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Updated: June 11, 2025
In his "Classical Landscape: Italy," the master has indeed for once a sky that seems at anchor, or at least that moves with "no pace perceived." Nor are the trees in this antique landscape the trees so long intimate with Corot's south-west wind, so often entangled with his uncertain twilights.
A piece of literature resembles a painting in this respect. Corot's well-known painting, "Dance of the Wood Nymphs," presents only a few objects, including a landscape with some trees and some dancing women.
There are, however, two things worth noting in Corot's landscape, beyond the mere fact that, better even than Rousseau, he expresses the essence of landscape, dwells habitually among its inspirations, and is its master rather than its servant.
Whether it was that some of us saw in him that hitherto unguessed-at phenomenon, a French Dickens not an imitator, indeed, but a kindred spirit or that others found in him a refined, a volatilized "Mark Twain," with a flavour of Cervantes, or that still others welcomed him as a writer of naturalistic fiction that did not revolt, or finally that most of us enjoyed him because whatever he wrote was as steeped in the radiance of his own exquisitely charming personality as a picture of Corot's is in the light of the sun itself whatever may have been the reason, Alphonse Daudet could count before he died thousands of genuine friends in England and America who were loyal to him in spite of the declining power shown in his latest books, in spite even of the strain which Sapho laid upon their Puritan consciences.
A great painter writes us a letter, tells us of the things he has seen or heard or felt, gives us news of the world wherein he lives. He expresses his personality to us, and personality in art is a thing incalculable. Corot's Arcadia landscape delights us because it is the distilled essence of the vision, heart, and character of the personality called Corot.
We are losing sight of things but one still feels that everything is there everything is vague, confused, and Nature grows drowsy. The fresh evening air sighs among the leaves the birds, these voices of the flowers, are saying their evening prayer. Corot's Letter to Graham
That little word "bing!" appears also in his paintings, as little leaves or bits of tree-trunk, some small detail which, high-lightened, accents the whole. There could hardly be a more charming painting than this which hangs in the Louvre. It is of a half-shut-in landscape of tall trees, their branches mingling; and all the atmospheric effects that belong to Corot's work can here be seen.
During the last few years of Corot's life, his income was over fifty thousand francs a year "more than I received for pictures during my whole career," he once said. And then he shed tears at parting with the treasures that had been for so long his close companions. "You see, I am a collector," he used to say, "but being poor, I have to paint all my pictures myself they are not for sale."
To Ryder the imagination was the man; he was a poet painter, living ever outside the realm of theory. He was fond of Corot, and at moments I have thought of him as the heir and successor to some of Corot's haunting graces; but there was all the difference between them that there is between lyric pure and tragic pure.
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.
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