LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| Plate | ||
| I. | Danse des Bergers | [Frontispiece] |
| Page | ||
| II. | L’Etang | [14] |
| III. | Les Chaumières | [24] |
| IV. | Le Soir | [34] |
| V. | Paysage | [40] |
| VI. | Le Vallon | [50] |
| VII. | Souvenir d’Italie | [60] |
| VIII. | Vue du Colisée | [70] |
All the illustrations are taken from the Louvre, Paris |
The work of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot has been steadily rising in the estimation of the instructed ever since he won his first notable successes in 1840. During the greater part of the artist’s life-time the rise was very gradual, and he would have been astonished indeed if he could have known how rapid it was to be after his death. It is by no means only a rise in the selling prices of such of his works as come into the market—a Corot has something more than a collector’s value; but figures are in their way eloquent, and when we find a work (“Le Lac de Garde”) for which the painter was glad to get 800 francs selling for 231,000 francs within thirty years of his death, the rapid growth in the fame of the painter is materially evidenced.
There are fashions in art as in everything else: for reasons which the dealers could often disclose if they would, this or that artist’s work is suddenly boomed, and for a time commands absurdly big prices in the auction rooms, only to find its proper level again when it is no longer to anybody’s interest to maintain an artificial valuation. But it is difficult to believe that the passing of years will do anything to diminish the fame of Corot, or lessen the prices which connoisseurs are willing to pay for the possession of his work. Rather will both increase, there is reason to think, as under the winnowing of Time’s wings the chaff is separated from the grain, and many a painter hailed as a master to-day is scorned if not forgotten. For whatever may happen, it is impossible to believe that the work of Corot will ever become old-fashioned. There is in it something that does not belong to one time, but to all times; not to one place, but to all places. It is elemental and universal, and instinct with a vitality and youth that unnumbered to-morrows can have no power to destroy.
Even those critics who most strongly opposed the canons Corot professed—and there were many of them—were often unable to condemn a heresy in which faith was so justified by works: coming to curse, like Balaam, they remained to bless. A far more trying ordeal the artist had to undergo in the intemperate rhapsodies of enthusiastic admirers. But neither censure or praise, the scepticism of his own people, or the indifference of the picture-buying public, could tempt him to deviate from the path that for him was the right one. “Vive la conscience, vive la simplicité!” he used to say. His creed was in the words, and he lived up to it.