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THE HIGHER LIFE IN ART 
 
THE 
 
 HIGHER LIFE IN ART 
 
 A SERIES OF LECTURES ON 
 THE BARBIZON SCHOOL OF FRANCE 
 INAUGURATING THE SCAMMON COURSE AT 
 THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN LA FARCE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE McCLURE COMPANY 
 MCMVIII 
 
Copyright , 1908 , fry The McClure Company 
 
 RESEARCH LICRARY 
 GETTY RE£ INSTITUTE 
 
THE SCAMMON LECTURES 
 
 John Young S common, a prominent citizen of Chi- 
 cago, was deeply concerned in everything pertaining to 
 the higher life of the city. He had the active co-opera- 
 tion of his wife, Mrs. Maria Sheldon Scammon, inter- 
 ested in all the works of her time, and especially devoted 
 to the fine arts. Mrs. Scammon, who survived her hus- 
 band, provided by her will for a fund, left to the Art 
 Institute of Chicago, for lectures upon the history, 
 theory and practice of the fiv£ arts, to be known as 
 “ The Scammon Lectures.” In May, 1903, Mr. La 
 Targe delivered at the Art Institute the first course of 
 Scammon lectures. Unforeseen circumstances have de- 
 layed until now the publication of this first series. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 First Lecture — The School 3 
 
 Second Lecture — Delacroix 27 
 
 Third Lecture — Millet 69 
 
 Fourth Lecture — Decamps and Diaz 95 
 
 Fifth Lecture — Rousseau, Dupre, Daubigny 127 
 
 Sixth Lecture — Corot 151 
 
 INDEX 
 
 181 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FIRST LECTURE 
 
 CHASSERIAU. 
 
 “THE ROMAN BATH." from lithograph by lamy. 
 
 “PORTRAIT OF HIS TWO SISTERS." 
 
 CARTOON FOR “PEACE.” 
 
 “PEACE” (Fragment), formerly in the cour pes comptes, now in the 
 
 LOUVRE. 
 
 DELACROIX. 
 
 “THE BARQUE OF DANTE.” the louvre. 
 
 FANTIN-LATOUR. 
 
 “HOMMAGE A DELACROIX.” 
 
 SECOND LECTURE 
 
 GERICAULT. 
 
 “AN OFFICER OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD.” (portrait of mr. m.) 
 
 THE LOUVRE. 
 
 “THE WOUNDED CUIRASSIER.” the louvre. 
 
 “THE RAFT OF ‘LA MEDUSE.’” the louvre. 
 
 DELACROIX. 
 
 “EPISODE OF THE MASSACRES OF SCIO.” the louvre. 
 “ENTRANCE OF THE CRUSADERS INTO CONSTANTINOPLE.” the 
 
 LOUVRE. 
 
 IX 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 “DEATH OF MARGUERITE'S BROTHER.” from lithograph by a. 
 
 MOUILLERON. 
 
 “L’AMENDE HONORABLE.” now in the willstach museum, Phila- 
 delphia. 
 
 “CHRIST IN THE TEMPEST.” now in the collection of sir w. c. 
 
 VAN HORNE, MONTREAL. 
 
 “ST. SEBASTIAN.” from lithograph by eugene le roux. 
 
 “COAST OF MOROCCO.” now in the collection of james j. hill. 
 “ALGERIAN WOMEN AT HOME.” the louvre. 
 
 “HELIODORUS CAST OUT OF THE TEMPLE.” church of st. m l- 
 
 PICE, PARIS. (FROM THE ETCHING BY GREUX.) 
 
 “TIGRE COUCHE.” now in the collection of james j. hill. 
 “JACOB WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL.” church of st. sulpice, 
 
 PARIS. 
 
 “TOBIAS AND THE ANGEL.” church of st. sulpice, paris. 
 
 THIRD LECTURE 
 
 MILLET. 
 
 “ON THE CLIFFS OF LA HOGUE.” now in the collection of john 
 
 G. JOHNSON. 
 
 “MARINE.” IN THE COLLECTION OF JOHN G. JOHNSON. 
 
 “GOOSE GIRL BATHING.” drawing. 
 
 “SPRING.” THE LOUVRE. 
 
 “LA FILEUSE.” now in the collection of j. j. hill. 
 
 “THE GLEANERS.” the louvre. 
 
 “THE END OF THE DAY.” now in the collection of august Bel- 
 mont. 
 
 FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 DECAMPS. 
 
 “THE SMOKER.” from lithograph by j. laurens. 
 
 “LANDSCAPE IN ASIA MINOR.” from lithograph by j. laurens. 
 “A STREET IN SMYRNA.” the louvre. 
 
 X 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 “ITALIAN SUBJECT.” from lithograph by c. nanteuil. 
 
 “LE CHASSEUR.” from lithograph by francais. 
 
 “LA SORTIE DE I/ECOLE TURQUE.” the louvre. 
 
 “THE TOWER OF BORDEAUX.” from lithograph by eugene le 
 
 ROUX. 
 
 “PORTE DE FERME.” now in the collection of john w. simpson. 
 (from a lithograph.) 
 
 “THE WITCHES.” from lithograph by eugene le roux. 
 
 “THE CROSSING OF THE FORD.” the louvre. 
 
 “DEFEAT OF THE CIMBRI BY MARIUS.” from lithograph by 
 
 EUGENE LE ROUX. 
 
 “JOSEPH SOLD BY HIS BRETHREN.” now in the collection of 
 
 JAMES J. HILL. 
 
 “REVENGE AND DEATH OF SAMSON.” from lithograph by 
 
 EUGENE LE ROUX. 
 
 DIAZ. 
 
 “DESCENT OF THE BOHEMIANS.” boston museum. 
 
 “A POND IN FONTAINEBLEAU FOREST.” now in the collection 
 
 OF PERRY BELMONT. 
 
 “TURKISH WOMEN IN LANDSCAPE.” from lithograph by j. 
 
 LAURENS. 
 
 FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 “UNE ALLEE DE VILLAGE” (Village of Becquigny). now in the 
 
 COLLECTION OF GEORGE J. GOULD. 
 
 “SUNSET— FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU.” now in the collection 
 
 OF P. A. B. WIDENER. 
 
 “LE PUY.” now in the j. j. hoagland collection. 
 
 “IN THE FOREST.” unfinished picture now in the collection of 
 
 SIR W. C. VAN HORNE. 
 
 “THE CHARCOAL BURNERS’ HUT.” now in the collection of 
 
 GEORGE J. GOULD. 
 
 XI 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 DUPRE. 
 
 “ILLUSTRATION TO SIR WALTER SCOTT.” now in the william 
 
 H. VANDERBILT COLLECTION. 
 
 “ON THE ROAD.” now in the Chicago art institute. 
 
 DAUBIGNY. 
 
 “MOONLIGHT.” now in the collection of fir george dhimmonm, 
 
 MONTREAL. 
 
 “THE MILL AT GOBELLE.” now in the collection of william l. 
 
 ELKINS. 
 
 “DIEPPE.” NOW IN THE collection of HENRY c. FRICK. 
 
 SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 COROT. 
 
 “GENOA.” NOW IN the collection of m. rterson. 
 
 “THE COUNTRY CHURCH.” now in the collection of joiin a . 
 
 JOHNSON. 
 
 “VILLE D’AVRAY — MORNING ” now in the collection of j. j. hill. 
 “LANDSCAPE.” now in the collection of sir george drummond, 
 
 MONTREAL. 
 
 “DANSE DES NYMPHES.” the louvre. 
 
 “LA DANSE DES AMOURS.” in the collection of george j. gould. 
 “LA PETITE CURIEUSE.” now in the collection of sir w. c. van 
 
 HORNE, MONTREAL. 
 
 “GIRL READING.” now in the collection of james j. hill. 
 
 “THE WOUNDED EURYDICE.” now in the collection of james j. 
 hill. 
 
 “L’ ATELIER.” now in the collection of p. a. b. widener. 
 
 Xll 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
These lectures addressed to students but also to a 
 future large audience as being the beginning of the 
 record of the Scammon lectures. The choice of a subject 
 determined somewhat by memories of interest vn the 
 art of France some fifty years ago. There and then war 
 raged , as very usual , in the world of art and literature. 
 Certain names such as those of Ingres and Delacroix 
 represented the main conflicting ideas. Appreciations of 
 that time for Millet , Rousseau , Dupre , Corot , Gerome , 
 Diaz , Decamps. Men of a still older school had memo- 
 ries of the eighteenth century by which they judged. 
 No one artist absolutely recognized as a full authority. 
 Chasseriau; his unfulfilled promise of conciliating oppo- 
 sites. His early death. His influence on Puvis de Chavan- 
 nes. His view of the advantage of passing from one 
 school to another's influence. Chasseriau' s admiration for 
 Delacroix; at that moment the turn of the tide against 
 that great painter. Some description of his life, his ideas ; 
 the character of his works. His dramatic expression not 
 theatrical . The tendency and practice of painting for 
 some long period had been more and more towards a 
 set scene as in the theatre. Nature , of course , the ab- 
 solute reverse. Delacroix also loved beauty as an aim: 
 wherein we see Millet differ. As also the Realists , who 
 were , like Millet , in harmony with the master through 
 admiration . Notice of the poorer technical work of the 
 middle and end of the nineteenth century. Loss of me- 
 chanical methods of the past and the new unsettled. 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 M R. PRESIDENT, ladies and gentlemen, and my 
 fellow-students (notwithstanding my greater 
 age, I am still a student) : First I shall say a few words 
 concerning my choice of subject for these lectures, and 
 I need also to remark that these lectures are of a 
 special nature. They are addressed to students, but 
 they are also addressed to a larger audience and a 
 future one, as they form the beginning of the record 
 of the Scammon lectures. 
 
