CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF J. F. Mason Cornell University Library N6847 .S64 Barbizon days olin 3 1924 030 658 805 The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030658805 Barbizon Days BARBIZON DAYS MILLET— COROT—ROUSSEAU-BARYE By CHARLES SPRAGUE SMITH NEW YORK A. WESSELS COMPANY 1902 yi Copyright, 1902 BY A. Wessels Company New York N J. F^ a^o HILDA INTRODUCTION A decade of years ago, we pitched our summer tent at Bourron, a little hamlet on the borders of the Forest of Fontainebleau ; or rather we occupied another's tent, for our dwelling was a grey stone cottage similar to that of the peasants — our neighbors and friends. The Forest itself was only a few rods distant and my study, the summer through, was in the open air and under the boughs of one of its noble trees. Sitting at my neighbors' board, when their day's work was done, roaming the wood in all directions, searching out especially the haunts of the artists, the months glided away all too fast. There were not hours enough in which to write of all the artists I would have selected as themes. These sketches are not art criticism, they are but the chronicle of that summer. If they make clearer the relation between na- ture and art, suggest that art's alphabet is everywhere awaiting only the seeing eye, or if I have been able to give again in part the inspiration obtained from that summer's con- verse with the strong, this record of Barbizon Days will have accomplished its purpose. CHARLES SPRAGUE SMITH New York, July i , 1 902 The Forest of Fontainehleau THE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU The Forest of Fontainebleau If we call up before our minds the places made notable by great achievements in mod- ern art history, Paris and other centres of European life suggest themselves. The only exception to this rule, so far as I know, is a tiny hamlet, a single street, bounded on the one side by the Forest of Fontainebleau and on the other by a broad plain. It is asserted that, between 1825 and i860, there gathered about an inn table in this hamlet the largest group of men of creative power with the brush, that have ever assembled anywhere since the Renaissance. A day in the Forest and in the hamlet of Barbizon now, after a half century's inter- val, cannot give the same impressions of either wood or village which those " men of 1830" received. For the forest has been ^ transformed, its solitudes have been made ac- cessible, and thus, to the artist, profaned ; and the hamlet has been bound to the great world, not merely by broad carriage roads, displacing a foot-path across the forest, but even by a railroad that passes Rousseau's and Barye's cottages and Millet's atelier. BARBIZON DAYS Yet, if one follows day after day the lure of the wood-paths and loiters or hastens a the hour and Nature invite, the forest, per suaded that you are not a trifler, will admi you to so intimate a companionship that yoi can think away every profanation; and, tc recall the hamlet seek out the less frequentec villages, even though remoter from th< wood, and recreate, with features borrowec from one and the other, that old peasan street, hidden away from the world, leading from the plain of labor to the cow-gate, th< opening into the wood, through which eacl morning the herdsman drove the cattle o: the village to their pasture in the forest. The Forest of Fontainebleau cannot hav( been in 1830 in any true sense a primeva forest. Man had used it too long for hii own purposes. Some one of the early Cape- tian dukes or kings built in its centre a don- jon, already old in the time of Louis VII ( 1 2th century) when we have the first his- torical record of its existence. In latei centuries, a Renaissance chateau, largely thi work of Franfois I., displacing the feuda donjon, became the favorite residence, out side of Paris, of the Kings of France. Anc in the forest glades, men and women, whon [-3 T HE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU history names, hunted and disported them- selves. Numberless paths traversed the wood and a road had been built about it as early as in the time of Henri IV. (i 589-1610). The forest had not only lost, by 1830, in a large degree, its primeval savagery, its mystery of the unexplored ; but it had never been vast enough for a true empire of Nature. It is only fifty miles in circumfer- ence, not more than ten in average breadth, and there are neither lakes nor mountains in its entire domain, only shallow pools and low ranges of hills. In a primeval forest the sunlight scarce penetrates ; the trees are too tall, their crests too serried to allow the sun's rays to glide between. There is no green undergrowth, for the soil is buried deep beneath the brown leaves. You cannot go far in a straight line. Bristling barriers or long, narrow mounds, the dying or dead boles of old forest kings, obstruct the path. Bird-notes are rare. Mountain tops reveal a world of pine and oak, of maple and birch, sweeping in grand undulations to the horizon's verge. Between the hills, blue lakes rest, free of all intrusion save the native life of the woods. In mid-air, above a lake, an eagle or an osprey floats. [13] BARBIZON DAYS The Forest of Fontainebleau, in the 1 9th century at least, knew nothing of all this. And, since its Hmited area with its many centuries of subjection to man forbade long ago that it should be a primeval forest, I hold they have done right who have ad- mitted air and light to the wood, and, com- pleting the work of earlier foresters, have made of the whole a grove, not of one char- acter but manifold; now choked with un- dergrowth, now stretching in vast open templed aisles, and now, with lesser trees withdrawn a space paying homage to some grand oak that sheltered perhaps the first French king and survives the last. The Master of it all, the Lord Creator of its surpassing beauty, is the Sun, who fills its atmosphere with life, bands its trunks, drips in diamonds from myriad leaf-tips at the sunset hour, makes gold-yellow the fresh green of the under-growth, bejewels heather and vagrant flowers and rests a mel- low sheen on lichen-covered rocks and in open glades. The Forest of Fontainebleau has to-day a beauty all its own and every whit as overpowering, when you have come under its spell, as the grand, stern beauty of primeval Nature. THE FOREST OF FQNTAINEBLEAU I have said that the wood has no lakes, only shallow pools. A good friend and neighbor has told me once and again I must not leave the forest without paying at least one visit to the beautiful Mare aux Fees, the Fairies' Pond, and I have just returned therefrom. The way thither had a charm of noble woods, cleansed of decay and pruned of after-growth. The trees dwarfed as I drew nearer the Mare. I reached it at last, a tiny shallow pond, half choked with reeds and whatever else Nature sends forth from her storehouse to do battle with water and make of ponds first marshes and then rich meadow land. But if the wood is without the charm of lakes, it has an element of power and variety that few primeval forests can boast. Eight to ten ranges of low sandstone hills traverse it from east to west, separated often only by narrow gorges. Broken tables of stone are heaped up in fantastic piles in the gorges' bottom or tilted against each other on the slopes. Huge blocks are strewn broadcast everywhere among the trees. The gorges of Apremont and Franchard suggest Milton's description of the battle between the hosts of heaven and hell, where hills BARBIZON DAYS were plucked up by their roots and hurled, encountering mid-air, the wrack falling to earth. To the forest this rock scenery adds a note of savagery, and Fenimore Cooper must have had this feature especially in mind when he said that the Forest of Fontaine- bleau exceeded in savage variety anything he had ever seen in America. Such then, though more primeval in places and more reserved to the few, was the forest which the men of 1830 knew. The Fontainebleau villages have a rich and varied charm of novelty and art-sugges- tion for the eye accustomed only to the countryside of the New World. But the masters of 1830 had not such other- world images in their eyes. The Norman peasant, Millet had seen elsewhere in France villages differing only in unimportant details. The distinctive feature of Barbizon, to the men of 1830, was that its isolation served as a screen to shut away all suggestions of mani- fold activities and interests, and concentrate attention upon man in his few primeval re- lations to Nature — man as husbandman, man as husband and father. To-day, apart from its associations with Millet and his friends and its setting of plain [16] THE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU and forest, Barbizon yields in rural charm and artistic suggestion to other Fontaine- bleau villages. Montigny looks down from its towered church, overtopping huddled gray cottages, upon the Loing as it glides, a modest river, between banks sentineled with closely trimmed poplar trees. By the riverside, near the tiny bridge, where the white and color of kerchief and apron can catch the sunlight, the women of the hamlet wash their clothes. If you linger till the noon hour, the exhaling river breath will fuse the green of the poplar leaves into a silver haze. Through Moret and past Grez the Loing flows also ; Moret has noble turreted gate- ways and Grez a church more picturesque than that of Montigny, riverscapes more alluring, and a ruined chateau said to be of Queen Blanche, mother of St. Louis. Thomery has covered the high walls of its narrow streets, the street ends and fafades of its houses with lush vine leaves ; and the heavy green pendant bunches are the chas- selas, best of all the grapes of Northern France. Larchant, a tiny village away from the forest, was to Millet and his friends a shrine of yearly pilgrimage. It was once a [17] BARBIZON DAYS walled town of some importance with a noble church, contemporary of Notre Dame of Paris, and sacred to Mathurin, a local saint, born here in the fourth century, whose miracle-working tomb it covered. But the Calvinists sacked the church in 1567, and two centuries later, 1778, a conflagration swept the town and completed the work of the iconoclasts. A solitary dismantled tower rises high above the plain; around and over it multitudes of black-winged birds hover, as in Millet's painting of the Greville church. In the old days of post travel, Chailly was the last relay station on the high road from Paris to Fontainebleau. Barbizon, a hamlet of Chailly, across the fields and about a mile away, was formed of a single short street a half-mile in length joining plain and forest. The houses or farmsteads lining it consisted of open courts, where the manure was thrown, the cows milked, the poultry fed, the children played. About each court stood the stables and the dwelHng. There was no church, no market-place, no inn, not even a graveyard in the hamlet. The only access to it was afforded by the almost impassable road across the fields from Chailly [18] THE FOREST OF FQN TAINEBLEAU and a path through the forest, that left the highway between Chailly and Fontaine- bleau, Barbizon was discovered. Will Low tells us, in 1 8 24. Two artists, Claude Aligny and Philippe Le Dieu, had come to Fontaine- bleau to visit their friend Jacob Petit, direc- tor of a porcelain manufactory. The three started one day to explore the forest in quest of themes for the brush. By nightfall they had lost their way. Following the sound of a horn and of tinkling bells they came upon a cow-herd, who told them they were in the gorge of Apremont and six miles from Fontainebleau. He led them to the nearby village of Barbizon and the house of Fran9ois Ganne, a thrifty peasant, who with his young wife occupied two rooms, one as sleeping apartment, the other for his trade as tailor and for the sale of wine. Ganne could provide food but not lodging, so the cow-herd let them pass the night on the straw with his cattle. The next morning they explored the portion of the wood near- est the hamlet, the Bas Breau, I presume, and were so amazed and delighted there- with that Aligny and Le Dieu insisted that Ganne should receive them as permanent [19] BARBIZON DAYS lodgers. Ganne saw his advantage and consented, ceding to them his bedroom and, with his wife, taking up his own abode in the barn. Word was brought back to Paris of the discovery of this bit of unspoiled primitive Nature only a day's walk distant from that most modern of European capitals, and the next year the artists invaded the place, occu- pying every available nook and corner. Ganne provided food for all. Those who could not find lodgings in Barbizon stopped in Chailly at the White Horse, among others Corot, Rousseau, Barye, Diaz. In 1830 Ganne bought a large barn and fitted it up as a two-story hotel with win- dows on the north side for studios. On the ground floor there was an immense dining- room and cafe with billiard table and balls as large as a man's fist. All the artists took lodgings with him. In the height of the season some slept on the top of the table and others in the barn loft on the straw. Be- tween 1825 and i860 nearly every French artist and representative artists from every other civilized nation visited Barbizon. It was a glad and sane "vie de Boheme" these men led, to judge from Low's report. [20] THE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU Each season one was chosen as leader and the joint pleasures took on a more serious or boisterous tone according to the leader's temperament. Under Gerome they deco- rated the panels of the dining-room; under Amedee Servint, the troupe invaded in masquerade on horseback the outlying vil- lages. It w^as the law of the place to rise early, the most diligent at five, and be ofF to the forest, the fun not commencing till after the dinner hour. Each newcomer had to smoke Diaz's pipe. If the color of the smoke were iridescent he was declared a colorist, if gray a classicist. The most jovial festival of all was at the marriage of Ganne's youngest daughter to Eugene Cuvelier, an artist of Arras. The feast was held in a barn, candles in tin baskets served as lanterns, ivy as deco- ration. Rousseau and Millet were the chief decorators. Corot led the bottle dance, first slowly, then fast and faster. Empty bottles were placed at equal distances from each other and the dancers had to pass between. Whoever tipped over a bottle was out of the dance. He who survived received the prize, a flower from the bride. Corot, Rousseau and Barye came in 1830 BARBIZON DAYS and stayed after the others had left. Corot came only irregularly; Rousseau after 1849 spent only his summers there ; Barye spent summer and fall until his death; to Millet it was home all the year round. The good " vie de Boheme" has vanished vs^ith the artists from Barbizon never to re- turn. But, though the hamlet itself has been transformed, its setting remains essentially unchanged. The plain of labor stretches aw^ay, broken by clumps of trees, hamlets, tovv^ns, to Paris in the distance. In its fields men and w^omen are sowing, reaping, gleaning, driving cattle, sheep to pasture, watching sheep by night; the old farm at the village end and the tow- ering hayricks remain, and still, from the tower of Chailly church, the Angelus calls at the sunset hour. Still in the Bas Breau, noblest wilderness of all the forest and at the very door of Bar- bizon, the grand trees speak as they spoke to Rousseau; still in open glades the play of light and shadow lures and witches as it did Diaz ; still the gorges of Franchard offer the background for scenes of animal life they gave to Barye. The cattle of Troyon are still at pasture in the meadows, and so [22] THE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU everywhere Nature offers, essentially un- changed, the originals whereof the canvases of 1830 are the art interpretations. Corot only is absent in spirit, for the sun-steeped haze and the idyllic tone of his best can- vases are not of Fontainebleau. The artists who have supremely ex- pressed the genius of the place, are the two whose medallions have been set in the rock near the old cow-gate. Millet and Rousseau ; Millet as interpreter of human life indoors and out, and of those landscapes which spring held up before him at his studio door, when the air was moist yet clear and the gnarled apple trees clothed themselves for a moment with surpassing glory; Rous- seau as interpreter of the woods. Forest- ward the empire is all his. His single steadfast purpose to be revealer of the trees to man has made each noble stem, each bosky group, his own. Before 1830 Fontainebleau, plain and forest, was as beautiful as to-day, grander perhaps, but inarticulate; now it is voiceful everywhere, and it will not soon lapse back into silence. We are too close to those men of Bar- bizon to determine whether or not they [23] BARBIZON DAYS created immortal works, and yet, one thing at least we may affirm without fear of err- ing : some of their canvases, as the " Sheep- Fold at Night" of Millet and the "Hoar Frost" of Rousseau, will long offer defiance to forgetfulness.