The Romantic Movement In France

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The one great compensation that Corot possessed during these years was the affection of a number of his brother artists, who both admired the artist and loved the man. Corot possessed a sunny, tender, tranquil nature that endeared him to all who came in contact with him. He was never embittered by his want of success, but lived the life of a peasant, happy in his art. “Le Père Corot’ became the beloved patriarch of a colony of artists who had settled in the little village of Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau, a spot attractive to artists by the richness and variety of its sylvan scenery and at the same time reasonably near to the exhibition center, Paris. In this district Corot painted the most famous pictures of his later days, e.g ‘The Pool’ and ‘Souvenir of Mortefontaine’. He particularly delighted in the poetic effects of early morning and approaching eve, ‘when all Nature sings in tune,’ and during the glare of the noonday sun he would retire indoors, for effects of brilliant sunshine did not make the same appeal to him. He preferred the minor to the major chords of Nature’s coloring, and was the supreme interpreter of her moods of wistfulness, mystery, and reverie.

Though the dreamy poetical beauty of Corot’s later landscapes, with their willowy trees and mysterious atmosphere, made an unprecedented appeal to American and British collectors towards the end of the nineteenth century, so that extravagant prices were paid for typical examples—in one year more so-called ‘Corots’ were said to have been imported into the United States than Corot himself could ever have painted—it is only in comparatively recent years that the supreme excellence of Corot’s early works and figure paintings have become recognized.

More immediately successful than Corot was his friend Jules Dupré (1812-89), whom Corot called ‘the Beethoven of Landscape.’ Duprè was the son of a porcelain manufacturer at Nantes and, like several other distinguished artists of the time, began his career by painting on china. He was one of the pioneers of ‘natural’ landscape in France, turning away from the medley of the classical painters to render with fresh obsevation and expressive detail the characteristic beauties of rural France, her pastures, forests, and villages.

One of the most vigorous and famous of the Barbizon School, Théodore Rousseau (1812-67) was born in the same year as Dupré and, like him, was an enthusiastic admirer of Constable. Rousseau was the son of a Paris tailor and, though town-born, he experienced the fascination of the forest in his early boyhood, when he stayed with an uncle who had sawmills near Besancon. This uncle persuaded his parents to allow Théodore to study art, and accordingly the young man was placed in a Paris studio. From his masters mediocre painters of classic landscape, Rousseau learnt less than from Nature, and a very early picture, painted in the open air at Montmartre—the almost country—showed a remarkable mastery in rendering air, light, and the details of Nature. In 1831 his first landscape was accepted and hung in the Salon; in 1833 he began his studies in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and again exhibited with credit; and in 1834 his picture of ‘A Cutting in the Forest of Compiègne’ was awarded a medal, and was bought by the young Duke of Orleans. This early success, far from bringing him fortune, proved disastrous, for the older landscape painters, jealous of his growing reputation and his power, cruelly determined henceforward to exclude his work from the Salon. Accordingly in 1836 his magnificent ‘Descente des Vaches’—a great picture of herds of cattle coming down in autumn from the high pastures of te Jura—was rejected by the Salon. The picture is now one of the chief treasures of the Mesdag Museum in The Hague.

For fourteen years the work of Rousseau was excluded from the Salons; as a result of this attack Rousseau in 1837 left Paris for Barbizon, where he was joined by other independent painters. After the revolution of 1848 the work of Rousseau began to be known and appreciated, but though his pictures now began to sell and he was awarded a first medal in 1849 and the Legion of Honor in 1852, he made no change in his life and continued at Barbizon till his death in 1867.

Corot, with characteristic modesty, once said: ‘Rousseau is an eagle; as for me, I am only a lark who utters little cries among the grey clouds.’ There was indeed a great difference between the two men, for Rousseau did not look at Nature with the dreamy gaze of a poet, but with fiery glance of a scientist who would wrest all her secrets from her. He delighted in the infinite details of Nature, and while preserving her breadth and majesty, he delicately differentiated between plants and weeds, mosses and lichens, brushwood and shrubs. Nothing was too great for his soaring imagination, nothing was too great for his soaring imagination, nothing too small for his earnest attention. His vigorous rendering of form and his searching characterization of Nature may be seen in ‘The Oaks.

The Romantic Movement In France (continued)