 Now, one of the dreams that beset the older man is 
 the possibility of giving some of his experience to the 
 younger, as you know, sometimes to your cost. Ever 
 since man was man the older generation has handed 
 down what it could of its memories and its experiences. 
 Some of them have survived ; many are lost ; but we are 
 built up entirely of these memories from the time when 
 our ancestor, under the name of Prometheus, inherited 
 the invention of the use of fire. From them to the text 
 books that we use to-day, we are but a series of memories 
 
 3 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 reflected upon other memories, which, set at so many 
 angles, give us what we think to be new points of view. 
 Therefore the older man feels justified in talking of his 
 memories, though he may know that only a few of them 
 are to be of any use. That is to say, they may not be 
 of much use at the moment, but there is at some time a 
 possibility of their filling a serious gap of need. So, 
 for instance, the historian has always accumulated his 
 facts and his reasonings, and long after we see that it 
 might have been possible to use his information, and oc- 
 casionally some of us do so. These ideas have come up 
 to me more especially upon my deciding the precise sub- 
 ject which shall be a theme — what the French call a 
 canvass — for the statements and perhaps the reasonings 
 which I may address to you. 
 
 On being asked to give a course of lectures to the 
 working students of the Institute (which lectures were 
 also to be heard by persons interested in artistic mat- 
 ters), I naturally felt the difficulty of a choice that 
 might meet two far distant extremes. I knew that any 
 subject might be of use, not because of the subject 
 itself, but because of its necessary development — the 
 explanations about it. These coming from the reserve 
 fund of experience, might interest the student even if 
 by no more than quickening his perceptions, encourag- 
 
 4 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 ing him to think, and still more to live for himself. I 
 mean, to live for that part of him in which he increases 
 his understanding of art, his love for it, and his judg- 
 ment of how best he can employ his natural faculties. 
 Still the question would come up as to what might be 
 the more natural way of addressing the student when I 
 was not his usual teacher, when I could not tell what 
 his antecedents were, nor his ambitions. On asking a 
 younger man, a student whom I employed, what he 
 thought students might wish, he told me that their 
 one certain wish would be to know “ how to get on.” 
 Taking that seriously, it seemed to me that a form of 
 discourse which should refer to the works of men who 
 must have had the same problem before them and met 
 it in a special way, might be a manner of explaining 
 one’s experience by using it to look at the experience of 
 others. In this particular case, if I wrote and spoke 
 about artists who had lived within my own time, of 
 whom I absolutely knew, whose life was part of my 
 own, these real stories would be like the talk of the older 
 professional man to the younger about what the men of 
 his day were like, what happened to them, and the 
 lessons of that reminiscence would come of themselves. 
 Of course, some of this would fall by the wayside; but 
 part of it would make the works of art by which we 
 
 5 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 know the men of my day more natural, less accidental 
 and separate, and the younger man might connect his 
 own beginning or experience with the experience of 
 names that he knows only as signatures or labels to 
 pictures hung on the wall, much praised or much de- 
 bated upon, and which, after all, are no more than 
 what he himself is to rival or to continue. 
 
 If these works of art are recent he cannot help con- 
 sidering them. They are inevitably built into his memory 
 by the mere mechanism of his sight. Therefore I have 
 chosen for the subject of my talks some account of the 
 lives of certain painters, whose effect on modern art has 
 been so great that no painter, no artist, can avoid hav- 
 ing been influenced by them more or less, whether he 
 knows it or does not. I have restricted their number 
 so that they might connect with us more closely. The 
 experience of my own life has covered a great part of 
 theirs. I have lived during the period when they were 
 discussed, and through their having made their final 
 position, and I am, as it were, a part of their story. 
 I am part of the artistic public that followed them with 
 interest and anxiety. The people I once knew fought 
 for them, or fought against them, and I can go far 
 enough back to have felt a personal triumph in their ob- 
 taining their final position. I remember how my old 
 
 6 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 friend William Hunt, at the end, in 1868, after the 
 International Exposition, came up to me and said: 
 “ Well, our men have won ” ; Rousseau and Corot and 
 Millet were at last placed, and placed for good, and 
 with them the others connected with them by mutual 
 admiration and a similar fate of battle and final success. 
 
 The illusion of having followed these men farther 
 back than my own childish life was very great. I had 
 known men to whom all these names were the names of 
 beginners. I had known men who had known the famous 
 Greuze himself, had seen the end of the schools of the 
 eighteenth century, and had hailed the beginning of 
 David and the French Empire school during the French 
 Revolution, which latter also, in large, was, as their 
 art was in small, the promise of a new era that should 
 settle everything. Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gains- 
 borough were to them what Rousseau and Corot are to 
 you — people of only a few years back. They had seen 
 the beginnings of Turner. They had appreciated Sir 
 Thomas Lawrence and seen him paint. This connection 
 with the past made me feel as if I, too, had lived then 
 and gone through some of their interest in the promises 
 of the beginning of that nineteenth century which has 
 just closed. 
 
 Paris has usually some artistic civil war raging, rag- 
 
 7 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 ing more or less gently in the world of art and litera- 
 ture. In the middle of the fifties, when I was first there, 
 the names of Ingres and Delacroix were still a battle- 
 field. And yet most of my very young acquaintances 
 among the artists and art students were untroubled 
 by the dilemma of choice between these two men and the 
 ideals they represented. These younger men were fol- 
 lowing new leaders, new names of which a few were to 
 attain some prominence, but none to represent the prob- 
 lem in all art symbolized by the two names I have men- 
 tioned. 
 
 Courbet had made his appearance ; Manet was known 
 to only a few of us; Couture was one of our teachers, 
 occupying a place of his own, but rather an uncertain 
 one as far as doctrine went; he was an executant, he 
 was not an exponent of law. Millet was known to but a 
 few of us, and rather doubted by our leaders. They 
 could not realise that his was to be a universal fame. 
 Corot was accepted. Rousseau and Dupre also, even 
 to some degree by men who disliked them and whom 
 they disliked. Diaz was the fashion, a pet for almost 
 all the differing schools. Men who thought Rousseau 
 stupid, heavy, inartistic, could tell me that they recog- 
 nised in Diaz a real artist compared to the bigger man, 
 and those who told me that were among our teachers. 
 
 8 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 Gerome, now a patriarch, was a young man, full of 
 purpose, destined to reinforce academic training in 
 methods and subjects which the academy had never 
 dreamed of and would have objected to. 
 
 Many of these whom I have mentioned as accepted — • 
 more or less — “arrived” as the French call it — were not, 
 however, quite suited to the sacred places in the Holy 
 Church of the Academy. Their names, with the one 
 exception of the promising disciple, Gerome, were con- 
 sidered as accidents, as temporary flashes, as slight 
 tricklings outside of the strict embankments of that 
 majestic canal built by academic art in France. 
 
 My fate was thrown in both camps, which is one of 
 the reasons of my having the confidence of addressing 
 you with considerable certainty, and a certainty from 
 my earliest youth. I was with my student friends who 
 had their special new admirations, and with my older 
 acquaintances who preached the more arid doctrine of 
 the school. And there were some of these last who con- 
 sidered that even the rigid teachings of the Academy 
 were but a manner of feeding the young with easier 
 doctrine. They recalled the glorious days of the passage 
 from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth when, 
 amid the trumpets of battle and the establishment of 
 new formulae of government, the great David had 
 
 9 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 placed the limits of classic art in a way suited to the 
 French intellect. To them even M. Ingres had a little 
 of a poetic and sentimental turn. We younger men 
 thought him rather dry, and they thought him too 
 much influenced by the gentle genius of Raphael, whose 
 works could not be packed within a rigid enough in- 
 struction, within a facility of teaching, within an easy 
 formula, within a doctrine of “ no mistake.” They still 
 retained a kindly trust in the later Italians, in Guido 
 for instance, in the men who represented the “ perfec- 
 tion ” of art, that is to say, an art which had no mis- 
 takes, as it had, perhaps, not too much sympathy. We 
 to-day have gone so far from these perfect artists that 
 we are oblivious of them; we are unjust; we do not 
 know them. 
 
 There was no one artist at that moment to carry out 
 with sufficient authority these more ancient ideas. 
 Therefore my ancient friends accepted the academic 
 teaching, such as it was, and as expounded by M. 
 Ingres, who is on record as not liking it himself, and 
 by M. Flandrin, for one. There had been great war 
 between the so-called Romantic school and the so-called 
 Classical school, and the survivors seemed to be repre- 
 sented by the two names of Ingres and Delacroix. A 
 singular intellectual good fortune allowed me, a looker- 
 
 10 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 on in Paris, slightly interested in art, to find one little 
 nook, a place where a debate concerning these two 
 names was centred in one man. This man was to appear 
 for a moment in the character of a student, and a 
 follower of both sides, was to bloom for a short moment, 
 to be a mere promise, to represent the past, a good deal 
 of the future which he might be thought not to be 
 dreaming of, and then to die suddenly, and to be almost 
 forgotten. You will see how far forgotten. I do not 
 know how many of you will recognise the name of Theo- 
 dore Chasseriau. The Exposition of 1900 brought out 
 again a few of his works, and pious hands are reproduc- 
 ing as well as possible the half destroyed paintings which 
 passed through the flames of the Commune. So that a 
 tardy justice has brought him back to the memory 
 of some, and to the attention of a few. 
 