* * Both paintings are in Mr. Walter's gallery in Baltimore. [H] Millet MILLET Millet Those lives are worthiest that strike deepest root in the soil of our common life and are yet most responsive to the inspira- tions that come from the spaces beyond. They are akin to the century-old children of the wood, that grasp tenaciously the black subsoil of the forest and aspire steadfastly toward the sunlight. Both grow gnarled and gray in the struggle, the tree and the man. The stancher, the longer- lived of the twain, speaks often courage to his feebler comrade. Where such comrade- ship has existed, the spirit of those long communings lingers in the still forest. There is a life we would talk over with the trees of the Forest of Fontainebleau, one that, wearied with the work, the disappoint- ment and the pains of life, came to them constantly for sympathy and drew as con- stantly renewal of strength from their comradeship. Jean-Fran9ois Millet found the work given him to do, and therein he implanted his life. Its fruits were rugged, harsh to the taste of his generation. He might have [27 J BARBIZON DAYS drawn, from shallower soil, that which pleased. But his simple, peasant nature, close in its qualities to the homely, in- dustrious, fruit-bearing earth ; akin in its tenacity of purpose to the firm-rooted oaks of his beloved forest, refused and refused again and turned back to work and suffer. The canvases into which his experiences and aspirations, his life, were wrought, the children born of his constant pain and want, are freed now, and while he rests, as the forest trees rest, when their work is accom- plished, these immortal ones are making the mystery of night more sensible, are deepening the religious sentiment in an age that needs that quickening, are intoning in grand, sober, rugged strophes the epic of toil. Jean-Fran9ois Millet was born the 4th of October, 18 14, at Gruchy, and was the second of nine children. Henley says: " In the commune of Greville, on the iron- bound coasts of la Manche, stands the little hamlet of Gruchy. It is built at the sea's edge, on the granite cliffs of la Hague, overlooking the stormy waters of Cherbourg Roads; but it is situate, for all that, in a fertile and pleasant valley, rich in grass, [28 J MILLET corn and wood, covered with herds and peopled with a race of husbandmen." The hamlet consisted of from twenty to twenty- five houses, and Millet said: "A stranger was rarely seen there, and such a silence reigned that the clucking of a hen or the cackling of a goose created a sensation." The village life was a patriarchal one. In the winter, the women sewed and spun, while the men wove baskets, and, as they worked, the old fables of the country were retold and the noels sung. The home of the Millets, Yriarte describes as " a long, low house of unhewn gray stone, roughly cemented together, capped with a high-pitched thatched roof. An old, gnarled vine half hides one part of the front under its green leaves." This type of peasant- house is a very common one to-day in Normandy and Brittany, though tiles have frequently displaced the thatch. Although the means were straitened, an open-handed hospitality ruled. The wayfarer and the beggar were always welcomed to a full share of warmth and nourishment, as the ancient traditions of that part of France enjoin. The father was of a simple, gentle, devout nature. He was " passionately fond [29] BARBIZON DAYS of music and the precentor of the Gruchy church, where he led and trained a choir that was the envy and admiration of all the countryside." He had a tender and reverent love for Nature, and was ever pointing out to his son the beauty of the landscape, as a whole, or of the little and greater things that composed it, the grass, the trees. The neighbor's house, half-hidden behind a swell of the field, impressed him as a picture. The son recalls him moulding in clay and carving in wood. The mother was descended from the Henry du Perron, a family of rich farmers, regarded at one time as among the gentry of the region. Simple, pious, devoted to her family, and wholly submissive to her hus- band's will, she passed her life chiefly in the fields and stables. For, it was, we are told, the custom of the country that the wife should perform the work of an out-of-door laborer, while the headship within doors re- mained in the hands of the husband's mother. The strong personalities of the Gruchy home were the grandmother and the great- uncle. The former, Louise Jumelin, widow of Nicolas Millet, was a peasant woman of the best type, industrious, clear-headed, born [30 J MILLET to command. Her family was " old country stock, strong heads and warm hearts." She is described as "consumed by religious fire, severe for herself, gentle and charitable toward others, passing her life in good works, and with the ideal of sainthood constantly before her eyes."* She was so scrupulous and modest, touching her own conduct, that she invariably sought the counsel of the village curate, whenever a doubt arose about any action of her life. "Her religion blended itself," Millet said, "with a love of Nature. All that was beautiful, grand, terrible, appeared to her as the work of the Creator, whose will she respected and adored." Franfois was her favorite grandson, her godson and the oldest boy, and she gave to him the name of her chosen saint, Fran9ois d' Assise. Millet re- calls her entering his bedroom one morning, when he was but a little lad. " Awake, my little Fran9ois," she said; "if you only knew how long a time the birds have been singing the glory of the good God ! " The uncle, Charles Millet, was one of * Henry Naegely says that Millet's portrait of his grandmother rep- resented her with large eyes, a firm, rather wide mouth, curving with kindness, and a powerful face, refined and softened by a shadow of mysticism. Her attire was always rigid in neatness and simplicity. [3t] BARBIZON DAYS those priests whom the revolution had unfrocked. He stanchly refused to swear allegiance to the constitution, believing that it infringed the rights of the Pope. During the Reign of Terror, he was proscribed and had many hairbreadth escapes. When again at liberty to assume his sacred office, he joined, with the work of priest and teacher, that of peasant. We see him, a giant in strength, carrying huge blocks of granite to build a wall, or holding the plough handle, with breviary in pocket and cassock tucked up to his waist, entering, in a word, into all the labors of peasant life with the energy and zest of a man of vigorous and helpful temperament; or — a gentler side of his nature — teaching the poor children of the commune. Fran9ois' early education was pushed quite far, it would seem, for a peasant's son. He began the study of Latin at twelve and, though compelled to devote a large part of his time — later his entire time — to the fields, he conquered early the elementary difficulties of the language and acquired a love therefor which continued all through life. Virgil and the Latin Bible were from this time forward favorite books. MILLET From the years of his maturity there comes a story which interhnks itself with these earHest days. Millet was enabled, for the first time in many years, through an order received for a painting, to revisit his childhood's home. The grandmother, whose pride and hope he had been, and the weary mother, had awaited long his coming, but death had already overtaken them.* Sad memories blended therefore with the joy of the return with his children to the old home. He wandered everywhere, sketching all the beloved, familiar things. One evening, as he was returning homeward, the Angelus sounded from the church tower of the little village of EcuUeville. He entered. An old priest was kneeling at the altar. He approached him and waited until he rose from his knees. Then, touching him gently on the shoulder, he said, in a low voice; "Francois." It was the Abbe Jean Lebriseux, his former teacher. They embraced weeping. Then the old priest *The grandmother died in 1851, the mother two years later, with Millet's name on her lips. Millet, on receiving the news, took out his Bible, and read the story of Tobit and his wife. The idea of "I'Attente" came to him at the thought of his mother's longing for him, and he made a sketch immetfiately. The painting was not exhibited till 1854. As his share of the inheritance. Millet asked for the great oak cupboard and his great-uncle's books, and begged that the ivy growing over the house be left untouched. B A R BIZON DAYS asked, " And the Bible, Franfois, have you forgotten it, and the psalms, do you re-read them?" "They are my breviaries," Millet answered. " It is from them I draw forth all that I do." "You loved Virgil well in the old days." " I love him still." The home library was composed almost wholly of religious works, brought there by the grandmother and uncle. Sensier men- tions The Confessions of Saint Augustine; The Lives of the Saints ; Saint Fran9ois de Sales; Saint Jerome, especially his letters; the religious philosophers of Port-Royal; Bossuet; Fenelon; the Bible in Latin, and Virgil. The peasants of Gruchy were farmers rather than fishermen ; thus the lad knew all the phases of the peasant-farmer's life from personal experience. But he knew the ocean also. In one of his reminiscences to his biographer, Sensier, he described an event that befell on All-Saints'-Day. A terrible storm was raging, the villagers were gathered in the church. Suddenly a seaman appeared at the door, crying out that a number of ships were being swept ashore and upon the rocks. He called for volun- teers; fifty men rose and accompanied him. [34j MILLET The peasants saw from the cliiFs five ships, in quick succession, broken upon the rocks and all on board drowned. Many other ships met a like fate on the following day. The boats sent to the rescue were overturned and the men could render no assistance. One ship drove in between two rocks and the crew escaped. Francois, noticing a heap upon the shore covered with a sail cloth, lifted a corner and saw a mountain of corpses. So the years passed until 1832. These eighteen years form the first period of Millet's life. To the influences that sur- rounded him during this germinating age, as well as to his inherited traits, he owed the fundamental elements of his character and expression. The lad was intelligent, studious, persistent. Had he not been, he would not have mastered the Latin Bible and Virgil. The artistic element, which appeared as a germ in the grandmother and labored awkwardly for expression in the father, was already moving actively in him. The engravings of the Bible excited a desire of imitation. During the siesta, while the rest slept, he made sketches of whatever was before him, "the garden, the stables, the [35] BARBIZON DAYS fields with the sea for horizon, and often the animals that passed." The father only simulated sleep and watched with content the developing facility of the son; he had the longing without the power ; perhaps the bon Dieu had given both to Franfois. He who was later to be the painter of peasant life had received from the bon Dieu exactly that early training necessary to fit him for his work. If one thing were lacking therein, if one thing is lacking in Millet's representations of peasant life, it is sunlight, glad resting, joy, laughter. Yet joy, undimmedby care, can hardly have come oftentimes to that Gruchy household; the mouths were too many, the soil was too old, too obstinate, the temper of the ruling spirits too serious ; the house itself, to judge from the photograph, is stern and bare. The mother, a gentlewoman, bearing nine children and doing the rude work of the field and stable, never complaining, yet always weary; the gentle, simple-hearted father; the strong-spirited, devout grand- mother; the rising with the sun; the in- cessant toiling throughout the slow year; and, for reward, existence and the conscious- ness of duty done — everything here im- [36] MILLET pressed upon the plastic mind of him who was part of it all the serious meaning of life, its worthiness and its rude grandeur too, where the burden was borne with the man- liness and womanliness he saw exhibited in those nearest to him. No master could ever instruct him as Nature had done ; he had the knowledge now; he did not yet know, he would not learn for nearly a score of years how to give it expression. One day, on returning from mass, he noticed a peasant, an old man with stooping figure, and was astonished at the perspective. It came to him as a kind of revelation. Hastening home, he made a charcoal sketch. His father, on seeing it, was profoundly moved and said: "My poor Fran9ois, I see well that you torment yourself with this idea. I would gladly have sent you to learn this profession of painter, which they say is so fine, but I could not. You are the oldest of my boys, and I had too much need of you; but now the others are growing up and I will not hinder you from learning what you so much desire to know. We will presently go to Cherbourg and ascertain if you have in truth the talent to gain your living in this occupation." [37] BARBIZON DAYS The lad finished for the Cherbourg visit two sketches, the first, of two shepherds and a hill-slope with sheep. One shepherd was playing a flute and the other listening. The shepherds wore the jackets and wooden shoes of his country. The hillock with pasturing sheep was an apple orchard be- longing to his father. The second drawing represented a starry night, with a man coming out of a house carrying bread which a second received. Sensier says that he has looked at this drawing for thirty years and it is the work of a man who already knows the great drift of art. One would believe it a sketch by a seventeenth century artist. The painter, Mouchel, whom Francois Millet and his father consulted in Cher- bourg, refused to believe these drawings the work of the lad. When finally convinced by their repeated protestations, he cried out to the father : " Eh bien, vous serez damne, pour r avoir garde si longtemps, car il y a chez votre enfant I'etoffe d'un grand peintre!" The career of Fran9ois Millet was de- cided; his father even urged him toward it. The lad entered the studio of M. Bon Dumoucel, commonly called Mouchel. Sen- [38] MILLET sier describes this first master as an original genius, self-educated, loving art and the country. Although the journal of the following years is somewhat vague in details, the broad lines are sufficiently clear. Millet remained only two months with Mouchel and learned less from him than from his work in the Cherbourg museum, studying and copying from the old masters.* His father's death, in 1835, recalled him to Gruchy, and he remained there for a time, the charge of affairs naturally devolving upon him as the oldest son. But his work in Cherbourg had excited a great deal of local interest, and the notabilities bestirred them- selves in order to prevent his going back to the life of the farm. When his grandmother heard thereof, she said : " My Francois, we must accept the will of God; your father, my Jean-Louis, said you should be a painter; obey him and return to Cherbourg." On his return he studied with another painter, Langlois, a pupil of Gros, but the relationship as before is represented as merely a nominal one. He worked in the museum and "read everything, from the Almanack *The museum contained good paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters. [39] BARBizoN Days Boiteux of Strasburg to Paul de Kock, from Homer to Beranger, and, with passion, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Byron, Cooper, Goethe's Faust and the German ballads." Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand especially impressed him. His biographer adds a paragraph which shows how just was Millet's native art sense. "He would have wished to reject all of his (Hugo's) exagger- ations, in order to compose for his own use a Victor Hugo of two or three volumes, which would have been the Homer of France."* Langlois was so impressed with the power and originality of his pupil, that he ad- dressed, in August, 1836, a most enthusiastic letter about him to the mayor and members of the municipal council, asking their assist- ance, in order to send him to Paris, and gave them his personal pledge that posterity would do them honor, if they consented thereto, "for having been the first, on this occasion, to assist in endowing the fatherland with one great man more." The municipal * Theocritus and Burns were later great favorites. He said: " The reading of 'rheocritus proves to me more and more that one . is never so much Greek as in reproducing very naively impressions, it matters little where received, and Burns also proves that to me." In 1864 he began the study of Itahan, in order to read Dante in the original. [40J MILLET council voted him an annuity of four hundred francs, to which the general council for the Department of la Manche added later six hundred francs. This grant. Millet said, did not continue long and was far from meeting his expenses.* Dismissed with the devout, patriarchal exhortations of his grandmother. Millet reached Paris in January, 1837. He says of himself at this period: "I came to Paris with my ideas all formed in art, and I have not judged it a propos to modify them. I have been more or less fond of such and such masters, or such and such form of expressing art ; but I have made no changes in the fundamentals." He was proud, sensitive, shy, awkward, and had, in consequence, many difficulties and unpleasant experiences in establishing himself in the capital. At first he made no attempt to enter upon a regular course of study. While wandering hither and thither he entered the Louvre, as it were by haphazard, and lived therein a month. Michelangelo impressed him most, thereafter * 600 francs were voted unanimously by the Municipal Council the first year. The following year the annuity was reduced to 400 francs and was only secured by the mayor's casting-vote. In 1839 the annuity of Cherbourg was withdrawn. [4tJ BARBIZON DAYS the early masters, the great Italians of the Renaissance, Murillo in his portraits, Ribera, Poussin and Lesueur of the French school. "I loved," Millet said, "everything that was powerful, and I would have given all of Boucher for a single nude of Rubens." Rem- brandt blinded him at first; he felt he could only approach him gradually. He never made but one copy of the masters, and that, in a single hour and without premeditation, of Giorgione's "Concert." In the Luxembourg, he saw only theatrical effects and cared for nothing save the work of Delacroix. He said later : "After Michelangelo and Poussin, I have held to my first liking for the early masters, for those subjects simple as infancy, for those unconscious expressions, for those beings who say nothing but feel themselves overburdened with life, or who sufl?er patiently without cries, without com- plainings, who bear the oppression of human law and have not even the idea of calling anyone to account for it." Michelangelo and Poussin remained his life-favorites, and there is much in his work that suggests both, Poussin's strong, sober coloring and absence of sensuous qualities, and Michel- angelo's ruggedness and strength of line. [42] MILLET He was homesick and utterly solitary, for he did not dare to speak to anyone from fear of being laughed at. Naturally he wished to return to the Gruchy home, but the Louvre held him. He put off for a long time entering a studio, partly through native shyness, partly because he was not drawn toward the notable artists of the day. He chose at last the studio of Paul Delaroche, apparently as a kind oi pis aller, but he was too original and unadaptable to fit into the life of the place. His comrades of the atelier dubbed him " I'homme des bois." His figures surprised them, but they looked upon him as bizarre, revolutionary and without a future. He left the studio soon, but returned for a time at Delaroche's personal entreaty. The master recognized the strength of the pupil, but it apparently rather startled him than otherwise, for he had not the knowledge or skill requisite to guide it. In 1839, when Millet was preparing to compete for thePrix de Rome, Delaroche told him he should use his influence that year to secure the scholarship for another of his pupils ; the following year he would support Millet's claims. Millet, indignant at what he considered the unfair- [43] BARBIZON DAYS ness of this procedure, withdrew definitively from Delaroche's studio. Thenceforth Millet was his own guide. He hired with a comrade from the Dela- roche studio, Louis-Alexandre Marolle, a little attic studio, and worked also in the evenings from the living model and the antique. Millet was then, as always after- ward, excessively shy and^ awkward. His friend, Marolle, served him as medium of communication with the rest of the world, accompanying him everywhere and acting as spokesman. A great amount of light work was thrown off at this period, in order to secure funds wherewith to exist, for example, pastels in imitation of Watteau and Boucher. The highest price received therefor was twenty francs, while portraits sold as low as five francs. But he was working diligently meantime, reading the best books he could find on the human form, and especially everything connected with Michelangelo, whom, Sensier says, "he never ceased to regard as the highest expression of art," and whom Millet himself describes as " that one who haunted me all my life." We have followed Millet's course during [44] MILLET these earliest years, step by step, watching the unfolding of his nature. It is already plain that his talent is too original, his will too restive under rules imposed by others, to follow in the beaten path. If there is suffi- cient native strength within him, backed by persistency, and fortune is not too rigorous, I'homme des bois will subject a field unto himself, in untilled ground, and broaden the domain of art. The ten years that follow his leaving Delaroche's studio are the ones in which this question is decided. His nature slowly grows toward its maturity, his consciousness of the work given him to do becomes distinct, and his resolve to do this and naught else so tempered by adversity that it can hold steadfast. He married twice during these years ; first, in 1 841, a delicate girl, who only lived two and a half years, and again, in 1845, the brave, strong woman who was his courageous helpmeet until the end.* The greater part of this period was spent in Paris, though we find him at Cherbourg at different times. The good people had been disturbed at his way of using the bounties * Millet always said that the years 1843-44 were the hardest in his life, when his first wife, dying, left him a widower and childless. [45] BARBIZON D AY S accorded, and gave him in 1841, perhaps as a test of his powers, the commission to paint the portrait (5f a deceased mayor. The work did not meet with their approval, they refused to accept it, and, it is said, even his old teacher, Langlois, abandoned him; but a few years later, in 1844, when a Salon picture had attracted considerable attention, Cherbourg gave him a better re- ception. He was even offered a professor- ship of drawing in the college, but wisel)^ refused the position. The struggle for existence during these years was at times a severe one. The little family was often on the verge of actual want, or even passed it. Thus Millet, receiving a hundred francs, brought him by a friend in 1848, said: "Thanks; they come in season. We have not eaten for two days; but the important thing is that the children have not suffered — they have had thus far their nourishment." He painted anything and everything asked of him ; e. g., in Cherbourg in 1841, signs for a veterinary surgeon, a tight-rope dancer, a sail maker. The thirty francs he received for a sign painted for a midwife in Paris in 1848 supported him and his for fifteen days. [46] MILLET Diaz, who had formed a high opinion of his talents, was indefatigable in his efforts to secure him a patronage, as was Rousseau at a later period; and Sensier, who made his acquaintance in 1 847, was thenceforward his devoted friend; but the comradeship among the few younger men who were loyal to him, while affording him a moral support, never kept want long or far distant. Sensier mentions the prices he received for his pictures in 1848; six beautiful drawings for a pair of shoes, four portraits of Diaz, Barye, Victor Dupre and Vechte, life size to the bust, for twenty francs ; any number of charming sketches, at prices ranging from five francs to one. His art studies consisted chiefly in satu- rating himself with the spirit of the old masters, whom he had chosen as his guides. One who has known and loved Millet cannot walk to-day through the Louvre without recalling how he haunted it. Poussin's cool, strong landscape in the Salon Carre, the devout work of the child-masters of Italy in the long room beyond, and Michel- angelo's drawings have a more intimate interest for us because of what they taught Millet. [47] BARBIZON DAYS But Millet had not yet reached entire self-consciousness. Perhaps it would be more true to say that he did not yet dare to be altogether himself, on account of the home which little ones were fast entering. He must earn money and therefore paint what could be sold. He had acquired re- markable facility. Sensier recalls walks in the fields (Montmartre or Saint-Ouen) at this time, and finding in his atelier, on the morrow, all the impressions of the outing as finished paintings. He was known among artists as the " Master of the Nude," that being the class of subjects wherein he had done most and his best work. Sensier says: "Until 1847, Millet painted external life, human nudity, in its most unconscious state, the purely physical life of beings that let existence flow past as the stream of oblivion. He did not paint the soul and its torments, as he did later, but living forms, and he depicted them with the alluring charm of material beauty, in their movements as well as in their repose." To judge from his biographer's descrip- tion. Millet's facility with his brush and the demands of life combined for a time to carry him to the limits of propriety. An ex- [48] MILLET hibition at Havre in 1 845 and a "Temptation of Saint Jerome" of the same period repre- sent this extreme phase. Reports thereof awoke apprehension in the Gruchy home. The good grandmother acted shrewdly here. She did not upbraid her beloved foster-child, but sent him a patriarchal exhortation. "Follow the example of that man of your own profession who used to say: *I paint for eternity.' For no cause whatever, permit yourself to do evil works or to lose sight of the presence of God. With Saint Jerome, think incessantly that you hear the trumpet that shall summon us to judgment."* Millet always cherished a reverential love for his grandmother, and never became modern Parisian enough to have been in- sensible to this appeal. "Millet had a sensuous organization," Sensier says, "in love with the flesh, but his soul was upright and almost without a spot. In the midst of our decadence, he has guarded the purity of a primitive heart." "The atmosphere of Paris was heavy to him, the small talk, ... the ambitions, the morals, the fashions, threw him into a world *Maiet's father charged him, on his deathbed, "never to execute a work of impiety, and that all his desire should be to praise God by thought, word and deed." [49] BARBIZON DAYS he did not understand." The revolution of 1 848 came. Millet, with all other citizens, had to shoulder a musket and defend the assembly. At the capture of the barricades of his quarter, Rochechouart, he saw the chief of the insurgents fall. That intensified his aversion to Paris. He had already sent two pictures to the Salon in 1848, one of which, "Le Vanneur" (a man winnowing corn), attracted attention. It was his first important attempt to paint a scene from farm life. Ledru-RoUin, the minister, purchased it for five hundred francs, and gave him a commission to paint another canvas for eighteen hundred francs. Millet chose for his subject "Hagar and Ishmael." It was a nude, and the work was almost done when he overheard a conversation between two young men, as he was passing one evening before the art store of Deforge. They were looking at his " Baigneuses" (Bathers). " Do you know the author of this picture?" one asked. The other replied: "Yes, it's a fellow called Millet, who only paints nude women." On reaching home. Millet told his wife the story, and added: "If you wish, I will never again do any more of this painting; [so] MILLET life will be still harder, you will suffer from it, but I shall be free and shall accomplish that which has long occupied my mind." She replied simply: "I am ready; do ac- cording to your will." "Hagar and Ishmael" was left unfinished, and a second scene from peasant life, "The Haymakers Resting," took its place. Millet had just received the pay therefor, when political troubles again broke out, the manifestation of the thirteenth of June, 1 849 ; the cholera was also at its height. He decided therefore to abandon Paris for a time, and went, with his friend Jacque, to Barbizon. Will Low describes charmingly the en- trance of the peasant painter into that realm of labor he was to immortalize, and where he was to find his true self. Jacque, it seems, had heard of the quaint, tiny village on the borders of the great forest, but had forgotten all save the last syllable of its name, "zon." So the two families took the diligence from Paris through Chailly to Fontainebleau. Thence the brother artists explored the forest on foot, finding Barbizon at last, and entering it through the cow-gate. The following day. Millet [SI] BARBIZON D AY S drove with his wife and children to where the footpath left the highway for the village. Dismounting, the Norman peasant took his two little girls on his broad shoulders and trudged ahead, while the wife followed with an infant of a few months in her arms, a servant with a basket of provisions accompanying her. Rain fell, the mother's skirts had tobeiaised to shield the little one, and a peasant woman, noticing the bedraggled procession, took the Millets for strolling actors. Their first home was at the village's western end, away from the forest. A peasant, proprietor of a cottage of two rooms, ceded one of them, and the other, which he himself occupied, served, with its fireplace, as kitchen and dining-room for both families. Millet's atelier was across the street. But Millet soon dis- covered, at the other end of the village, an unoccupied peasant house, one story and a loft in height, and this became his permanent home.* A garden, forty- eight feet wide, ran its entire length. A door in the high stone wall at the rear of * The building was 6i feet long, 16 feet wide and 17 feet from ground to ridge-pole. [52] MILLET the garden admitted to the plain. The house contained three rooms on the ground floor. The one nearest the street had been used as a barn and was without floor, save the bare earth, to judge from WilHam Hunt's account. It was rarely heated, and then only by burning straw. The entrance to it was from the street end, and a window, three feet square, admitted light. This room served Millet as atelier, and the two rear rooms, floored, plastered, and with rafter ceilings, as home. Five years later, his proprietor transformed a barn across the garden into an atelier, by putting in floor and rafter-ceiling and cutting a large window and a door, opening toward the old home, and rented it to Millet. The old atelier became a part of the living- quarters, which were enlarged as time went on, a home which many children entered.* The father's hope, however, to have a home of his own, "a nest for his little toads," as he expressed it, was never realized. Millet came to Barbizon expecting to linger only for a brief period, but remained there twenty-seven years, or until his death. The hamlet has been transformed and * Piednagel says Millet had nine children. [S3j BARBIZON D AY S Millet's home has not escaped ; the house and garden have disappeared. The atelier externally is unchanged, but within has been dismantled.* Fortunately, word- sketches remain, drawn by his friends Sensier, Piednagel, Claretie, Yriarte, William Hunt and others, and the son of the artist, Carl Bodmar, has preserved in photographs the garden, the house as seen from the court, from the street, and the street itself, as they were in Millet's time. The French villages, upon the borders of the Forest of Fontainebleau, consist of low houses, built of stone and plaster, and white- washed. The whitewash takes on, with the years, the color of a lichen, and the red tiles of the roofs become a deep, dull bronze, fringed here and there with rusty moss. The houses, or the groups of structures which constitute the homesteads, have an exterior and relatively unattractive side turned toward the outer world, and an interior of court, or courts and garden, shut away by high walls over which no intrusive eye can look. Sometimes the main house * Millet's atelier was very simply furnisiied with a few casts, the spoils from the woods and fields, his favorite books, and, in the corner, a heap of blouses, aprons, kerchiefs, etc., sun and weather stained and bleached. Blue was his favorite color. [S4] MILLET turns an end or a broad side toward the street and its wall forms part of the parapet which protects the intimacy of the home life. Millet's atelier turned its broad side to the village street, his little house its end. We have the photographs before us as we write, and also the memory of the street, seen but yesterday. Between the atelier and the house, over the wall which seems to have twice the height of the peasant woman in the foreground, thick- foliaged trees rise in a bouquet. Wayward sprays of vines, that are growing luxuriantly within, escape over the wall. Wander anywhere along the streets of the Fontaine- bleau hamlets and you will find numberless pendants to this picture. We have pulled the cord and, as the bell jangles within, someone admits us to the home world. Piednagel describes the house as "a maisonette literally covered with a thick growth of clematis, ivy and jasmine of Virginia. The little door, formerly painted white and without any ornament, is never closed to him who knocks. The fa9ade of this modest dwelling looks out upon a large garden, all filled with an attractive disorder. Flowers, vegetables, and fruits grow there BARBIZON DAYS without any thought of symmetry and seem to live and multiply in perfect intelligence. A great white rose vine, inquisitive and artful, seems to be trying to scale the windows, and a hedge of sweetbrier and elders, twined about with convolvulus, an- nounces the beginning of the garden." Nature was the only member of the Millet household that had abundant stores and could make therefore lavish expenditure. But the French peasant knows how to make this guest feel at home, giving her space and freedom, and Millet had not merely the peasant's love for foliage and flowers, but the artist's sympathy with everything that lives in Nature. Sensier says that he loved Nature so that the pruning of the ivy or the clematis caused him an actual pain. Once, after returning from a walk in the forest, resplendent, imperial in its frost raiment. Millet attempted to describe the scene. "The tiny branchlets of all kinds were perhaps the most beautiful of all," he said; "it seems to me that Nature wishes to make them take their revenge and to show that they are not inferior in anything, those poor, humiliated things." Jules Claretie admits us to the interior [56] MILLET of the house. "On the right side of the street, in going toward the forest, one can see around a table, lighted by a lamp, a family patriarchally grouped. The mother and the father are there, the children are working, the girls sewing. All are silent. Sometimes the father, who is reading to himself, finishes his reading aloud. They listen without raising their heads. The father is a large and robust man, young still, with gentle expression, calm and severe at the same time, with black beard, something of the peasant and of the Quaker. He is silent and usually dreaming." Others paint equally beautiful home scenes. It is evening; Marian and George are standing near him, the youngest child is on his knees and Millet is humming a rustic ballad; or it is afternoon and he is strolling in the forest, a child among his children, weaving fantastic stories. The last time Sensier saw him free from suffering and happy, six months before his death, all went to the forest. Millet, his wife, Sensier, the children and the grandchildren. He was spoiled by all the members of his family, all noises were hushed near his studio, even the youngest remembering not to disturb [57] BARBIZON DAYS Papa at his work; but, when discourage- ment came, he threw the studio door wide open and forgot the disconsolate artist in the happy father. If you leave the atelier behind and turn toward the forest, within five minutes you will be in an open grove with stately trees. To the right, as far as a startled pheasant will fly, on the face of a cleft boulder, forming one of an enormous, primeval heap, a bronze tablet has been inserted, containing heads of Millet and Rousseau. Fifteen minutes farther, either to the right or left, will lead to commanding platforms. The wood falls away to the west, and the plain, dotted with villages, is spread out as on a map. A forest fire has recently swept the spaces just beyond, and many of the famous oaks that Millet knew and loved are black and grotesque shapes now. Within easy walking distance, however, not more than an hour from Barbizon, are the most beautiful portions of the forest. The Bouquet du Roi extends for a considerable distance, a narrow wood road, lined on both sides with stately trees that form a continuous, sloping roof through which the sunlight sifts. The [S8] MILLET forest stretches away, clear of underbrush, or with enough left in spaces to afford a marvelous contrast between the fresh green of the bushes, the dark, grey trunks banded with light, and the forest roof, a fretwork of green leaves and blue sky, with the sun- light burning through it all. None but the noblest trees may have place in this park of the kings. The walk through it in the late afternoon defies description. The consciousness of beauty becomes actual pain, through bewilderment and intensity. Millet wrote : " If you could see how beautiful the forest is ! I run there some- times, at the close of the day, after my day's work is done, and I return therefrom always crushed. I do not know what those beggars of trees say to each other, but they say something which we do not understand, because we do not speak their language. Voila tout!" Overtaken by the close of day in the gorges of Apremont, he exclaimed: "It is a prehistoric deluge, a chaos. It must have been terrible, when it ground under its masses generations of men, when the grand waters had taken possession of the earth and only the Spirit of God survived [S9j BARBIZON DAYS so many disasters. The Bible paints it in three words : 'Et spiritus Dei superabat super aquas' (And the Spirit of God prevailed over the waters.) Poussin alone, perhaps, has understood that end of the world." The reverse of this picture of a happy- home life and constant, intimate communion with Nature is the long, cruel struggle with poverty, headache and disappointment.