".K'tiU^ h 57 7 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FINE ARTS LIBRARY 3 1924 014 886 976 DATE DUE Barbizon Days BARBIZON DAYS MILLET— COROT—ROUSSEAU-BARYE By CHARLES SPRAGUE SMITH NEW YORK A. WESSELS COMPANY 1906 ^ ■J Copyright, i 902. ^ BY A. Wessels Compan? New York PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y Co 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 Fontainebleau 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 knovs^, 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 as the hour and Nature invite, the forest, per- suaded that you are not a trifler, will admit you to so intimate a companionship that you can think, away every profanation; and, to recall the hamlet seek out the less frequented villages, even though remoter from the wood, and recreate, with features borrowed from one and the other, that old peasant street, hidden away from the world, leading from the plain of labor to the cow-gate, the opening into the wood, through which each morning the herdsman drove the cattle of the village to their pasture in the forest. The Forest of Fontainebleau cannot have been in 1830 in any true sense a primeval forest. Man had used it too long for his 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. (i2th century) when we have the first his- torical record of its existence. In later centuries, a Renaissance chateau, largely the work of Fran9ois I., displacing the feudal donjon, became the favorite residence, out- side of Paris, of the Kings of France. And in the forest glades, men and women, whom [12] ) THE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU history names, hunted and disported them- selves. Numberless paths traversed the w^ood 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 betw^een. There is no green undergrow^th, 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 limited 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. [14] THE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU 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 ' [^6] 1 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 facades 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 dwelling. 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 FONTAINEBLEAU and a path through the forest, that left the highway between Chailly and Fontaine- bleau. Barbizon was discovered, Will Low tells us, in 1824. 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 Franfois 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, ^he 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 ['9] 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] \^St ^^^fflj '"^^^^ flB| W^s ^m -^tWB i|H <^B 1^' 1 jal^U^^^I , .-:: — --aeSaaaa^M jji ^9 '■''BI9 1 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 was 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 [21] 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 vi^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, tow^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. h4] 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 vi^ood, that grasp tenaciously the black subsoil of the forest and aspire steadfastly tovi^ard 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-Francois 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 [^7] BARBI20N 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-Franfois Millet was born the 4th of October, 1 8 1 4, 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] 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] 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." Fran9ois was her favorite grandson, her godson and the oldest boy, and she gave to him the name of her chosen saint, Francois d' Assise. Millet re- calls her entering his bedroom one morning, when he was but a little lad. " Awake, my little Francois," 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. [31] / 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. [3-] \ \ MILLET From the years of his maturity there comes a story which interhnks itself with these earUest 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 immediately. 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. [33] BARBIZON 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. [34] MILLET The peasants saw from the cHfFs 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 Fran9ois. 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 j oy, undimmed by 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 heuse 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 Francois, 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 t© 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 >^7<^ 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 I'avoir garde si longtemps, car il y a chez votre enfant I'etoffe d'un grand peintre!" The career of Franfois 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 Franyois, 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 musenm 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 Theocritus proves to me more and more that one is never so much Greelc 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 Italian, in order to read Dante in the original. [40] 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. [41] 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 pow^erful, 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 suffer 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 "Vhomme 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 ihePrix 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, rhomme des bois will subject a field unto himself, in unfilled 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, ^^ 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. [4S] BARBIZON DAYS accorded, and gave him in 1841, perhaps as a test of his powers, the commission to paint the portrait of 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 wisely 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 1847, 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 i 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." 1 "The atmosphere of Paris was heavy to him, the small talk, . . . the ambitions, the morals, the fashions, threw him into a world * Millet'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 I 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-Rollin, 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 ; [S°] 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, 1849; ^^^ 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] BARBIZQN DAYS 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 to be laised 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, i6 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 WilUam 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. [S3] BARBIZON DAYS 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 furnished 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. [54] 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 facade of this modest dwelling looks out upon a large garden, all filled with an attractive disorder. Flowers, vegetables, and fruits grow there [55] 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 Rot 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 [59] 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, 1 874, 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] 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, sold for 50,000 francs; " Woman 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] 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) he said: "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 retreating a j-ij/^o/' J- length, and, if need 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] 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 headaches 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] BARBIZON DAYS ths 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] M I I. L E T is to us purposeful. Man even must in a measure be obscured, the God in his face veiled, if he who looks upon the canvas is to realize that humanity after all is only a part, though an important part, of a greater whole, only an instrument in the hands of Omnipotence. When it was objected to his portrayals of peasant life that pretty maids and fine- looking men could be found in the village as well as in the city, and that he was calumniating the country by deliberately choosing the brutal and formless, he an- swered: "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. 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 [69] 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 role.? 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 * This letter was written in reply to the criticisms of his " Man with the Hoe." [70] 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 [71] BARBIZON DAYS 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 /»^/(?/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, v^arriors 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. [73] 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- *Whenhis" Sower" appeared at theSalonof 1 850, one critic went so far as to see in it a Communist flinging 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 centred 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] r BARBIZQN 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 and 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-Franfois 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 [79] 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- Hng Paris and traversing the nearer suburbs, crosses the Seine and makes a broad sweep, cUmbing 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 of 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] BARBIZON DAYS poplars stand here and there in the file, like survivors of a sturdier militia. There are villas everywhere. The French- man, who 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 hillward, 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 DAYS 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 O T 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 DAYS 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 R O 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 power of the city as a whole conceal from us the individual man. The peasant stands alone in his fields, a statue of labor, hewn in the living flesh and freed in space, against the brown 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, 1796. 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. [93] C O R O T the water, and the trees. The soHtude 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] BARBI20N DAYS 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 vi'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."-}" This was Corot's first study, and he used to show it to all who visited his atelier. He said to Dumesnil, Fran^ais, Troyon, 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, seemea 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. [97] BARBIZON DAYS 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 [98] C O H O 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] BARBIZON DAYS 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 tlie Forest of Fontaine- bleau, October 22d, 1822. [ 100] 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 j day on the Palatine hill and sketching the | Coliseum. Aligny vs^as 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 ndivetS com- bined, and congratulated Corot. Corot at first took this praise for pleasantry, but AHgny 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] BARBIZQN DAYS from nature at Aligny's advice, striving to render everything he saw with truth and precision, leaving no_£lace to the imagina- tion. Charles Blanc says that Aligny exercised for fifteen years and more a powerful 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 [104] 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 t-nice, in 1833 and 1843. BARBIZON DAYS 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 vnth 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. 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 w^oodland these ; and how vi^onderfully the colors of their drapery blend w^ith 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 trembhng 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 O 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 i^Oh doni, M'sieu, c'est bien biau, alkz!)' '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 [XII] BARBIZQN DAYS 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] BARBIZON DAYS whose scintillation the trembling of the water increases ; you are looking zt 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 1 Corot;" all his contemporaries speak of him i 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 ["S] 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 ion 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.'" [ii6] 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 who 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 1846, 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. [ 12? ] C O R O T 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 were 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 Fran9ais, 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 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] C O R O T different from Millet's. We know that all of Millet's great canvases are the results of deep experience, long and careful study, and painfully slow and conscientious execu- tion. Hunt says that he would work over a canvas long after every one else thought it finished, when the picture was sold and he needed every franc that new work could bring him. Corot, we are told, worked rapidly, and disliked to either spend a long time over a canvas or to take it up anew, from fear of dulling the spontaneity and the charm of the immediate interpretation. There is perhaps no word-artist, save Shakespeare, whose natural endowment sur- passed that of Lope de Vega. He heard all the rhythmed voices wherein Nature speaks; birds carolling, trees putting forth green leaves, fountains sparkling, grain fields waving, dashed with the scarlet poppy; or where, in human life, as well as in Nature, the strong, stern chords of passion are struck. Singing as the birds sing, producing without effort, he failed to create a "Lear," a " Hamlet" or a " Pros- pero." Yet how Nature shimmers through Lope's verse ! How perfectly he re-gives, [1^5] BARBIZON DAYS in poetic numbers, the tripping measures and the dewy atmosphere of the springtime ! Yet this is not said in criticism or in condemnation of Corot's methods. He knew best how to express what Nature said to him. That fresh grace, akin to Lope's, which he feared to tarnish by using the brush in hours when Nature was not with him, constitutes the distinct- ive charm of his canvases — to each artist, liberty and his own conscience as supreme judge ! Corot said: "To enter well into my landscapes one must have at least the patience to let the mist rise; one only penetrates therein little by little, and, when one is there, one ought to enjoy oneself." But we do not need to wait for the mist to rise in order to enjoy ourselves in that land of idyls, which is Nature and yet not Nature, a landscape seen in the real world, and then re-seen, transfigured, in the world of dreams. "I dream my picture," Corot said; "by and by I will paint my dream." We would not have Corot otherwise. We are willing to renounce the grand master rather than sacrifice the weaver of ballads. Whose work is best done, his work is [126] C O R O T highest; for to each of her interpreters Nature has assigned a special service, and who can tell through which portal of her many-doored temple the greater throng will come to find rest and renewal of courage. It may be at the proud portal of the drama, it maybe at the humble gate of the ballad; it may be in an epic strophe of Millet, it may be in a summer idyl of Corot. C"7 3 Rousseau M : i ■ . 