 As the portraits shown at the Exposition of 1900 
 indicate his possession of the manner and the latent 
 feeling of his first master, Ingres (who believed at first 
 in the pupil’s future, and in his living according to 
 proper tradition), so the paintings on the walls of the 
 Cour des Comptes, as well as some of his later smaller 
 works, show the acceptance of Delacroix as a patron, 
 and leader and master. But not only do they show this, 
 but in the wall paintings we can also see something 
 
 11 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 which connects with Puvis de Chavannes as he was to 
 be, and even with Millet, only then beginning to take 
 his later shape. So that the paintings of Chasseriau, the 
 drawings — the few drawings that you may occasionally 
 see — are prophetic; they keep to a certain vein of 
 academic classical refinement and attention to some side 
 of what is called drawing, but they are animated by a 
 certain poetic vein of imagination which was kindled by 
 Delacroix, and here and there, in certain arrangements, 
 in certain figures, in a tendency to some simplification, 
 one can see the future Puvis de Chavannes, and some- 
 thing also of the Millet who was to come. 
 
 This was my own supposition, but within these few 
 weeks I have learned more thoroughly that I was even 
 mechanically correct, that Puvis kept to his death in 
 his consultation case, as we might say, a certain number 
 of drawings and studies of the Chasseriau whom we 
 knew, and who was the coming man, when Puvis hesi- 
 tated yet as to what he should do. This young man’s 
 mind was one of assimilation. If one can use so great an 
 example, there was something in him of the young 
 Raphael, taking naturally to each new possibility sug- 
 gested by some other artist’s work. My conversations 
 with him were few. I was a youngster talking to the 
 coming man. Neither could I have had any more; he 
 
 12 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 was within a short space of unexpected death. But the 
 influence of his admiration for Delacroix, mingled with 
 a respectful and calmer appreciation of Ingres, his 
 master, has always remained with me as a reasonable 
 motive, carefully considered and sufficiently vital to be 
 of use in intellectual criticism, and in that manner feed- 
 ing the flame of the torch which we artists hand from 
 one to the other. 
 
 Chasseriau had upon the younger mind, the advan- 
 tage of being able to impress the lesson that technique 
 was not all that there was in study, and especially that 
 one technique served, or might serve, as a substratum 
 of another very different. His example was there to 
 show this, and his talk about Delacroix made the value 
 of that great painter clearer. 
 
 At that moment the turn of the tide was just going 
 against this great painter. Three years later the exposi- 
 tion of a series of his paintings was to be the strengthen- 
 ing of a small number of his friends, and the source of 
 a series of attacks and depreciations which upon the 
 younger men have left lasting traces. Delacroix was 
 then getting older, though in the full maturity of his 
 talent, which never weakened until the day of his death, 
 only a few years later — 1864. 
 
 He was a solitary man, with no equals for com- 
 
 13 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 panions. He was known to the younger men at a great 
 distance. His studio was open to anyone who wished to 
 call, if they were students. Those who called for other 
 motives he cared not for. Notwithstanding, we all felt a 
 veil of something between us and him, and few of us 
 had the courage to do more than occasionally present 
 our respects. He was supposed to be well off by us 
 young students, those of us who did not know, who had 
 no personal means of knowing. After a lifetime devoted 
 to his art all that he had managed to put aside was 
 something like a few thousand dollars, while his fame 
 had reached throughout the whole of Europe. But his 
 absolute independence from the dealer, from the shop- 
 keeper, from anything that could in any way push 
 him, was such that the natural suggestion came up, 
 “ This man, to be so independent, is so because he needs 
 nothing.” And among us younger people, who did not 
 know, there was this tradition. I on my part knew other- 
 wise, but it was impossible to convince any of my young 
 friends that this man was a poor man, working just as 
 they did, notwithstanding his fame. 
 
 From inherited habits he appeared, and rather liked 
 to appear occasionally, in what is strictly called 
 “ society,” and he was known to all that were distin- 
 guished in literature, science, and art. Even such a thing 
 
 14 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 as a royal visitor from some foreign country came to 
 him occasionally. But for all that he was still a man 
 of moods, who preferred the possession of himself to that 
 of any others. So that the young did not know him, as 
 I say, and his appearance in the sittings of the Institute 
 in one of his new relations to the academic powers, 
 tested him and marked him as a man not to be ignored, 
 of an intelligence that must be influential, absolutely 
 independent, and consequently dangerous, and though 
 a just man and a humourous man he liked them not. 
 
 Thus on his death-bed he submitted ironically to a 
 formal visit from the Institute, or the gentlemen repre- 
 senting it, and representing different forms of science, 
 art, and literature, remarking when his visitors had left, 
 “ Have not these people made me suffer enough al- 
 ready ? ” 
 
 Long before, in the interrupted journal which he 
 kept through much of his life, we find the young man’s 
 wish expressed, far back at the very beginning, “ Never 
 to belong to any of those trades of humbug which in- 
 fluence the human race.” The secret of his career is all 
 in this expression, which explains the independence of 
 feeling that persists in all his work, which makes it 
 charming when you feel like it, which is at times dis- 
 agreeable, though not repulsive, when out of one’s 
 
 15 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 ordinary vein. He was passionately absorbed in one idea 
 alone, the pursuit of art as a freedom from forms of 
 intellectual slavery, and as allowing him to keep full 
 possession of himself. Naturally that feeling expressed 
 in his works met — I almost guessed at it already in my 
 own experience — sometimes sympathy and sometimes 
 the reverse. I know of no artist with whose mood one 
 must happen to fall in so distinctly as with his. Of 
 course there is the succession or continuation, of ad- 
 mirable colour and proud composition, but the picture 
 is the expression of the mood ; and the dramatic form 
 which he liked and which had the shape of his time is so 
 much the realisation of this personal impression that 
 one does not always follow him. 
 
 Already had begun — and the siege had been laid long 
 ago by the pupils of the great Raphael, continued 
 through the majestic art of a few of the great French 
 masters by the schools and the literary teaching of the 
 eighteenth century — already had been laid out the pro- 
 gramme of what we have to-day, so that we can hardly 
 break away from it, we can hardly think without it — the 
 representation of the picture as a set scene, as a thing 
 in the theatre, as a thing carefully composed in the way 
 that it will look best, in which the light will fall in a 
 certain way on the main actor, and in a less important 
 
 16 
 
CHASSERIAU: “THE ROMAN BATH’- 
 
CHASSERIAU 
 
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 MANET BRACQUEMOND DE BALLEROY 
 

FIRST LECTURE 
 
 way on the others, in which everybody shall have a 
 place, in which nothing shall be unsettled, in which 
 nothing shall be accidental, contrariwise to what hap- 
 pens in real life. Now with Delacroix the influence of 
 the great master, of the very great master, Rubens, 
 which was upon him, his own personal nature, his ab- 
 sorption of the modern literature of other nations at 
 that time richer than his own, of Byron, Goethe — who 
 were far from the set forms of the rather narrow France 
 of his day — his love of Shakespeare, all these influences 
 moulded his view of the idea of the picture. Moreover 
 he saw the picture before he painted it, before he com- 
 posed it. It dropped upon him as the sights that you 
 see drop upon you. For example, as the fire that I saw 
 to-day — the groups, all necessary, because some of them 
 were doing something and attending to it, and others 
 were doing nothing, and contradicted what ought to 
 have been (and would have been in the modern view of 
 painting) a set scene, with nobody contradicting the 
 real meaning of it. On the contrary, in the real fact, 
 three-quarters of all the people I saw had really nothing 
 to do with it. They were either curious chance lookers- 
 on, or were trying to help when they should not have 
 helped ; they were doing everything that was against 
 the composition of the modern picture; hence curves 
 
 17 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 of the most enchanting beauty crossed the necessarily 
 strict line of the horses and the firemen and whatever 
 was necessary to do the business. And I could not help 
 thinking that here was a sufficient proof of another 
 variety of sight, not the so-called academic, not the 
 correct so-called “ classical,” commonplace, school-boy 
 composition. 
 
 Now further than that, this man, Delacroix, acted 
 the story for himself, for the sensations he got out of 
 it, for beauty of line and colour, very much as a musi- 
 cian might. 
 
 This different view of his is recorded in his paintings, 
 many of which you know. The famous ones at least you 
 know by a photograph or a print, and some of the less 
 important you actually know by sight. Much of such 
 views of the picture influenced also Millet, a man far 
 removed from Delacroix in temperament, in religious 
 feeling, in spiritual turn, in habit of life, in ironical 
 mood. But Millet seeing Delacroix’s work was struck 
 at once by the fact that this was not the theatre ar- 
 rangement, but was the way that happens in real life, 
 or in the ancient forms of art which we know of as 
 the works of the great masters. So deep was this im- 
 pression that the theatre itself became distasteful to 
 Millet through the naturalness of Delacroix, who seems 
 
 18 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 to us occasionally unnatural because we have been 
 trained for over a century in the theatre . 
 