* His letters show that the morrow scarce ever was secure. He was often in fear of being turned out of doors. About the time that his "Angelus" was finished he wrote to Sensier : " We have only wood for two or three days more ... I am suffering and sad." William Hunt says: "I found him (Millet) working in a cellar, three feet under ground, his pictures becoming mil- dewed, as there was no floor. He was desperately poor, but painting tremendous * Sensier's portrayal of Millet's struggle with poverty has been criticised, even by Madame Millet, as overdrawn. But Millet's letters seem to bear out at least the assertion that, in his mind, the situation was tense almost to the last, causing great solicitude, if not actual material want. All the responsibility therefor is not however to be imputed to lack of due appreciation of his work as artist. The needs of a very large family, with his generous shielding them against the suspicion even of distress, and his own lack of financial wisdom, his incautiousness when fortune smiled, were also con- tributory causes. His eldest son said they were the happiest of children and only knew later on that their father's life had been worn out by his hard struggle. [60] MILLET things." The most cruel part of it all, in the retrospect, is that the struggle was ended, his existence assured and hostile criticism stilled only about 1870, that is a few years before the end, when already the strong man was broken by the burden bearing. In December, 1874, when he was con- sciously entering the shadow land, he said: " I die too soon ; I disappear at the moment when I begin to see clear in nature and art." In January, 1875, a stag was pursued into a garden near by and tortured to death. Millet heard all. "It is a prognostic," he said; "that poor animal, which has just died near me, announces without doubt that I too am going to die." January 20th, 1875, the long struggle ended. At his death there was, as his biographer expresses it, an explosion of sympathy and justice. Whatever might be the variance of opinion with regard to his art interpretation, all recognized that a brave man had passed. Single canvases, that could scarce find a buyer at any price when first painted, have brought since his death prices that would have assured him not merely a competence, but wealth. Thus, "The Gleaners," which Millet had sold for two thousand francs, [61 J BARBIZON DAYS brought three hundred thousand francs; and "The Angelus," which he had great difficulty in disposing of for twenty-five hundred francs, brought, at the Secretan sale in 1889, five hundred and fifty-three thousand francs, and later, in 1890, eight hundred thousand francs. The Gavet collection of his pastels and drawings was sold in the year of his death for four hundred and thirty-one thousand francs.* Yet this story is a common one, and the wish of his heart, despite all, had been fulfilled. For he wrote in 1867: "I con- tinue to desire only this, to live from my work and to bring up my children fittingly; then to express the most possible of my impressions ; also, and at the same time, to have the sympathies of those I love well. Let all this be granted me and I shall regard myself as having the good portion." Millet's nature was saddened by the struggle. The cloud that hung forever in his sky dulled his vision to the im- * High prices were realized at sales, even before his death. In 1873, " The Angelus," which was one of his favorites, soldfor 50,000 francs ; " V^Toman with the Lamp," 38,500 ; " Flock of Geese," 25,000 ; and others for corresponding prices ; but Millet was already sick and had hemorrhages. The May following his death, his unfinished pictures, drawings, etc., sold for 321,000 francs and this gave Madame Millet a comfortable income. Proofs of etchings he had sold for half a franc brought from 100 to 150 francs. [62] :4 1 ' ''5j MILLET portant part that light and gladness have in Nature, aye to the sunny side of that peasant life whereof he had always been a part and whose interpreter he felt himself called to be. Yet, despite money vexations, despite the demon headache, which gained a tighter clutch upon him every year and pitilessly stole away strength and time from creative work, despite his repeated failures to secure recognition, he walked manfully forward and, in the darkest years, wrought much of his noblest work. About the time of his finishing "The "Gleaners" (in 1857) ^^ ^^^'^^ "Let them not believe that they will force me to lessen the types of the soil ; I would prefer to say nothing rather than to express myself feebly. Let them give me signs to paint; yards of canvas to cover by day's labor, as a painter of buildings ; a mason's work, if need be ; but let them leave me in peace to conceive, according to my own fashion, and accom- plish my task." When his "Death and the Wood-chopper" had been refused at the Salon, in 1859, he said: "They believe that they will make me bend, that they will impose upon me the art of the Salons. Ah, No! Peasant I was born, peasant I shall [63] BARBIZON DAYS die, I wish to say that which I feel. I have things to describe as I have seen them, and I will remain upon my soil without retreatingaj-tf^o^'j-length, and, ifneed be . . . I will fight too . . . for honor." * From the misunderstanding and non-appreciation of man he turned constantly to Nature for cheer: "Let us go and see the sunset; that will comfort me again." When well nigh disheartened, in 1864, he wrote: "Let us pray Him who gives us intelligence not to abandon us too much, for we have need of all our strength to accomplish this task. Gird we up our loins, then, and march!" Sensier visited Millet and Jacque fre- quently during the first months after they came to Barbizon, and found them so over- whelmed by the beauty of the forest that they could not work. The charm of forest and plain and the exhilarating consciousness of being at last free to live his own life combined for a time to intoxicate Millet. "When I get to the ground," he had said before leaving Paris, "I shall be free." With the return of calm, he began his life work, sketching everything that spoke to him and working very rapidly in the * " The Angelus " was already painted. [64 J MILLET preparation of these first notes. Later he elaborated with care a series of small studies, embracing the entire life of the peasant, both man and woman, and almost from cradle to grave. His paintings, the final stage in this work of creation, grew slowly. He did not finish more than three a year. He was a severe and patient self-critic. If he felt the expression incomplete, he let the canvas hang untouched for months, even years. He did not paint from the model. He sought the typical rather than the indi- vidual, and the model would obscure the type that was taking form within. We are accustomed to think of the Barbizon period as completely severed from the earlier period, in that the painting of the nude, wherein Millet had shown hitherto his chief mastery, was abandoned. But this is an error. He continued, for ten years still, 1848-58, producing nude studies, side by side with his peasant interpretations. When it was known that Millet was to abandon Paris for Barbizon, Diaz, the lover of color and graceful form, protested. "What ! In the name of the great pontiff, do you pretend to tell me that you have decided to live with brutes and sleep on weeds and [6s] BARBIZON DAYS thistles, to bury yourself among peasants, when, by remaining in Paris and continuing your immortal flesh painting, you are certain to be clothed in silks and satins?" Diaz expressed a truth with regard to Millet's nudes. Their strong and simple lines and their noble, sensuous forms declare him a master in this field. Millet's sketches af- forded him the largest opportunity for the free exercise of that quality wherein he excels, the power to express form, character, motion with few, sure lines. In his large canvases expression does not always equal conception. Yet considering art "not for art's sake" alone, but as one of many fields of man's creative power that may contribute to the uplift of all life. Millet's peasant canvases remain his supreme achievement. We learn, from Yriarte, that he removed a portion of his wall In order to have, almost on the level of the ground, a view out upon the country, and there, seated upon a heap of stones, passed hours in contempla- tion. Sensier tells us that his occupations at Barbizon were twofold, — in the morning he dug his garden, and after breakfast, that is in the afternoon, he retired to a low- roofed, cold, dark hall which he called his [66] MILLET studio. If he remained there too long, he would have frightful heiadaches which lasted perhaps for weeks. To ward them off, he wandered about the fields and forests in sabots, an old straw hat and an old sailor's blouse, and there his full vigor returned. His work has been styled " The Poem of the Earth." Life was to Millet profoundly- serious, permeated with the divine. Every act of life should be related to the eternal order of things; every work, well done, is so related. The church had taught him to leave the afar to God. The riddle of the near, he read as discipline. Through work shalt thou earn thy bread, and, more, become a part of the regenerative force that shall redeem the earth. He had found his place. His part, as God's servant, was to take page after page from the book of the fields about him and read it to his fellow- man. The peasant's work is both the first and the most fundamental of human labors. Millet was close to the soil by birth and instinct. He felt rightly that, with the primer of peasant life, from which all com- plexities of higher social organization are absent, he could best contribute his part to [67 J BARBIZON DAYS tlie interpretation of life — at least describe soil and life-pictures, in their beauty and strength, which the eye saw but the mind apprehended not. By force of sincerity, he related what he himself even did not fully grasp. Submissive himself to earth's un- equal allotment of good and evil, of the rewards of labor, he pressed home with such crude verity the fact of this inequality that men began to think more seriously thereof, and the readjustment of society, the realization of human brotherhood, is being advanced to-day by his work, without his having sought or even dreamed of such a result. The Barbizon peasants were not un- fortunate above other French peasants ; nay, more favored, for they were comparatively well-to-do, with field and forest as store- houses of food and heat. Millet recognized this.* He was not portraying the Barbizon peasant, nor even the peasant, as peasant, but as symbol of humanity. The faces of his peasants are not only not individualized, but are usually without expression, often wholly in shadow, or only suggested. That * He said repeatedly that he did not consider the Barbizon peasants unfortunate. [68] (SKk'-jflj ■ m WM •>^B^B| ^^B^^H '^^^^^^9^ MILLET is to us purposeful. Man even must in a measure be obscured, the God in his face veiled, if he v^ho looks upon the canvas is to realize that humanity after all is only a part, though an important part, of a greater w^hole, only an instrument in the hands of Omnipotence. When it w^as objected to his portrayals of peasant life that pretty maids and fine- looking men could be found in the village as vv^ell as in the city, and that he was calumniating the country by deliberately choosing the brutal and formless, he an- sw^ered: ^'Beauty does not dwell in the face ; it radiates forth from the whole figure and appears in the suitableness of the action to the subject y Your pretty peasants would be ill suited for picking up wood, for gleaning in the fields of August, for draw- ing water from a well. When I paint a mother, I shall strive to represent her beauty solely in the look she gives her child. Beauty is expression." Elsewhere he interprets the same thought more clearly: "I would wish that the beings I represent should have the air of being consecrated to their position and that it should be impossible to imagine that the [69J BARBIZON DAYS idea could occur to them of being other thing than that which they are." "One can say that all is beautiful which arrives in its time and at its place, and contrariwise. . . . The beautiful is the suitable." "One can start from all points in order to arrive at the sublime, and everything is proper to express it if one has a sufficiently high aim. Then that which you love with the most self-forgetting and passion becomes your beautiful . . . The entire arsenal of nature has been at the disposal of the strong men, and their genius has made them take there, not the things which men have agreed to call the most beautiful, but those which suited the place best. Has not everything, at every hour and in a certain place, its r6le? Who would dare to decide that a potato is inferior to a pomegranate?" * " There are those who tell me that I deny the charms of the country. I find there far more than charms — infinite splendor. I see there, as they do, the little flowers of which the Christ said: 'I assure you that Solomon even in all his glory was never clothed like one of these.' I see *Thisletter was written in reply to the criticisms of hiis "Man with the Hoe." [7°] MILLET very well the aureoles of the dandelions, and the sun, which displays down there, far away beyond the villages, his glory in the clouds. I do not see the less on that account the laboring horses all steaming in the plain, then in a rocky place a back- broken man, whose 'hans' (pantings) have been heard since morning, who is trying to straighten himself upright for a moment in order to breathe. The drama is en- veloped with splendors. That expression, 'The cry of the earth,' is not my invention; it was discovered long ago. My critics are men of education and taste, I imagine; but I cannot put myself in their place, and, as I have never seen in my life any other thing than the fields, I try to say as well as I can that which I saw and experienced when I worked there. Those who wish to do better have certainly the good por- tion." "See those things which are moving down there in a shadow. They are creep- ing or walking, but they exist; they are the genii of the plain. They are nothing but poor folk, however. It is a woman all bent, without doubt, who is bringing back her load of grass; it is another, who is [71J BARBIZON D AY S dragging herself along exhausted under a bundle of fagots. From a distance they are superb. They square their shoulders under the burden, the twilight devours their forms; it is beautiful, it is grand as a mystery." Paul Victor said of Millet's figures: " His painting of ' The Reapers ' is an idyl of Homer translated into /»(2/o/j-. His rustics . . . are of a superb, brutal, primitive ugliness, resembling the figures of captives sculptured on Egyptian tombs. . . . You feel a respect in the presence of those rude peasants, com- panions of the great cattle, warriors armed with scythes, nourishers of men." * William Hunt said : " Millet's pictures have infinity behind them. His subjects were real people, who had work to do. If he painted a haystack it suggested life, animal as well as vegetable, and the life of man. His fields were fields in which men and animals worked, where both laid down their lives, where the bones of the animals were ground up to nourish the soil and the endless turning of the wheel of existence went on." * Millet said once that Hunt was the best and most intimate friend he had ever had. [72] MILLET Many looked upon Millet's peasants as hiding a political protest, breathing the spirit of social revolution. That heavy boor, scarce above the ox, his comrade in toil, painted on the cold canvas without any softening of lines, and thrust before the eyes of the delicately nurtured and well-clad, seemed the cry of the country against the city, of the toiler against the man of ease.