7^ 's^£*^ f^ • ,. ^&f^ -'^xiM^-^Mfc. ^^^I^^M m m "■' fcWSaagjMKMMHIBttUI In *•* ^^.^t»''K^^^ Si.^*a^^f::lS^-^ lv: [TiniiL^Hiiirj^LiiLiir' :m>'^^.^ «.'4 HbI ^iKw .•r.-ji.:i-v-.-i;?J,?t .v^ ^P IH-!.^ St'-'i ' \ ■ ¥ £ -'■- ^'^^^''■^^''^''''■^"'^'y J/, ^^'wEivi^lj^^^^i^^P^^^'^^^^ ^ t^ R .^0^-^:<-^v^ i mrr'' ■■: ^■■w"yw^^;^^■m^■ - *■ ML ^i .: ■„/■ .xfrn ■^^C■'^y^''■' ffi.** »<«« W-^:' ^''r ^:^ V, .. • ■- ^ '^^ ^- .~ ^-'i.^. ROUSSEAU Rousseau Following the main street of Barbizon, some five minutes' walk beyond Millet's home, you will see on your left, through the bars of a broad iron gate, a charming little garden of flower beds and low trees. There is a tiny church to the right, in the rear of the garden. It is of recent date, having been built since the time of the great artists. Farther back to the left a nest of a house is hiding. Vines cover it completely ; a stone stair leads, at the end nearest the church, to a loft which oc- cupies the whole upper floor, and was once used for storing hay, but by Theodore Rousseau as an atelier. A photograph of Rousseau's time shows the vines peering in everywhere, scarce allowing space enough at the door for entrance, looking in at the bedroom window to wish good morning, and striving to clamber up the covered stair, leading to the master's atelier, in order to watch him at his work. The rooms are tiny, scarce large enough to contain the necessary furniture, and the rear garden is correspondingly small. BARBIZON DAYS Man was for Millet the grand earth poem. But Rousseau said: "The tree which rustles and the heather which grows are for me the grand history, that which will not change. If I speak well their language, I shall have spoken well the language of all times." Pierre-Etienne-Theodore Rousseau was born in Paris, April 15th, 181 2, and was the only child of his parents. His father was a successful tailor, and a man of super- abounding kindness. He does not seem to have been able to resist any appeal for help, and his charities, with his indulgence toward his noble patrons, prevented him from ever accumulating a property. Sensier ' says that he gave away ten thousand francs at the time of the burning of Salins in 1825; Rouget de Lisle, the author of the "Marseillaise," was supported by him for years, as also a multitude of others, in- cluding political refugees of all nationalities, poets and vaudevillists. Rousseau's mother was a woman of superior character and charming appearance. The home was a happy one, the wife and mother its centre, and husband and son attached to her with a tender and respectful affection. A num- [132I ROUSSEAU ber of Rousseau's kinsfolk on his mother's side had already shown artistic talent. Her cousin, Alexandre Pau de Saint-Martin, was a landscape painter of some reputation. The boy, Theodore, loved to pass his free hours in the atelier of his uncle, as he called him, copying the paintings on the wall; but he always added something of his own, the wall itself, the nearest objects, in fine, all surroundings. It was a kind of instinct with him to give everything its natural environment. At the same time he was copying, with his pen, engravings, and displaying therein that same tenacity and patience of detail which characterized his mature work.* When Rousseau was from twelve to fifteen years old he accompanied M. Maire, a friend and compatriot of his father, into the forests of the Franche-Comte. M. Maire and his brother had established a sawmill in a faubourg of Besan^on for the * Sensier records also the germination of another characteristic trait of Rousseau, his sympathy with the lower orders of Nature, his unwillingness to inflict suffering upon anything that had life. One day, while handling a lizard, its tail was broken off, and he would never thereafter touch one from fear of injuring it. As mature man, he preferred to bear with the ants and other insects that invaded his home rather than disturb them. Everything that lived, animal and vegetable, had for him its habits and its rights, and it was unjust and cruel for man to interfere. For the same reason he would never carry a firearm. [ ^Z2>^ BARBIZON DAYS exploitation of the timber, and the lad served as aid and secretary. He saw now for the first time a forest in its wild state, and the trees charmed and intoxicated him. There he remained a year, when the failure of the enterprise caused him to return home. It is supposed that his parents had chosen for him the career of civil engineer, but the lad took the matter into his own hands. He was the only child, and, while docile and affectionate, also resolute and persistent, and his parents stood loyally by him, always seconding every just desire. Pro- viding himself with an artist's outfit, with- out informing any one of his purpose, young Theodore went one day to the Butte Montmartre, and, sitting down in front of the old church, "began to sketch what- ever he saw before him — church, cemetery, trees, walls, and the upward slope of the land. In a few days he had finished a study which was accurate, firm and very natural in its tone." The cousin-uncle, Pau de Saint-Martin, was consulted. He took the lad off with him to Compiegne, and had him make studies from Nature under his eye. On their return he advised Rousseau's parents [134] ROUSSEAU to send him to Remond, a landscapist, whom he esteemed as second only to Demarne among French masters. This occurred in 1826. Rousseau began there- fore in earnest his art career at fourteen. He was not pleased with the instruction received in Remond's classical atelier. He always spoke of it afterward with contempt. " It took me several years to get rid of Remond's spectres." He escaped, therefore, as often as he could from the atelier regime into the open freedom of Nature, making Sunday excursions to the charmingly wooded suburbs of Saint-Cloud and Sevres, and, on longer holidays, pushing further out into the country. Once he traversed the Forest of Fontainebleau to Moret, some fifty miles from Paris, and made a study of the route royale. The natural school of landscapists had not yet come decisively forward; the classical school was in undisputed mastery. But Rousseau's instinctive aversion to the atelier rules and his intense love for Nature were already an indication of the coming revolt. The Grand Prix de Rome, left vacant by Michallon's death, was open to com- petition, and Remond desired to put Rous- [135] BARBIZON DAYS seau in training therefor. The pupil at first consented, and prepared himself to paint the classical trees and the proper heroic surroundings for the theme an- nounced in the official programme ; " Ze- nobia dead in the waves of A raxes, picked up by fishermen." But his artistic common sense revolted. "What need had they of digging up Zenobia in order to put soul into a landscape.?" He gave up the task and played truant with more seriousness than before, sketching in the open air at Dampierre and the Vaux de Cernay, and in the dull winter days copying in the Louvre the animals of Du Jardin and Claude's landscapes. He studied the human figure in the atelier of Guillon-Lethiere. The year 1830 was an epoch-making one for Rousseau. He was then between eighteen and nineteen, an age when, if young manhood is strong, there is a joy in that strength and a confidence in its powers of achievement which seldom return with mature years. The spirit of the age, too, was youthful, revolutionary and Byronic. Rousseau had resolved to shake off entirely the academic fetters. Though his biog- rapher does not state it in so many words, [136] ROUSSEAU it is clear that he felt, if Nature alone were to be his teacher and guide henceforth, he must seek her out where she manifested herself in all her primitive strength. He went therefore with a friend directly to the Cantal mountains in the Auvergnat, "a weirdly picturesque volcanic region," Mollett says, "where the hilltops spread in star-shaped ranges from a central dome, and between them are inaccessible ravines and noisy torrents rushing through with frequent tremendous cascades, and on the hills black forests of firs, alternating with wild scenery of barren upheavals of rock." Rousseau's eye became clear and his hand firm in the presence of this unshorn Nature, and his spirit, breaking entirely with the traditions of the schools, went forth in freedom and with ecstasy to gather in its first harvest. Naturally the savage and bizarre aspects of Nature attracted him most. " He turned himself," Sensier says, "with a kind of delight to the most sinister mountains, the widest horizons, the secret places invaded by the capricious travails of the genesis. The country afforded him a vast uplifting of frightful precipices, where the Cere now [137] BARBIZON DAYS plunges in impetuous rapids, now falls asleep in yawning abysses. He applied himself with insatiable pleasure to rendering a denuded rock, to painting the ruggedness of virgin soil, to sounding the giddy depths of black torrents and accursed whirlpools, as well as of gloomy caverns." This first season of freedom was one of revelling in Nature. He roamed everywhere about the forests and wilds, sharing with the goat- herds their bread and couch. He passed the nights frequently in the open air, watching the pallid light, seeking to know, to grasp, the life of that mysterious world of the night. Millet went forth to the work appointed him as a mature man. He had counted the cost, a life-long struggle, poverty, and perhaps no recognition. Corot escaped to the summer land of his dreams ; his servile years ended with the day when he went down to the bank of the Seine and began to sketch. Thenceforth his life flowed on as a river, calmly resolute, deeply peaceful. Rousseau made his choice in an ecstasy of glad communing with Nature, when manhood's strength leaped as an un- locked fountain within him. [138] a ROUSSEAU One stormy night he thought himself lost in the vegetation of a morass without limits. He was in water up to his arms several times and in real danger. At day- break he came to a pasture, upon a slope of the ancient domains of Recoule and Muret, and found there a goatherd in his hut, who warmed him at his fire and gave him a breakfast of buckwheat bread, quail, and cheese made from goat's milk. He remained there two days, running about with his host and reconnoitering the whole canton, and ended the adventure by drag- ging the mountaineer to the little city of Thiezac in order to requite his hospitality with a town feast. On Rousseau's return to Paris with his studies, his master, Remond, "gave him over to the infernal gods. His work, he said, was the fruit of delirium, and there was nothing wiser for him to do now than to go back and live with the swineherds of the Auvergnat." At this crucial moment, happily for Rousseau, his parents had suffi- cient affectionate confidence in him to allow him entire liberty of action. Nor was he long without an advocate, whose judgment in artistic matters was respected. [ 139] BARBIZON DAYS Ary SchefFer was then known as a patriotic painter and a literary critic. The works of Rousseau were shown to him, and he was profoundly impressed. He felt that an original and robust talent was here marking out a path for itself. In his own youth and poverty he had received substantial aid and encouragement from Gerard, the official painter of the king, and it seemed to him the noble way of repaying that debt to aid in a similar manner a young artist of such unusual promise. He took Rousseau's paintings therefore, "hung them on the walls of his own atelier and called the attention of all his visitors to them as the works of a most original and incisive talent." Rousseau had an immediate success. The young Romantic School saw in him an exponent of their ideas. The uncon- ventional and robust spirit of his studies was in accord with the aspirations of that school, and with much of the earlier work of its master in literature — Victor Hugo. Here was an artist who did not hesitate to paint the rugged and bizarre aspects of Nature, without preoccupying himself as to whether such landscapes were in harmony [140] ROUSSEAU with the traditions of the schools and the ruling laws of taste in art. It was enough for him that he had found them in Nature and had faithfully represented them, or interpreted what they said to him. With- out seeking such distinction, simply because the march of his spirit was in harmony with that of the young generation, Rousseau became a champion of the new school. His work found also favor in the eyes of critics who were non-partisan, and all of them agreed that his studies marked a grand advance in French art in the direc- tion of truth and naturalism. • Rousseau did not, in his elation over his success, remain idle and cease to advance. The recognition he had won stimulated him the rather to more earnest study. Though, in his work, a recognized leader of the young school, he took little part in the discussions of the day between Classicists and Romanti- cists. He preferred to think and work. He said later: "I thought only of one thing, to account to myself for the laws of light and perspective. I did not attach any impor- tance to what they found original, new and romantic in me, I sought the picture." During the day he worked in his atelier, [141] BARBIZON DAYS (9 Rue Taitbout), or in the open air at Saint- Cloud, and took counsel of his former master, Lethiere, who advised him to study in entire liberty. The evenings were spent socially in the restaurants. A favorite gathering place was at Lorentz's, 18 Rue Notre-Dame des Victoires. Almost all the members of that group have since become known. They smoked a good deal but in other respects, making a virtue of necessity, were very abstemious. Water was their regular beverage. Burette was able once to offer five bottles of beer to the company, numbering fifteen, and that evening was marked with a red letter in their souvenirs. Sensier says: "They talked about the theatre, Hugo, Dumas, Barbier, painting, actresses, the republic, travels; they made charades, drew up programmes and estab- lished the Society of the Grelot (little bell), which was nothing but a laboratory of mystifications for the opponents of roman- ticism and a graft of the Society of the Invisibles of Charlet. They picked the Institute to pieces and laid an interdict upon the Academy; the great volcano of 1830 had one of its little craters there." Several times they appointed a rendezvous [ 142 ] ROUSSEAU at midnight at the Place de la Concorde in order to go from there without stopping to Dampierre or Chevreuse and return at once to Paris the next evening, a walk of fifteen leagues. Rousseau was one of the inde- fatigable; he made sketches en route, but talked little about his work. In the following year, 1831, he exhibited for the first time in the Royal Salon of the Louvre. His picture was called " Site d'Auvergne," and was a souvenir of the bridge he had seen at Thiezac. It repre- sented a valley bounded by the Cantal mountains. In the centre was a bridge with ruined arches. The public paid little attention to it, but the young school praised it. Jules Dupre, who afterward became Rousseau's bosom friend, had also four land- scapes at the Salon and thus made his dSbut. The peace and rustic charm which his work translated won for him immediately the public opinion, while Rousseau's bolder en- deavors created both partisans and enemies and led to continual discussions. Rousseau felt he must know more of Nature ; he must see everything in order to understand and interpret. " He looked upon Auvergne," he said, "as only his first [143] BARBIZON DAYS day of creation. There he had assimilated the spectacles of Titanic regions, of the commencements of the world and of the first sorrows of Nature ; he had, in a sense, touched the age of iron and fire. He thought to make another step forward in studying countries that were in community of life with man, the rivers, the trees, the cultivated fields, the villages, and to attempt the exploration of the liquid element, the ocean, which gives to the phenomena of the skies their variety and their sudden movements." So a portion of 1831 and 1832 was given up to voyages of exploration into the unknown. He went first toward Rouen and studied the windings of the Seine, thence to Andelys where he sketched the Norman trees, the rocky slopes along the rivers, and the old castles; from there to Bayeux and the cliffs of Arromanches and explored the whole coast of la Manche and Calvados. He made a multitude of sketches and, in order to meet man under his native sky and know him too, he lodged in the country inns and mingled with the people. The following year, 1832, he visited Normandy again, going directly to Mont Saint-Michel, and from this trip brought [ 144] ROUSSEAU back the sketch for his Salon picture of 1833, "The Coast of Granville." This painting "placed Rousseau permanently in the front rank of French landscapists."* M. Lenormand, in writing the criticism of the Salon for that year, selected the work of six landscapists — Aligny, Cabat, Corot, Delaberge, Dupre and Rousseau for an especial examination. He said of Rous- seau's painting: "The view of the coast of Granville is one of the truest things and the warmest in tone that the French school has ever produced. What M. Rousseau lacks is especially study ... he is still far from his goal, but I would not give his future for the entire career of twenty of our most renowned landscapists." Another round of the ladder was beneath young Rousseau's feet ; this victory was a far more signal one than that of three years before, but he remained constant to his aim and unyielding in his demands upon him- self. He shut himself up alone in his studio, and passed his days in meditation and his nights in painting. In the summer he returned to Saint-Cloud, but did not linger under the trees. He climbed to the *Sensier. [145] BARBIZON DAYS heights, from which he could gain grand sweeping views, and there painted two panoramas — one from the terrace of Belle- Vue, showing the Basin of Paris and the course of the Seine, and the second from the terrace of Saint-Cloud, showing the valley of Meudon and the Isle Seguin. He made many studies here, and often returned from these days of communing with Nature too agitated to sleep, and passed the hot summer nights in his garret atelier in feverish intense work. However rapid his achievement, his ambition far outran it. For the vision beautiful, more majestic, more alluring, with each larger, deeper insight into Nature with each day's work done, still eluded him. " I shall never grow old," he exclaimed once, " as long as I have my eyes to see." Had it been possible, Sensier suggests, he would have made of some aerial body a chariot, and, bending over it, have seized the grand forms of the earth, the river's silver in the entirety of its windings, the green and brown of the plains as a checkered whole, the forest as a single green bouquet. And, since that might not be, he would go to the mountains, for there [146] ROUSSEAU Nature appears in her grandest guise, thence the outlook is freest. But he would pre- pare his mind through the lesser aspects of Nature, although grand and primeval, in order that the majestic beauty of the mountain world might be read and inter- preted aright. So he went down in Novem- ber, 1833, to Chailly, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, and took lodgings with a peasant woman, la mSre Lemoine. Sensier says that the forest near Chailly was then as virgin as in the time of the Mero- vingians. The heather and oaks were its lords, and the horror of solitude was there. We have wandered about it recently: it is still grand with trees centuries old, and huge blocks of sandstone, tossed about in some play of the giants. The heather still covers with a robe of rose and misty green the open places. But the wild beauty and strength and the vast solitude of a primeval forest are absent. Rousseau was too intoxicated to work. That fever was upon him which seized upon Millet and his friend Jacque, when they first came to Barbizon. He walked incessantly, and the night found him often amidst the rocks, which, in the moonlight, seemed huge, crouching [147] BARBIZON DAYS antediluvian monsters. "I heard," he told Sensier, "the voices of the trees; the sur- prises of their movements. Their varieties of form and even their peculiarity of attrac- tion toward the light had suddenly revealed to me the language of the forest. All that world of flora lived as mutes, whose signs I divined, whose passions I discovered. I wished to converse with them and to be able to say to myself, through that other language, painting, that I had put my finger upon the secret of their grandeur." In the evenings, in the peasant home, he was genial with all the world. Phrenology was a craze of the day, and Rousseau amused himself in searching out the apti- tudes of the men about him, finding, as he wrote, " painters, poets, sculptors, diplomats, financiers, and verily even ministers in their natural state [boiirrey * "A peasant said to me: 'As for me, in the first place, I must command ; I don't like to be opposed ; ' good for a minister. Another believes that the thunderbolt is an arrow that leaves the stars and comes to strike us, in order to talk a little roughly with us and excite us to answer ; good for a poet." * Bctrn l\ liumlly coarse wool. [148] ROUSSEAU He remained in Chailly until February, 1834, and would have stayed the winter through, had not Ary Scheffer pressed him to return to Paris and deliver a painting he was preparing for the Salon, and had sold to the Due d' Orleans before leaving for Fontainebleau. It was always a great sacrifice for Rousseau to part with a pic- ture. He was never satisfied with his work, and forever retouching it. He brought back only a few studies from Fontainebleau, but expected soon to return there again with a mind calmed and ready to receive and interpret. Meanwhile he made his preparations for a trip to Switzerland, intending to see everything, and not to return until the money received from the sale of his painting was exhausted. Just at this time he made the acquaintance of Jules Dupre, and the two young artists became at once the warmest friends. Dupre almost per- suaded Rousseau to defer his trip to the Alps, making in its stead an expedition in his company "to the borders of the Bousane or the Vienne, into the country of swamps and high forests;" but Lorentz, a comrade from childhood, told him it might [ 149] BARBIZON DAYS be the last time in his hfe that he could persuade himself he was a bird, soar above the mountains, share the society of the clouds and eat a bear steak. So Rousseau decided for Switzerland. A short time before starting, the director of the royal museums sent Rousseau an order for his Salon picture, which had already been sold to the Due d' Orleans, and Rousseau could proudly reply that it was too late. His star was ascending steadily and rapidly; admirers were multiplying and old acquaintances eager to claim him as friend. He was only twenty-two years old, and life, with all its splendid possibilities, ahead. The friends, Rousseau and Lorentz, had taken a solemn oath to meet in Switzerland ; Rousseau started first, and stopped en route at la Faucille, a mountain of the Jura range, with a wayside inn built of fir logs like the Swiss chalets. He planned to remain there a week while awaiting his comrade, but lingered four months. Mont Blanc had fascinated him, looking over from the distance across the lake of Geneva, and he had found at the inn a charming cavalier of the court of Louis Sixteenth, a nobleman with all the better qualities of [^50] ROUSSEAU the ancient regime, liberal and progressive besides. He loved Nature tenderly, was brave and generous to a fault; Homer and Horace were his constant pocket-com- panions; with three score years and ten well passed, he was as vigorous in mountain tramps as a lad of twenty. His relations, to prevent him from dis- tributing his possessions among those in need, had taken them away from him, and reduced him to a meagre allowance. He had in consequence taken refuge in the mountains, where he could live without control as Nature ordered, worshipping God and loving his fellow-man in freedom. Young Rousseau's fresh way of interpreting Nature, his earnestness and enthusiasm, won the old count's heart. He had been dis- appointed in his own son ; he adopted Rousseau in his stead, and called him fjton jils, and Rousseau repaid him with a like affection. When the comrade (Lorentz) arrived, gayety and the abandon of youth took possession of the inn. The days were given to mountain courses ; in the evening Lorentz sang Musset's odes; they danced in the moonlight or talked philosophy, as the mood suggested. BARBIZON DAYS Rousseau paints himself to us in the confidences of a home letter to his mother. "My good Mama: " I am always the same . . . always the same happy life, always fresh for seeing, vigorous for running, and diligent for one end. . . . The Mont Blanc is our alarm clock in the morning, our vis-h-vis are the folk on the other side of the lake of Geneva, (8 leagues). I could not say that we get along badly, though we do dispense with the ceremony of saluting each other and saying bon jour when we look out at the window, for we don't meddle in our neighbors' affairs. Our sight carries fifty leagues about us, and we are equally everywhere, although only occupying the space of our two feet. I am delighted with having received my stretchers in order to commence my view of the Alps. I burn with the desire of fulfilling the difficult task of giving upon canvas an idea of the immensity which surrounds me in order to distribute its benefits to those less fortunate than myself. ... I ask without scruple, because it seems to me that I have something to give. I have so ROUSSEAU much confidence in myself, mon Dieu, when I examine myself." He had chosen as his great theme a picture of the Alps, and was busily studying Mont Blanc under all atmospheric condi- tions and at every hour of the day. Sensier describes a superb scene witnessed in Sep- tember . "The Alps had veiled themselves under an immense black cloud mass, which held all the sky and the earth; the thunder roared, and the lightning flashes suggested, behind that gloomy shroud, Mont Blanc always calm, always august, under the insults of the elements; when a horrible crash of thunder, such as Belshazzar must have heard on his last day, re-echoed in that vast conflagration of celestial wrath, and, after a few minutes of convulsions and struggles, the veil, rent and overcome, lifted and fled away; then the Alps appeared, virgins of light, radiant against a blue sky, blue as the dreams of paradise cannot imagine." The three friends, who had been silent for a long time, cried out with all their might : " Vive Dieu, vive Dieu, vive le grand artiste!" Rousseau painted, [153] BARBIZON DAYS as a souvenir of this scene, his canvas — "Viev7 of the Chain of Mont Blanc during a Tempest." He also made a study of the inn after a night of snow^ and frost, and this hung above his bed his life through. Rousseau's conduct had excited grave suspicions. La Faucille is not far from the Sw^iss frontier. A young fellovi^ had been seen prow^ling about in the most unseason- able times and out-of-the-way places, always noting down something and making sketches. The sub-prefect of Gex, a French village near by, thought the matter needed investi- gation. So this worthy official, M. de Montrond, presented himself at the inn to examine the travellers and their baggage. Lorentz treated him courteously, and, by way of a flourish, turned a triple hand spring, thereafter offering his arm as to a grande dame, and escorting Monsieur to the room where his comrade was madly at work. Rousseau received his guest some- what coldly, but invited him to be seated. Unfortunately the one chair of the room had vanished. A light dawned in the worthy official's mind, and he proposed a pipe for better understanding. [^54] ROUSSEAU Some time later, as guests of M. de Montrond, they witnessed from the balcony of his official residence an imposing spec- tacle, the descent of the flocks from the high mountain pastures at the approach of winter. "A ruminant nation emerges from the heights of the snowy peaks, and spreads itself down the slopes to the lowest pastures, resembling the precious stones of a jewel box that a Polyphemus would throw out of his cavern. The caravan descends grave and slow, invades the ravines, winds around the rocks, glides under the high arches of the firs. . . . This migration, of a Biblical majesty, continues for days and nights; they hear it still in the vagueness of the fog, and the horn of the herdsmen, the lowing of the cows and the tinkling of the bells, sound like the chords of a pastoral symphony." After visiting the Saint-Bernard, they returned to Paris in December, 1834. Rousseau had brought back a large number of studies and at once set to work to prepare a picture for the Salon. He chose for his theme the "Descent of the Cattle." His own atelier was too cramped for a canvas of the size he wished to paint and AryScheffer BARBIZON DAYS loaned him an atelier. The work was ready in a few months and was offered to the jury of the Salon of 1836.