Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
"Hurry up and tell us the rest; it's growing late," insisted the Antiquary, as he beckoned for the bill. "I saw Campbell Corot only once more, but occasionally I saw his work, and it told a sad tale of deterioration. The sunrises and nymphals no longer deceived anybody, having fallen nearly to the average level of auction-room impressionism.
Invariably there were packages to be called for at Berjot's grocery store, or Dudrumet's dry goods counter, and then H. having discovered the exact corner from which Corot painted his delightful panorama of the city, a pilgrimage to the spot almost always ensued.
This alone would give Corot a lower rank, in the absence of a marked superiority in some special high quality superiority which does not exist, for the picked work of Rousseau possesses technical excellences all its own, as consummate as anything in the world's landscape art, while the range of treatment and subject, so much greater in Rousseau than in Corot, puts the limited and mannered art of the latter as a whole in a distinct inferiority.
The Barbizon School which, by the way, was never a school, and if it exists now is not at Barbizon was made up of five men: Corot, Millet, Rousseau, Diaz and Daubigny. Corot saw it first this straggling little village of Barbizon, nestling there at the foot of the Forest of Fontainebleau, thirty- five miles southeast of Paris. This was about the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty.
Our young enthusiast watched the Diaz of a wood interior turn slowly into a Corot, and with a cry of delight was about to unstrap his own and Margaret's sketching-kits, when the sun was suddenly blotted out by a heavy cloud, and the quick gloom of a mountain-storm chilling the sunlit vista to a dull slate gray settled over the forest.
In our work-a-day, materialistic age, like a thrush singing in a boiler-shop, he is the quiet but triumphant vindication of the truth that all great art has its roots firmly implanted in the earth of Hellenic civilization, though its expression may be, as in Corot's case, through an art unknown to the Greeks, and even, as in the case of the one greater man of this century than Corot Millet by the presentation of types which the beauty-loving sons of Hellas disdained to represent.
He stood before the painter, exuding a mixture of deference and patronage in which either element might predominate as events developed; but Stanwell could see in the incident only the stuff for a good story. "My dear Shepson," he said, "what are you talking about? This is no picture of mine. Why don't you ask me to do you a Corot at once? I hear there's a great demand for them still in the West.
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."
Before a Corot you had better give way, and let its beauty caress your soul. His colors are thin and very simple there is no challenge in his work, as there is in the work of Turner. Greens and grays predominate, and the plain drab tones are blithe, airy, gracious, graceful and piquant as a beautiful young Quaker woman clothed in the garb of simplicity and humility but a woman still.
There never was a great painter who had not exquisite horizons, and if Corot and Crome were right, the Londoner loses a great thing. He loses the coming of the cloud, and when it is high in air he loses its shape. A cloud-lover is not content to see a snowy and rosy head piling into the top of the heavens; he wants to see the base and the altitude.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking