Corot Part 1

Corot.

by Sidney Allnutt.

The work of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot has been steadily rising in the estimation of the instructed ever since he won his first notable successes in 1840. During the greater part of the artist's life-time the rise was very gradual, and he would have been astonished indeed if he could have known how rapid it was to be after his death. It is by no means only a rise in the selling prices of such of his works as come into the market--a Corot has something more than a collector's value; but figures are in their way eloquent, and when we find a work ("Le Lac de Garde") for which the painter was glad to get 800 francs selling for 231,000 francs within thirty years of his death, the rapid growth in the fame of the painter is materially evidenced.

There are fashions in art as in everything else: for reasons which the dealers could often disclose if they would, this or that artist's work is suddenly boomed, and for a time commands absurdly big prices in the auction rooms, only to find its proper level again when it is no longer to anybody's interest to maintain an artificial valuation. But it is difficult to believe that the pa.s.sing of years will do anything to diminish the fame of Corot, or lessen the prices which connoisseurs are willing to pay for the possession of his work. Rather will both increase, there is reason to think, as under the winnowing of Time's wings the chaff is separated from the grain, and many a painter hailed as a master to-day is scorned if not forgotten. For whatever may happen, it is impossible to believe that the work of Corot will ever become old-fashioned. There is in it something that does not belong to one time, but to all times; not to one place, but to all places. It is elemental and universal, and instinct with a vitality and youth that unnumbered to-morrows can have no power to destroy.

Even those critics who most strongly opposed the canons Corot professed--and there were many of them--were often unable to condemn a heresy in which faith was so justified by works: coming to curse, like Balaam, they remained to bless. A far more trying ordeal the artist had to undergo in the intemperate rhapsodies of enthusiastic admirers. But neither censure or praise, the scepticism of his own people, or the indifference of the picture-buying public, could tempt him to deviate from the path that for him was the right one. "Vive la conscience, vive la simplicite!" he used to say. His creed was in the words, and he lived up to it.

He claimed for the artist an entire independence. "You must interpret nature with entire simplicity, and according to your personal sentiment, altogether detaching yourself from what you know of the old masters or of contemporaries. Only in this way will you do work of real feeling. I know gifted people who will not avail themselves of their power. Such people seem to me like a billiard-player, whose adversary is constantly giving him good openings, but who makes no use of them. I think that if I were playing with that man, I would say, 'Very well, then, I will give you no more.' If I were to sit in judgment, I would punish the miserable creatures who squander their natural gifts, and I would turn their hearts to cork." Again he says--"Follow your convictions. It is better not to exist than to be the echo of other painters. As the wise man says, if one follows, one is behind." And again--"Art should be an individual expression of the verities, an ardour that concedes nothing."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--L'ETANG.

"Beauty in art is truth bathed in the impression, the emotion that is received from nature.... Seek truth and exact.i.tude, but with the envelope of sentiment which you felt at first. If you have been sincere in your emotion you will be able to pa.s.s it on to others." So said Corot to a pupil, and "L'Etang" would in itself be sufficient to prove that he knew how to practise what he preached. It is a variant on a simple motive that he was never weary of, and that he knew how to invest with new beauties every time it came to him.]

It is on the face of it rather a hopeless task to attempt to trace the artistic pedigree of a painter who, at all costs, will be individual with "an ardour that concedes nothing"; and it would not help much towards an understanding of him. At the same time, it would be a mistake to suppose that Corot was quite so independent of the influences around as, perhaps, he imagined himself to be. "Artists," says Sh.e.l.ley in a notable utterance, "cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circ.u.mstances belonging to the times in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded."

Thus Corot took his part in the revolt against cla.s.sicism in France, with which the name of the little village of Barbizon is so inseparably a.s.sociated. He coloured it, and was coloured by it--so much was inevitable; but his intense individuality none the less preserved him in an aloofness from what I may be permitted to call the broad path of the movement. And as he grew older, so far from becoming more affected by his contemporaries, he only seemed more and more to discover himself.

Before all things Corot was an idealist--a painter of ideas rather than of actualities; which, of course, does not in any way discount his simple sincerity. His landscapes give the idea of a place or an effect rather than its exterior appearance. The rendering of a beautiful pa.s.sage of colour, of a gracious form, or a delicate play of light and shade, was never held to be sufficient. Within the body of phenomena he saw the throbbing heart and luminous soul of Nature revealed; and it was the very heart and soul of his subject that he strove to prison in his pigments. At the same time, dreamer as he was, there was always in him a healthiness and sanity rare indeed amongst those who are given to seeing visions.

I remember a studio gathering at which Corot was discussed. I wish the master, who always loved to be praised by those who could understand and were sincere, could have heard what was said of him. At length some one said, "Corot was a great artist. It is true that he also happened to be a great painter." The words seemed to me to have meanings.

A painter is a man who does something; an artist one who is something.

The statement may not be new, but it is true; and what it involves is, I think, too often forgotten.

In considering what a painter has done it is natural enough to be preoccupied with his method, to become immersed in an a.n.a.lysis of his technique. There will be an attempt to determine whether he is faithfully obedient to the accepted canons, or modifying and adapting, if not it may be defying them. In the latter case an endeavour must be made to find a solution for the question whether these progressive or revolutionary activities are justified in their result.

It is criticism of this sort that fills innumerable studios with a jargon unintelligible to all but those who are, so to say, "in the trade" in one way or another, and can speak with a craftsman knowledge--of technical terms if of nothing else. Such talk is often futile enough, a breaking of b.u.t.terfly nothings upon a ponderous wheel of words; though it can, on occasion, be useful enough. In any case only a few, comparatively speaking, are likely to be either interested or benefited.

It is altogether another matter when an artist is approached. How he conveys his message is of much less importance than what is conveyed. He may be poet, painter, or musician, but the need for understanding what he does is infinitely less than that of learning what he is. This is not to say that, in the case of the artist, technique is beneath consideration; but it is to say that it must not be considered first.

Trembling script sometimes give the authentic gospel its birth in words, and a true vision may be recorded by an uncertain hand. To lose sight of the artist in contemplating the technique of the work by which he reveals himself is to sacrifice the substance for the shadow.

Corot was a great artist. To him his art was not a trade or an amus.e.m.e.nt, still less a trick, but a religion. He worshipped with an unceasing diligence and intensity before the chosen altar of his adoration. Less than his best he dared not offer there. Nothing that was not wholly honest and true could be acceptable. What a magnificent character he gives to himself, all unconsciously, in confessing to M.

Chardin an artistic sin! "One day I allowed myself to do something chic; I did some ornamental thing, letting my brush wander at will. When it was done I was seized with remorse; I could not close my eyes all night.

As soon as it was day, I ran to my canvas, and furiously scratched out all the work of the previous evening. As my flourishes disappeared, I felt my conscience grow calmer, and once the sacrifice was accomplished I breathed freely, for I felt myself rehabilitated in my own sight."

What would some of our painters say to a conscience so tyrannous?

It is, for me, impossible to look at Corot's work without feeling that his was, if I may put it so, a monastic nature. Here is a serene and cloistered art, something secluded from the traffic of the everyday world, a vision intense rather than wide. I think of Corot as a priest at the altar of one of Nature's innermost sanctuaries celebrating sacramental mysteries. Every picture that came from him is an elevation of the Host.

This is the quality in his work, much more than a fastidious refinement nearer the surface, that gives it so high a distinction. Hung in a gallery among other pictures, a Corot does not clamour for notice. It is much too quiet in matter and manner for that; but, after awhile, it draws the eye, and when it has done so its hold is secure. The surrounding canvases almost invariably begin to look a little vulgar in its neighbourhood. And this not only because rioting colour might well look blatant by the side of the tender greys and greens and rose flushes that the artist loved so well, but because the spirituality of which those tones are merely the expression places the Corot upon another and a higher plane.

To come upon a Corot in a gallery is like stepping out of the noisy glare of the market-place into the cool stillness of a church.

Market-places are good things, and the noisy crowd is perhaps only noisy because it is doing its appointed work in a right hearty fashion; but the Presence seems nearer in the silence of the church. The silence is not dead, but quick with soundless speech. So with a Corot picture; its quietness is the very antipodes of stagnation. It seems to spread far beyond the limits of the frame in ever-widening waves, until everything around is subdued.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--LES CHAUMIeRES

Luminous and almost uncannily true in tone, "Les Chaumieres" takes high rank among the finest productions of Corot's maturer years. It is the work of a man who "knows," who is able to take hold of essentials, and let non-essentials go, with a certainty of discrimination. Profound knowledge, so thoroughly a.s.similated as to be instinctive in its application, can alone account for both the completeness and simplicity of the landscape, the result achieved with apparently so absolute a lack of effort.]

The only other works of art which have ever given me quite the same impression in this direction are one or two of those dreaming Buddhas that, wherever they may be, seem to be shrined in a stillness emanating from themselves.

From first to last Corot was as independent as he was industrious. He strove always to see Nature with his own eyes, and to keep his vision clear and simple. Whether or not other painters had a grander or n.o.bler vision was nothing to him. It mattered only that he should be true to the grace that was his own. "I pray G.o.d every day," he said, "that He will keep me a child; that is to say, that He will enable me to see and draw with the eye of a child." That prayer was surely answered, for never did an artist look out upon the world with a more direct simplicity, or with eyes more delicately sensitive to the appeal of beauty.

It was seldom the obviously picturesque that appealed to him. He seemed instantly to apprehend the most elusive of the beauties in the scene before him. That death-bed utterance of Daubigny is significant: "Adieu; I go above to see if friend Corot has found me new landscapes to paint."

That was it: Corot never failed to find new landscapes to paint, for his eye was keen enough to pierce through what seemed commonplace, and discover the underlying beauty. Starting off on one of his innumerable sketching excursions, he remarks to a friend that he has heard bad accounts from painters of the country for which he is bound, but adds that he has no doubt he will find pictures there. And, of course, he found them. The pictures are always there, though the faculty of seeing them is rare.

No one ever worked more constantly and faithfully from Nature, or became more intimately acquainted with the subtle outward expressions of her innermost moods; but the profound knowledge thus gained was only treated as the poet treats a wide vocabulary; as a means of expression, not as in itself worth exploitation. The scene before him was not recorded as a collection of facts, but as it had stirred his emotions, and as it was, in a sense, transformed by his vivid imagination. The resulting picture is the record of an adventure of the soul; the outward reality is not lost, but rather realised in a strange intensity. "See," said Corot, pointing to one of his landscapes, "see the shepherdess leaning against the trunk of that tree. See, she turns suddenly. She hears a field-mouse stirring in the gra.s.s."

Of how the artist went to work when he had "found" a new landscape some notion may be gained from M. Silvestre's description. "If Corot sees two clouds that at first sight appear to be equally dark, he will, before building up the whole harmony of his picture on one or other of them, apply himself to discover the difference he knows must exist. Then, when he has decided on the darkest as well as the lightest tone in the scene before him, the intermediate values readily take their places, and subdivide themselves indefinitely before his discerning eyes. These values, from the most positive to the most vague, call to one another and give answer, like echo and voice. When the artist sees he can divide the princ.i.p.al values of the landscape before him into four, he does so by numbering the different parts of his rough sketch from 1 to 4, 4 standing for the darkest and 1 for the lightest patch, while the intermediate tones are represented by 2 and 3. This method enables Corot, with the help of any old pencil and any sc.r.a.p of paper, to make records of the most transitory effects seen upon a journey. Corot was not a man to make an inventory of his sentiments, and the fact that he made such records proves that they were sufficient for his own purposes.

As a rule he first of all puts in his sky, then the more important ma.s.ses in the middle of the composition, then those to the left and to the right; he then picks out the forms of the reflections in the water, if there is water, and so establishes the planes of his picture, his ma.s.ses falling in one behind the other while one watches him. Sometimes he proceeds in a less orderly way; for it goes without saying that his methods are the methods of freedom, and not the invariable recipes of a pedant. He runs an unquiet eye over every part of the canvas before putting a touch in place, sure that it does no violence to the general effect. If he makes haste he may become clumsy and rough, leaving here and there inequalities of impasto. These he afterwards removes with a razor, as if he were shaving his landscape, and leaving himself free to profit by such accidents of surface as are happy in effect."

The picture of Corot sketching in shorthand shows him when the long and close study of Nature had enabled him to generalise with confidence, and when a memory, always retentive, had been trained to a pitch that made it far more reliable than any sketchbook memoranda. Although he always expressed impatience with the idea that anything worth doing could be done merely by taking pains, Corot was the least apt of men to spare any pains that were essential to his purpose; and nothing could be farther from the truth than the suggestion sometimes made, that he was wanting in this respect. To generalise as he generalised is not to be careless of detail, but the very reverse: it implies a knowledge so complete of every element in a landscape that those belonging to a particular view of it can be selected with an unerring judgment, and what is non-essential eliminated. "Put in as much as you like at first, and afterwards efface the superfluity," is a bit of advice that comes from Corot himself. It was not a strikingly original remark, but it could not have been made by other than a conscientious worker.

It is certainly a mistake to suppose that Corot was careless of details in the sense that he did not give them due consideration; but he always realised that details were details after all. "I never hurry to the details of a picture," he said; "its ma.s.ses and general character interest me before anything else. When those are well established, I search out the subtleties of form and colour. Incessantly and without system I return to any and every part of my canvas."

There is a note in Mr. George Moore's _Modern Painting_ that seems to throw some illumination upon Corot's manner of looking at his subject.

Mr. Moore came upon the artist, an old man then, "in front of his easel in a pleasant glade. After admiring his work, I ventured to say: 'What you are doing is lovely, but I cannot find your composition in the landscape before us.' He said, 'My foreground is a long way ahead.' And sure enough, nearly two hundred yards away, his picture rose out of the dimness of the dell, stretching a little beyond the vista into the meadow."