* They refused it. Ary Scheffer, indignant, hung it on the walls of his own atelier and invited all the art world to come and see it. Jules Dupre considered it an extraordinary creation. Rousseau had, through inexperience, fol- lowing Ary Scheffer's suggestions, used pigments which have since almost destroyed the painting. But, from the stir occasioned by the action of the jury, from Sensier's description, and from what we know of Rousseau at the time, it is clear that, what- ever may have been its immaturity, he had put into it all the glory and the strength of his artist springtime. The jury of that period was an irrespon- sible body, its members holding office for life. It consisted of the fourth class of the Institute, composed of painters, sculptors, architects, engravers and musicians. Rous- seau, in some way, it would seem, either through his social intimacy with a group of young artists and writers of revolutionary tendencies, or because of the prominence *The Salon opened at that time in January, and works of art intended for exhibition had to be sent in October or November of the preceding year. [156] ROUSSEAU given to his work as the embodiment of a new school ideal, or for some deeper and unknown reason, had incurred the personal hostility of the ruling powers in the art world, and they had determined to crush him. He and his friends knew beforehand that no picture of his would be accepted at the Salon, and none was admitted until after the revolution of 1848 which did away with the old jury. The year 1836 was thus a turning point in Rousseau's life. Since the state will com- mand nothing of him, nor the Salon admit his pictures, those great creations whereof he had dreamed, must be given up for a time ; for they demand large canvases — the Salon for their proper exhibition, and the state or a princely amateur as purchaser. So he turned from the mountains to the forest he had already learned to love, went down to Barbizon and established himself at Pere Ganne's inn, lodging in a peasant's house near by. The innkeepers of the artist towns of the forest, Barbizon, Marlotte, Grez, etc., divide their dining-room walls into wooden panels, and on these, as well as on cupboard doors and everything paintable, the artist guests exercise, [157] BARBIZON DAYS in idle hours, their talents. Pere Ganne's inn has disappeared, but its panels, and cupboard doors, have been transported to the garden of the new Hotel of the Artists, kept by his son-in-law at the entrance to the forest. There you will see more of Rousseau's work than of any other of the famous guests of that Barbizon hostlery, a charming panel of Corot, but nothing of Millet. Rousseau met Aligny and Diaz at Bar- bizon. During the day he worked in the forest, especially in the gorges of Apremont. In the evening he traced in ink the series of sketches from Nature, which he was prepar- ing as a study of the forest. Diaz was carried away by Rousseau's talent. When Rousseau started for a tramp in quest of a theme for his brush, Diaz followed, keeping always at a respectful distance. Where Rousseau set up his easel there Diaz might be found, a few paces away, painting a mossy rock or a tree trunk, but not venturing to speak. At last, one day, Diaz went forward and asked Rousseau to tell him the secret of his wizard coloring. Rousseau received him with open- heartedness, and that, says Sensier, was the point of departure of his (Diaz's) true talent. [158] vy 'V' " * ^ C ^H y ,;* fa. ■ V,T~ #f iii 1 .. \ 1* ' if^l-fll''!! w / ,va til i' \^i *h^i ,[ "'|f' lf» ROUSSEAU "Speak of it to Diaz, whose beard has whitened with work and pain, and you will see his Castilian face light up, as at the souvenir of a great chieftain who led him to victory, and you will feel his heart expand at the memory of Rousseau." The horizon was darkening in many quarters for Rousseau; his mother, passion- ately loved, died in 1837; the blow aimed at her son had struck her too; his father's financial position became embarrassed through his lavish generosity. The years that follow, until the revolution of i 848, are a season of severe discipline for Rousseau. It is doubt- ful whether he could have held himself strong, with undiminished creative force, had it not been for Jules Dupre. For he was, on the art side, supersensitive to criticism, pitiless in his self-demands, and merciless in his condemnation of work re- garded, often morbidly, as imperfect. He once said to Sensier, pointing to a painting, — "The Farm" — upon which he had worked for years : " Do you see that corner of canvas there, large as the hand, does it not seem to you that it far surpasses in intensity, in clearness, in expression, the rest of the canvas?" "Yes, without any [IS9] BARBIZON DAYS doubt." "Well, then, all the rest must pass under the control of that little centre; all that which surrounds it submit itself to that diapason of light and the whole of the picture be as charged with life as that which you see there. Must we not in- cessantly lift ourselves, surpass ourselves, in this terrible profession of painter?" "But, Rousseau," objected Sensier, "with your reasoning, an artist would consume his life upon one picture." "What of that! Yes, a man ought to be courageous enough, loyal enough, and rich enough, not to produce but one prodigious work, in order that this work should be a chef-d'oeuvre, and glorify the man in his creation. And, furthermore, a great painter is only resplendent through a unique work. Michelangelo through his 'Last Judgment,' Rembrandt through his 'Night Guard,' Correggio through his 'Antiope,' Rubens through his 'Descent from the Cross,' Poussin through his 'Diogenes,' Gericault through his 'Medusa;' all that they create thereafter are always the children of giants, but inferior to their elders. If I could have my wish, I would be a millionaire for nothing else save to effect the genesis of a single and unique [i6o] ROUSSEAU picture, to consecrate myself thereto and to find my pleasure therein, to suffer and joy in it, until, content with my work, after years of trial, I could sign it and say : * There my powers stop and there my heart ceases to beat ; ' the rest of my life would be passed in making designs, in painting for my relaxation, studies which would be only flowers thrown upon the work whereof I would be content." Seeing him absorbed at the end of a day, Sensier asked: "Well, Rousseau, are you content with your day?" "Ah, my dear friend," he answered, "never is a day long enough, never is night short enough; have you ever thought of that vain fellow, that impudent monsieur, who is called Pygmalion, so satisfied with his own work that he fell in love with it ? I should like to know that presumption. It must be a crushing happi- ness, but I shall never attain thereto." Sensier tells how Dupre saved at least one canvas, " Border of the Forest," which Rousseau, morbidly critical, was about to injure by overpainting, or destroy altogether, by urging him to turn it face to the wall and give it a long month's lease of life. When the month had expired, he examined [i6i] BARBIZON DAYS it long and searchingly in Dupre's presence, finally exclaiming: "Well, I am going to sign it; it is finished." On the human side, Rousseau's nature was rich indeed in its social capacities and powers of enjoyment. Pierre Millet, brother of Fran9ois, says : " One could not be near Rousseau and not love him." Yet, as seen in the biography of his friend, Sensier, he was one who peculiarly needed companion- ship. Both of an age, Rousseau and Dupre be- came as brothers in their friendship. What- ever may have been Rousseau's counter gift, we know that Dupre gave to him cheerful- ness and courage, and was, for all the time of their comradeship, a helpful balance wheel in his troubled existence. To unite in a close alliance the artists, whom the jury had put under its ban, Dupre gave frugal fortnightly dinners, at which Ary SchefFer, Decamps, Eugene Delacroix, Barye, Chenavart and Rousseau were pres- ent. Ary Scheffer, though not among the outcasts, was generously the most outspoken in his criticism. The brother artists were weary of the Paris world and eager to live somewhere [162] ROUSSEAU together, where they needed but to cross the threshold to find Nature and could for- get all about Salons. So in 1841 they went to the native country of Dupre's parents, to a little village Monsoult, on the borders of the forest of Isle-Adam. Their studios were door to door, Madame Dupre, Jules's mother, presided over the home, and the days interlinked themselves as the lines in an idyl. In 1843, in Paris, they had studios side by side; neither ever went out for an evening without the other and no invitation was accepted that did not in- clude both. In the following year, they went south to explore the barren heaths of Gascony, of whose picturesqueness alluring reports had come to them. After passing Bor- deaux and Mont-de-Marsan, " they visited those strange sandy countries, where the aborigines take care of their flocks, mounted upon stilts, where for leagues and hours one only sees dunes and sand plains, only vegetation, which is neither grass nor lichen, seeking to cover the ground with its clutching creepers. . . . They descended to Peyrehorade (Pierre who rolls), a charm- ing little city, which seemed to them a [^63] BARBIZON DAYS specimen of those happy nooks where one Hves upon the blue of heaven and the mur- mur of the water ; from there to Tartas, thence to Begars — a happy country of woods and warmth; everything pushes forth there with the vigor of the tropics, melons climb the trees, lemons and orange trees grow as robust and fresh as our apples, in company with oaks as majestic as those of Fontaine- bleau. The dwellings of rough wood and thatch are built under the shadow of the oaks and even in their branches. Man there loves the tree, which protects him j from the wind and sand. . . . Finally, close { to the forest, through the maritime pines, appears the Gulf of Gascony, the wave blue as a sapphire which, without wrath and without obstacle, arrives, calm and strong, from the shores of America." There Rousseau began work on two paintings, "The Farm" and "The Village Bakery," which, with a third, " The Vil- lage," were to occupy him the rest of his life, and there the friends struggled in vain five months with the constant fathomless blue of the southern sky. " What man touches, he can become master of," Dupre said, " but to paint that sky without clouds, [164] ROUSSEAU that well of light, is as hopeless a task as it would be to sound its depths." They gave it up at last, put their knapsacks on their backs and visited on foot a part of the Pyrenees, traversing the Basque country ; but they had sworn, " by the oaks of Begars and by the blue ocean, to meet every spring at Whitsuntide on the square of the village of Begars, in order again to start forth for the discovery of the azure, the blue without limit, in its immaterial essence." But the times became harder. Rousseau had often, between 1837 and 1840, revisited Barbizon and lingered there on into the winter, after all others had left. He allowed himself therefore to be persuaded now, un- der the tranquil charm of the forest, that it was not well for man to see more than once in his life such agitating spectacles as the Basque country and the Pyrenees offered. One of his favorite forest haunts was Belle- croix, a region of rocks, heather and low trees, overlooking the valley of the Solle. A few twisted, dwarfed trunks stand there to-day, the decrepit survivors perhaps of a weird, gnarled forest of Rousseau's time. Rousseau said to Sensier, " Ah, silence is [165] BARBIZON DAYS golden ; when I was at my observatory of Bellecroix, I did not dare to move, for the silence opened to me the course of discov- eries. The family of the forest then be- stirred itself. It is the silence which has permitted me, immovable as I was as a tree trunk, to see the stag in his lair and at his toilet, to observe the habits of the field rat, of the otter and the lizard, those fantastic amphibii. He who lives in the silence be- comes the centre of a world ; for a moment I would have been able to believe myself the sun of a little creation, if my study had not recalled to me that I had so much diffi- culty in aping on my canvas a poor tree or a tuft of heather." Rousseau loved the trees as individuals. For him each had a distinct character, and temperament and he would fain know each one apart. Thus he could come close to the heart of that great community we call the forest and, after years perhaps, his brush would be able to interpret to man the thought and sentiment that live within trunk and branches and disclose themselves in the outreaching of arms to the sun, in every movement, in every silence. In September, 1867, two months before [166] ROUSSEAU his death, when ahxady half paralyzed, he took a ride with Sensier to look once more at the heather. " Pointing to the Sully, a giant of the wood, he said : ' One winter's day I saw it covered with snow, white as a warrior of Ossian. It extended its arms like an old bard, a branch fell at my feet and might have killed me. It would have been a beautiful death, there in the heart of the forest, killed by an oak and perhaps forgot- ten upon the heath for years. Do you see all those beautiful trees there ? I sketched them all thirty years ago ; I have had all their portraits. Look at that beech there, the sun lights it up and makes of it a marble column, a column that has mus- cles, limbs, hands and a fair skin, white and pallid, as that of the Hamadryads. . . . See the modest green of the heath and its plants, rosy, amaranthine, which distil honey for the bees and fragrance for the butterflies. The sun lights them up and gives them a diapason of extraordinary color. Ah, the sun, it is the Lyre of Orpheus, it makes everything move, feel, attract, it makes the stones eloquent!'" When on his dying couch, he said : " I watch for the ray, which traverses the poplars and comes to me. It [167] BARBIZON DAYS brings me still the good odor of the leaves and the cry of the insects. I have still to learn and to profit." Rousseau's long absences from Paris only aggravated the situation produced by the hostile attitude of the jury.