This portrait represents "good Papa Corot," as he was universally known, at work out of doors.
It was Corot's good fortune to meet at the start a young landscape painter, Michallon, who had lately returned from Rome, where he had gone after winning the prize for historical landscape, which then formed part of the curriculum of the École des Beaux Arts. Michallon died in 1824, when only twenty-eight years old, too soon to have shown the fruits of an independent spirit which had already revolted against the trammels of the school. Desiring to save Corot from the mistakes which he had himself made, he adjured him to remain naïf, to paint nature as he saw it, and to disregard the counsels of those who were for the moment in authority. Gentle, almost timid by nature, having met so far in life with little but disapproval, Corot disregarded his friend's advice at first, and placed himself under the guidance of Victor Bertin, a painter then in vogue, and, needless to say, deeply imbued with scholastic tradition. In his company Corot made his first voyage to Italy, in 1825, and thus came for the first time under the true classic influence. The lessons taught in the school of nature, where Claude had studied, were those best fitted for the temperament of Corot, who has been called "a child of the eighteenth century, grown in the midst of that imitation of antiquity so ardent, and so often unintelligent, where the Directory copied Athens, and the Empire forced itself to imitate Rome." It is a curious and interesting fact that when, as in this case, the spirit of classicism reveals itself anew, its never-dying influence can be the motive for work as fresh and modern as that of Corot. It is also true that the rigid enforcement of the study of drawing was a healthy influence on Corot's early life. All the pictures of his early period show the most minute attention to form and modelling; and when he had finally rid himself of the hard manner which it entailed, there remained the substratum of a constructive basis upon which his freer brush played at will.
A BY-PATH. FROM A PAINTING BY JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT.
One of Corot's later works, and treated with greater freedom than the earlier.
Many years, however, Corot was to wait before the memorable day when he bewailed that his complete collection of works had been spoiled, he having sold a picture. Living on his modest income, which his father doubled when, in 1846, the son was given the cross of the Legion of Honor, he was happy with his two loves, nature and painting. Little by little he gained a reputation among the artists, especially when, after 1835, on his return from a second voyage to Italy, he found that the true country of the artist is his native country. After that period his works are nearly all French in subject, many of them painted in the environs of Paris; though, with his Theocritan spirit, he could see the fountain of Jouvence in the woods of Sèvres, and for him the classic nymph dwelt by the pond at Ville d'Avray. His life was long—he died February 22, 1875—and completely filled with his work.
After Corot's death, there was exhibited at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris a collection of several hundred of his pictures, and then, perhaps for the first time, the genius of the man was profoundly felt. To those who were inclined to undervalue the pure, sweet spirit which shone through his work, and to complain of the representation of a world in which no breeze stronger than a zephyr blew, in which the birds always sang, and the shepherd piped to a flock unconscious of the existence of wolves, there were shown efforts in so many and various directions as to forever silence their reproach of monotony, so often directed against Corot's work. There were landscapes, showing the gradual emancipation, due to the most sincere study of nature, hard and precise, in the early period; vaporous and filled with suggestion, as the sentiment of the day and hour represented became important to the painter, and his technical mastery became more certain in later years. There were figures, none too well drawn from the point of view of David or Ingres, but serving, to a painter whose interest in atmospheric problems never ceased, as objects around which the luminous light of day played, and which were bathed in circumambient air.
