To most, Corot is “the man of greys,” the painter of the twilight. Without for a moment suggesting that this is true in so far as it seems to hint that his art had very narrow limitations, I am certainly inclined to believe that the general eye has fixed itself upon his most characteristic and most valuable work. The two dawns, as the old Egyptians called them, Isis and Nephthys, the dawn of day and the dawn of night, revealed themselves to Corot with a fulness to be measured only perhaps in part by the manner in which he has revealed them to us. The stillness, the freshness, the indescribable tremor of awakening life, the curious sense of a remoteness in familiar things, the expectancy as of some momentous revelation, all that goes to make the mystery and magic of the dawn, he knew how to translate into subtle yet easily understandable terms of form, and tone, and colour. It was a miracle to which he seemed to have found the key—perhaps by means of that prayer to be “kept a child.” Over and over again he invoked the dawn to appear upon his canvas, and never in vain. In ever-varying robes of loveliness, but the same in all of them, the dawn responded to his call.
Grey dawn! The words had a cold and gloomy sound until Corot interpreted them, taking the gloom away and leaving of the cold only the delicious shiver of the morning freshness. Beautiful almost as the dawn itself—born of it as they were—are those wonderful pearly greys of his. His palette seemed to hold an infinite range of them, each pure and perfect in itself, and each in a true harmonic relation to the others.
And if the painted dawns are beautiful, they are also true; they carry instant conviction of their absolute verity. There is only one thing that can make a painted canvas do this, and that is truth of tone, and of tone-values Corot made himself a master, mainly because he never ceased to be a student. He retained the eye of a child, but his mind became stored with the accumulated experience of many long hours that were only not laborious because the work was a delight. And great as the store grew in process of time, he was adding to it up to the last.
Here is a picture by Albert Wolff of the artist at the age of 79, when the hand of Death was already stretched out towards him. “An old man, come to the completion of a long life, clothed in a blouse, sheltered under a parasol, his white hair aureoled in reflections, attentive as a scholar, trying to surprise some secret of nature that had escaped him for seventy years, smiling at the chatter of the birds, and every now and again throwing them the bar of a song, as happy to live and enjoy the poetry of the fields as he had been at twenty. Old as he was, this great artist still hoped to be learning.”
It is altogether an important thing about Corot that he was always singing—in season and out of season I was about to say, when I remembered that he would probably have declared that it was always singing-time. He went to his work carolling like a lark, though with a somewhat robuster organ, and snatches of song punctuated his brush strokes. The day’s work done, he broke out into melody in earnest, and sang to himself, to his friends, at home or abroad, with equal vigour and enjoyment. We are told that on one occasion his irrepressible song broke out at an official reception, doubtless to the confusion of dignities and the shocking of many most respectable people.
The play of light filtering through foliage has never been more beautifully rendered upon canvas, or with a closer approximation to the truth of Nature, than in the “Paysage,” reproduced here. The manner in which the tree has been portrayed, the body and soul of it, is not less astonishing. The landscape is a masterpiece among masterpieces, and an impressive witness to Corot’s amazingly sensitive faculty of apprehending what was in front of him, both with eye and mind.
I cannot but think that something of music found its way into Corot’s pictures. They look as if they could have been done in music as well as they were done in paint. In a way they were: if there was always a song on his lips, surely there was also a song at his heart. One may say that his paintings were built to music like the walls of Thebes. They are haunted by sweet harmonies, and seem charged with hidden melodies that tremble on the verge of sound.