 Delacroix held himself subject to many intellectual 
 views which are really classical, and he studied deeply 
 the ideas, the manners, and the circumstances of all the 
 forms of older art. But that was the substratum of 
 good sense and of culture of the intellectual man. His 
 temperament, on the contrary, was a passionate one, 
 and through that he belonged to the class of the very 
 great artists, of Rembrandt and Rubens, Tintoretto 
 and Michael Angelo, with whom the expression of a 
 sentiment, either of peace or war, of sympathy or ob- 
 jection, is the main stuff and fabric, and who make 
 their form out of the subject as they go along. Hence 
 also, like the very few, as I have just said, he is a 
 dramatist. All with him is more or less a drama. Those 
 animals, in the two little pictures up-stairs, that drink 
 are not merely a lion drinking, they are a beast lapping 
 water ; they are the animal indulging itself, the animal 
 getting its necessary supply; they are Delacroix re- 
 freshing himself as he laps the water through the beast. 
 He is playing this action. It is not the copy of the beast, 
 the observation of a naturalist, it is the observation of 
 the higher division of animated nature, recognising in 
 the lower form that side which he can understand, and 
 
 19 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 clothing it in the vision of the eye. Hence also as I have 
 been saying, like the very few he is a dramatist. All with 
 him is more or less of a drama, and I do not mean by 
 that the plausible arrangement of the theatre, which 
 on the contrary is, as I have been saying, the mark of 
 all that false classical school which he distrusted, or dis- 
 liked, or despised, and whose influence persists to-day 
 in modern French art, and in most modern art every- 
 where. These works, however important, however the 
 make of strong minds and good eyes, are not creations 
 from within. They are agglutinations of probabilities 
 such as the stage shows, such as the manager arranges, 
 with excellent actors, with fine voices and with beautiful 
 scenery. So, as I was just saying, we are not surprised. 
 We merely praise such a successful ordering and plac- 
 ing of things. So we should have done if we had had the 
 arranging of the world. 
 
 In the realities of the world, on the contrary, we are 
 surprised ; and sometimes we are disagreeably surprised. 
 Things turn out differently from what we expected ; ac- 
 cidents of all kinds happen in shapes that we had not 
 foreseen ; otherwise they would not surprise us ; we 
 should be prepared and we would almost — as we moved 
 in the outside world — we would almost applaud. But 
 wdien an artist like Delacroix gives us Apollo riding his 
 
 20 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 chariot and shooting the poisoned arrows which his 
 sister hurriedly hands from the quiver ; or Hamlet, who 
 pushes back with his foot the dead Polonius ; or Faust, 
 who having killed Margaret’s brother by the hand of 
 Mephistopheles, passes into the shadow of the narrow 
 German street, we are surprised — we did not expect 
 that; and sometimes it is disagreeable. This is what 
 really happens in nature. This is really accident, unar- 
 ranged by us. This great breath of the real world and 
 its fates flows through all the scenes of Delacroix’s 
 paintings and his drawings. Therein, as I said, they 
 belong to the greatest forms of art, those that we can- 
 not foresee and we cannot arrange. And again, as I say, 
 they are often unpleasant, except for their beauty — for 
 they always have some form of beauty. They are always 
 recognisant of the past of art, of certain ancient for- 
 mulae of art, of certain masses of light and shade, of 
 certain arrangements of colour, of certain truths of 
 colour. 
 
 With him goes the tradition of the past and of 
 beauty for itself. With Millet, who liked Delacroix and 
 admired him, if the story of the picture seems stronger 
 by omitting some beauties that might occur, Millet 
 sacrifices them without hesitation. The story is to be 
 told at all cost, and if that story in his mind is less well 
 
 21 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 told from a point of beauty than from a point of ab- 
 solute truth, let it go, all the better. With Delacroix 
 never does this happen. He is entirely free in everything 
 that he does, yet keeping in mind the ancients. It may 
 be as far back as the Greeks, it may be Michael Angelo, 
 it may be Raphael, it may be Rubens, it is always some- 
 thing that he feels behind him without effort. The whole 
 thing is the result of the ages, the expression of a very 
 highly cultivated, intellectual gentleman. And yet at 
 that moment began the realistic side of the development 
 of French art, the realistic side carried out by some of 
 his greatest admirers, by the other men of whom I shall 
 speak, who, working differently, and understanding 
 differently and placing realism as the first basis of their 
 impression, were still in harmony with this man’s work 
 through admiration. 
 
 Time, as I say, has brought Delacroix’s name back 
 to us at a moment of revolt against mechanical ex- 
 cellencies. This moment is a most singular one in the 
 question of doubt as to technical forms. We have every 
 form of representation in our own art of painting that 
 has ever existed, in some shape or other. We have for 
 years, for almost fifty, gone as the men of the Renais- 
 sance did, or tried to do, to science to help us, to steady 
 us in our formulae. We know that the future is coming; 
 
 22 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 we know that we must hold on to the past, but the 
 nineteenth century has given us bad habits of mechani- 
 cal work. We have not been in all that century beautiful 
 painters, as were the commonplace men of a further 
 past. The very men I speak of, whose work is wonder- 
 ful, whose work is beautiful, were still floundering in 
 the ordinary mechanism of oil painting if we compare 
 them to the eighteenth-century men, Chardin, Watteau, 
 anybody, it does not matter who. So that, as I say, time 
 has brought this name back again to us at a moment of 
 revolt against mechanical excellencies which we do not 
 compass. The power of the name will exist even with 
 those who do not like him, and with whose ideas he could 
 have no sympathy. This name is destined I think to be- 
 come still more important as the line of the great suc- 
 cessors in the realm of art recedes further away from us. 
 Among them I think that this one of Delacroix will re- 
 main the keynote, the strongest expression of what was 
 done. That does not in any manner mean that he will be 
 a clear teacher — what is called an easy teacher. More- 
 over he belongs to that nineteenth century which flound- 
 ered unsuccessfully but triumphantly in the use of 
 painting. 
 
 With this I close the opening of my lectures. I shall 
 repeat to-morrow in another shape the story of Dela- 
 
 23 
 
FIRST LECTURE 
 
 croix and make some beginning of notice of some of the 
 other men. But I preferred to test, as it were, the in- 
 tention of what I am going to do by some consideration 
 of a man who will be later a type of all I have to say, 
 and whose name would be one of what the ancients called 
 good augury. 
 
 24 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
The subject , Delacroix the precursor . The name of 
 Barbizon school a misnomer , an accidental grouping of 
 things with little connection. It is a pity that this 
 name should be continued by habit. It is a mere expres- 
 sion of the fact that certain painters happen to have 
 lived for a time within the forest of Fontainebleau y find- 
 ing there themes for landscape or for parts of their 
 pictures. And they entertained for each other great 
 admiration and liking and had admirations in common 
 outside. The number of artists under that title uncer- 
 tain. The United States has a large proportion of 
 their work , and appreciated them early. 
 
 The romantic , the emotional , and the realistic tenden- 
 cies met formalisation in art and were forced into ap- 
 parent opposition. Certain names mark this beginning : 
 Delacroix , Gericault. They were no innovators. Impres- 
 sion of their early work on the public. “ The Wounded 
 Cuirassier “ The Raft of the Medusa Delacroix's 
 exotism , the breath of that moment. “ The Massacre 
 of Scio.” “ The Women of Algiers .” Subjects from 
 foreign poetry and history. His extraordinary power 
 of absorption of the idea. 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 O UR subject is Delacroix, the precursor of the 
 so-called Barbizon school, which as you know 
 is a misnomer, an accidental way of grouping a 
 number of things together that have really not very 
 much connection. The title, the name of the Barbizon, 
 or the Fontainebleau school, is a mere expression of 
 the fact that certain of the men whose names we as- 
 sociate with that title happened to live for a short 
 time within the great and beautiful forest of Fontaine- 
 bleau, and found therein sufficient themes for landscapes 
 or for those parts of their pictures that needed a land- 
 scape motive. The exact number of these men whom we 
 should bring together under that title is also an un- 
 certain and a fluctuating matter. Probably I shall drop 
 half of those who may fairly go in under the name. As 
 you all know perhaps, the United States has a very 
 large proportion of their work, to the credit of our 
 country, which is supposed to be and is I suppose, and 
 I hope will always consider itself, a barbaric country, 
 
 27 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 because there is no greater protection than ambition for 
 to-morrow. To our great credit we were also among the 
 early admirers of this school which triumphed later in 
 France. Millet was acknowledged here before he was 
 really known over there, and Millet certainly met his 
 first great encouragement through Americans. As I 
 said, the exact number of these artists is a question of 
 fluctuation. Their ideas, their temperaments, happen 
 to be very diverse, and perhaps even in certain ways 
 contradictory ; their origin, that is to say the way they 
 came to live at a certain moment under certain circum- 
 stances and certain influences, is not separable from the 
 great movement of which they are the results, even when 
 they contradict it. That great movement is a wave of 
 the history of the world — the stormy settling of the 
 waters after the French Revolution and the spread of 
 its effects through the wars of Napoleon. The arts of 
 peace, which had little free expression during the polit- 
 ical and military spasms preceding the settlement of 
 the Napoleonic wars, showed upon their revival the 
 moral and intellectual effects of the storm already 
 marked in social and political changes. New ideas had 
 been accepted ; old ones had faded away ; and against the 
 new ideas arose the natural reaction that accompanies 
 revolutions. The desire for passionate self-expression, 
 
 28 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 forced upon the mind by the openings of new gates 
 of thought, brought up also a desire for peace, and 
 reasonableness and ready adjustment. We must remem- 
 ber that in France the revolution, through its settling, 
 through its formalisation by the influences about Na- 
 poleon, produced a more logical and consequently a less 
 flexible, less human arrangement of society than had 
 existed before. All was done rapidly, so as to meet the 
 question of the necessary hurry. Innumerable things of 
 beauty and goodness were put aside because they did 
 not fit at once. 
 