* Dupre, vv^ho was always the elder brother in their coun- cils, decided therefore that they must show themselves in Paris and make a brave ap- pearance to attract buyers. So they hired, at 2 Place Pigalle, two fine studios, with each a suite of rooms attached, on the first floor of a building constructed for painters. The young militant school gathered there and it was there also that Sensier made Rousseau's intimate acquaintance. Rousseau's finances were, at this time, very straitened. Sensier says he had scarcely money enough " to keep him in tobacco." His art-outlook too was dark. No ama- teurs came near him, art dealers scarce ventured to hang his paintings in their win- dows. The Salon condemnation had borne its fruit. Dupre exhibited two of his com- rade's canvases in his own atelier and, after infinite discussion, disposed of both for six * In 1S45-6 he was again for a long time at Isle-Adsun with Dupre. [168] ROUSSEAU hundred francs. Sensier, writing in 1871, says that 42,000 francs had been offered for them. The friends made Millet's acquaint- ance, but their poverty seemed luxury to poor Millet, and he drew back into his isolation. The following year, 1847, Rousseau became engaged to one whom he loved deeply, who was worthy of him and re- turned his love. The engagement was broken. Sensier will not lift the veil. May we read between the lines, Rousseau's pov- erty, dark future and sensitive pride? He fled to the Forest of Fontainebleau, walking incessantly, that in fatigue he might lull sorrow to sleep. He hired from a Barbizon peasant, for a brief season, a tiny thatched cottage at the end of his garden, two rooms and a loft, and remained there the rest of his life. The revolution of 1848 created a short- lived republic. One of the first acts of the new government was to satisfy the artists. A painter, M. Jeanron, was named director of the Museum, and in lieu of the old Salon and its irresponsible jury, it was resolved to accept everything offered and to allow the entire body of artists to elect a commission [169] BARBIZON DAYS for hanging and awards. Rousseau did not exhibit, but both Dupre and himself were named members of the commission. Ledru-Rollin, the Minister of the Interior, at the suggestion of the new director of the Museum and of Charles Blanc, director of the Beaux Arts, went in person to the studios of Rousseau and Dupre and ordered of each a canvas at four thousand francs, a sum then regarded as enormous. This act was intended as a public reparation to the artists who had been persecuted by the old rigime. It would be natural to expect that the unlucky star which had dominated Rous- seau's firmament for twelve years would set now and fortune make amends by un- usual graciousness. But this was not to be. How much his lack of balance, how much the survival of the old hostility to him, as an innovator in art matters, or as one affiliated with Thore and other political radicals, contributed to this result, it is impossible for us to determine. In 1849 Dupre, who had not exhibited, received the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Rousseau's three pictures were badly hung and he was awarded only a first medal. [170] ROUSSEAU He said : " The simplest field-flower would suit my button-hole better, but I feel my- self wronged ; I am not understood." This difference in awards led to an estrangement between the two friends, the fault being, so far as we can discover, wholly on Rousseau's side. Two years later he had a somewhat similar experience, Diaz being decorated and he remaining without recompense. Diaz conducted himself in royal fashion. At the official dinner of the artists who had received the decoration he rose and, in the presence of the heads of the Administra- tion, proposed the toast, " To Theodorfe Rousseau, our forgotten master." The following year, 1852, brought an official reparation. Rousseau had resolved not to exhibit and the time for sending in canvases was past. The Director of the Museums came to his studio in person and pleaded with him to be allowed to take some of his canvases and hang them on the walls of the Salon. Rousseau yielded and was at last decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor. This gave him a stand- ing before the public and was the beginning of a brief period of fame and abundance. Sensier describes Rousseau in his prime. BARBIZON DAYS "He was of middle stature, very vigorous and made for walking ; his head was olympian and strikingly resembled Shake- speare's, his eye kind and fine, his look that of one who fears nothing because there is nothing to fear, his hair black and curly, his forehead proud in its tranquillity and strength." His conception of the relation of Art and Nature is well expressed in his reply to Guizot. The Due de Broglie had ordered of Rousseau a painting of the Chateau de Broglie, intending it as a souvenir for his friend and colleague in the Ministry, M. Guizot. Madame Guizot had died there, and Guizot urged Rousseau to make the painting grave and sad, and, as far as possi- ble, an interpreter of his own feelings. Rousseau replied : " If my painting depicts faithfully and without over-refinement the simple and true character of the place you have fre- quented, if I succeed ... in giving its own life to that world of vegetation, then you will hear the trees moaning under the win- ter wind, the birds that call their young and cry after their dispersion ; you will feel the old chateau tremble ; it will tell you [172] ROUSSEAU that, as the wife you loved, it too will . . . disappear and be reborn in multi- ple forms. If, in fine, I have thrown upon my canvas the mighty breath of the crea- tion, which engenders to destroy, I shall have interpreted your thought. . . . Our art is only capable of attaining the pathetic you wish to refind in it by the sincerity of its portraiture. . . . One does not copy with mathematical precision what one sees, but one feels and interprets a real world, all of whose fatalities hold you fast bound." Rousseau desired to be a millionaire, in order to devote his entire life to one paint- ing. An opportunity, akin to this, was provided for him by Frederic Hartmann, who ordered and paid for three paintings,* allowing Rousseau all the time he wished for their execution. He was busied upon them during fifteen years. Death alone put an end to the travail and permitted the purchaser to claim his canvases. Sensier says, " They passed through phases, now marvellous, now lamentable. Millet and I were the only ones permitted to catch a glimpse of them. Indeed, at * " The Farm," "The Village Bakery " and "The Village." [173] BARBIZON DAYS times, he hid himself from us, when the work assumed sombre tones and vigorous accents. Then there took place on his canvases a kind of aerial tragedy, which disheartened us. The silhouettes of the trees became menacing, the forms of vegetation shrivelled, the features of the landscape be- came petrified in a dull despair. Rousseau seemed to be chastising his work ... in return for his long labor of creation, by condemning it to the most lugubrious and painful metamorphoses. Then on other days we saw them reborn, as limpid, joyous and scintillating as the mornings of spring- time." . . . " ' The Village ' was one of his torments. The day before it was sent to the Salon even he worked upon it with a fury that disheartened us. In a single day, trebly-locked in his studio, he transformed the entire sky. He had thrown himself with abandon into Japanese art and, domi- nated by those beautiful oriental auroras, which unite so well, in just balance, the softness of dawn and the ardor of the trop- ics, he had made for that poor hamlet of Picardy, a firmament where Buddha would have chosen his throne of light. . . . Later he refashioned it again and turned back to [174] ROUSSEAU our melancholy horizons, to our skies sad and gray.* M. Castagnary said of Rousseau : " He does not carry us away, as Fran9ois Millet, toward the sorrowing epochs of rustic life, to reveal their savage grandeur or gloomy solemnity ... he does not transport us as Corot, into the lands of twilight, where the light, the freshness and the shadow sing an aerial melody, whose last notes reach out into infinity. No : simple, strong, all im- pregnated with naturalism, he respects the exact relations of the trees, the animals, man and the sky." Before turning the last pages in the jour- nal of Rousseau's artist career, we must visit him in Barbizon in the home which, from 1848 on, another shared with him. A young girl, of humble parentage and poor, came to him in Paris in 1848, seeking his protection. He sheltered her and she be- came his wife. The relation between them was a most affectionate one. She was not his companion in the higher life, and his friends appear to have looked upon her as a kind of chattering magpie and a burden on * "The Hoar-Frost," a culminating point in tiis art, wa», on the contrary, finished in eight days. [175] BARBIZON DAYS account of her ill health, yet it is plain that, to Rousseau, she was a tenderly loved and most tenderly cherished child-wife. Her chatter was refreshing song to him, what- ever it may have been to his friends. Sensier is almost impatient with Rousseau for that father and lover spirit, which the strong man showed toward this weak singer of Beranger's chansons, who had found her way into his home ; but he recognizes the complete blending at the last of their exist- ences. He went to visit them during their honeymoon in Saint Martin's in summer. " The little house was covered with clematis, nasturtiums and cobeas. One felt the presence of a woman in that coquetry of hermitage." Rousseau had found his happiness and his old inspiration. He spent all his time in the forest and made charming studies there. One of these, "The Little Hillock of Jean de Paris," contains a picture of his wife. The autumn wind is moving in the birch trees. A young woman, in a blue dress, is sitting at work at the foot of a tree. Rousseau's letters to his wife are in charming contrast with his usual epistolary style. He who is always serious, restrained, [176] ROUSSEAU in contrast to Millet, stiff and cold almost, becomes free, glad and merry to joviality. His letters for the first time sing ; not a grand epic strain as Millet's, or a ballad of nature as Corot's, but a light chanson, such as those his wife was wont to repeat. " Thou must get good round cheeks, for otherwise I shall use them all up for thee at once. ... I think of thee every moment, savoring beforehand all the pleasures I shall have in leaving the train, from seeing thy dear face calling me with thine eyes. It's idle to say that the absent are at fault ; it is not true when one loves them from the bottom of one's heart. See, thou art be- coming apotheosized for me, thou gainest every day, thou hast never had a fault, thou hast never tormented me, not even on thea- tre days. . . . Thou art, in fine, such that I only need thy presence to be happy all the days of my life. . . . Au revoir, my darling little one ... I embrace thee as I love thee. My father. Millet, Sensier, Daumier, embrace thee ; the whole family, le bon Dieu, et le Triable, embrace thee. ... P. S. As for the pheasant, I hear a gun-shot, that must be the Pere Baudouin,* who is making *A neighbor who bad promised Rousseau a pheasant for his wife, [177] BARBIZON DAYS his first essay. Patience, patience then, and enjoy a foretaste of it. Latest News : The pheasant is still living, but they talk about bringing a stuffed one from Paris. . . ." The fat years had begun for Rousseau. His thatched roof was changed for one of tiles, he bought rare bits of old faience from the peasants and picked up etchings of Rembrandt, Ostade and Claude Lorrain. " At this time the home of Rousseau was a little hospitable centre, full of attentions and charms ; the friend arrived there with- out other announcement than his presence. Rousseau received him with that smile and that child's glance which signified, * I ex- pected you.' We talked painting, Paris, literature, we hailed Millet, who was working, still unknown but courageous in his country atelier, we passed comments upon the masters, the setting sun, the light and the longevity of man. The months were years, to-day they are only days." A culminating point came with the Uni- versal Exposition of 1855. Rousseau ex- hibited thirteen paintings and won a deci- sive victory, due however rather to the appreciation of Americans than to that of his own countrymen. Millet had sent but [178] ROUSSEAU one canvas, " The Grafter." Rousseau was enthusiastic about it. One day Sensier was amazed to learn from Rousseau that he had sold Millet's canvas to an American for four thousand francs. Sensier was beside him- self to discover who this extraordinary in- dividual was who was willing to pay four thousand francs for a canvas which would not have brought one thousand in Paris or in all Europe. "But consider," he said, " Rousseau, that astonishing man has been enlightened, as St. Paul on his road to Damascus. What a rare organization that of a being, new and without education, who arrives from his deserts and feels himself all at once drawn toward an expression so simple ! Don't you see, we need not despair of anything ? " " Ah, well ! my friend, to-morrow he will come to see me, come, don't fail." "The next day I arrived at the house and, extending his hand, Rous- seau said in a low voice : ' Well, here he is, he is here. Yes, it is I, since you will know it. But swear to me that