Corot

by Sidney Allnutt

“Beauty in art is truth bathed in the impression, the emotion that is received from nature.... Seek truth and exactitude, but with the envelope of sentiment which you felt at first. If you have been sincere in your emotion you will be able to pass it on to others.” So said Corot to a pupil, and “L’Etang” would in itself be sufficient to prove that he knew how to practise what he preached. It is a variant on a simple motive that he was never weary of, and that he knew how to invest with new beauties every time it came to him.

He claimed for the artist an entire independence. “You must interpret nature with entire simplicity, and according to your personal sentiment, altogether detaching yourself from what you know of the old masters or of contemporaries. Only in this way will you do work of real feeling. I know gifted people who will not avail themselves of their power. Such people seem to me like a billiard-player, whose adversary is constantly giving him good openings, but who makes no use of them. I think that if I were playing with that man, I would say, ‘Very well, then, I will give you no more.’ If I were to sit in judgment, I would punish the miserable creatures who squander their natural gifts, and I would turn their hearts to cork.” Again he says—“Follow your convictions. It is better not to exist than to be the echo of other painters. As the wise man says, if one follows, one is behind.” And again—“Art should be an individual expression of the verities, an ardour that concedes nothing.”

It is on the face of it rather a hopeless task to attempt to trace the artistic pedigree of a painter who, at all costs, will be individual with “an ardour that concedes nothing”; and it would not help much towards an understanding of him. At the same time, it would be a mistake to suppose that Corot was quite so independent of the influences around as, perhaps, he imagined himself to be. “Artists,” says Shelley in a notable utterance, “cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the times in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded.”

Thus Corot took his part in the revolt against classicism in France, with which the name of the little village of Barbizon is so inseparably associated. He coloured it, and was coloured by it—so much was inevitable; but his intense individuality none the less preserved him in an aloofness from what I may be permitted to call the broad path of the movement. And as he grew older, so far from becoming more affected by his contemporaries, he only seemed more and more to discover himself.

Before all things Corot was an idealist—a painter of ideas rather than of actualities; which, of course, does not in any way discount his simple sincerity. His landscapes give the idea of a place or an effect rather than its exterior appearance. The rendering of a beautiful passage of colour, of a gracious form, or a delicate play of light and shade, was never held to be sufficient. Within the body of phenomena he saw the throbbing heart and luminous soul of Nature revealed; and it was the very heart and soul of his subject that he strove to prison in his pigments. At the same time, dreamer as he was, there was always in him a healthiness and sanity rare indeed amongst those who are given to seeing visions.

I remember a studio gathering at which Corot was discussed. I wish the master, who always loved to be praised by those who could understand and were sincere, could have heard what was said of him. At length some one said, “Corot was a great artist. It is true that he also happened to be a great painter.” The words seemed to me to have meanings.

A painter is a man who does something; an artist one who is something. The statement may not be new, but it is true; and what it involves is, I think, too often forgotten.

In considering what a painter has done it is natural enough to be preoccupied with his method, to become immersed in an analysis of his technique. There will be an attempt to determine whether he is faithfully obedient to the accepted canons, or modifying and adapting, if not it may be defying them. In the latter case an endeavour must be made to find a solution for the question whether these progressive or revolutionary activities are justified in their result.

It is criticism of this sort that fills innumerable studios with a jargon unintelligible to all but those who are, so to say, “in the trade” in one way or another, and can speak with a craftsman knowledge—of technical terms if of nothing else. Such talk is often futile enough, a breaking of butterfly nothings upon a ponderous wheel of words; though it can, on occasion, be useful enough. In any case only a few, comparatively speaking, are likely to be either interested or benefited.