 The story of this romantic and emotional and realis- 
 tic school is associated with this difficulty. They met 
 not a helping, but a tyrannical formalisation of art, 
 meant for the good of a general public, but which to 
 their independence was disastrous. Their forced op- 
 position to the great school, the great government 
 school, is the constant thread that unites all these men 
 together. 
 
 In the arts which most reflect the aspirations of men, 
 there came, beside the expression of passion, of doubt, of 
 interest in all forms of movement, a special admiration 
 of what is outside of man’s agonies and anxieties — the 
 peace and beauty and harmony of nature. The melan- 
 choly born of failure in fitting the issues of the world 
 
 29 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 to one’s own desires turns naturally into the con- 
 templation of that over which we have no control — that 
 nature which continues undisturbed by the vicissitudes 
 of man. So that the protests of Shelley and of Byron 
 coincide with the contemplation of Wordsworth and the 
 detachment of Goethe; and in France the doubt of De 
 Vigny, the agitation of Chateaubriand, merge into the 
 melancholy of Lamartine, the questionings and poetic 
 anxieties of De Musset, and the pictorial and exotic 
 wordings of Victor Hugo, which belong to the same 
 period as George Sand’s description of pastoral regen- 
 eration. 
 
 In France more than anywhere else the art of paint- 
 ing showed the same rhythm of diverse tendencies. The 
 official management of art had been established under 
 Napoleon and continues to this day ; but its steady 
 reign began to be attacked as soon almost as the Na- 
 poleonic era closed. As often happens, the great leaders 
 of the opposition had no desire to make a protest ; they 
 only asked to be let alone by the police of art. They 
 were merely expressing themselves and their likings ; 
 likings the result of real surroundings, and not of aca- 
 demic influences ; results also of another form of the past, 
 that is to say, the past of the entire world, with which 
 they were beginning to be familiar, and not the academic 
 
 30 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 past, which was only a few years old, perhaps some 
 fifty years old at most. 
 
 Some of these men had seen much outside. For a short 
 time during the Napoleonic reign, during part of the 
 Napoleonic triumph, they had the spoils of the world 
 of art in Paris. They had very many of the great paint- 
 ings ; they had much we go to see now in different places 
 all brought together. Englishmen, English artists came 
 there to see them; our Allston was there and got the 
 benefit of all that. Travellers were saved all delay and 
 difficulties as well as expense, and a general idea of the 
 past was brought to these Frenchmen at the time that 
 the Academy was formalising something based only on 
 a small section of the past. Our artists thus became 
 revolutionary, under the influences of their many ances- 
 tors. What they were really protesting for was a regard 
 for the men before them, whom we recognise and admire 
 so much to-day, from Velasquez and Rembrandt to 
 Watteau and Chardin. They were not trying to do any- 
 thing new, they were simply trying to keep up the old 
 tradition which has never ceased so far as we know, from 
 the beginning, from the very beginning of painting, 
 from anything done by the Egyptian, or before the 
 Egyptian. And yet — so true is it that revolutionary 
 may merely mean some form of change from what is 
 
 31 
 
SECOND LECTUBE 
 
 an oppression — the famous Gericault, who left but a 
 few fragments, began quite unintentionally to paint in a 
 manner which involved great difficulties, consequently 
 more emotion, so that the official school, being the gov- 
 ernment institution as it is to-day, felt the danger of 
 everything not compassed by its own scholars. Almost 
 every man seemed to have something to say against 
 what might be the teaching or example of the official 
 school, and that apparently without any special inten- 
 tion of opposition. Many of the names are of little im- 
 portance to-day, but one or two remain that cannot be 
 passed over, and they make a beginning of the men of 
 whom I speak. 
 
 Foremost of these is Delacroix, around whose name, 
 often to his annoyance, clustered much of the opposition 
 to the narrowness of the government teaching, as well 
 as the enthusiasm of all who had either something to 
 say of art in any form or tried to think they had. With 
 him begins the list of the men who so affected French 
 art that no artist anywhere to-day has escaped the 
 results of their individual efforts. 
 
 This moment of very great flowering of French art, 
 coming as such flowerings do upon the peace after 
 war, found England in a lulled condition ; the only 
 remnant of its ambitions in painting being Turner, who 
 
 32 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 was trying to do something new after what he had al- 
 ready done ; and a few very remarkable and most intelli- 
 gent painters of society, purely of society, representing 
 a narrow view of human nature — -Thomas Lawrence, for 
 instance, beautiful, but with no emotion, no danger, no 
 difficulty, no great anxiety about the problems of man- 
 kind. Blake was unknown and dying. There was nothing 
 in Italy, nothing in Holland. In Germany a movement 
 was beginning which ended in a dramatic formulation 
 on one side and a form of religiosity in art on the 
 other. All that is absolutely in the past. 
 
 Delacroix is himself a difficult man to define, being as 
 complex as the nineteenth century, whose middle period 
 is covered by his life. Born, I think, in 1798, he died 
 in 1861. The old Latin formula that man is double 
 ( homo duplex) is not only true enough, but man has 
 even more varieties of himself than the adage gives him. 
 We happen to know to-day quite well the interior mind 
 of this painter of dramatic expression, who was, when he 
 worked, carried away by emotion. We have his letters, 
 his journals, or notes of thought and work, covering 
 some forty years, and meant for himself alone. Therein 
 he appears as a man of calm, judicial view, with a percep- 
 tion of subtle origins in art quite equal to those of any 
 metaphysical analyst of his time. He judged his work 
 
 33 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 when done with a severity tempered only by comparison 
 with the work of others. Although he understood well 
 that the methods of painting, or of any art, are not an 
 end in themselves, he made studies of light and colour 
 which began the series of modern attempts in that direc- 
 tion, and though an innovator to the public, he was a 
 firm believer in all the great principles of the past, and 
 an admirer of all classical beauty. But, like all the 
 higher men, he tried to express what he wished to say 
 in terms of himself and of his own temperament. 
 
 The difference between Delacroix, along with the 
 artists of whom I shall speak, and the academic teach- 
 ers, the government painters, the French Institute and 
 the 44 Beaux- Arts,” was that these newer men who were 
 to affect the whole of modern art did not include the 
 professors of the 44 Beaux-Arts 99 among the great 
 masters of the past, while the professors of the 44 Beaux- 
 Arts 99 and members of the Institute wished to be looked 
 upon as the old masters themselves. The struggle is the 
 same as that with all teaching bodies, and is merely 
 one of the sad sides of human development. The story 
 of such struggles is not different from the stories of the 
 difficulties of the saints who are opposed by the official 
 church and are thwarted and hindered until the day 
 comes when they are put upon the altar. 
 
 34 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 The story of these men is similar. They have not 
 taught anything different from what has always been 
 taught, but their special teaching was impossible to the 
 average. It was simply this, “ To thine own self be 
 true,” which law demands a personal existence and a 
 personal value, that most of us are unwilling to dis- 
 engage so long as we can use the opinions and the 
 manners of others as being more acceptable for pres- 
 ent success. What Delacroix and the men a little later 
 than himself did was to kindle the flame, or keep it 
 burning. 
 
 Delacroix had been a companion, and to some extent 
 a fellow-student, of Gericault, who begins the life of 
 modern French art, outside the strict lines of the Insti- 
 tute, at the date of 1820. Gericault was not unfavour- 
 ably looked upon by many men who wrote about art at 
 that time. They felt in the great work of Gericault a 
 certain connection, and also it must be told, a certain 
 theatrical tendency, a certain malice prepense, in think- 
 ing of his subject beforehand, which connected with the 
 teaching of the school. 
 
 The two young men — for Delacroix was then twenty- 
 two years old — (in 1820), belonged to the higher classes 
 of society and dropped into the practice of art from the 
 liking of the amateur. Delacroix was attracted to art 
 
 35 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 through the paintings of the maturer Gericault. Geri- 
 cault was for a time in the Royal Body Guard, and was 
 always fond of the accomplishments and pleasures that 
 a young man is sure to indulge in when he keeps a cer- 
 tain amount of social relation. He was very fond of 
 horses, and he helped Delacroix to have a similar turn 
 that way. He also, and it is quite a mark of what the 
 nineteenth century took upon itself immediately after 
 the Revolution, he also was fond of England and Eng- 
 lishmen. Both of these young men went over to Eng- 
 land. They were, like a good many Frenchmen, exceed- 
 ingly anxious to see what this England really was 
 against which they had been struggling for some twenty 
 years. Already a beginning of romance and individ- 
 ualism was associated with the name of this first pre- 
 cursor of the Romantic school, so called. In 1812, the 
 youngster, only twenty years old, had attracted and 
 slightly shocked and had also pleased by his first paint- 
 ing — the famous, astonishing, and singular picture, 
 known as the “ Portrait of Mr. M.,” which represents 
 an officer of the Imperial Guards on horseback, sup- 
 posed to be charging. This astonishing work, — whether 
 as we see it to-day in the Louvre it bears out fully its 
 curious renown, — is still to be marked as the first call 
 of a new era. There is, of course, a something theatrical 
 
 36 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 in the canvas, but not in the sense of a possibly fixed 
 image. There was in the young man himself a certain 
 fondness for show — a certain ambition of display, with 
 the ease of success which comes from youth and fortune, 
 social position, acquaintance with the elect of fashion, 
 and, in this case, a liking for the pretty side of military 
 life as he saw it among his friends. All that is in the pic- 
 ture, and only a young man in the first flush of life could 
 have invented and painted it. We have seen so much, 
 the nineteenth century has worked so hard at the com- 
 prehension and the rendering of Nature, the photo- 
 graph has so acquainted us with innumerable facts and 
 variations, which our stupidity had never perceived, 
 that the once extreme novelty of this painting leaves 
 us to-day somewhat uncertain. Imitations, suggestions 
 from it have gone on. We do not recognise its birth in 
 love of Nature. But it is really the result of having a 
 personal acquaintance with the horse, of being a rider, 
 and of a distaste for the polite representation of the 
 animal by the artists whom the painter knew. He was 
 studying at the time anything relating to the horse, 
 and all in the vein of amusement and pleasure. The ac- 
 cident of seeing a horse rearing, in a cloud of dust, at 
 some suburban fair, is translated by the imagination of 
 the youngster into a horse, charging and pulled up 
 
 37 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 suddenly. From this the youth of twenty created the 
 picture. It is the picture of a horse, and the rider is 
 merely the necessary accompaniment. The fact that a 
 friend was willing to pose for the head, for the costume, 
 is simply thrown in to give assurance of some additional 
 facts. Seen in this way, we realise the new departure, 
 and the reason of that suddenness of impression which 
 is essential to the greater work of art. 
 
 In his next picture, the “Wounded Cuirassier Leaving 
 the Field of Battle,” we have again the love and use of 
 the horse as the motive. But now a sentimentality, an in- 
 tention of lyric meaning fills the picture, determines its 
 lines, and the arrangement of its masses. It is not an 
 echo, but it has the note of the Byronic feeling coeval 
 with it. The officer is now r an intimate part of the story 
 — perhaps the story itself, and Gericault has entered 
 the Guards and is wearing the uniform of the mus- 
 keteers. And then he goes back to study, and Italy 
 makes more and more a sculptor of him. Italy also frees 
 his mind through admiration of every kind. For he is, 
 like Delacroix, an admirer ; he is not an imitator. All 
 that he asks from the various contradictory admira- 
 tions is the excitement and additional life that we gain 
 through admiration. His personal influence may not 
 have been perhaps as great at it seems to us to-day, 
 
 38 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 but he opposed very strongly the official school, and all 
 the more after his having seen in Rome the results of 
 the academic form of teaching. He was opposed to all 
 government interference in art, and to all strict educa- 
 tional prisons. The school then was more dogmatic than 
 we can quite understand to-day. One of the criticisms 
 of Gericault’s principal painting was that it did not 
 quite seem to be “ within the limits of our school.” We 
 must remember that the great M. Ingres, whom my 
 youth and yours also, perhaps, considered a severe 
 master, was once looked upon as a person whose views 
 might be a little bit doubtful, because of a suspicion of 
 independence. 
 
 Some of Gericault’s actual words are worth quoting. 
 One day, seeing a child scribbling something on a wall, 
 he was astonished at the boldness of the drawing, and 
 said : “ What a pity ! The school is going to spoil all 
 that.” He goes on to say : “ Suppose, indeed, that all 
 young men in the school are endowed with all the qual- 
 ities that make painters ; isn’t it dangerous to have all 
 study together for years and years, under the same 
 influence, copying the same thing and travelling, you 
 may say, on one road? How can they have any origi- 
 nality after that? Haven’t they exchanged with each 
 other any particular qualities which they had? So it is 
 
 39 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 disgusting every year to see the compositions of these 
 young men, all painted quite correctly from end to end, 
 and yet having nothing of their own. That is because 
 having long put aside their own sensations, none of 
 these rivals is able to have a physiognomy of his own ; 
 one drawing, one colour, one system of drapery, one set 
 of gestures, one set of expressions — all that is the sad 
 result of the school, comely in the same way, inspired 
 by the same soul — if, indeed, one can admit that the 
 soul can still preserve any faculty and preside over 
 such work.” 
 
 That is, in short, what Gericault taught, and, to a 
 certain extent, practised in his painting. But he was 
 not, in the slightest way, revolutionary or loose-ended. 
 He was a hard and severe student upon the old lines, 
 and his last and great work shows what previous studies 
 he must have made in the direction of a severe view of 
 Nature. Yet there is something of an appeal to the 
 public — an appeal which is still understood, for his pic- 
 ture, either in its original paint or translated by engrav- 
 ing or photograph, has still a popularity. That, it 
 could hardly escape, if fairly well done, for the subject 
 is such a one as appeals to all our memories and sensa- 
 tions — the story of castaways in the middle of a threat- 
 ening ocean, on an insufficient raft, discovering at 
 
 40 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 length a sail which may be their salvation. The 44 Raft 
 of the Medusa ” is, therefore, a great historical paint- 
 ing, in the sense that, besides its popular success, it has 
 great professional qualities of respect, and study of 
 the scholarly and classical, and an extraordinary reach- 
 ing out to the strongest realism. Whatever might have 
 happened to this remarkable young man, the most that 
 we know is that he made this brilliant mark, and in- 
 fluenced more or less many about him. The very brevity 
 of his life — cut off by accident — has helped to make of 
 him all the more, a special figure. (He was thrown off 
 his horse, a fate quite in accordance with his passion 
 for everything concerning the horse.) 
 
 Considering this influence, and both the friendship or 
 friendly acquaintance between Gericault and Delacroix, 
 it is worth while comparing their first successes — if, 
 indeed, we can use these words for a success cut short 
 like that of Gericault’s. The first painting of Dela- 
 croix’s, 44 The Barque of Dante,” still has a certain 
 preoccupation or anxiety for a rendering which shall 
 be in accordance with 64 Beaux- Arts ” tradition. The 
 figures are studied, as it were, separately, with some 
 anxiety. Of course, the extraordinary imagination of 
 the painter has seen the thing altogether, while in the 
 great painting of Gericault one feels that its existence 
 
 41 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 has been slowly evolved out of many possible combina- 
 tions. It is only very slowly — this we know — that Geri- 
 cault placed on the empty barrel in the raft the figure, 
 the naked negro, who waves his signal for relief. When 
 Delacroix comes to paint his next great picture, “ The 
 Massacre at Scio,” his mind is absolutely free from 
 the wish to hark back to some rule — in fact, to paint 
 a picture. He sees the thing in his mind as we do in 
 Nature. 
 
 So that the step between these two men is really very 
 wide. But they must have helped each other, especially 
 in their having together visited England, and admired 
 the paintings, both of the day itself, which was not a 
 great one, and of the men who were just gone, the Rey- 
 noldses and Gainsboroughs, and others. 
 
 Reverses of fortune obliged Delacroix to take to 
 painting as a means of support. His father had been 
 secretary to the Prime Minister Turgot in the previous 
 century ; a lawyer in Parliament ; a deputy to the Con- 
 vention; a member of the Council of State, as in the 
 usual way of parliamentary men of that day; then a 
 Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Ambassador. A cer- 
 tain disfavour towards a name associated with revolu- 
 tionary antecedents may, later, have helped somewhat 
 an opposition to the son, our artist. His mother was 
 
 42 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 a daughter of the celebrated maker of furniture, Oeben, 
 and through him, from that line, Delacroix perhaps 
 inherited a certain Teutonic something. He was other- 
 wise well connected, and this influenced his life for 
 good and bad; I mean that this insured his easy rela- 
 tion with people who were in the foremost ranks of 
 political and social life. Educated in a manner suitable 
 to his prospects, he retained throughout his life a love 
 for literary culture. This marks his choice of subjects 
 and helps to explain the familiar ease with which he 
 moves in his representations of historical and literary 
 characters. He had learned some English early, so that 
 Shakespeare and Byron were familiar influences. In this 
 way he came to know something of England, which he 
 visited, as you know, and he became familiar at an early 
 date with English art, which he admired. He cared for 
 all its best examples, even to the later day of the Pre- 
 Raphaelites. These he was the first by half a century to 
 praise before an unbelieving Continental audience. A 
 certain liking for many English institutions remained 
 with him, and perhaps influenced his political and social 
 ideas, which remained opposed to the loose democratic 
 movement of France. His father and his father’s family 
 had moved in diplomacy and public life. They were 
 inside the influences that moved their world, and he 
 
 43 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 must have seen what was going on, must have seen back 
 of the scenery of the theatre. Not, however, that his 
 ideas were retrograde. He represented, as I think I 
 fairly said, what might come to a man who, having a 
 great deal of strong, good sense, knowing the mis- 
 fortunes of his country, its excessive anxiety to settle 
 everything, had heard reasonable views expressed to him 
 by men of affairs who knew and who saw. Then his con- 
 nection with England had made him appreciate the 
 English manner that managed to get along and to get a 
 great many things without general theories of guidance. 
 Delacroix was fond of music and retained its love 
 through life, and it was this slight matter which deter- 
 mined, as we may see later, his admission into the Insti- 
 tute, at a time when painters and sculptors in the gov- 
 ernment positions were all against him. He had thought 
 of entering the army, in which were most of his family, 
 his brother being a general. 
 