* But nothing was farther from Millet's idea. His spirit knew not such a thing as protest against the ordering of God and Nature. Turning backward over the centuries, he heard the curse spoken. He felt its shadow brooding over all the earth, darkening the tilled field, bending the back of the laborer. It was a mystery, but to a Millet human toil and pain are but the discipline of divine justice, love and wisdom. His canvases present life as he saw it, reveal profound sympathy with toiling humanity, but breathe neither lament nor protestation. He said repeatedly: "My programme is work, for every man is vowed to bodily fatigue: 'Thou shalt live in the sweat of thy brow ' was written centuries ago, an im- * When his " Sower " appeared at the Salon of 1850, one critic went so far as to see in it a Communist iiinging handfuls of shot against the sky. [73] BARBIZON DAYS mutable destiny. . . . What every one ought to do is to seek progress in his own pro- fession, exert himself always to do better, to become strong and noble in his occupa- tion and to surpass his neighbor by talent and conscientiousness in work. That is for me the only path. . . ." In 1867 he wrote: "I repel with all my strength the demo- cratic side, as it is understood in the language of the clubs, that they have wished to attribute to me. My sole desire has been to direct thought to the man consecrated to earning his livelihood in the sweat of his brow. ... I have never had the idea of mak- ing any plea whatsoever, Je suis paysan pay- san." No fact in Millet's life is clearer than that he was always remote in thought and purpose from radicalism.* Millet was as sensitive as any of his contemporaries to the splendors of the earth. "Ah! I would wish," he ex- claimed, "I could make those who look at what I do feel the terrors and the splendors of the night. One ought to be able to make the songs, the silences, the murmurs of the air heard. One must per- *He said often that he failed to grasp Socialist doctrines and that all revolutionary principles were distasteful to his ideas. He did not even read political newspapers. [74] MILLET ceive infinity. Is not one terrified when one thinks of those constellations of light which have risen and set for centuries upon centuries with a regularity nothing disturbs ? They give light to everything, the joys and the sorrows of men, and when this world of ours shall sink, that sun, so beneficent, will be only a pitiless witness of the uni- versal desolation." He says of winter: "Oh, sadness of the fields and woods, one would lose too much not to see you ! " And elsewhere : " Oh, spaces which made me dream so when I was a child, will it never be permitted me to make you even suspected?" * But his supreme interest was centrea in man. " It is the human side which touches me most in art and, if I could do that which I wish, or at least attempt it, I would never create anything which was not the result of an impression received through the appearance of Nature, either in land- scapes or figures. It is never the joyous side which presents itself to me. I do not know where it is, I have never seen it. * He wished every canvas to suggest infinity. " Every landscape, however small, should contain a suggestion of the possibility of its being indefinitely extended on either side. Every glimpse of the horizon should be felt to be a segment of the great circle that bounds our vision." [75 j BARBIZON DAYS The gladdest thing I know is the calm, the silence that one enjoys so deliciously, either in the forest or in the tilled fields, whether tillable or not. You will admit to me that it is always very dreamful there and the dream sad, though delicious. You are seated under the trees experiencing all the well-being, all the tranquility one can enjoy. You see coming forth from a little path a wretched form laden with fagots. The unexpected and always startling way in which that figure appears to you, carries you back at once to the sad con- dition of humanity, weariness. That gives always an expression analogous to that of La Fontaine in his Fable of the Wood Cutter : ' Quel plaisir a-t-il eu depuis qu'il est au monde ? En est-il un plus pauvre en la machine ronde? ' In the places that are tilled, though some- times in certain regions scarce tillable, you see figures digging with spade or mattock. You see one of them from time to time straightening up his loins, as we say, and wiping his brow with the back of his hand. *Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brow.' Is that there the gay, merry labor in which certain people would like [76] MILLET to make us believe? It is there, notwith- standing, that I find the true humanity, the grand poetry." The peasant patiently bearing his burden from the cradle to the grave, in the hot fields of summer and the cold, desolate woods of winter, was to Millet the earth poem, and grander far than royal sunset or voice of wind in the forest. There was the battle of life out there in the fields. There was the world's true hero, sowing, reaping, gleaning. He was redeeming the earth from its curse a-nd making atonement, by a life of self-renunciation, for the vast, primal sin; waiting too patiently the revealing of the world of peace and joy beyond. The scintillation of the stars whispered to him thereof as he watched by the sheepfold at night. When as evening fell the Angelus sounded forth from the bells of the village church tower, he bowed his head and drank in for a moment a holy, quiet peace, presage of that beyond. Such was the poem that formed itself in Millet's mind; every action of the peasant life, indoors and outdoors, takes on a re- ligious aspect in his canvases. It is hu- manity performing the old necessary, patri- [77] BARBIZON DAYS archal services, man working with Nature, both under the shadow, under the burden, uncomplaining, waiting for the morning. There is without doubt a deep truth in all this. That peasant and son of peasants in coarse blouse and sabots who roamed these woods so many years was one of the prophets. The forests of the Bas Breau and the gorges of Apremont are holy places to-day, because Jean-Fran9ois Millet walked there. And yet it is only a part of the whole truth. Neither Nature nor human life rest all under the shadow. And he \ who, as Corot, finds and interprets the sun- sprent beauty of the woods, who sees bright-colored forms dancing in the glades, whose heart is sensitive, responsive to the joy, the carols that breathe everywhere in , this world, is a prophet too. The life of the peasants has another side. Sunlight and song are not all reserved for that morrow of whose advent the stars murmur at night and the Angelus at sun- set. Walk through these village streets. The houses stand sociably close to each other, not separated, as in a hamlet of the western world. It is evening ; the fields of labor lie still and waiting under the stars. [78] MILLET There are groups upon the streets and the neighborly talk has a cheery ring. Enter through the gate ajar and sit down with the peasant family in the open court, if it is midsummer, around their table. It is rudely, but generously spread. These men and women were at work with the sunrise and the day has but just ended for them. They are bent, perhaps, the oldest ones especially, but there is a gladness, a song in their greeting, in their voices, that tells not only of a kindly, social spirit, but also that Nature has not been altogether a harsh stepmother to them. No, the life of humanity is not all under the shadow; it is earnestness, it is unceasing effort, it is tireless aspiration, if a true life; but song and sunshine are as integral a part of it as sorrow and cloud. The trees rise grey and tall about me, and the wind is soughing in their upper branches, but the sunlight is filling all the forest world with sparkle and shimmer, the birds are chattering overhead; a roe- buck took my place yesterday beneath the beech tree, when I had deserted it for the noon hour. Each poet-painter sings his measure, each [79l BARBIZON DAYS prophet declares that part of the whole truth revealed to him. But the whole envelops the parts and reaches outward into the infinities. And we who listen to these partial truths begin at last to hear, as sound of distant bells, the disclosings of the whole truth. [80] Corot C O R O T Corot Take the train at the Saint-Lazare station for Ville-d'Avray. The road, after tunnel- ling Paris and traversing the nearer suburbs, crosses the Seine and makes a broad sweep, climbing and following the high ground that encircles as a ring the basin through which the river winds. The backward and downward look is inspiring. The great city lies just beneath, with the Eiffel Tower far overtopping everything, the Arc de Triomphe and the turrets of the Troca- dero Palace as conspicuous objects in the foreground. The sun has set aflame a gilded ball far back among the swarming myriads of structures, the overflow from Lutecia, the tiny island city of Roman times. To the left rise the heights ©f Montmartre, surmounted with the white, un- finished church. A fortressed hill is near, " a watch-dog of Paris," as Hugo calls it. Then the Bois de Boulogne comes between, and the Seine winds at the foot of the ridge, with low trees, trimly uniformed, sentinelling its banks. Groups of tall, gaunt Lombardy [83 J BARBIZON DAYS poplars stand here and there in the file, like survivors of a sturdier militia. There are villas everyw^here. The French- man, w^ho loves the country and yet would not be out of sight and hearing, out of near reach, of the bright, gay capital, can pitch his stone tent upon the terraces of this ridge and see the lights of the city and its suburbs, swarming multitudinous down into the valley, the flight of a song away, while taking his evening meal en famille in his own pretty, vine-roofed arbor. We pass Saint-Cloud, rush in and out of tunnels and are at Sevres-Ville-d'Avray. Sevres is below on the river, but Paris and the Seine are hidden. Ville-d'Avray is farther back on the ridge. We saunter hill ward, following the Chemin Corot, the channel through which the daily tide of city travel ebbs and flows. There are villas on both sides. To the left green vines wanton along high stone walls, dropping here and there a fresh spray, and behind rise trees luxuriantly foliaged. We have reached the Avenue de Ver- sailles, the main thoroughfare of Ville- d'Avray, and turn to the left. There are gates invitingly open on the valley side, [84] C O R O T glimpses of flower gardens and parks, of a downward sweep of lawn and an upward climb beyond, that allure almost to in- trusion. Then we are in a bourgeois part of the town ; the houses are in blocks, but between them, occasionally, a narrow space, an open door for our eyes, that wander eagerly down into that valley of mystery. At last there is a break in the line, a broad open space, from which steps lead downward. We descend the steps and are at once on the shore of a small, beautiful lake. Water is gurgling from a marble fountain just at the foot of the steps. The fountain, surrounded by flower beds and overarched by trees, faces the tiny lake. It consists of a large, thick slab with triangular cornice, a base, and, in front, an urn to receive the water. A bird is singing on a branch in the cornice. A heavy laurel wreath, caught at the upper corners of the slab, falls in a festoon, and in lieu of a knot below there is a grotesque head, out of whose mouth water is flowing. Below the cornice is the inscription: " Veri diligentia " (Search after truth). A large medallion head has been cut In the slab, and beneath it we read: "Coiot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille ; born [8S] BARBIZON D AY S at Paris July 26th, 1796; died at Paris February 23d, 1875." Opposite the fountain, across the path that descends from the main street, a substantial country house hides behind densely branched trees and a high stone wall. It was Corot's home, and nothing, we are told, has been changed since his time. The house is massive, of stone and plaster, a spacious, old-fashioned home. Opposite the house are the stables and outbuildings. Vines run riot over them. House and stables look at each other across an ample court. Be- yond the enclosure, we catch glimpses of a flower, fruit, and kitchen garden. It is a picture of home comfort, of ease without excess, taste without tinsel, with the quaint flavor of olden times, the bright gladness of flowers, the wild freedom of green vines and rest beneath wide-branching trees. But the door of the court is closed upon us, so we follow the path past the house end and study the garden over the high stone wall and through the lattice work of the foliage, left happily incomplete by Nature. A bosky grove — a towered arbor — a broad brook gliding between low-swung branches — a marble statue hiding in a shady nook — [86] C O R OT great trees rising everywhere — open spaces of sunlight. As we turn and face the lake — we are at its foot now — we are amazed at the revela- tion. There are Corot's trees ! Willows, more silvery leafed than any we have ever seen before, stand in sparse groups upon the bank, with tall, dark-green beeches between, and here and there a silver poplar ; and on the opposite shore tall, gaunt trees, Lombardy poplars, with scarce any foliage, only a rag- ged ruffle of leaves twined about their stems. It is a day of moods; while we linger, the sky becomes overcast and gray and the silver of the willow leaves is fused into a mist. The sun comes out for a moment and sets, in the distance, the facets of the lake sparkling. These are all familiar things, so familiar that we return and stand beneath Corot's windows. The ragged- foliaged poplars cannot be seen, but the silver willows are looking across, and the whole background is filled with the trees of the park climbing a gently sloping hill. We saunter about the lake, make the acquaintance of the individual trees, look again at the genial face in the medallion, and then sit down before the whole, while [87] BARBIZON D AY S the senses link in one all the separate im- pressions. Then we return by the grand hill-balcony of the railroad. We have been looking forth upon scenes as familiar to Corot as the walls of his ate- lier. If the human element be eliminated, there is no pathos here, only loveliness everywhere, reaching its highest expression on the shores of the lake and within that jealously guarded court. Yet humanity is not only here in Corot's world but holds a larger place therein by far than in the vil- lages upon the border of Millet's forest. The great city that camps in the plain has multitudes working harder, suffering more than ever Barbizon peasant. They bear life's burden with equal courage and patience. The fields of labor, that skirt the forest of Fontainebleau, have scarce other memories than those of man's tenacious, bloodless wrestlings with Nature. The teeming plain that surrounds that Seine islet has seen other steel flashing than that of hoe and ploughshare. A bloodier sweat than that of toil has dripped into its furrows. How can humanity be eliminated from a scene where it has been intensely, sufFeringly active ever since the dawn of history? [88] C O RO T The city laborer is lost in his environ- ment; the eye perceives from that hill- balcony Nature and man's work, but not man. The graceful lines and grouping of park, river and hills, the grandeur and variety of architectural forms, the beauty, symmetry, and pow^er of the city as a v^hole conceal from us the individual man. The peasant stands alone in his fields, a statue of labor, hew^n in the living flesh and freed in space, against the brovrn of the soil, the green of the meadows and woods, the blue of the sky. A still infinity sur- rounds him. Millet's nature was in full sympathy with his environment, Corot's with his; but neither understood the other. Millet said: "Corot's pictures are beautiful, but they do not reveal anything new." Corot said of Millet: "His painting is for me a new world, I do not feel at home there. I am too much attracted to the old. I see therein great knowledge, air, and depth, but it frightens me; I love better my little music." Beside every one of Millet's rugged, Dantesque strophes of toil should hang one of Corot's summer idyls, for each interprets [89] BARBIZON DAYS only a part of Nature and life, and without the other is incomplete. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was born in Paris the 26th of July, 1 796. His parents were milliners, then greatly in vogue, and their store was on the corner of the Rue du Bac and the Quai Voltaire, facing the Pont Royal, Here the young Corot was born. Thurwanger, his godson, says of his relation to his parents: "He had great respect for his father, but a real veneration for his mother, whom he considered the most beautiful of women. Unless away on a journey, he never failed, until his mother's death, to accompany her to church every Sunday. He was proud to walk with her, arm in arm, and always called her *la belle femme.'" His father's family came from the vineyards of Burgundy. Corot discovered late in life some distant kinsfolk still living there, and, about i860, went to visit them. He used to say to his friends later: "The country is full of good workers, who have the same name as myself; they call out to each other in the fields: 'He Corot!' You don't hear anything else. I always thought they were asking for me, and it seemed to me that I was there as in my own family." [90] C O R O T Corot was proud of his peasant stock and had much of the peasant too about him, both physically and morally. Dumesnil describes him. "Of good height, strong, of a robust constitution, with a healthful, frank, jovial expression; liveliness and ten- derness in his glance; a tone of bonhomie, blended with much penetration ; great mobility of face and a ruddy complexion, which gave him the appearance of a peasant from the vineyards of Burgundy." His father sent him about 1806, for economical reasons, to the Lycee of Rouen, where he re- mained seven years, receiving there his entire education. While in Rouen, he was under the oversight of a correspondent of his father, a man of rather sombre tastes, who loved solitude and twilight walks. Young Corot used, therefore, to wander with him, usually toward sunset, in unfrequented paths, under the great trees of the meadows or along the river, and received from these solitary walks a profound impression. His father intended to make of him a business man. After his return from Rouen, he was therefore placed in a draper's store, and remained in similar employ until about 1822. The artistic tendencies of his nature [91] BARBIZON DAYS were already manifest. While working in the Rue de Richelieu, the moment he was at liberty he would hide himself under the counter and sketch. His employer was very indulgent, but told the father that the son would never be good for anything as a busi- ness man and he ought to let him follow his natural tastes. Corot attributed to this business training his lifelong habits of order and punctuality. It was his custom always to rise early and, from the moment of his awakening, fix his thoughts upon the picture he was painting. He sang, Dumesnil says, while dressing, then ran to his easel, reaching his atelier promptly, summer and winter, at three minutes before eight. Corot's father purchased in 1817 a country house in the Ville-d'Avray, the one we have described.