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I studied and learned. I want to learn. I want to move; I want to keep right up with the times and the people. I got books and photographs, and I went to all the galleries. I read the artists' biographies and took in all the loan collections. Now I'm loaning, too. Some of these things are going to the Art Institute next week that Daubigny, for one.
By Charles Jacque, the painter of sheep, three works are shown including 72, The Great Sheepfold. Daubigny, Descamps, Diaz and others of the school are well represented in the collection.
It was pretty going, all afternoon, with scenes like pictures by Rousseau and Daubigny, and twice, in the shadows of bamboo groves I saw veritable Monticelli's, when we met people and ox carts labouring through the sand; when forms and colours were all soft and blended, and the glow of day changed to night Art is consoling when the bag is empty, even the purse sometimes!
His modesty was proverbial, and once Daubigny, on introducing him to an American picture dealer, warned him not to ask less than five thousand francs for the first picture he sold to the man. The American went to Daumier's atelier, and seeing a picture on the easel, asked, "How much?" The artist, remembering Daubigny's warning, answered, "Five thousand francs."
Daubigny, Diaz and Rousseau are great painters, and they each have disciples and imitators who paint as well as they; but Corot and Millet stand out separate and alone, incomprehensible and unrivaled. And yet were ever two artists more unlike! Just compare "The Dancing Sylphs" and "The Gleaners." The theme of all Millet's work is, "Man goeth forth to his labors unto the evening."
Eighteen years before, on December 22, 1867, there had died at Barbizon, Théodore Rousseau, who, born in Paris, July 15, 1812, had been the leader of the revolution in landscape painting, in which we to-day count Corot, Daubigny, Dupré, Troyon, Diaz, Jacque, and others who, with our mania for classification, we call the "Barbizon school."
Just such tranquil rural pictures have been portrayed over and over again by Millet, Corot, Daubigny, and in this very simplicity often lies their charm. No costume or grandiose outline is here as in Brittany, no picturesque poverty, no poetic archaisms; all is rustic and pastoral, but with the rusticity and pastoralness of every day.
All reproductions, however, bring the works of world-famous artists within our reach, and enable us to be on intimate terms with the animals of Rosa Bonheur, the peasants of Millet, the portraits of Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Sargent, and Gainsborough, the landscapes of Corot, Daubigny, Dupre, and Turner, and the madonnas of Raphael, Botticelli, Bodenhauser, and Correggio.
Charles Jacque, with the keen smile and the facility for absorbing ideas from the best of them; Ziem even, who painted Venice for some years in the shades of Fontainebleau; Dupré, whose nature expresses itself in deep sunsets gleaming through the oaks of the forest; Daubigny, the youngest of the group, and the more immediate forerunner of landscape as it is to-day, then winning his first success; Decamps, who later sometimes left the Imperial Court, domiciled for the moment at the palace of Fontainebleau, and brought his personality of a great painter who failed through lack of elementary instruction, among them; Daumier, the great caricaturist, and possibly greater painter, but for the engrossing character of the work which first fell in his way all these and more made up the constantly shifting group.
It seemed to imply a delicate distinction that carried conviction at once. It was decided formally that the reddish brown cows in the picture were reminiscent of Daubigny, and that the handling of the masses was altogether Millet, but that the general effect was not quite Corot.
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