 He was helped in his first beginnings by Gericault, 
 who found living work for him ; and almost at once, in 
 1822, his first great picture of “ Dante and Virgil 
 Crossing the Infernal Lake ” drew the attention of the 
 public, of critics, of people of fashion, of all the literary 
 men, to the promise of extraordinary talent. The suc- 
 cess was ahnost too great, and opinions divided. Great 
 
 44 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 praise was met by objections which seem to us to-day a 
 condemnation of the critics who opposed. He was espe- 
 cially blamed for the greatest of all qualities that can 
 be found in any work of art; to quote the exact words 
 of the most important authority who arraigned him: 
 “ He had combined all the parts of his work in view of 
 one emotion.” This phrase is perhaps the best definition 
 of what any judicious mind would choose for an ex- 
 planation of the superior work of art. It may be said, 
 in fact, that this is all there is in any very great work 
 of art. But it was not what the school taught, and what, 
 unfortunately, schools are unable to teach, in so far as 
 they are merely trainings in the grammar of the pro- 
 fession. Into those questions, the questions of grammar 
 and of mechanical execution, these greater questions 
 can only come in by chance. And also the weak have to 
 be encouraged even at the expense of the strong, and 
 the supply of teachers must remain limited. 
 
 The famous painter of that day, Gros, wished to take 
 Delacroix with him, but the young man declined the 
 honourable offer, notwithstanding his admiration for 
 the older painter. He needed the practical help, how- 
 ever, very much. He was very poor, as people are poor 
 who step down from manners of living which have no re- 
 lation to self-help. From economy he lodged in one 
 
 45 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 room, with one of the Fieldings, the English painter 
 (who taught him the English methods of water colour), 
 both living on rather insufficient food. For instance, they 
 saved up their coffee-grounds to make their coffee on 
 the following days, and kept a piece of meat from which 
 they cut small slices to be roasted in the chimney fire- 
 place. Delacroix was already suffering from a form of 
 illness that persisted through life — an ague — which at 
 times cut him off absolutely from work. He therefore 
 needed great courage to stand by himself, and was 
 obliged to take any small work which might keep him 
 afloat, even to caricature. It was possible to sell studies 
 of horses, and these days of adversity brought him to 
 attempt representations of the horse which antedate by 
 half a century the modern perception of the stages of 
 motion, which we owe to the photograph. That which 
 to-day is a proof of his perception of nature remained 
 against him for many years, because the average eye 
 was accustomed to see the horse represented according 
 to academic teaching. Another form of the insuccess 
 attending merit is the fact that he was unable to abtain 
 the prize he steadily competed for in the School of 
 Fine Arts. At the very moment when he exhibited 
 “ Dante and Virgil” one of the famous paintings of 
 the world , he was the last in the competition, obtaining 
 
 46 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 only the number 60. But this is the continuous story 
 of the Roman prize, which, though excellent in its mean- 
 ing, has usually merely provided a place for a favour- 
 ite pupil. Later we shall see the great Millet told 
 by his teacher, Delaroche, that he deserved the prize but 
 that Delaroche wanted it for another pupil, a man 
 whom we only know through this. 
 
 Under these circumstances Delacroix’s next great 
 painting, “ The Massacre of Scio,” was produced and 
 exhibited. The subject of the famous painting was one 
 of that moment, a record of the effect of the news from 
 Greece. This is the date of Lord Byron and of the 
 struggle of Greece for freedom, that moved the entire 
 civilised world. The painting is a lyric, or a Byronic 
 poem, and however accurate in many exotic details, and 
 in its probability, was frankly meant as an ideal drama. 
 In this and later we shall see the extraordinary percep- 
 tion of Delacroix in rendering exotic picturesqueness, 
 in which he is the earliest, and perhaps the most suc- 
 cessful of modern artists. 
 
 One must remember that this is a first attempt at 
 rendering the appearance of the Oriental man, and we 
 can see how even to-day that appearance is real and 
 living in his work. Yet there was no intention of mak- 
 ing a quite correct record ; merely the necessity of cloth- 
 
 47 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 ing the subject in dress sufficiently near to probability; 
 sufficiently real to appeal to the current enthusiasm 
 for the independence of Greece. An enthusiasm felt here 
 also as our literature tells us. The Western Christian 
 world had been stirred to its depths by stories of the 
 cruelties of the Turks in their repression of the Greek 
 attempt at independence. This sympathy is part of the 
 poetic life of England, as we know, and in France also, 
 had a similar echo. There was a spirit of opposition to 
 government latent, and perhaps our painter may have 
 been marked as meaning such opposition by his picture. 
 For both France and England were forced into help- 
 ing Greece by accident. The public were favourable 
 to the cause. The great painting then was a man- 
 ner of appeal which to-day would be too slow with all 
 our changes of time and space. But then there was time 
 enough to prepare either in words or in painting some- 
 thing that might be still within the news from Greece. 
 The exact story of the massacres I have not looked up. 
 
 The accurate title of Delacroix’s great painting is 
 “ An Episode of the Massacres of Scio.” The title 
 makes a careful difference, and is worth remembering 
 as marking the special point in this extremely impor- 
 tant painting. However admired, however famous, it has 
 never received the full appreciation that it deserves, nor 
 
 48 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 are its lessons jet comprehended even in the country 
 which has held it so long, in its most important collec- 
 tion. However well balanced, however carefully com- 
 posed as line, however much of a unity, the painting 
 asserts itself as part only of a scene which we do not see 
 entirely. We know that outside of this frame, outside 
 this opening, more- is going on of the same kind. We 
 are only looking at a small fragment, a small centre of 
 murder and brutality. The little group of wounded men 
 and horrified women is evidently circled by a band of 
 Arnauts, of whom we only see a few, who stalk or gallop 
 around them, taking their choice of victims for murder 
 or for rape. And the mind of the artist recognises quite 
 well the merely official, commonplace cruelty of the 
 Turkish victors. They are merely doing their ordinary 
 business. On the contrary, the victims give us, beyond 
 any representation that I have ever seen the terrible 
 story of the varieties of agony endured by the van- 
 quished. The soldier calmly waiting his turn, whose 
 children alongside of him, embrace him and each other 
 in fright; the dying man resigned to fate, dreamily 
 expectant, his wife’s head on his shoulder; the dying 
 woman whose child hopelessly pulls at her breast; the 
 mother attempting to save her daughter from the Turk 
 who drags her away at the tail of his horse ; the other 
 
 49 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 women awaiting in abandoned sorrow their horrible 
 fate — all these things were new in the history of art, 
 and have never been equalled in their dramatic intensity, 
 in the carefulness of the probabilities of each detail. All 
 that is for the poetic thought, the historical apprecia- 
 tion, and the dramatic terror of the story. 
 
 For us, who are students of the art of painting, which 
 has strict technical laws and variations of means, we 
 can see how part of this marvel of representation is ob- 
 tained by the form of the composition. It is a reversal 
 of the usual baby-form of making an official picture, 
 which was especially taught then, and which has not 
 disappeared from the usual school. The centre of the 
 picture is empty. Our eyes take up the incidents on 
 each side, so that we naturally feel that the story, the 
 facts, are spread out further than the centre, continu- 
 ing indefinitely around it, as they do in Nature, which 
 is not enclosed, by a frame of perpendicular and hori- 
 zontal, either gilded or not gilded. The vast plain and 
 its details far away, of people, and villages, and hills, 
 and the sea, give us all the more the sense of the help- 
 lessness of the little crowd gathered in this spot. 
 
 Of course, there are wonderful bits of painting in the 
 picture, and the whole of it is a great piece of colour, 
 and drawing, and motion. And it is worth noticing that 
 
 50 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 we have the record of the number of hours, and they are 
 few, which were given to the painting of some of these 
 figures ; notably, the half-naked woman on the right 
 dragged away by the Turkish horseman. The studies, on 
 the contrary, were many and long. There are exquisite 
 arrangements of line, and beauties of the melody of 
 painting which you can see for yourselves. Notice, for 
 instance, the extraordinary arrangement of line which 
 brings within the curve of the Turkish scimetar the 
 agonised body and clutching arms of the poor mother, 
 trying to save her daughter. With some of the greater 
 painters — Rembrandt, and Titian, and Rubens, and with 
 Delacroix, we do not recognise at once the beautiful 
 pattern and careful disposition of space and line, be- 
 cause all that is covered by the splendour of colour, and 
 modelling, and realisation of Nature, which makes the 
 difference between a painter and a designer of pat- 
 terns . 1 
 
 In this picture, then, we have the beginning of free- 
 
 1 For some of you who are more especially students, it would be worth 
 while to look up some of the publications of the beginning of the last 
 century, which gave reproductions of pictures in outline. For the pur- 
 poses of education in the way of appreciation of composition and decora- 
 tive line, this, of course, is the simplest of methods. You will be 
 surprised at seeing the qualities I have just mentioned, in Rubens or 
 Titian, in a manner quite free and apart from the other merits which 
 we all feel so strongly. 
 
 51 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 dom in our art, in a manner quite opposite to the school, 
 and so subtly placed before us that only the natural 
 enmity to nature entertained by academic training 
 could hesitate in its recognition. 
 
 The great painting was at once admired and disliked. 
 It was, however, bought by the government, which shows 
 that there was still a recognition. But many of the 
 important painters were frightened and disconcerted, 
 and with this painting begins the long career of opposi- 
 tion through which our great painter had to struggle, 
 and which has deprived France and the world of what 
 would have been the greatest of all modern painting. 
 This went so far that Delacroix was officially notified, 
 three years later, when he next exhibited the three paint- 
 ings known as the “ Death of Sardanapalus,” “ Christ in 
 the Garden,” and “ Marino Faliero,” that no further en- 
 couragement from official sources would come to him. 
 