* The family spent their summers there. Dumesnil says: "This dwelling was situated near a pond, . . . and often, while all were sleeping, he (Corot) remained in his room a part of the night, leaning upon the open window, absorbed in the contemplation of the sky, * Corot and his sister occupied it together after their father's death, [92 J C O R O T the water, and the trees. The solitude was complete; no noise came to trouble the dreamer on that solitary slope; he passed thus long hours, his eyes, and doubtless his thought, transported into that atmosphere, charged with humidity, im- pregnated with a kind of visible dampness composed of light and transparent vapors, which rose above the water. The souvenirs of his childhood and the impressions he had received at Rouen were thus renewed and implanted themselves more deeply in his brain. He attributed to them a great influence over his manner of seeing and feeling Nature, and over all his career as artist. From the moment that he took the brush, he found again, without diffi- culty, and as if unconsciously, the tones proper to express that which had remained in his imagination — that gray mist, light and ambient, wherewith the air is saturated, which half veils the horizons ... in a majority of his paintings." These are the years, in the growth of the human plant, when the senses of an artisti- cally endowed nature open to the beautiful, as the petals of the convolvulus to the sun- light, and the whole course of a life may be [93] BARBIZON D AYS determined by the slope of the hills, the sweep of the meadows, the aspects of en- vironing nature. Corot's father had there- fore chosen without due forethought in admitting Camille to this school of the Ville-d'Avray, where a sympathetic teacher was ever quickening his artistic senses and, in equal measure, deepening his aversion to commercial life. He made, while a draper's clerk, the acquaintance of Michallon, the first recipient of the Grand Prix de Rome, a young man of his own age, and already highly esteemed. Michallon doubtless encouraged him in his ambitions. The yearning to express what he saw and felt became at last too strong for him to continue passively longer in the career his father had chosen for him. So one day he went to his father and begged him for permission to give up business, follow his natural inclination, and take the brush, "for that was what he most desired in the world." Corot was then about twenty-six, yet his relation to his parents remained through life that of a child. Charles Blanc says that they always treated him as a little boy, and until after fifty he was as submissive to them [94] C O R O T as a child. The father, a shrewd business man, accustomed to command, was not pleased at this unwise choice; yet he did not, as he might have done, coldly thwart Camille's ambition. Probably the advice of Camille's employer and his own experience convinced him that his son would make a failure in business, unless he renounced now, for good and all, his art whims. He there- fore resolved to give him a choice; to hold out before him a stimulating prospect, should he continue in business; but allow him if he wished, on meagre conditions, to follow his inclinations. He said: "The dowries of your sisters have been ready for them, and I expected very soon to provide you also with a good establishment; for you will speedily be of an age to be the head of a business house; but, since you have refused to continue in your trade, in order to become a painter, I forewarn you that, while I live, you will have no capital at your disposal. I will give you an allowance of fifteen hundred livres (francs). Never count upon anything else, and see if you can get along with that."* Camille, deeply * That sum represented the interest of the dowry of one of his sisters, which had reverted to the family, she having died without children. [95] BARBIZON DAYS moved, embraced his father saying, "I thank you; it is all that I need, and you make me very happy."* Forthwith delay- ing only long enough to provide himself v^^ith the tools of his new trade, he went down upon the shore of the Seine, close to his father's house and, " looking toward the Cite, full of joy, began to paint."-j- This was Corot's first study, and he used to show it to all who visited his atelier. He said to Dumesnil, Fran9ais, Troy on, and Busson in, 1858: "While I was doing that, thirty-five years ago, the young girls who worked at my mother's were curious to see Monsieur Camille at his new employment, and ran away from the store to come and look at him. One of them, whom we will call Mademoiselle Rose, came oftener than her companions; she is still living and unmarried, and visits me from time to time. She was here only last week. Oh, my friends, what a change, and what reflections it calls forth ! My painting has not budged, it is as young as ever, it marks the hour and time of day when I made *We have followed here Dumesnil's account. Charles Blanc says his father offered to put one hundred thousand francs in his hands, if he would continue in business. Thurwanger says the annuity was only 1,200 francs. t The Seine island, site of the original city. [96] C O R O T it; but Mademoiselle Rose and I, where are we?" The contrast between Millet's abandon- ment of the farm and Corot's release from the counter is a significant one. Millet's father and grandmother saw, in the lad's talent, a sign of the divine will, and sent him forth, as one called to a higher, a holy work. Corot's father had no confidence in his son's artistic ability. The life of a painter, at least so far as Camille was concerned, seemed to him a half-idling, a toying with life, and his attitude thence- forth toward his son was one of tolerance of a caprice, rather than encouragement of a talent.* Millet married, and his career was from beginning to end a struggle, a con- secrated one, from the moment of his clear recognition of his special field. Corot escaped from the counter to the land of his dreams. He never married; whether the desire thereof came to him or not, we are not told — Mademoiselle Rose awakens a suspicion — but, if it did, he turned his face *Even so late as 1846, when Corot had been decorated with the Legion of Honor, his father said to Fran9ais, who was perhaps Corot's favorite pupil: "Tell me, you who are a connoisseur in painting, whether Camille has really merit ? " Fran9ais assured him that his son was " stronger than all the rest," but found it difficult to con- vince him. [97J BARBIZQN D AY S resolutely away. He gave his life entirely to art; his father's allowances satisfied his modest needs, and so he lived on, in- terpreting Nature as she appeared to him, diffusing about him a constant sunshine, with a song always in his heart and upon his lips, until, dreaming of landscapes and skies all rose, he fell asleep. When some one remarked that painting was a folly, he replied : " It may be so, but I defy anybody to find on my face the traces of sorrow, of ambition or remorse, which mar the faces of so many unhappy people. This is why we should not only pardon that folly but seek it. We should love art, which gives calm, moral content- ment, and even health to one who can bring his life into harmony with it." He said once to a friend: "I pray every day the bon Dieu to make me a child, that I may see her (Nature) as she is, and to make her, as a child, without reserve." Such prayers the bon Dieu always answers, for the desire is proof that the heart is open to receive the simple messages of the outer world, though not indeed its depths and heights; for these are only disclosed to him who has struggled and suffered. One may [98J C O KO T indeed suffer and yet remain a child. A mere financial independence, such as Corot enjoyed, is not a shield against the arrows of fate. But, so far as we can observe, Corot's life moved forward, from the time of his release from business, as evenly and happily as it is reasonably possible for human life to do. His vigorous health and glad nature, more receptive of sunlight than of shadow, counted for much therein. The failure to secure recognition had not the meaning for him that it had for Millet and Rousseau, harassed by creditors and de- pendent upon the fruits of their labors. It was therefore without that drop of supreme bitterness. Late in life, when the battle was over, he said, in reference to a sugges- tion made by Barye that he should offer himself as candidate to the Institute : " No," pointing to his easel, "all my happiness is there. I have followed my path without flinching, without changing, and for a long time without success; it has come late; it is a compensation for youth flown away, and I am the happiest man in the world." His friend Michallon became for a brief time his teacher. His first drawing from nature was made at Arcueil under Michallon's [99] BARBIZQN D AY S eye,* Dumesnil sums up the precepts of his first master : " To come face to face with Nature, to strive to render her with exactness, to paint what one sees and to translate the impressions received," and this advice, Dumesnil adds, was about that which Corot gave in turn to his pupils. Though Corot did not remain long under Michal- lon's direction, the precepts of his first master had undoubtedly an abiding influence with him. They responded to the leadings of his own nature. Michallon died in 1822. His death must have occurred therefore not long after Corot's release from business. Rene Menard says of Michallon: "At a time when only conventional landscape was known, with the inevitable temple in the background, and the foreground with large leaves to give it distance, Michallon was regarded as a seeker after realism, because his subjects were chosen from Nature, instead of being composed in the imagina- tion." Victor Bertin, the acknowledged master of landscape, was Corot's second teacher. He had been also the teacher of Michallon. * Corot made one of his first studies in the Forest of Fontaine- bleau, October 22d, 1822. [ 1°° ] C O R O T Dumesnil says that "he was a pure classi- cist, putting everything in order, and whose paintings recall, if one may so express it, the coldness of the accessories of tragedy." Bertin was not the master to appreciate and foster the artistic qualities of Corot's na- ture, but he was a conscientious worker and a good draughtsman, and his instruction was helpful in the direction of precision. Jean Rousseau describes the ruling art ideals at the time when Corot began his apprenticeship. There was nothing but the noble style; "no rivers, but torrents; no houses, but Greek temples; no peasants, but shepherds and nymphs ; and no familiar trees even, no simple elms and commonplace birches, but cedars and palms." After two winters spent in Bertin's studio, Corot went to Rome in 1825. A number of young French painters were there at the time. Pierre Guerin was director of the Academy. Corot's social qualities made at first a much greater impression than his ability as an artist. At the evening gather- ings, at the CafFe della Lepre or Caffe Greco, he used to sing with great gusto a ballad then very popular, and which remained one of his favorites. BARBIZON DAYS " Je sais attacher les rubans, Je sais comment poussent les roses. Des oiseaux, je sais tous les chants, Mais je sens palpiter mon coeur." As an artist Corot was timid, and the in- difference of his comrades went at times even to the point of ridicule. His first attempts at independent drawing discouraged him, and he felt that the time passed under Victor Bertin's instruction had been wasted. But he persevered and learned to sketch rapidly the groups he met on the street, seizing the character and the details too, if those who were unconsciously posing lingered long enough. Corot, as Millet, was a more apt pupil in the large studio where Nature teaches than in the routine of the atelier. He loved to wander alone about Rome.* Corot is indeed the child of the Ville- d' Avray and of Rome, the pupil of Nature and of Classic Art. He unites harmoniously the academic traditions taught by Michallon, Bertin and the rest, with his own impressions received immediately from Nature. * There was no other city in Europe, even as late as 1875, save Athens perhaps, where one could learn as much of art and history by simply wandering to and fro. Rome was still ancient Rome, now it is an emerging modern European capital, and the crum- bling gray of the old contrasts harshly with the pretentiousness of the new. [102] C O R O T For those lithe, shapely figures that lead the dance in his summer landscapes are the wood and river goddesses of ancient art, most charmingly bereft of all heroic or superhuman qualities, and become but the impersonations of the hour and the mood of Nature in color, in form, in posture, in everything. A comrade, Aligny, found him sitting one day on the Palatine hill and sketching the Coliseum. Aligny was regarded as an authority in landscape. He was struck by the precision of the sketch and, examining it closely, discovered therein qualities of the highest order, mastery and ndiveti com- bined, and congratulated Corot. Corot at first took this praise for pleasantry, but Aligny insisted and told their comrades that evening that Corot could well become the master of them all. That gave Corot a standing among his fellows and he was thenceforth looked upon as an artist with a future. Corot always attributed to Aligny the success of his life. That spontaneous recognition of his talent and hearty en- couragement, coming from a man whose judgment all respected, opened to him again the golden gate. He made sketches [103] bArbizon days from nature at Aligny's advice, striving to render everything he saw v^ith truth and precision, leaving no place to the imagina- tion. Charles Blanc says that Aligny exercised for fifteen years and more a pow^erful in- fluence over Corot. During this period Corot "sought style by the drawing, by grand lines resolutely marked, an intentional so- briety in details. . . . That however which was rude, solemn and somewhat emphatic in the drawings of Aligny and in his virile, austere paintings . . . appeared in Corot less abrupt, more penetrated with the warmth of life. . . . Corot had something more than Aligny and Victor Bertin, and that was love. Everything depicted itself in harmony in his awakened soul." Corot would never part with that study of the Coliseum, and toward Aligny he cherished always a reverential feeling. A friend whom Corot took to Aligny's studio, after Corot himself had become famous, was surprised to see him timid and as it were like a little boy in the presence of him whom he regarded as his true master. Dumesnil describes the closing scene of that friendship. It was eight in the morning C O R O T of a winter's day, the snow was falling and melting as soon as it touched the earth, the sky wan and sad. Aligny's funeral was being celebrated at Montparnasse. There were few present. Corot, then seventy-eight years old, stood shivering beside the grave. Madame Aligny came to him and begged him to go away, but he refused. Somewhat later that same day, as he was leaving his atelier, he related his experiences to Dumesnil. Just then a ray pierced the mist. "Ah," exclaimed Corot, " it's better weather now than it was this morning in the cemetery, but it was for me a duty, a sacred debt." Edward Bertin, another of the French artists then at Rome, Aligny and Corot used often to wander about the Campagna together seeking motifs, and Corot said: " it was Edward who always had the instinct to choose the right spot." He felt he owed much to his counsels. Corot's first manner of painting, "dry rather than vaporous, has its source in the studies that he made at this time." On Corot's return to France in 1827,* he sent two pictures to the Salon, and from that time forward never missed an exposition. • He revisited Italy twice, in 1833 and 1843. BARBIZON D AY S Yet it was long before he secured recogni- tion His pictures were always badly hung, unnoticed by the critics, and returned unsold to him.* But he had, in compensation, from an early period a small band of ad- mirers and champions, among others Diaz, and many warm friends, and was spared the bread struggle. Charles Blanc says that " his work at first was idyllic or historic landscape, and did not differ enough from the work of his masters and the painters of the day to attract attention. Furthermore, the true sentiment of rustic nature was not yet awakened in the French school. When, a few years later, Cabat, Jules Dupre and Rousseau appeared, " the veil of mist and poetry which the ami- able Corot had thrown over Nature was rent by that brilliant young group. The paintings of Corot seemed pale, gray, and, in their delicacy, they could attract only the deli- cate." These however were touched, and recognized therein the soul of a poet. We have seen but few of his earlier canvases. "The Coliseum " and " The Forum " in the * He used to return sometimes from an exposition with tears in his eyes and look at the studies on the walls of his atelier saying: "At least they will not be able to take that away from me, with all their intrigues." [ io6 ] C O R O T Louvre, dating from this first period, lack that romance and that silver mist wherein Corot found his natural expression, and they disclose no other quality which separates them from the throng. x Corot's " Paysage " in the Louvre seems the natural and complete expression of the life and spirit of the artist. A lake rests in the silver haze of a summer morning. We have often seen that gauze, woven of minutest pearls, suspended over an Adiron- dack lake. It is so tenuous that the eye can pierce through its meshes to the shore far away, and there, in the distance, the sun has rent it, and on the glassy surface drops of sunlight are falling and bursting. The wooded shores are half shrouded in mystery, half revealed. There is a life stirring at this hour. Were the eye not so dull, it would perceive graceful forms moving rhythmically along the shore and among the trees, or disporting themselves in the lake. The ancients were not at fault when they peopled lake and forest with nymphs and dryads. For these were elusive things, and the beauty of the woods and lakes, of hours and moods such as this, has the same elusive quality. But we turn back from [107] BARBIZON DAYS Nature to the "Paysage," or better, to its companion canvas, "Le Matin." There they are; Corot has seen them and painted them to the life — graceful, shapely, lithe, not mortal nor sensuous, as in the nude can- vases of the modern school ; not divine, nor heroic ; of the woodland these ; and how wonderfully the colors of their drapery blend with the tones of the landscape. There is poetry everywhere, but it can- not speak the language of man until it has found an interpreter. And those beings, not of human, nor yet of heroic, divine kinship that Corot perceived and painted, are just and true impersonations of sentiments that exist in Nature, and without them his landscapes would lack their final perfection. Corot recognized that he was not painting grand things.