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The French have made a phrase for his kind of work, paysage intime meaning the beloved country the one best known. It is a fine phrase, and it was first used to describe Rousseau's and Corot's work; but it especially applies to Hobbema's. While this artist was not yet recognised, his uncle van Ruisdael was known as a great artist.
His father was originally a barber; but, marrying a dressmaker, he joined forces with his wife to such effect that they became the fashionable house of their time; and a "dress from Corot's" found its place in the comedies of the early part of the century, very much as the name of Worth has been potent in later days.
Every man who knows what it is to dream of landscape meets with one of these works of Corot's first manner with a cry, not of welcome only, but of recognition. Here is morning perceived by the spirit of the hours of sleep. To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than yourself or than any meaner burden.
During forty years of Corot's career the critics said, when they deigned to mention Corot at all, "There are two worlds, God's World and Corot's World." He was regarded as a harmless lunatic, who saw things differently from others, and so they indulged him, and at the Salon hung his pictures in the "Catacombs" with many a sly joke at his expense. The expression, "Corot Nature," is with us yet.
Thus all that we know about dawn not only of a summer morning helps us to see, and seeing to rejoice, in Corot's silvery mist or Monet's iridescent shimmers. All that we know and feel about the patient majesty of labor in the fields, next the earth, helps us to get the slow, large rhythm, the rich gloom of Millet's pictures.
His frankness recalls Constable's, but it is more distinguished in being more spiritual. He has not Diaz's elegance, nor Corot's witchery, nor Rousseau's power, but nature is more mysteriously, more mystically significant to him, and sets a deeper chord vibrating within him.
But Corot's true distinction what gives him his unique position at the very head of landscape art, is neither his color, delicate and interesting as his color is, nor his classic serenity harmonizing with, instead of depending upon, the chance associations of architecture and mythology with which now and then he decorates his landscapes; it is the blithe, the airy, the truly spiritual way in which he gets farther away than anyone from both the actual pigment that is his instrument, and from the phenomena that are the objects of his expression his ethereality, in a word.
Something is just going to happen somebody is coming, some one we love you can almost detect a faint perfume, long remembered, never to be forgotten. A Corot is a tryst with all that you most admire and love best it speaks of youth, joyous, hopeful, expectant youth. The flavor is Grecian, and if the Greeks had left us any paintings they would all have been just like Corot's.
And to speak of transpositions leads us inevitably into consideration of the great secret of Corot's art, his employment of what is known in studios as values. By values is meant the amount of light and shadow contained in a tone.
The leaves on Rousseau's grand old trees are trembling in the forest; Corot's misty morning is as fresh and soft as ever; while Diaz's ruddy sunsets still penetrate the branches; and the peasant pauses daily as the Angelus from the Chailly church calls him to silent prayer." In "The Angelus" you may see far-off the spire of the church at Chailly, from which the bell sounds.
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