His end was as harmonious as his life and his art. “Rien ne trouble sa fin, c’est le soir d’un beau jour.” His sister, with whom the old bachelor had lived, died in the October of 1874, and Corot could not endure loneliness. On 23rd February 1875—when he had just completed his seventy-ninth year—he was heard to say as he lay in bed drawing with his fingers in the air: “Mon Dieu, how beautiful that is; the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen.” When his old housekeeper wanted to bring him his breakfast he said with a smile: “To-day Père Corot will breakfast above.” Even his last illness robbed him of none of his cheerfulness, and when his friends brought him as he lay dying the medal struck to commemorate his jubilee as an artist of fifty years’ standing, he said with tears of joy in his eyes: “It makes one happy to know that one has been so loved; I have had good parents and dear friends. I am thankful to God.” With those words he passed away to his true home, the land of spirits—not the paradise of the Church, but the Elysian fields he had dreamt of and painted so often: “Largior hic campos æther et lumine vestit purpureo.”

When they bore him from his house in the Faubour-Poissonière and a passer-by asked who was being buried, a fat shopwoman standing at the door of her house answered: “I don’t know his name, but he was a good man.” Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor was played at his funeral, according to his own direction, and as the coffin was being lowered a lark rose exulting to the sky. “The artist will be replaced with difficulty, the man never,” said Dupré at Corot’s grave. On 27th May 1880 an unobtrusive monument to his memory was unveiled at the border of the lake at Ville d’Avray, in the midst of the dark forest where he had so often dreamed. He died in the fulness of his fame as an artist, but it was the forty pictures collected in the Centenary Exhibition of 1889 which first made the world fully conscious of what modern art possessed in Corot: a master of immortal masterpieces, the greatest poet and the tenderest soul of the nineteenth century, as Fra Angelico was the tenderest soul of the fifteenth, and Watteau the greatest poet of the eighteenth.

Baschet.
DAUBIGNY.A LOCK IN THE VALLY OF OPTEVOZ.

Jules Dupré, a melancholy spirit, who was inwardly consumed by a lonely existence spent in passionate work, stands as the Beethoven of modern painting beside Corot, its Mozart. If Théodore Rousseau was the epic poet of the Fontainebleau school, and Corot the idyllic poet, Dupré seems its tragic dramatist. Rousseau’s nature is hard, rude, and indifferent to man. For Corot God is the great philanthropist, who wishes to see men happy, and lets the spring come and the warm winds blow only that children may have their pleasure in them. His soul is, as Goethe has it in Werther, “as blithe as those of sweet spring mornings.” Jules Dupré has neither Rousseau’s reality nor Corot’s tenderness; his tones are neither imperturbable nor subdued. “Quant derrière un tronc d’arbre ou derrière une pierre, vous ne trouvez pas un homme à quoi ça sert-il de faire du paysage.” In Corot there is a charm as of the light melodies of the Zauberflöte; in Dupré the ear is struck by the shattering notes of the Sinfonie Eroica. Rousseau looks into the heart of nature with widely dilated pupils and a critical glance. Corot woos her smiling, caressing, and dallying; Dupré courts her uttering impassioned complaint and with tears in his eyes. In him are heard the mighty fugues of Romanticism. The trees live, the waves laugh and weep, the sky sings and wails, and the sun, like a great conductor, determines the harmony of the concert. Even the two pictures with which he made an appearance in the Salon in 1835, after he had left the Sèvres china manufactory and become acquainted with Constable during a visit to England—the “Near Southampton” and “Pasture-land in the Limousin”—displayed him as an accomplished master. In “Near Southampton” everything moves and moans. Across an undulating country a dark tempest blusters, like a wild host, hurrying and sweeping forward in the gloom, tearing and scattering everything in its path, whirling leaves from the slender trees. Clouds big with rain hasten across the horizon as if on a forced march. The whole landscape seems to partake in the flight; the brushwood seems to bow its head like a traveller. In the background a few figures are recognisable: people overtaken by the storm at their work; horses with their manes flying in the wind; and a rider seeking refuge for himself and his beast. A stretch of sluggish water ruffles its waves as though it were frowning. Everything is alive and quaking in this majestic solitude, and in the mingled play of confused lights, hurrying clouds, fluttering branches, and trembling grass.