* " When I find myself in the fields," he said once to Silvestre, "I fly into a rage with my pictures." When standing before a painting of Delacroix, he exclaimed: " He is an eagle ; I am only a skylark ; I send forth little songs in my gray clouds." His remark about Millet's work, as com- pared with his own, voices the same thought. *He said of his painting: " I know well that I do not go far in it; I cannot; but I am persuaded that I am on the right path." C O R O T Dumesnil finds in his religious paintings, the best of which are in Saint-Nicolas-du Chardonnet at Paris, a capacity for the grand art as represented by Titian, Poussin, Rembrandt and their fellows. But Corot would have deprecated such a comparison, and his own more modest judgment as to his distinctive place in art is the one time will approve. We can spend a day with Corot by reading his letter to Monsieur Graham. "Look you, it is charming, the day of a landscapist. He rises early, at three in the morning, before the sun ; he goes and seats himself at the foot of a tree. He watches and waits. There is not much to be seen at first. Nature resembles a whitish canvas upon which the profiles of certain masses are vaguely sketched ; all is fragrant, all thrills under the freshening breath of the dawn. "Bing! the sun is becoming clear — the sun has not yet rent the gauze behind which hide the meadow, the valley, the hills of the horizon — The vapors of night still creep like silvery tufts over the cold, green grass. Bing ! Bing ! a first ray of the sun ! a second ray of the sun ! The [109] BARBIZON DAYS tiny flowerets seem to awake joyous; each one has its drop of trembUng dew; the leaves, sensitive to the cold, move to and fro in the morning air — Under the foliage the birds sing unseen — It seems as if it were the flowers saying their prayers. The loves, on wings of butterflies, descend upon the meadow and make the tall grasses sway to and fro. One sees nothing — everything is there — the landscape is all there behind the transparent gauze of the mist, which rises, rises, rises, inhaled by the sun, and discloses in rising the river scaled with silver, the meadows, the trees, the cottages, the vanishing distance. One distinguishes at last that which one divined at first. "Bam! the sun has risen. Bam! the peasant passes at the end of the field with his cart drawn by two oxen. Ding! ding! it's the bell of the ram that leads the flock. Bam! bam! all bursts — all glitters — all is in full light, blond and caressing as yet. The distances, simple in contour and harmonious in tone, lose themselves in the infinity of the sky across an air misty and touched with azure. The flowers uplift their heads; the birds flit hither, thither. A countryman, mounted upon a white horse, [no] C O R Q T disappears in the hollow path; the little rounded willows seem to be spreading themselves like peacocks upon the bank of the river. It is adorable, and I paint — and I paint — Oh! the beautiful fawn-colored cow, sunk up to her dewlap in the damp grass ; I am going to paint her — crac ! there she is ! Famous, famous ! Dieu, how well I've hit her off! Let's see what that peasant will say who is watching me paint and does not dare to approach. * Ho, Simon ! ' Good; here is Simon approaching and looking. 'Well, Simon, what do you think of that?' 'Oh, well. Monsieur, it's very beautiful, of course [Oh dom, M'sieu, c'est bien biau, allez!)' 'And you see well what I meant to paint ?' ' Why, of course, I see what it is ; it's a large yellow rock you've put there.' " Boom ! boom ! noon ! the sun aflame burns the earth. Boom ! everything grows heavy, everything becomes serious — the flowers hang their heads, the birds are silent, the sounds of the village come to us ; they are the heavy labors, the smith whose hammer resounds upon the anvil. Boom! let us return home — One sees everything; there is nothing there longer. Let us go BARBIZON D AY S and breakfast at the farm, a good slice of home-made bread, with butter freshly churned — eggs, cream, ham — Boom ! Work, my friends, if you will; I rest, I take my noon nap — and I dream a morning landscape — I dream my picture — by and by I will paint my dream. "Bam! Bam! The sun sinks towards the horizon — It is time to return to work. Bam ! the sun gives a blow of tam- tam. Bam ! it sets amidst an explosion of yellow, of orange, of fire red, of cherry, of purple — Ah, it's pretentious and vulgar; I don't like that — Wait ; let's sit down there at the foot of the poplar — close to that pond, as smooth as a mirror. " Nature has a tired mien — the flowerets seem to revive a little — poor flowerets, they are not like the rest of us men, who find fault with everything. They have the sun on the left — they are patient. ' ' Good,' they say to themselves, * presently we'll have it on the right ' — They are thirsty — they wait. They know that the sylphs of the evening are going to sprinkle them with vapor from their invisible watering pots; they wait in patience, giving thanks to God. [112] C O R O T " But the sun sinks more and more behind the horizon. Bam ! Bam ! it casts its last ray, a smoke of gold and purple which fringes the fleeing cloud. Now- then see ! it has altogether disappeared ! Good ! Good ! the twilight begins. " Dieu, how charming it is ! The sun has disappeared — There remains in the softened sky only a vaporous tint of pale lemon, the last reflection of that charlatan of a sun, which melts into the deep blue of night in passing through the greenish shades of pale turquoise, of a fineness unheard of, a delicacy fluid and intan- gible. The fields lose their color — the trees only form brown or gray masses — the darkened waters reflect the soft tones of the sky — One begins to see nothing more — one feels that everything is there — All is vague, confused. Nature is falling asleep — Yet the fresh air of the evening sighs among the leaves ; the birds, those voices of the flowers, repeat the evening prayer — The dew strews with pearls the velvet of the lawn — The nymphs flee, hide them- selves — and desire to be seen. "Bing! a star of heaven plunges head foremost into the pond. Charming star, ["3 J BARBIZON DAYS whose scintillation the trembling of the water increases ; you are looking ?.t me — you are smiling at me and winking too — Bing! a second star appears in the water, a second eye opens. Welcome, fresh and smiling stars. Bing! bing! bing! three, six, twenty stars, all the stars of heaven have given each other a tryst in that blessed pond. All grows still darker — Only the pond scintillates — It is a swarming of stars. The illusion is produced — The sun having hidden itself, the inner sun of the soul, the sun of art rises — Bon ! Voila mon tableau fait ! " And afterward — "After my excursions I invite Nature to come and pass several days with me. Brush in hand, I hunt for nuts in the forest of my atelier. I hear there the birds singing, the trees trembling under the wind. I see there the brooks flowing, and the river charged with a thousand reflections of the sky and of all that lives upon the banks — the sun rises and sets chez. moi." Corot, painted by himself, in the open- hearted abandon of correspondence, was a simple child, whose life fed upon the sun- light and the song of Nature, just as all green things that live in the forest do. ["4] C O R O T Life's sorrows and disappointments he knew unquestionably; for who can pass through life and not know them? Summer does not rule in Nature throughout the twelve- month, and even midsummer's shield cannot ward off the blow and gloom of the storm. Yet there are hearts, as there are fountains, so pure and self-nourished, that no shadow or soil of earth can tarnish them long. The returning sunlight chases the shadows away, the broken twigs and dead leaves, cast therein by the wind, are washed up on the bank, the impure dust lies clear at the bottom of the pool. So it was with Corot; and the more we know about him, the more complete be- comes the correspondence between the work and the man, the man and his environ- ment. He went by the name of "le Pere Corot ; " Isnard calls him " le bon Papa Corot;" all his contemporaries speak of him with tenderest affection. Dumesnil says that in his younger years he was among the gayest of the gay at the dances held in the Academy of Design, and always wore a gorgeous yellow Spanish costume. Built like a Hercules, he was as jovial as he was robust. In his studio he wore a little cap BARBIZON DAYS of striped cotton and a blue blouse. A high, stiffly-starched standing collar and a pipe were also part of his costume. To and fro he went humming, " Je sais attacher les rubans, Je sais comment poussent les roses." Charles Blanc says he was loved as a comrade and respected as a master among the landscapists, his juniors by twenty years. "It is hard to say," he adds, "of how many things his popularity consisted. His uprightness and his good humor counted for a good deal therein, his rustic air too, his frank face, with fine and tender ex- pression, and his joviality." William Hunt says: "Corot was strong, stanch, decided, cheerful about his own things. When I saw him last he was seventy-seven. He said: 'If the Lord lets me live two years longer, I think I can paint something beautiful.' " * He painted smiling or singing. -f- While at his work he was constantly exclaiming: "Correggio, Giorgione, lend me your * When some one remarked, " You, Corot, built as you are, you will last one hundred years," he replied, "I — one hundred and four years 1 I expect to obtain from the bon Dieu les quatre au cent!" t Silvestre says : " He talks or listens to you hopping on one foot or both." " When the public was all opposed to him, he said, with his good and fine smile : ' They will come to it.' " [ii6J C O R O T brush ! " He wandered about in a large blue blouse, with great parasol, and was always talking aloud with Nature, with the birds, the butterflies, the trees. " Is it for me you are singing, little bird? Well, this is fine!" Every spring he fled to the country. He said: "In the spring I have a rendezvous with Nature, with the buds which begin to burst, with the new foliage and with my little birds, perching curiously on the end of a branch to look at my work." He did not like to have night come and stop his painting, yet he would always remark cheerily : " Well, I must stop, my heavenly Father has put out my lamp." When his day's work pleased him, he would say to his mother: "A little fairy came, and, by touching me with her wand, has given me success." He loved music passionately, but was no reader. He had purchased a ticket once for a symphony concert when Daubigny happened in, and Corot insisted upon his using the ticket. In referring to it after- ward, he said that he had heard every bit of the music in his room, shared Daubigny's pleasure beside, and, "over and above all that, here's Daubigny thanking me for it!" ["7] BARBIZON DAYS He bought books on the Quays for their form and color, and put them in the hands of his models. He read, we are told, one book over and over again, selecting for that purpose Corneille's Polyeuctes. " For twenty years," one of his friends says, " he has been going over the first two hundred verses of this tragedy, but never gets to the end of it, and, when he talks of reading, he says: "But this year I must finish Polyeuctes." His generosity was in harmony with the rest of his great, glad nature. He would never accept any money from his pupils and gave always generously, even when living on the modest income allowed him by his father. In 1855 he inherited an estate yielding annually 25,000 francs. Success in art came at about the same time, and he was soon earning large sums with his brush. He placed the inherited income out of his reach, allowing it to accumulate for his nephews and nieces, and the estate had nearly tripled at his death. His own habits were very simple, and he used the surplus of his earnings for his chief diver- sion, helpfulness to others. He gave away many annuities, some, his [118] C O R O T godson says, of 6,000 francs each. To en- courage and assist his less fortunate com- rades, he would pretend to be enthusiastic about their paintings and purchase them. The artist, Honore Daumier, had become blind, and it was reported that his landlord was about to dispossess him. Corot pur- chased the villa and sent the title deeds to Daumier with the message: "This time I defy your proprietor to put you out of doors." Daumier replied: " You are the only man I esteem enough to be able to accept from him anything without blush- ing." He made one year, near Arras, a study of a little peasant girl. On his return the following year he learned that the child had been drowned. Carrying his sketch to the father, he said : "Here is your daughter come back!" The peasant would never permit that sketch to be either loaned to an exposition or seen by any one but himself, and directed in his will that it be laid on his heart to sleep with him in the tomb. Corot encouraged all who frequently sought his assistance to continue to come, declaring that it was a pleasure to him to help others. He said: "I would rather ["9] BARBIZON DAYS give to ten who are undeserving than deny a single one v^^ho is in want;" and again: "I never accumulate my revenues, and, from fear of a flood, I raise the gates every year ; that is, if something remains over, I make a little distribution to all my neph- ews. . . . Those who are rich buy shawls for their wives, those who are poor buy mutton or petticoats." Yet Corot never looked upon giving as meritorious; he had more than he needed and others lacked ; he was simply readjusting the balance ; besides, " it's nothing, it's my temperament and my happiness. I gain it back so quickly in painting a bough ; that always produces for me more than it costs. I work better and with the heart more at ease. Once I gave away a thousand francs; that was all my pocket could stand for the moment. The next day I sold paintings for six thousand francs. You see that the thing had brought me good fortune, and it's always so." When he foresaw, in 1870, that the siege of Paris was inevitable, he returned thither August 29th and remained until the end, helping those in need with his money, assisting in the ambulances, and [120] C O R O T working hard all the time at his painting, without which, he said : " I believe I should have gone mad." When the national sub- scription for the liberation of the territory was opened, he gave ten thousand francs, and was deeply pained when it was re- turned to him because the plan had mis- carried. And, most touching of all, it was on his own deathbed that he learned of Millet's death. Corot esteemed Millet highly; but Sensier says they were never friends, only acquaintances. Yet Corot at once took measures to provide permanently for Millet's destitute family. Auguste Isnard says : " Of religion, Corot loved only Christ and his teachings. He had always in his room 'The Imitation of Christ,' and it is in this favorite book that he learned how to pass life in calm, and to close his heart to the breath of ambition and of egoism." What wonder that Burty should say of him that he was perhaps more loved than any other contemporary ! Corot's life, after his return from Rome, resembles Millet's with those wide diver- gences which the difference in their natures and in their financial conditions caused. Corot too had to struggle almost [121] BARBIZON DAYS until the end against the opposition of those in power in the art world. He was decorated after the Salon of 1 846, and that persuaded his father to say: "I think I might allow Camille a little more money now."