evening. Corot’s labourers never grow weary: lightly touched in rather than painted, dreamt of rather than seen, they carry on an ethereal existence in the open air, free and contented; they have never suffered, just as Corot himself knew no sufferings. But as a rule human beings were altogether out of place in the happy fields conjured up by his fairy fantasy; and then came the moment when Prudhon lived again. The nymphs and bacchantes whom he had met as a youth by the tomb of Virgil visited him in the evening of life in the forest of Fontainebleau and in the meadows of Ville d’Avray.

Cassell & Co.
DIAZ.FOREST SCENE.

L’Art.
CHARLES FRANÇOIS DAUBIGNY.DAUBIGNY.SPRINGTIME.

In his pictures he dreamed of pillars and altars near which mythical figures moved once more, dryads sleeping by the stream, dancing fauns, junctæque nymphis gratiæ decentes in classical raiment. In this sense he was a Classicist all his life. His nymphs, however, are no mere accessories; they have nothing in common with the faded troop of classic beings whose old age in the ruins of forsaken temples was so long tended by the Academy. In Corot they are the natural habitants of a world of harmony and light, the logical complement of his visions of nature: in the same way Beethoven at the close of the Ninth Symphony introduced the human voice. No sooner has he touched in the lines of his landscapes than the nymphs and tritons, the radiant children of the Greek idyllic poets, desert the faded leaves of books to populate Corot’s groves, and refresh themselves in the evening shadows of his forests.

For the evening dusk, the hour after sunset, is peculiarly the hour of Corot; his very preference for the harmonious beauty of dying light was the effluence of his own harmonious temperament. When he would, Corot was a colourist of the first order. The World Exhibition of 1889 contained pictures of women by his hand which resembled Feuerbach in their strict and austere beauty of countenance, and which recalled Delacroix in the liquid fulness of tone and their fantastic and variously coloured garb. But, compared with the orgies of colour indulged in by Romanticism, his works are generally characterised by the most delicate reserve in painting. A bright silvery sheet of water and the ivory skin of a nymph are usually the only touches of colour that hover in the pearly grey mist of his pictures. As a man Corot avoided all dramas and strong contrasts; everything abrupt or loud was repellent to his nature. Thus it was that the painter, too, preferred the clear grey hours of evening, in which nature envelops herself as if in a delicate, melting veil of gauze. Here he was able to be entirely Corot, and to paint without contours and almost without colours, and bathe in the soft, dusky atmosphere. He saw lines no longer; everything was breath, fragrance, vibration, and mystery. “Ce n’est plus une toile et ce n’est plus un peintre, c’est le bon Dieu et c’est le soir.” Elysian airs began to breathe, and the faint echo of the prattling streamlet sounded gently murmuring in the wood; the soft arms of the nymphs clung round him, and from the neighbouring thicket tender, melting melodies chimed forth like Æolian harps—

“Rege dich, du Schilfgeflüster; Hauche leise, Rohrgeschwister; Säuselt, leichte Weidensträuche; Lispelt, Pappelzitterzweige Unterbroch’nen Träumen zu.”