From first to last Corot was as independent as he was industrious. He strove always to see Nature with his own eyes, and to keep his vision clear and simple. Whether or not other painters had a grander or nobler vision was nothing to him. It mattered only that he should be true to the grace that was his own. “I pray God every day,” he said, “that He will keep me a child; that is to say, that He will enable me to see and draw with the eye of a child.” That prayer was surely answered, for never did an artist look out upon the world with a more direct simplicity, or with eyes more delicately sensitive to the appeal of beauty.
It was seldom the obviously picturesque that appealed to him. He seemed instantly to apprehend the most elusive of the beauties in the scene before him. That death-bed utterance of Daubigny is significant: “Adieu; I go above to see if friend Corot has found me new landscapes to paint.” That was it: Corot never failed to find new landscapes to paint, for his eye was keen enough to pierce through what seemed commonplace, and discover the underlying beauty. Starting off on one of his innumerable sketching excursions, he remarks to a friend that he has heard bad accounts from painters of the country for which he is bound, but adds that he has no doubt he will find pictures there. And, of course, he found them. The pictures are always there, though the faculty of seeing them is rare.
No one ever worked more constantly and faithfully from Nature, or became more intimately acquainted with the subtle outward expressions of her innermost moods; but the profound knowledge thus gained was only treated as the poet treats a wide vocabulary; as a means of expression, not as in itself worth exploitation. The scene before him was not recorded as a collection of facts, but as it had stirred his emotions, and as it was, in a sense, transformed by his vivid imagination. The resulting picture is the record of an adventure of the soul; the outward reality is not lost, but rather realised in a strange intensity. “See,” said Corot, pointing to one of his landscapes, “see the shepherdess leaning against the trunk of that tree. See, she turns suddenly. She hears a field-mouse stirring in the grass.”
Of how the artist went to work when he had “found” a new landscape some notion may be gained from M. Silvestre’s description. “If Corot sees two clouds that at first sight appear to be equally dark, he will, before building up the whole harmony of his picture on one or other of them, apply himself to discover the difference he knows must exist. Then, when he has decided on the darkest as well as the lightest tone in the scene before him, the intermediate values readily take their places, and subdivide themselves indefinitely before his discerning eyes. These values, from the most positive to the most vague, call to one another and give answer, like echo and voice. When the artist sees he can divide the principal values of the landscape before him into four, he does so by numbering the different parts of his rough sketch from 1 to 4, 4 standing for the darkest and 1 for the lightest patch, while the intermediate tones are represented by 2 and 3. This method enables Corot, with the help of any old pencil and any scrap of paper, to make records of the most transitory effects seen upon a journey. Corot was not a man to make an inventory of his sentiments, and the fact that he made such records proves that they were sufficient for his own purposes. As a rule he first of all puts in his sky, then the more important masses in the middle of the composition, then those to the left and to the right; he then picks out the forms of the reflections in the water, if there is water, and so establishes the planes of his picture, his masses falling in one behind the other while one watches him. Sometimes he proceeds in a less orderly way; for it goes without saying that his methods are the methods of freedom, and not the invariable recipes of a pedant. He runs an unquiet eye over every part of the canvas before putting a touch in place, sure that it does no violence to the general effect. If he makes haste he may become clumsy and rough, leaving here and there inequalities of impasto. These he afterwards removes with a razor, as if he were shaving his landscape, and leaving himself free to profit by such accidents of surface as are happy in effect.”
The picture of Corot sketching in shorthand shows him when the long and close study of Nature had enabled him to generalise with confidence, and when a memory, always retentive, had been trained to a pitch that made it far more reliable than any sketchbook memoranda. Although he always expressed impatience with the idea that anything worth doing could be done merely by taking pains, Corot was the least apt of men to spare any pains that were essential to his purpose; and nothing could be farther from the truth than the suggestion sometimes made, that he was wanting in this respect. To generalise as he generalised is not to be careless of detail, but the very reverse: it implies a knowledge so complete of every element in a landscape that those belonging to a particular view of it can be selected with an unerring judgment, and what is non-essential eliminated. “Put in as much as you like at first, and afterwards efface the superfluity,” is a bit of advice that comes from Corot himself. It was not a strikingly original remark, but it could not have been made by other than a conscientious worker.
It is certainly a mistake to suppose that Corot was careless of details in the sense that he did not give them due consideration; but he always realised that details were details after all. “I never hurry to the details of a picture,” he said; “its masses and general character interest me before anything else. When those are well established, I search out the subtleties of form and colour. Incessantly and without system I return to any and every part of my canvas.”
There is a note in Mr. George Moore’s Modern Painting that seems to throw some illumination upon Corot’s manner of looking at his subject. Mr. Moore came upon the artist, an old man then, “in front of his easel in a pleasant glade. After admiring his work, I ventured to say: ‘What you are doing is lovely, but I cannot find your composition in the landscape before us.’ He said, ‘My foreground is a long way ahead.’ And sure enough, nearly two hundred yards away, his picture rose out of the dimness of the dell, stretching a little beyond the vista into the meadow.”
I think Corot’s foreground had a habit of being a considerable way ahead.
“My ‘Soir,’ I love it, I love it! It is so firm,” said Corot, standing before his picture in the exhibition gallery in company with an appreciative friend. It is “firm” enough beyond question, and the sky especially is a marvel of delicate, palpitating colour. But it is much more, a moment of magic beauty, evanescent as the reflected picture on a bubble-bell, seized and made permanent; an emotion of pleasure cast into a material shape.