* But the battle continued still for a long time. Success came to him only at the age of sixty. After he had become famous, Corot said: "What an astonishing thing it is for me to find myself to-day an interesting man ! What a pity that it was not told sooner to my. father, who had such a grudge against my paintings and who did not find anything good therein because I did not sell them ! " The grand medal of honor was not given to Corot after the exposition of 1874. His friends had wished therefor, and considered it fitting as a final and full recognition of the master's work. A movement started in consequence among the artists, which led to a public sub- scription and the preparation of a gold medal, the gift of his friends and admirers. Just at this time his sister, with whom he had shared the cottage in Ville-d'Avray, died. His own health, hitherto rugged, * Will Low says that his allowance was doubled. [122] C O R OT for he had never been sick, declined there- after rapidly. The dinner was given at the Grand Hotel the 29th of December, three to four hundred persons w^ere present, and the dear old master was welcomed with great en- thusiasm and affection. When the medal was presented Corot, already sadly changed in appearance, whis- pered to the presiding officer: " One is very happy to feel one's self loved like that." It was the end; he went to his atelier at times, but could not work, yet he loved to linger there among his studies; he had given scarce any away, and they were the journal of his artist life. His pictures for the Salon of 1875 were ready, lacking only his signature, when his strength failed him utterly. They were brought to him as he lay on his dying bed; after signing them he fell back, saying: "Behold all that I can do." It was the last time that he touched a brush. A few days before his death he said to Frangais, his favorite pupil: "See, I have almost arrived at resignation, but it is not easy, and I have been striving for it a long time. Nevertheless, I have not to complain [123 J BARBIZON DAYS of my lot ; quite the contrary. I have had health during seventy-eight years, love of Nature, of painting and of w^ork. My family consisted of brave folk. I have had good friends, and believe I have done ill to no one. My lot in life has been excellent, and, far from addressing any reproach to destiny, I can only thank her. I must go, I know it, and I do not wish to believe it ; despite myself I conserve still a little hope, and (trying to smile) sometimes I would like to get near that soup I loved so well, and, if Madame T. put a good bit of cabbage in the dish, that would be perfect."* On one of the last mornings he said: "I saw last night, in a dream, a landscape with a sky all rose. The clouds also were rose; it was delicious. I recall it very well. It will be admirable to paint." In his last moments he moved his right hand to the wall, his fingers seemed to be holding a brush, and he said : " Look, how beautiful it is ! I have never seen such admirable landscapes." He died on Tuesday, the twenty-third of February, 1875, five weeks after the death of Millet. Corot's methods of work were radically * This was an allusion to the reunions -with his artist friends. [124] > f /, V" :-:...- ^^;-v. ^•: ■ f k:;pft|'' ■-,'■■■".■ ■ v '^1?^#5'^ • ■ « . f' •*-'i/' ^.fc ''•'^iH^SumK S^g^ -^.^v: >>" •.«*:, >= ^_..iiW. 1^ 1 0^"^'^'^'^^^ ll !#;:■- ,|f '^■" ^IJl^^Hfe. ^n9:4^ ^ r>E- ^■ '"v # U A h^^^&->^ »«4^ ■ ■' - B A R Y E room where three of Barye's masterpieces have been placed side by side. The "Tiger" of 1 83 1 and the two exhibits of 1851. It is clear, from the striking analogies in pose and lines, that the "Centaur and Lapith" of Barye come after the antiques, but the half- brute of Barye is not their descendant. The lines and moulding are all stronger, nobler. The hind legs are placed far apart, the right far forward. That creature was an instant since running as the wind, and the forward impulsion of the whole body is tremendous, despite that violent arrest which has bent backwards the right hind pastern. That half-brute has its stall in the woods, on the free crags, and the storm wind is its playmate. The tail stands up a splendid shock of bristling hairs. You can read the whole story there : immense, shapely brute strength and suppleness, with every muscle tense to bursting, and yet the spirit cowering. The Centaur knows that a master bestrides it. And Theseus ! — he is one of the Olym- pians, serene, severe. His raised hand will strike but one blow, and that will crush as the thunderbolt.* *Both the Theseus groups were retouched during many years. Sometimes he left a model ten years before casting it. [219] BARBIZON DAYS And now leave the Louvre, and taking one of the little Seine steamers, a swallow or fly {hirondelle or mouche), as you choose, visit the Jardin des Plantes, and stand before the cages where the great cats are confined, the lions, the Bengal tiger. Notice the grand savagery in the face, the packed mus- cularity of every part, the slip of the whole with every movement. What elasticity, backed by what projectile power ! It is as elusive as the sunset hues in the clouds, as the dance of light upon the forest carpet. What sculptor can seize that ? Re- turn to Barye's room in the Louvre and look at the "Jaguar devouring a Hare." If you put your hand upon the bronze, you will feel the slip of the muscles beneath the tense skin. Barye has missed nothing, neither the spring nor the strength. His jaguar is life, and the life of the forests, which is other than that of the cage, and is not an individual but a type. That is the new element which he has discovered and added, the immortal soul he has breathed into the bronze. And that is genius. We do not care to follow Barye the sculptor farther, step by step. He has at- tained immortal things already. He will [ 220 J B A R Y E not advance. Not that advance were im- possible for him, but his years and strength are now^ in their full maturity. Barye had just finished a pendant to the "Centaur and Lapith" in the Louvre one day in 1850, w^hen he received w^ord to withdraw at once. The order to vacate was so sudden that Barye could think of no better way of removing his new model to his home on the other side of the Seine at the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve, than to hire a hand-cart. He followed it, picking up the fragments of the clay, as they were broken off and thrown out by the jolting over the cobbles, and when the house was reached, there was nothing but frag- ments. He was named, we are told, as a sort of apology, professor of drawing at the agricultural school in Versailles, but the position was suppressed the following year. It meant nothing and probably was so treated by Barye. The "Jaguar" appeared in bronze at the Salon of 1852 and was purchased by the imperial house. The fourteenth of Octo- ber, 1854, Barye was named Professor of Drawing in Zoology at the Museum of Natural History at a salary of two thousand [221 J BARBIZON DAYS francs a year, raised in 1863 to two thou- sand five hundred francs. He held this po- sition until his death. He was also charged with the decoration of the pavilions, Denon and Richelieu, of the new Louvre. The chair at the Jar din des Plantes must have been a great gratification to him. There where he had come, untaught by the schools and refused at the Beaux Arts, to study directly from Nature when but an artisan, he came again thirty years later, recognized as a master in animal drawing. We are told that his teaching limited itself to such remarks as these : " Look at Nature and make your choice ; " "What shall one teach in presence of that (Nature) ? " He was apt to forget himself en route and would be found standing before one of the cages. The action of the Jury of 1837 had sent Barye back to the workshop. We are tempted to think that, with that deep, silent determination which was the basis of his character, he resolved then and there, as a producer of these same little things, scorned at the time as of the jeweler's craft and genre works, to win at some future day complete brilliant recogni- [ 222 J B A R Y E tion. It came with the World's Exposi- tion of 1855. He was member of the Juries of admission and of awards ; he ex- hibited in the Section of Beaux Arts the "Jaguar" only, but placed in the Section of Industry a collection of his models. The International Jury unanimously awarded him the grand medal of honor in the Section of Art Bronzes, and he was thereafter named Officer of the Legion of Honor. When the Central Union of Beaux Arts applied to Industry was founded in 1863 he was named president, and in 1868 he was elected to the Academy of Beaux Arts. The public work of Barye's last period embraced the four groups for the two pavil- ions of the new Louvre ; the decoration of the pediment of the pavilion of the Hor- loge ; the equestrian statues of Napoleon I. for Ajaccio (Corsica), and a sim- ilar statue of Napoleon III. for the Porte du Carrousel — this last was torn down in 1870 also groups in stone for Marseilles. The most important of all are the groups in stone for the pavilions of Denon and Richelieu. They represent War, Peace, Strength protecting Labor, and Order pun- ishing the Perverse. [223] BARBIZON DAYS The constituents are the same in every group, an animal (horse, bull, lion, tiger) reclines in the background, a man and a child occupy the foreground. These groups recall in their serenity and grand lines the "Theseus " of the Louvre galleries, and reveal a kinship with Greek sculpture.* Barye does not seem himself to have been entirely satisfied, or he felt that his powers were waning. He said one day on the scaf- folding before one of these groups, " They give me to eat when I have no more teeth," and similarly, later, referring to the Statue of Napoleon III., " I have waited all my life for customers and they come at the moment when I am closing the shutters." One of the most perfect of all Barye's single figures of animals is the " Lion walk- ing." It was cast in silver and given by the Emperor to the winner of the Grand Prix of 1865. There was great excitement at the time. To the delight of all good French- men, the English horse was beaten and a Frenchman won the hundred thousand francs and the Emperor's gift. This lion is now in the possession of Mr. Walters, of Baltimore. * Guillaume considers the human figures here greater than in the two groups of " Theseus." [224 J B A R Y E Sylvestre, Barye's friend, describes him as he knew him at the zenith of his powers and' reputation. " He is of supple figure and above middle height ; his dress is mod- est and careful, his bearing and gestures are precise, tranquil, worthy; there is nothing dry or pedantic about him. His eyes vigi- lant, firm, look you always frankly, pro- foundly, in the face without provocation or insolence. The brow is losing its short and iron-gray hair; the nose is slightly turned up ; the parts of the face, of a vigorous squareness, are finely connected." " Barye looks at you, waits for you, listens to you with patience, and divines infallibly your thought. All his words hit the mark, but they seem to come forth with effort from his thin, strong lips, which are almost al- ways sealed by wisdom, for with him the love of silence is a virtue. Melancholy and pride breathe forth, escaping from the depths of his soul, and diffuse themselves over his clear and venerable face. That man, altogether superior, detests the lie and pomposity, avoids the full light, guards his mental strength for his work, fortifies his soul against adversity and follows the max- im, ' It is better to be than to appear.' He [225] »' BARBIZON D AY S has never taken an ambitious step, never spoken a servile word, and there is no trace in him of that jealousy w^hich infiltrates it- self like a poison in the heart of the artist and of the man of letters ; forgetting his own works, he takes pleasure in extolling those of others, and never needs to be in- formed by common report in order to rec- ognize merit. I do not know a contem- porary more ready than he is to hear that which is true, to exalt that which is beau- tiful. He carefully avoids talking, or listen- ing to talk about himself. You must draw words from him one by one, or else divine his impressions. You would believe him soured, an egotist, a dissembler; no, no; Barye is simply a strong, loyal and chaste nature, enemy of that chattering which is the curse of our time. He talks when it pleases him, with much wit and clearness, and he could rail in a biting way, but the most discreet irony suffices him. Pushed to the wall he would be implacable and ter- rible, as a man who places the right always on his side. A naif and profound observer, a great sculptor, a learned naturalist, a man sensitive and not sentimental, convinced of his own worth, without vanity, solid in his [226] B A R Y E affections, despising his enemies to the point of forgetting them, very charitable toward others and severe tow^ard himself, behold him ! " One w^ho lived in close intimacy w^ith him says that, w^hile he w^as silent tow^ard the world, alone with a comrade it was a different thing. " He was an exhaustless talker, a sagacious and naif critic." It is clear, from the pictures drawn of Barye by those who had access to the innermost cir- cles of his friendship, that there (as for ex- ample in Rousseau's loft-studio at Barbizon during the years of fatness), the mute and reserved man became full of animation and sparkle. Yet the self-restraint and the sar- castic humor native to him did not even then altogether abandon him. The door admitting to his atelier was closed save to his most intimate friends. Those who entered found him working, sometimes alone, sometimes his wife was reading to him as he worked. M. Eugene Guillaume says: " The atelier presented a unique spectacle. Models in clay and wax were upon the easels, casts still unfinished upon the tables with the tools near at hand ; upon the wall [227 ] BARBIZON DAYS were fastened numbered drawings and mod- els from Nature. The master, girt with his apron of worker in bronze, modeled, re- touched the plaster, chiseled, inserted parts in the vice, examining them under all as- pects and in every light, leaving nothing imperfect. His application was indefati- gable to the very end, and only when he had done his utmost did he sign his works." Roger Ballu describes his method of building up a figure : " Barye did not plant iron wires in the base of the model . . . He modeled the parts separately, one by one, in his hands, if they were not of considerable dimensions; on a table, if they were too heavy. When he had gath- ered all together, he sustained the parts by exterior supports or wooden props . . . His work, as some one has said, resembled a ship in process of construction with its rigging in place." He remained thus fi-ee to the end to make whatever changes seemed wise. Charles Blanc says that on entering his house, Quai des Celestins, "you traversed a veritable museum and seemed to hear a great noise. In his studio you found a man calm, chary of speech and gesture, but of an expressive face slightly [228] B A R Y E animated by a fine smile." All agree in emphasizing Barye's insistent vigilance, holding his art always up to Nature. The portfolio marked "Service," w^hich con- tained his notes and numbered drawings, the results of his observations and measure- ments, was always within reach. In the Beaux Arts collection of his drawings, one can follow him through all stages, as he models the jaguar. He studied first the living model in the menagerie, then the skeleton in the museum, then he took a dead cat and, placing it in the position re- quired, modeled it. What wonder, when he saw a fine hare in the cook's market- basket, he borrowed it and sometimes for- got to return it. His contemporaries admitted his suprem- acy as sculptor of animals. But some of them said that he was only an animal sculp- tor and had no talent for representing the human figure. Barye felt the injustice of the criticism and remarked with some bit- terness : " My brother artists, in relegating me to the beasts, have placed themselves below them." The two Theseus groups and those of the Louvre pavilions furnish a complete answer to these critics. [229] BARBIZON DAYS As Michelangelo, with whom, in the spirit of his work and life, Barye showed kinship, he was painter as well as sculptor. His contemporaries knew only his water- colors. But he worked also in oils. These canvases, however, were tightly locked in an armoire at Barbizon. His work as painter, by the consenting verdict of all critics, exhibits the same qualities as his work as sculptor, "grandeur of aspect and intensity of life." But Nature was for him rather a setting for his animals, whose tawny and spotted coats he admired equally with their strong and supple lines. The sentiment of Nature, as a thing to be loved in and of itself, the poetry of the earth and sky, the brush work of that grand colorist, the sun, were not his to interpret. Charles Blanc says that his oil paintings show great vigor, character, and truth, and at a distance could be mistaken for canvases of Diaz, Decamps, Dupre, or Rousseau. The execution is not, however, as skilful. He excels only in water-colors, but he puts too much vigor into them. His skies do not agree with his earth, because he had never seen the skies of the tropics. Theo- phile Gautier adds, " The brush of the mas- [230] B A R Y E ter acquires the firmness of the boasting- chisel. You would say that it was made of a lion's moustache." Barye's Barbizon life is associated with his work as painter. His village home was a modest one, as modest as Rousseau's. He loved to escape thither and wander either alone about the forest or in the com- pany of his friends Dupre, Decamps, Rous- seau, Corot, Fran9ais. His great friend Millet lived there. The gorges of Fran- chart were a favorite hunting ground. He did not travel, and the forest must give him the skies and the settings of rocks and trees for his colored representations of animal life. Late in July we wandered through the forest to Barbizon, by the wood paths, a walk of fifteen to twenty miles. Twice roe-bucks crossed the path a stone's throw away. One turned at our call and looked at us for the space of many breaths. A large red doe, feeding just behind the fringe of trees, waited until we had passed. Two deer in spotted coat, disturbed by a crack- ling branch, bounded away. In the gloam- ing, you will often see the wood trio — stag, doe, and fawn— feeding in a wood path, or in the strip of grass-land on the forest edge. [231 J BARBIZON DAYS Wild boar are said to inhabit the wood. Rabbits and hares swarm multitudinous in the enclosed warrens and open fields until the chase opens. Occasionally a pheasant may be seen stalking across a square of ploughed land cut into the forest domain. Barye knew all the habitudes of this animal life of the forest of Fontainebleau. He saw too, in imagination, in the gorges of Franchart and Apremont the fierce life of the Indian jungles and African wilds. Heart disease came upon the stubborn worker toward the last and held him to his chair.* Corot's death was kept a secret from him. One day his wife, dusting the bronzes, remarked, "My friend, when thou art well, thou shouldst see to it that the signature of thy works be more legible." " Be tranquil," answered the dying Spartan, " twenty years hence they will search for it with a magnifying glass." * He died June 25th, 1875. [232]