you will say nothing about it. I want Millet to believe in the American, that will encourage him and that will make us both more free, for I wish to purchase other pictures from [ 179] BARBIZON DAYS him.'" Those were glad days in the vine- covered cottage. Rousseau, delighted by his unexpected good fortune, loved to gather his comrades about his long poplar table in the loft atelier under the tile roof. " Diaz excited the hearty laughter of Rousseau by his caprices, as unexpected as the humorous explosions of Goya ; Daumier was in the mood of Rabelais ; Barye sparkled with sarcasm and biting tales about pedants and prudhommes ; Millet thought no more of his wretchedness and talked about his Nor- man country and his family souvenirs." But with 1857 the clouds gathered again. The Salons were not favorable, unfriendly criticism became keen once more, appar- ently not altogether without reason, for, to judge from Sensier's account, Rousseau was painting rather mechanically and work that would sell. His biographer tells also a strange story of the venomous pursuit of a Belgian picture dealer, who bought up Rousseau's pictures at a high price and then auctioned them off at a low one so as to make Rousseau's rating low ! Fortune did not smile on Rousseau again until 1865. During these years he was compelled to sell at auction his little col- [180] ROUSSEAU lection of bric-a-brac, was burdened with debt and constrained on that account to re- visit Paris every month, for a time every fortnight, so as to be at his legal domicile to meet his creditors. His wife's health failed from nervous weakness — she was pass- ing into hysteria. In 1863 he had made a second visit to la Faucille, thirty years after the first. As before, he sat facing Mont Blanc. What memories of old ambitions and youthful dreams must have returned ! The rain fell upon him in torrents, but he would not move. An inflammation of the lungs re- sulted therefrom, which was almost fatal and from which he seems to have never en- tirely rallied. His friends became anxious about him and plotted for his relief. One of them assumed, as he supposed, all his debts, but unfortunately Rousseau had not made a full confession. A retreat was pro- vided for his wife and the day of her re- moval set. But, at the moment of de- parture, Rousseau withdrew his consent. " Ah, my dear friend," he said to Sensier, "when I think that I shall dry up the source of so many treasures of tenderness, in separating myself from her, from her who [181] BARBIZON DAYS is but a spoiled child, I feel that I am very unjust to procure my repose at the expense of her heart." He remained steadfast in his refusal to the last hour of his life. Rousseau's fortunes, ill and good, had all his life through much of the unexpected about them. So it was in 1865. The Count, Paul Demidoff, ordered two wall panels of Rousseau at ten thousand francs each. Similar orders had been given to Corot, Dupre and Fromentin. While Rous- seau was at work upon this commission two young picture dealers offered him one hun- dred thousand francs for sixty canvases, all the old studies of his youth, and forty thou- sand francs additional for other work un- finished. In 1866 he was invited to the Emperor's court at Compiegne, and in 1867, at the Universal Exposition, was elected President of the International Jury, received one of the eight grand medals of honor,* sold paintings for two hundred thousand francs and gratified his love for the works of the old masters to the extent of buying thirty thousand francs' worth of engravings at one sale. Three Expositions were opened * Four for France — Cabanel, Gerome, Meissonier, Rousseau. Four for other countries — Kaulbach, Knaus, Leys, Ussi. [182] ROUSSEAU simultaneously, the Universal, that of the an- nual Salon, and a third at the Cercle des Arts. Rousseau was represented by a hundred and twenty-four works. His triumph was grand and complete. Hostile criticism was silenced. But that same malevolent influence that had dogged his steps hitherto dropped into his brimming cup that which made its every drop bitter. His comrades of the jury and his fellow medallists were all made officers of the Legion of Honor, he, the President of the Jury, was excepted.* It was the coup de grdce ; the tension had been too great since 1836; paralysis came upon him, he lingered, mo^-d dying about his garden, followed by his hysterical wife. Millet was constant in his devotion. The end came December 22nd, 1867, "the grand harmony " following upon the trag- edy of his life.j- * His French comrades of the Jury were Gerome, Pils, Fran9ais and Corot. He was made Officer of the Legion of Honor before his death. t Two days before his death he said, expecting to recover : " There will be a crisis and thereafter the grand harmony will come." [183] Barye B A R Y E Barye Antoine Louis Barye was born in Paris September 15th, 1796. His father was a goldsmith. His family preserved as souvenirs of his earliest childhood figures of animals that he had cut out of paper, and said that he used to mix pounded brick with water and paint therewith designs upon the wall. He was not sent to any lycie, but at thirteen apprenticed to Fourrier, an engraver in metals. Fourrier was charged with furnishing the metallic portions of the military equipments, the helmets, gor- gets, eagles and crosses of honor. The repouss^vfonV. for the gold snuff-boxes which Napoleon I. was in the habit of presenting to his brother sovereigns was also executed there. Young Barye was employed in the prepara- tion of the molds and dies for all classes of work, from the buttons of the uniforms to the finest products of the goldsmith's art. The conscription of 181 2 took him at sixteen away from the workshop, but for- tunately his training for his later career was not thereby altogether interrupted. He was attached at first to the topographical [187] BARBIZON days: brigade of the engineering corps and soon after incorporated in a battalion of sappers. He told Sylvestre that he " worked night i and day on reliefs of Mont Cenis, Cher- bourg and Coblentz, which are probably still preserved in the archives of the War Department." March 30th, 18 14, as he was returning wearied from a long walk across the fields of Montrouge, the porter of the military depot called out to him through the wicket : " The army has left ; go with all speed to rejoin it on the banks of the Loire." Montrouge is at the gates of Paris. Barye was penniless and thus un- able to follow the army in its retreat. So he returned to his father's house. The capitulation of Paris freed him from military service, and he resumed his work as engraver, but he said : " I was tormented by my vocation for statuary. I applied myself with infinite zeal to drawing and modeling, but, as I was not one to stir about, I neither knew how to find a master nor how to arrange matters so as to live as student." He solved the problem by mak- ing his handicraft supply the wherewithal for his studies and entered in December, 1 8 1 6, the studio of Bosio. Bosio was a [188] B A R Y E conventional worker of the old school, without originality or strength. The eques- trian statue of Louis XIV. of the Place des Victoires, and the four-horse chariot of the Arc du Carrousel, show his incapacity for monumental work. He was not, however, without a certain fine feeling in his treat- ment of the nude, as the " Hyacinthe " of the Louvre Galleries shows. Barye had come to his studio in order to learn the rudiments of the sculptor's art, and to this extent only is he probably Bosio's debtor. Three months later, in March, 1817, he entered the studio of the painter Gros, and apparently for a time frequented both studios. Gros was a pupil of David, and the author of several large canvases now in the Louvre. Barye's biographers agree in attributing to Gros more influence over him than Bosio exercised. Gros was an en- thusiast, full of energy and a strong worker. Arsene Alexandre says of him : " Classicist by conviction, the first of the romanticists by temperament, he exercised the same in- fluence over all the great painters who went forth from his hands. They observed what he did and listened as little as possible to what he said." [1S9] BARBIZON DAYS Guillaume says: "Barye appeared in the midst of a passion of renewal which began to seize upon the French school. The study of history and the knowledge of foreign literatures were enlarging the field of inspi- ration. With several artists this romanti- cism was signalled by a return to nature and science. Gericault may be considered an example. His anatomical designs have remained celebrated. He modelled. While painting the shipwreck of the Meduse he surrounded himself often with corpses." The 2nd of July, 1816, the Meduse was wrecked forty leagues off the western coast of Africa. A hundred and forty-nine per-' sons took refuge upon a raft. Twelve days later the brig Argus rescued the survivors, fifteen in number, when at the point of death; the rest had been claimed by the sea, or devoured by their companions. Gericault represents the raft at the moment when the brig heaves in sight. It is covered with livid, distorted figures, dead and dying. The canvas, exhibited in 1 8 1 9 when Barye was twenty-three, made an epoch. Geri- cault's work is considered to have exercised, a sensible influence upon Barye. In the year 1 8 1 9 Barye presented him- [190] B A R Y E self for the first time in a concours for medals at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The subject was a medallion, " Milo of Crotona Devoured by a Lion." He received the ' third prize. Opinions differ with regard to the merit of this first published work of Barye ; some, as Gustave Planche, discover- ing therein the promise of all his future powers, others seeing no such revelation. The question is of slight importance. Barye's schooling is far from finished yet ; his creative career, in the monumental sense, still distant. The following year, 1820, he entered the competition for sculp- ture, winning the second prize. The theme was " Cain Cursed by God after the Death of Abel." For four successive years he con- tinued to compete, but unsuccessfully. In 1823 no prize was awarded, the exhibits being considered below the grade demanded. In 1824 Barye's work was not even admitted. Already, since the preceding year, Barye had been in the employ of the goldsmith, Fauconnier, of the Rue du Bac, and he now abandoned the Beaux Arts entirely and re- turned to his craft. Fauconnier was pur- veyor by appointment to the Duchesse de [^91] BARBIZON DAYS Berry.* Here Barye remained eight years, or until 1831, and here it was that, under his own direction, he gained his art education. He was married at the time and two daughters were born to him. Be- yond this, and that wife and daughters died, that he married again and had in his second marriage a family of eight children, we know almost nothing of Barye's private life. He was by nature and resolution taciturn, and his life, in contradistinction to that of his brother artists of Barbizon, has for us only the art side. But that is so grand in its steel-like tenacity of purpose, so splendid in its steadfast growth, that we need no opening of the home doors in order to know and be inspired by the man Barye. While Barye was still at the Beaux Arts, he studied the Egyptian sculpture which Champollion was arranging in the Louvre. He learned much therefrom and more probably from the Assyrian sculptures, dis- covered and brought to France a score of years later. To the Greco-Roman collec- tions of the Louvre he was also, and in a large degree, debtor. But Barye gathered information, as the trees absorb the ele- *The Due de Berry was the second son of Charles X. [ 192 ] B A R Y E ments essential to their growth and fruit bearing. Nothing was neglected by him during these years of discipline that could contribute to the development of his talent. He had no theories to advance in the wars of the schools ; he was not militant, not even a talker, but he had determined where and how to pursue his studies. Though no biographer quotes a sententious declaration of his dating from this period to the effect that Nature is the first and last teacher to be consulted by one who would represent life, such was clearly his resolute, quiet decision as to himself and his studies henceforth. He drew from the human model in Suisse's atelier, he familiarized himself in the am- phitheatre, and through dissection with the physical structure of men and animals; he informed himself thoroughly about the best methods of melting and casting metals; he made himself an expert in every branch of his craft ; he copied in the Louvre the works of the masters. The Jardin des Plantes was, however, his great studio, not merely at this time, but thenceforward throughout his life. Many changes in the line of growth and expansion [ 193 ] BARBIZON DAYS have come doubtless since Barye first began his assiduous visits there seventy years ago, but the general features are the same. The Jardin des Plantes is not merely a menag- erie and herbarium, but contains also a series of museums illustrating all the different de- partments of natural history, with library, laboratories and lecture rooms, wherein to work over scientifically the material col- lected, and train students in the branches of knowledge there represented. In the Garden the different animals are to be seen living, moving behind the bars of their cages ; in the Museum of Zoology you will find them stuffed ; in the Museum of Com- parative Anatomy, founded by Georges Cuvier, you can study their skeletons as connected wholes, all the bones of their structures separately and, in many cases, casts, representing their bodies in various stages of dissection. This was the day of the Cuviers. Frederic, the younger of the two brothers, had been named curator of the menagerie in 1804. Barye made constant use of every facility of instruction afforded by the Garden, the Museums of Natural History, the Menagerie and the galleries of Comparative Anatomy, [ 194 J B A R Y E He studied Buffon, Cuvier, and works upon history and mythology. It is clear that he had already in mind the repre- sentation in statuary of heroic and mytho- logical incidents. He attended the courses of lectures. When an animal died he was at once notified by a messenger from the garden and, dropping everything in hand, hastened thither. He measured, drew and sometimes modelled the animal before or after dissection. The Pere Rousseau, who was the keeper of the ferocious animals, had become his especial friend. " He opened to him at five