Cassell & Co.
DAUBIGNY.ON THE OISE.

S. Low & Co.
DAUBIGNY.SHEPHERD AND SHEPHERDESS.

“Pasture-land in the Limousin” had the same overpowering energy; it was an admirable picture in 1835, and it is admirable still. The fine old trees stand like huge pillars; the grass, drenched with rain, is of an intense green; nature seems to shudder as if in a fever. And through his whole life Dupré was possessed by the lyrical fever of Romanticism. As the last champion of Romanticism he bore the banner of the proud generation of 1830 through well-nigh two generations, and until his death in 1889 stood on the ground where Paul Huet had first placed French landscape; but Huet attained his pictorial effects by combining and by calculation, while Dupré is always a great, true, and convincing poet. Every evening he was seen in L’Isle Adam, where he settled in 1849, wandering alone across the fields, even in drenching rain. One of his pupils declares that once, when they stood at night on the bridge of the Oise during a storm, Dupré broke into a paroxysm of tears at the magnificent spectacle. He was a fanatic rejoicing in storms, one who watched the tragedies of the heaven with quivering emotion, a passionate spirit consumed by his inward force, and, like his literary counterpart Victor Hugo, he sought beauty of landscape only where it was wild and magnificent. He is the painter of nature vexed and harassed, and of the majestic silence that follows the storm. The theme of his pictures is at one time the whirling torture of the yellow leaves driven before the wind in eddying confusion; tormented and quivering they cleave to the furrows in the mad chase, fall into dykes, and cling against the trunks of trees, to find refuge from their persecutor. At another time he paints how the night wind whistles round an old church and whirls the screaming weather-cock round and round, how it moans and rattles with invisible hand against the doors, forces its way through the windows, and, once shut in its stony prison, seeks a way out again, howling and wailing. He paints sea-pieces in which the sea rages and mutters like some hoarse old monster; the colour of the water is dirty and pallid; the howling multitude of waves storms on like an innumerable army before which every human power gives way. Stones are torn loose and hurled crashing upon the shore. The clouds are dull and ghostly, here black as smoke, there of a shining whiteness, and swollen as though they must burst. He celebrates the commotion of the sky, nature in her angry majesty, and the most brilliant phenomena of atmospheric life. Rousseau’s highest aim was to avoid painting for effect, and Corot only cared for grace of tone; a picture of his consists “of a little grey and a certain je ne sais quoi.” Jules Dupré is peculiarly the colour-poet of the group, and sounds the most resonant notes in the romantic concert. His light does not beam in gently vibrating silver tones, but is concentrated in glaring red suns. “Ah, la lumière, la lumière!” Beside the flaming hues of evening red he paints the darkest shadows. He revels in contrasts. His favourite key of colour is that of a ghostly sunset, against which a gnarled oak or the dark sail of a tiny vessel rises like a phantom.

Trembling and yet with ardent desire he looks at the tumult of waters, and hears the roll and resonance of the moon-silvered tide. He delights in night, rain, and storm. Corot’s gentle rivulets become a rolling and whirling flood in his pictures, a headlong stream carrying all before it. The wind no longer sighs, but blusters across the valley, spreading ruin in its path. The clouds which in Corot are silvery and gentle, like white lambs, are in Dupré black and threatening, like demons of hell. In Corot the soft morning breeze faintly agitates the tender clouds in the sky; in Dupré a damp, cold wind of evening blows a spectral grey mist into the valley, and the hurricane tears apart the thunderclouds.

“Wenn ich fern auf nackter Haide wallte, Wo aus dämmernder Geklüfte Schooss Der Titanensang der Ströme schallte Und die Nacht der Wolken mich umschloss, Wenn der Sturm mit seinen Wetterwogen Mir vorüber durch die Berge fuhr Und des Himmels Flammen mich umflogen, Da erscheinst du, Seele der Natur.”