I think Corot's foreground had a habit of being a considerable way ahead.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV.--LE SOIR

"My 'Soir,' I love it, I love it! It is so firm," said Corot, standing before his picture in the exhibition gallery in company with an appreciative friend. It is "firm" enough beyond question, and the sky especially is a marvel of delicate, palpitating colour. But it is much more, a moment of magic beauty, evanescent as the reflected picture on a bubble-bell, seized and made permanent; an emotion of pleasure cast into a material shape.]

To most, Corot is "the man of greys," the painter of the twilight.

Without for a moment suggesting that this is true in so far as it seems to hint that his art had very narrow limitations, I am certainly inclined to believe that the general eye has fixed itself upon his most characteristic and most valuable work. The two dawns, as the old Egyptians called them, Isis and Nephthys, the dawn of day and the dawn of night, revealed themselves to Corot with a fulness to be measured only perhaps in part by the manner in which he has revealed them to us.

The stillness, the freshness, the indescribable tremor of awakening life, the curious sense of a remoteness in familiar things, the expectancy as of some momentous revelation, all that goes to make the mystery and magic of the dawn, he knew how to translate into subtle yet easily understandable terms of form, and tone, and colour. It was a miracle to which he seemed to have found the key--perhaps by means of that prayer to be "kept a child." Over and over again he invoked the dawn to appear upon his canvas, and never in vain. In ever-varying robes of loveliness, but the same in all of them, the dawn responded to his call.

Grey dawn! The words had a cold and gloomy sound until Corot interpreted them, taking the gloom away and leaving of the cold only the delicious shiver of the morning freshness. Beautiful almost as the dawn itself--born of it as they were--are those wonderful pearly greys of his. His palette seemed to hold an infinite range of them, each pure and perfect in itself, and each in a true harmonic relation to the others.

And if the painted dawns are beautiful, they are also true; they carry instant conviction of their absolute verity. There is only one thing that can make a painted canvas do this, and that is truth of tone, and of tone-values Corot made himself a master, mainly because he never ceased to be a student. He retained the eye of a child, but his mind became stored with the acc.u.mulated experience of many long hours that were only not laborious because the work was a delight. And great as the store grew in process of time, he was adding to it up to the last.

Here is a picture by Albert Wolff of the artist at the age of 79, when the hand of Death was already stretched out towards him. "An old man, come to the completion of a long life, clothed in a blouse, sheltered under a parasol, his white hair aureoled in reflections, attentive as a scholar, trying to surprise some secret of nature that had escaped him for seventy years, smiling at the chatter of the birds, and every now and again throwing them the bar of a song, as happy to live and enjoy the poetry of the fields as he had been at twenty. Old as he was, this great artist still hoped to be learning."

It is altogether an important thing about Corot that he was always singing--in season and out of season I was about to say, when I remembered that he would probably have declared that it was always singing-time. He went to his work carolling like a lark, though with a somewhat robuster organ, and s.n.a.t.c.hes of song punctuated his brush strokes. The day's work done, he broke out into melody in earnest, and sang to himself, to his friends, at home or abroad, with equal vigour and enjoyment. We are told that on one occasion his irrepressible song broke out at an official reception, doubtless to the confusion of dignities and the shocking of many most respectable people.

I cannot but think that something of music found its way into Corot's pictures. They look as if they could have been done in music as well as they were done in paint. In a way they were: if there was always a song on his lips, surely there was also a song at his heart. One may say that his paintings were built to music like the walls of Thebes.

They are haunted by sweet harmonies, and seem charged with hidden melodies that tremble on the verge of sound.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE V.--PAYSAGE

The play of light filtering through foliage has never been more beautifully rendered upon canvas, or with a closer approximation to the truth of Nature, than in the "Paysage," reproduced here. The manner in which the tree has been portrayed, the body and soul of it, is not less astonishing. The landscape is a masterpiece among masterpieces, and an impressive witness to Corot's amazingly sensitive faculty of apprehending what was in front of him, both with eye and mind.]

Many of those who read may shake their heads at this attempt to make a confusion of two arts, but my apology shall take the form of a quotation from Corot himself. Moved to sudden emotion by a magnificent view, he exclaimed, "What harmony! What grandeur! It is like Gluck!" I think the man who said that may possibly have painted a little music, without caring for a moment whether he was confusing the arts or not. Perhaps he felt that painting and music were more nearly related than a certain school of critics can allow itself to admit. But that is by the way.

When in Paris he was frequent in his attendances at concerts and the opera, and indeed music always drew him with a power only second to that of his chosen mistress--painting. As the twig is bent the tree will grow--it may be that had the accidents of his early environment been other than they were, his name would be famous as that of a great composer instead of a great painter. Fortunately we do not know what we may have missed, while we are fully conscious of what we have gained.