o'clock every morning the doors of the menagerie and, when he saw him draw from his pocket a few poor crusts of hard bread, he handed to him some fine slices of tender bread taken from the daily rations of the bears." Pere Rousseau lived long enough to see his protege become famous, and he loved to talk to the young artists who visited the Garden about the in- defatigable ardor " of that thin and tall young man, always silent, who first found the beasts of Pere Rousseau worthy of being reproduced." He it was who sent a mes- senger to notify Barye whenever an animal [195] BARBIZON DAYS died. The two glories of his life were " that he had formed Barye and that he had conducted the Emperor Alexander in 1 8 1 5 about the menagerie." In sum, Barye, having seen others pre- ferred to himself and his own work con- demned at the Beaux Arts, resolved to equip himself for the career to which am- bition and a steadfast will held him, by acquiring a comprehensive and accurate knowledge of the higher organized beings, living and dead, and at the same time to train eye and hand in the workshop until he had become a master in every detail of his craft, the practical working of the metals. Furthermore, the great artists of old must yield to him the secrets of their power and inspire him to work, which would earn for him also the rank of master. His work for Fauconnier passed of course under the master's name. We know that he was asked to make a stag for a soup tureen and, after studies in the Jardin des Plantes, executed the order. The clients were not satisfied, it was *' too much like nature, not noble enough." The official report of the Exposition in 1825 states: " We owe to M. Fauconnier a collection of [196] 1 1 B A R Y E good models for the imitation of divers animals." It is not unfair to the master to find therein a recognition of his employe's work. After four years spent in such studies Barye made his first Salon exhibit in 1827. The true beginning of his creative career did not come, however, until 1831, when he was thirty-five. He made then exhibits both in painting and sculpture. Two of the three works in sculpture at- tracted general attention, a " Martyrdom of St-Sebastien " and a "Tiger Devouring a Crocodile." The last, which was one-half life size, was the corner-stone of Barye's reputation and of his artistic career. The criticism of the day shows the surprise and enthusiasm which the work created. Charles Blanc says that " the young (romantic) school was astonished and delighted by the accent of truth, liberty and the sentiment of life therein. For centuries ferocious animals had only been treated convention- ally. The idea of studying them at the menagerie had never occurred to anyone." The academic school, then in entire con- trol, despite its prejudices, was constrained to recognize him and awarded him a medal [. '97 ] BARBIZON DAYS of the second class. He received also an order for a bust of Louis Philippe. The St-Sebastien model, given into the charge of the administration of the Louvre (Barye having no suitable place for it), has disappeared, broken doubtless and carried away bit by bit, but the "Tiger" was cast in bronze and in 1848 purchased by the state. It is to-day in the Louvre galleries. The chief interest of this group is from the com- parative side. It shows the point of de- parture of Barye's creative life. It is strong, as all of his work, but it lacks the grandeur and the poise of his masterpieces. The posture is one of tense repose. The great cat is crouched upon all fours. The tenta- cles of his muscular fore-paws hold the vic- tim as in a vice. He is looking down upon the writhing amphibian. In another mo- ment he will crunch the life out of his feeble prey and gorge himself with the dark blood and the palpitating flesh. The crocodile is an image of weakness in the fast clutch of pitiless strength. And yet the sculptor has not attained the freedom and breadth of his maturity. The hairs even are indicated. The body does not slip forward with that tense and tre- [198] B A R Y E mendous muscularity, that feline ductility, which the living tiger of the Jardin des Plantes, surlily pacing back and forth in his narrow cage, and Barye's jaguar of 1851, show. Had Barye created only this tiger and the other masterpieces, which represent this stage in his development, he would scarcely have won a secure immortality. He had broken a path, pointed out a new field, astonished and surpassed his age ; yet the calm breadth of execution, the majesty and dignity of immortal works, of his own later creations, are lacking. But Barye never rested, never slackened his efforts to assure and broaden the foundations of his art through the study of nature and of the masters, to give suppleness to his hand, exactness to his eye, by constant exer- cise and observation. His talent shall soar upward, but on strong, even pinions ; knowl- edge shall balance and guide enthusiasm. His life from 1 8 3 i forward is therefore as the slow, steadfast ascension of a star. Charles Blanc says that the life of an artist when Barye's career began was not what it is to-day. The world sought them, not they the world. Their social life was passed in the artist reunions at the cafes and [ 199] BARBIZON DAYS restaurants. Such a gathering-place of artists and men of letters had been established at the Barriere du Maine at the Mere Saguet- Bourdon's. Barye and Sainte-Beuve were among the first admitted to this circle. The artist Charlet and Alexandre Dumas were also among the comrades. Beranger came sometimes. Here the grand battle for the triumph of Victor Hugo in Her- nani was prepared.* There was no Salon in 1832, the cholera preventing it, but in 1833 Barye exhibited six water colors representing animals, a frame containing medallions, a bust of the Duke of Orleans, and ten other works of sculpture, the most notable of which was the "Lion and Serpent." Barye had left the shop of Fauconnier in 1 8 3 i and begun his independent career. All his leisure since the exposition of the "Tiger" in that year had been spent in the Jardin des Plantes. This exposition showed the results. The effect produced by the "Lion and Serpent" was greater even than that caused by the "Tiger." The celebrated critic, Gus- tave Planche, who appreciated from the * The first representation of Hernani, the 21st of February, 1830, provoked in the parterre a veritable conflict between the Classicists and Romanticists. [ 200 ] B A R Y E outset Barye's powers and gave him in his criticisms helpful counsels, says: "The 'Lion' created a general cry of astonishment among the partisans of academic sculpture. Very soon the astonishment gave place to anger, for the public, despite the remon- strances which the professors and all who swore by their maxims addressed to it, ob- stinately persisted in praising Barye as an artist as happy as he was skilful." Barye was decorated with the Legion of Honor ; the "Lion" was purchased by the State and placed in the Garden of the Tuileries. The group is there to-day. It shows an advance upon the " Tiger " of 1 8 3 1 , yet it belongs to the same epoch in his development. We have styled the lion the king of the beasts. Looking upon him as personifying in a supreme degree the nobility and strength of the brute creation, we have made of this king of the wilds an imper- sonation of that brute force which alone is worthy to serve the highest types of man- hood or humanity in those employs which are the most heroic. We have harnessed him to our chariots of victory, we have placed him as guard at the portals of our temples and palaces, we have installed him [201] BARBIZON DAYS as watch by the tombs of our heroes, we have made him the prop of the thrones of our kings. But the Hon, as a grand, splen- did, savage Hfe, finding its beginning and end in self, we had not studied, scarce con- ceived, until Barye came. The type of the conventional lion is a familiar one. His body is limp, without bone, muscle or nerve; his face elonga- ted, venerable, stupid; his eye dull, opaque; his mane falls in long, heavy curls, strik- ingly resembling, as Theophile Gautier suggests, the wigs of Louis XIV.'s time; his paw rests upon a ball. He could not harm, to roar were impossible. It is doubtful whether the granite has not in its pores blood enough for that torpid exist- ence. With this image fresh in our minds — a pair of these nondescripts face the Place de la Concorde, one at either side of the Tuileries Garden — let us go and stand before Barye's group. The kinship is ap- parent in the elongated face, in the form and in details, but Nature is shaking off conventionality. What savagery in that ex- pression, what truth in that attitude ! How marvelous that relaxed right paw, whose keen claws have cut through the serpent's [ 202 ] B A R Y E coil, relaxed that in another instant the clutch may be fast, mortal ! How sugges- tive of the loathing of the nobler brute, of his involuntary shrinking from the fanged serpent, that head lowered and turned aside ! That lion lives and, if you wait long enough, you will hear the deep growl of the wilds escape its opened jaws. And yet it is, though nobler, of the family of the tiger of 1 8 3 1 . There is the same care in details, the same lack of breadth, grandeur, calm strength. Gustave Planche said : " I shall reproach M. Baryc with suffocating the life of his animals under a multitude of details too pettily reproduced. Less literally exact, the sculpture of M. Barye would be grander, more beautiful; it would be less real, but more true ; it would gain in elevation what it would lose in puerile fidelity." Alfred de Musset wrote, when the group had been cast in bronze in 1836: "The bronze lion of M. Barye is as terrifying as Nature. What vigor and what truth ! . . . Where indeed has he found a way of mak- ing such models pose ? Is his atelier a desert of Africa or a forest of Hindustan?" Charles Lenormant said: "The more I saw [203] BARBIZON DAYS that combat of the lion and the serpent, the more the impression grew ; it seemed to me at first the lion moved, yesterday I heard it roar." Theophile Gautier declares that the old conventional lions scattered about the public gardens almost let go of the balls, "w^hich keep them in countenance," when they saw Barye's lien. When the State had purchased the group and placed it in the Tuileries Garden, one of the academicians exclaimed : " Since when were the Tuileries a me- nagerie .? " Despite the opposition which the novelty of Barye's work and its success with the public had provoked in the academic camp, the promise of the future was rich indeed. He was but thirty-seven. The academic jury even, as we have seen, had been com- pelled to recognize him. The royal family were his patrons. Roger Ballu, in his biog- raphy, gives an engraving of him as he ap- peared at this time and accompanies it with a word painting: "The head slightly bent, the eyes large, dreamy, intelligent, lively, not flashing, but wide open and reflecting a certain melancholy, give to the face the ex- pression of a man who examines, observes, [ 204] B A R Y E meditates, scrutinizes, then resolves, and has the energy of his decision." We read in the face strength, a mind alert, questioning, almost suspicious. The Due d'Orleans, Louis Philippe's eld- est son, ordered of him a massive table- piece, in gold and silver, which was at first intended to be of reasonable dimensions and wholly the work of Barye. But M. Aime Chenavard succeeded in intruding his per- sonality through Barye, in his good-nature and his desire to be helpful, permitting his own work to be surrounded by a certain amount of architectural work of this artist. The final result was that M. Chenavard as- sumed the direction of the whole. If it had been completed according to his de- signs, it would have weighed nine thousand kilogrammes. When the first piece of the structure was brought, it was discovered that the table would not support it. This was a trivial thing. M. Chenavard ordered forthwith a new oak table of the proper solidity. Unfortunately he had not taken the measures of the dining-room. When the table was placed therein, no space was left for the chairs. Another triviality for a man of M. Chenavard's devices ! He pro- [205] BARBIZON DAYS posed to push back the walls of the Tuiler- ies, but the architect, out of patience with this jesting, interfered, and M. Chenavard, disappointed in his dream of adding per- haps a new wonder to the seven, died broken-hearted. Though M. Chenavard had a successor, the table-piece was never finished. Barye's work would have em- braced nine groups. He was busy upon them for many years. They were not ready in i 848, the year of the Revolution which expelled Louis Philippe and his fam- ily from France. In 1863, they were sold in fragments at the sale of the property of the widowed Duchesse d'Orleans. The five principal groups represent five grand hunts, of the tiger, the bull, the lion, the elk and the bear ; the four minor groups, combats of animals. The years that followed until 1837 were busy and prosperous ones for Barye. He was at work upon the order of the Due d'- Orleans; the Due de Nemours, Louis Phi- lippe's second son, the Due d'Orleans as well, and the Due de Luynes were among the purchasers of his bronzes. Only a few new works were exhibited at the Salons, as his strength was given almost entirely to [206] B A R Y E the execution of the table-piece. There was question at this time of charging Barye with the execution of a monumental work of supreme grandeur. Thiers was minister from 1832 to 1836, and eager to commem- orate in stone, in some surpassing way, the Napoleonic glories. He seems to have had a great diversity of ideas as to the method, and to have been carelessly generous with promises to artists, which were not fulfilled. The matter is unclear ; but we know that during these years the most inspiring pros- pects were held out to Barye ; now it was the decoration of the entire Place de la Con- corde, now of the four corners of the bridge. The plan which assumed the most definite form, was that of crowning the Arc de Triomphe with some grand work in statuary. Which of the two, Barye or Thiers, first suggested the imperial eagle is uncertain. Charles Blanc says it was Barye's idea. The plan, if carried out, would have given an eagle, with seventy feet span of wings, de- scending upon the arch, and while still half supported by the air clutching in its talons trophies symbolizing the cities and nations curbed or crushed by the genius of Na- poleon. [ 207 ] BARBIZON DAYS Nothing came of all this, but in 1835 the State asked of