The mention of his name conjures up before the mind the recesses of a wood, reddened by autumn, a wood where the sunbeams play, gilding the trunks of the trees; naked white forms repose amid mysterious lights, or on paths of golden sand appear gaily draped odalisques, their rich costume glittering in the rays of the sun. Few have won from the forest, as he did, its beauty of golden sunlight and verdant leaves. Others remained at the entrance of the forest; he was the first who really penetrated to its depths. The branches met over his head like the waves of the sea, the blue heaven vanished, and everything was shrouded. The sunbeams fell like the rain of Danaë through the green leaves, and the moss lay like a velvet mantle on the granite piles of rock. He settled down like a hermit in his verdant hollow. The leaves quivered green and red, and covered the ground, shining like gold in the furtive rays of the evening sun. Nothing was to be seen of the trees, nothing of the outline of their foliage, nothing of the majestic sweep of their boughs, but only the mossy stems touched by the radiance of the sun. The pictures of Diaz are not landscapes, for the land is wanting; they are “tree scapes,” and their poetry lies in the sunbeams which dance playing round them. “Have you seen my last stem?” he would himself inquire of the visitors to his studio.

These woodland recesses were the peculiar specialty of Diaz, and he but seldom abandoned them to paint warm, dreamy pictures of summer. For, like a true child of the South, he only cared to see nature on beautiful days. He knows nothing of spring with its light mist, and still less of the frozen desolation of winter. The summer alone does he know, the summer and the autumn; and the summers of Diaz are an everlasting song, like the springs of Corot. Beautiful nymphs and other beings from the golden age give animation to his emerald meadows and his sheltered woods bathed in the sun: here are little, homely-looking nixies, and there are pretty Cupids and Venuses and Dianas of charming grace. And none of these divinities think about anything or do anything; they are not piquant, like those of Boucher and Fragonard, and they know neither coquetry nor smiles. They are merely goddesses of the palette; their wish is to be nothing but shining spots of colour, and they love nothing except the silvery sunbeams which fall caressingly on their naked skin. If the painter wishes for more vivid colour they throw around them shining red, blue, yellowish-green, or gold-embroidered clothes, and immediately are transformed from nymphs into Oriental women, as in a magic theatre. A fragment of soft silk, gleaming with gold, and a red turban were means sufficient for him to conjure up his charming and fanciful land of Turks. Sometimes even simple mortals—wood-cutters, peasant girls, and gipsies—come into his pictures, that the sunbeams may play upon them, while their picturesque rags form piquant spots of colour.

L’Art.
TROYON.IN NORMANDY: COWS GRAZING.
L’Art.
TROYON.CROSSING THE STREAM.

Diaz belongs to the same category as Isabey and Fromentin, a fascinating artist, a great charmeur, and a feast to the eyes.

When in the far South, amid the eternal summer of Mentone, he closed his dark, shining eyes for ever, at dawn on 18th November 1876, a breath of sadness went through the tree-tops of the old royal forest of Fontainebleau. The forest had lost its hermit, the busy woodsman who penetrated farthest into its green depths; and it preserves his memory gratefully. Only go, in October, through the copse of Bas Bréau, lose yourself amid the magnificent foliage of these century-old trees that glimmer with a thousand hues like gigantic bouquets, dark green and brown, or golden and purple, and at the sight of this brilliant gleam of autumn tones you can only say, A Diaz!

The youngest of the group, Daubigny, came when the battle was over, and plays a slighter rôle, since he cannot be reckoned any longer among the discoverers; nevertheless he has a physiognomy of his own, and one of peculiar charm. The others were painters of nature; Daubigny is the painter of the country. If one goes from Munich to Dachau to see the apple trees blossom and the birches growing green, to breathe in the odour of the cow-house and the fragrance of the hay, to hear the tinkle of cow-bells, the croaking of frogs, and the hum of gnats, one does not say, “I want to see nature,” but “I am going into the country.” Jean Jacques Rousseau was the worshipper of nature, while Georges Sand, in certain of her novels, has celebrated country life. In this sense Daubigny is less an adorer of nature than a man fond of the country. His pictures give the feeling one has in standing at the window on a country excursion, and looking at the laughing and budding spring. One feels no veneration for the artist, but one would like to be a bird to perch on those boughs, a lizard to creep amongst this green, a cockchafer to fly humming from tree to tree.

L’Art.
TROYON.THE RETURN TO THE FARM.

L’Art.
TROYON.A COW SCRATCHING HERSELF.