him a Sainte-Clotilde for the Madeleine. The story goes that Barye wished to chisel a saint bearing his wife's name, but this grace was not given him. This opens for an instant the fast closed door of that home and shows us that love reigned there. The Madeleine figure, strong, pure, noble, is not unworthy of Barye, but as one looks from the Place de la Concorde up that sloping way of the Champs-Elysees, unique in the world, and sees the triumphal arch at the end, standing forth symmetrical, beautiful against the sky, one can but regret that France did not give to him, as Athens to her great sons, work worthy of his genius. The jury of thirty -six, that struck Rous- seau and limited his talent and thus the glory that France would have won there- from, had spared Barye. But he did not look for a continuance of such consideration from men who had closed the doors of the Salon to Delacroix and Rousseau. He was not therefore disposed to exhibit as yet the parts of the table-piece, several of which were ready. But the Duke of Orleans in- sisted, saying, " I will take charge of it." [ 208 ] B A R Y E The bronzes were refused. The duke, in- dignant, asked the king to interfere, but Louis Phihppe answered : " What do you wish ? I have created a jury, I cannot force it to accept chefs-d'oeuvre T Jules Dupre, meeting Barye, asked him how his work prospered. " It is going very well ; I am refused," answered Barye. Dupre was indignant. "It is altogether natural," said Barye, " I have too many friends on the jury." This action of the jury, when compared with that of the preceding year, seems to indicate the purpose of serving a sharp notice upon the young school that the old canons of art could not be violated with impunity, and the approval of the public did not carry with it the commenda- tion of experts in art matters. The reasons alleged, that the groups of the table-piece did not belong to the domain of sculpture but to industrial art, and that they were, furthermore, genre works, seem rather props to support a weak cause. Barye inter- preted the action in the sense of an order to submit, or cease to compete, and withdrew altogether from the Salon until the old jury had been swept away with the monarchy. He did not exhibit again until 1851. [209] BARBIZQN DAYS The year 1837 marks thus in Barye's hfe, as the preceding year had in Rousseau's, an epoch. As Rousseau turned from his earlier limitless ambition, to be the interpreter of Nature in her grandest manifestations, to the trees of the forest of Fontainebleau and was content to express their speech in " that other language, painting;" so Barye turned largely away from monumental art, in the grand sense, to the creation in bronze of those charming little animals, which were called by his contemporaries, half in pity, half in scorn, paper-weights. The royal family continued to support him. The Due de Nemours and the Due de Luynes desired also to have table-pieces from Barye's hand. The Due de Montpen- sier, fifth son of Louis Philippe, ordered a chimney-piece. Only one of these works, the last, was executed, and the principal group, intended to be placed above the clock and representing "Angelica delivered by Roger," a theme from the Orlando Furioso, is greatly admired. During the years prior to 1840, he re- ceived and executed a commission to fur- nish certain portions of the Bastille column. The lion that is walking about the base of [210] B A R Y E the column, and the cocks at each of the four corners of the pedestal, are Barye's work. The Bastille was captured by the Parisians and torn down July 14th, 1789. The lion is the zodiacal sign of the month of July. This "Lion of the Bastille" is another mile-stone in the onward march of the great sculptor. The details that weaken the lion of 1833 have disap- peared : the head is nobler ; the artist is working with greater freedom and breadth ; one step more and he will attain the majesty of the highest art. The lion is pacing with slow measured steps about the base of the pillar erected in memory of the brave, breathing low growls as he goes. Charles Blanc says of this lion: "It is the image of the people guarding their dead." Barye the artist answered the action of the Jury of 1837 by making himself a manufac- turer, hiring skilled workmen, watching strenuously over every detail of the fabrica- tion of his art bronzes and selling them him- self. These bronzes embrace not merely a Lilliputian menagerie, and a series of statu- ettes, but also candelabras, perfume burners, fenders, candlesticks, cups, even inkstands. Shall we regret or rejoice that the great [2Il'] BARBIZON DAYS artist was constrained to make his art sub- serve the needs of the multitude ? Despite all our admiration for these Lilliputians and our personal satisfaction that a cat or rabbit, a lion or tiger, may serve us as a paper-weight, when we stand before one of Barye's sublime creations, we do regret the worse than folly of French art rulers from 1837 forward. There stood an artist, such as the centuries yearn for, clear-headed, firm-handed, ap- proaching the zenith of his power. He would have done for Paris in the interpre- tation of animal life, and of animal and human life combined also, what the masters of Greek art did for Athens. These lions and tigers, bears, deer, horses and dogs ; these eagles, storks and pheasants, crocodiles, serpents and turtles ; these flying, walking and creeping, wild and tame crea- tures from Lilliput are grand despite their diminutiveness. The modeling is always that of a master. Because they were little things of base price, they were not there- fore despicable in his eyes. He signed them. He signed his candlesticks and ink- stands also. Go to his workshop, he is a master who knows better than his best workmen — for he has the broad compara- [212] B A R Y E tive standpoint — every detail of the man- ufacture. Every product must satisfy him ; if imperfect, it must be melted over ; if his hand is needed in some mechanical detail, he puts on the green apron and shows his employes how the work should be done. From the financial side, the venture was not a success ; he supposed naively that the merit of his work would draw the public to him, but it did not. With a large de- pendent family, carrying a heavy debt * and harassed by creditors, forced, in order to satisfy them, to give them his models as se- curity, and knowing that inferior casts were being made from them and the models in- jured, not a free man in definite possession of his own until 1857, Barye walked for- ward unshaken. His work, his art, suffered not an iota. With Olympian calm he worked and awaited the justice of the slow, sure years. Arsene Alexandre says: "His friends never heard him utter complaints or cry out against the rigor or the folly of the age. Nor was the grand art, the monumental, altogether neglected. The "Theseus and * Incurred in order to establish a foundry. [213] BARBIZON DAYS the Minotaur," though still rather statuette than statue,* is already Greek in its serenity, and belongs to the Grand Art. With 1 847 he sent forth from his atelier the " Sitting Lion." That was his first public answer in monumental work to the closing of the Salon doors. The answer was a complete one. It is the lion, the king, who is sitting there. We doubt if ever brute majesty has been as perfectly represented. Here all pettiness, all small lines, are effaced. Terrible in his conscious might, ^ ord of the brute creation, he sits there as on his throne, looking forth to the ends of the world, and there is no life, winged or four-footed, that does not bow before the lion, the king. The State purchased it to make amends, it is said, for his failure to receive the commission to decorate the Arc de Triomphe, and placed it in the Garden of the Tuileries not far from the " Lion and Ser- pent." It was removed later, and now faces the Seine at one of the entrances to the Louvre. A pendant was desired, and Barye prepared a model (since cast), but his price was too high. A replica was made at the State's order by purely mechanical processes, * Original dimensions 47 centimetres in height by 31 in length, [ 214] B A R Y E the head turning to the right instead of the left. Barye was indignant, but had no re- dress. M. Fremiet visited him in his studio in 1846 when he had begun work on the "Lion." "All the lines were fixed. The preparation was anatomical. All the im- portant bones of the skeleton were in place, each separately added, the skull, the verte- bral column, the cage of the ribs, the bones of the anterior and posterior members. ..." In a souvenir of artist gatherings, quoted by Dumesnil in his biography of Corot, we find Barye and Corot charmingly associated. " The thirteenth day of the month, which was in Rome that of the grand Ides of April, he (Corot) took part with our com- rades in the dedication of the ancient head of Jupiter Philios, protector of friendship .... the father of the profound and in- genious Minerva, of the laughing Venus, of Apollo and the adorable Muses, the toler- ant God, venerated by Pythagoras and Phidias, as much as by Homer and Or- pheus. An eloquent invocation was pro- nounced by one of the great-grandchildren of those who reared temples to him, and, meanwhile, two torches were held before [215] BARBIZON DAYS the venerable image, the one borne by M. Barye, the other by Corot." Arsene Alexandre describes a dinner which united regularly Barye, Corot, and a num- ber of their fellow artists. " They had the habit of defiling before a big [un grand dia- ble de) Jupiter of the Vatican, whom all, united in the same antipathies, loaded with all the imprecations intended for the Insti- tute." One of the events of every such gathering, awaited with curiosity, was Barye's turn. "Ha!" Corot would cry gaily, " il a ^ti tres digne." Forty-eight came, and with it the revolu- tion. By it Barye lost and gained. His royal patrons were driven out of France, but the Salon doors were no longer closed to him. Of the commission of eleven, chosen by the artists to have charge of the sculptures of the Salon of that year. Rude was chosen first, Barye third. This was the day when the outstanding accounts of aggrieved artists were balanced in part. Barye, as Rousseau and Dupre, received or- ders from Ledru-Rollin, the all-powerful leader of the Republican party, now Min- ister of the Interior. At the suggestion of Charles Blanc, Director of the Beaux Arts, B A R Y E Barye's "Tiger" of 1831 was purchased by the State, and Ledru-RolHn, furthermore, named him Conservator of the Gallery of Plaster Casts and Director of the Louvre Studio of Moulding. Until Barye's time, the position had been considered a business opportunity. The Louvre studios furnished duplicate casts for the European galleries. The moulds, purchased by the director, served as long as they w^ould hold together. How the interests of art and of public in- struction fared under such a rSgime may be imagined. Barye changed all this, put the best casts on turning-tables, made a choice of statues for reproduction, ordered new moulds, and surrounded himself with a corps of skilled workmen. Barye re-entered the Salon of 1850 with j two works which represent the full maturity ' of his powers. The " Centaur and Lapith," afterward called " Theseus Combating the Centaur Bienor," and the "Jaguar and Hare." Both are in the Louvre. Theo- phile Gautier said : " That Centaur, over- come by a Lapith, shows that Romanticist, proscribed by the Jury, to have been the modern sculptor who approached nearest to Phidias That Lapith of robust [217] BARBIZON DAYS and simple forms, beautiful as the ideal, true as nature, could have figured in the pediment of the Parthenon .... and that Centaur have joined the cavalcades of the metopes." There are in the Louvre galleries to-day two bronze casts of antique sculpture — the originals are in the museum of the Capitol in Rome — representing centaurs, beside a marble group, "A Centaur Conquered by the Genius of Bacchus." The three are al- most identical in pose and in their main lines. There is a conventional model of the centaur, and these three statues are slightly varying copies of one original. The hind legs are near together, the right fore-leg raised and bent backward. In the marble, the head also is curved backward, and the hands joined behind to express the subjec- tion of the half-brute to the child Bacchus, who bestrides it. One of the bronzes has a similar motif. The hands of the centaur are, however, bound instead of being clasped, and there is no child upon its back. There is a certain rude strength and a suggestion of a life of the woods about these antique sculptures, but of motion, of intense living in any form, there is slight trace. Cross the Louvre court and enter the [218] B A R Y E room where three of Barye's masterpieces have been placed side by side. The "Tiger" of I 83 1 and the two exhibits of 185 1. 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)y 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] 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, when he received word 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 Montague 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] 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 Jardin 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 ] 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 J 8 70 — 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. [233] 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 powders w^ere vi^aning. He said one day on the scaf- folding before one of these groups, " They give me to eat w^hen 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. * GuUlaume considers the human figures here greater than in the two groups of " Theseus." [224] 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.' Hf [225] BARBIZON DAYS has never taken an ambitious step, never spoken a servile v^^ord, 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 aflfections, despising his enemies to the point of forgetting them, very charitable toward others and severe toward himself, behold him ! " One who lived in close intimacy with him says that, while he was silent toward 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 free 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," which 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. [329] BARBIZQN 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, Fran^ais. 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] 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 v/ilds. 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, 1S75. [232]