 The name of Byron is connected with much choice 
 of subjects by Delacroix. He returned over and over 
 again to dramatic incidents from Byron’s poems, as 
 well as to stories from Shakespeare, from Dante, from 
 Goethe, all of which seems now to us English-speaking 
 people, quite naturally selected. To his own public, how- 
 ever, they were more or less unknown. Thus he did not 
 have the enormous advantage which is held by the choice 
 
 52 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 of a well-known motive. Perhaps he was not quite aware 
 of his subjects being so remote from ordinary acquaint- 
 ance. He lived in these poems and stories of poets who 
 were little known and unsympathetic to his French 
 audience. Nor was it prepared, nor is it prepared to- 
 day, for the essential difference between the represen- 
 tation of the story by painting as it was with Dela- 
 croix and by the theatre. It is impossible to think of 
 these paintings as represented by any stage arrange- 
 ment. Theirs is no arrangement in which one can take 
 out a part and put in another, and yet have an arrange- 
 ment quite as good or better than it was before. This 
 fact of the French not feeling the difference between 
 the representation of the story by painting, or by the 
 theatre, explains the opposition met by Delacroix and 
 later by Millet. 
 
 As I told you yesterday, Millet for a long time could 
 not go to the theatre after seeing the paintings of the 
 old masters, and after seeing Delacroix’s especial form 
 of representation of reality the theatre became more and 
 more distasteful to him. This influence of the theatre 
 accounts for a great deal of the annoying posing of 
 French art. When accustomed to see arrangements that 
 are purely theatrical, the average mind is disturbed by 
 the sight of a scene as it might really have happened, 
 
 53 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 and begins to wish for anything that will give assurance 
 that the story is taken from art and not from nature. 
 The mind distorted by convention cannot believe the 
 thing to be art which looks accidental. The habit of 
 the theatre, as distinguished from drama in life or in 
 painting, admits the declamation and posing and all 
 the varieties of untruth which fit the arrangement of 
 the stage ; and this is fair enough as far as the necessi- 
 ties of the theatre are considered. The effect of the 
 theatre fades away; there is a succession of movements 
 whose false poses are not recorded once and forever, as 
 they are in painting. The theatrical declamation and 
 voice become a memory. How many of us remember the 
 actors of our youth, the great actors and actresses? I 
 have been able to tell something about great actors and 
 actresses to other great ones who had only heard of 
 them, but what could this carry of the originals ? Paint- 
 ing of course keeps a record, and therefore should be 
 true to sight for another reason : because any falsity 
 will tell more and more as time goes on. If the declama- 
 tion of the theatre hung in our ears we should get tired. 
 
 It is this special limit that Delacroix, or Rembrandt, 
 or Millet, or any of the great dramatic masters, never 
 passed. And it is the extreme persistence of the theatre 
 notion that assures the unreliability of almost all French 
 
 5 4 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 art in representing stories from literature or from the 
 past, and which even affects and vitiates such careful 
 exotic representations as those of so careful an artist 
 as Gerome, for instance. But the convenience of the 
 other view is great by allowing the accuracy of a few 
 details to be studied out, as on the real stage — to the 
 detriment of the greater qualities, it is true, but to the 
 satisfaction of the unimaginative man who can exercise 
 his talent on the special points of which he has control. 
 Compared to the set scenes of French painters of that 
 day, Delacroix’s dramas seemed to have too much life 
 and not to allow the eye to fasten on each detail in suc- 
 cession. The partisans of the official school arrang- 
 ments of a subject, planned according to precedent, re- 
 mained enemies of our master to the day of his death; 
 and it was only by persistent struggle, by the intense 
 admiration of a few, that Delacroix was even allowed to 
 exhibit in the various “ Salons ” of successive years that 
 long series of glorious works which have placed him 
 alone of all the painters of the nineteenth century in 
 the same line of high expression which runs from Giotto 
 to Puvis de Chavannes. 
 
 Divided praise and blame therefore followed Dela- 
 croix from the moment of his first picture until his death 
 in 1864. He made a large number of paintings and 
 
 55 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 drawings, having been all his life a great worker. In- 
 deed, he found in work itself, in the problems which he 
 was obliged to solve — because his aim had been the 
 representation of any subject that interested him — his 
 one recourse against the pressure of an outside world 
 whose form was in many cases disagreeable to him, and 
 for which he had a most aristocratic contempt ; not the 
 contempt of the snob for those under him, but aristo- 
 cratic contempt for meanness, vulgarity, all the lower 
 forms of man, visible in one form of society as well as 
 in another. Somewhat a man of the world, to appear- 
 ances, at least, insomuch that he kept carefully all his 
 social relations, the notes of his journal, made only 
 for himself, explain that he thoroughly understood 
 the meanness of the crowd, the machinations of envy, 
 and asked for nothing more than the consolation 
 of faithful friendship and the privilege of carrying 
 out projects which were always increasing in his im- 
 agination. 
 
 Out of his complete catalogue of works of nine thou- 
 sand one hundred and forty pieces there are eight 
 hundred and fifty paintings. When urged in his later 
 days to desist from work, he answered : “ I have already 
 prepared in composition, ready to be carried out, 
 enough for two lives, and as for projects sketched out, 
 
 56 
 
GERICAULT 
 
 ‘AN OFFICER OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD ” 
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 CHURCH OF ST. SULPICE, PARIS 
 
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SECOND LECTURE 
 
 I think I have enough for four hundred years’ work.” 
 Nor could he have been exaggerating, for his special 
 mark is the novelty and suddenness of the appearance 
 of his conceptions. That one effort of all great men, 
 to have a novel view, the effort which justifies their right 
 to speak, seems as easy to him as ordinary speech. This 
 novelty and intensity of perception was such that the 
 great Goethe said, on seeing Delacroix’s illustrations to 
 his own (Goethe’s) 44 Faust,” 44 Delacroix has surpassed 
 the pictures that I made to myself of the scenes that 
 I wrote myself,” And he added : 44 The French reproach 
 him with having too wild a rudeness, but there it is 
 most certainly in its place.” The French to-day have 
 hardly forgiven him yet for the harshness of his render- 
 ing of harsh subjects, and no one could have been more 
 opposed by temperament and turn of mind to the 
 commonplace moment in which his lot was cast. 
 
 Once he escaped from it by an accident which deter- 
 mined a great part of his career, which gave him new 
 and splendid motives, and showed him glories of light 
 and colour unknown to his colder and darker native 
 land. In 1882, ten years after his public beginning, he 
 made a trip into Morocco with an embassy and brought 
 back the studies for some of his famous works ; among 
 them the 44 Algerian Women at Home,” the 44 Jewish 
 
 57 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 Marriage,” the “ Mad Dervishes of Tangiers,” the 
 66 Guard of the Sultan,” and many, many others. 
 
 They are the first competent representations of that 
 Oriental life which lies along the Mediterranean, and 
 they would answer for most Mahometan countries. Some 
 of them have separate qualities, astonishingly different 
 from his other and previous work. 
 
 It is needless to say that all through the paintings 
 and studies passes a current of poetic appreciation suf- 
 ficient to ennoble any subject. But what is extraordi- 
 nary is the passage from one form of realisation to an- 
 other. In this he is the first of the men of the nineteenth 
 century, and he has begun for all of us the appreciation 
 of different manners of painting according to the sub- 
 ject. In this particular meaning are intended the ac- 
 curate view of the differences of place, which we feel in 
 such a painting as his “ Algerian Women in their 
 Room.” The sense of closed space, the warm light, in- 
 dicative of a captive sunshine, are as beautifully ob- 
 served as in the intimacy of any of the Dutch painters 
 of interiors. Contrariwise the open air — what may be 
 called the weight of the sunlight upon burnous and 
 haick of Moorish warriors are again impressions of 
 open space, and of light and air. 
 
 And here again you will notice the look of momentary 
 
 58 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 poise in each figure — the laziness of the sitting ones, 
 the movement of entrance of the one who lifts the cur- 
 tain as she comes in — all so different from the set photo- 
 graphic studio stability we get even from good artists. 
 I say photographic, but each day of improvement in 
 the art of photography brings us nearer to a photo- 
 graphic rendering of the reality which is movement. 
 
 All through his life he returned at times to these 
 reminiscences that carried him to a land where he had 
 seen the external expression of man in harmony with 
 man’s habits and surroundings. Consequently he felt 
 that his ideas of art were fundamental. That, for in- 
 stance, in this harmony of man with nature was the real 
 clue to the value of our inheritance of the antique Greek 
 style. As with Rodin, who is a great example, as with 
 Rarye, Delacroix’s friend, as with the Greeks, as with 
 the greater men of all time, except the present, so Dela- 
 croix felt the unexpressed rule that the human being 
 never moves free in space , but always, being an animal, 
 in relation to the place w T here he is, to the people around 
 him, to innumerable influences of light, and air, wind, 
 footing, and the possibility of touching others. This is 
 the absolute contradiction of the studio painting, how- 
 ever dignified, where the figure is free from any inter- 
 ruption, and nobody will run against it. And the habit 
 
 59 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 of the studio has so acted on modern art that the 
 greater mass of even extraordinary successes are pic- 
 tures of pictures, and not pictures of Nature. 
 
 Please consider this the point that I am making for 
 you. Were Mr. Rodin, the sculptor, here he would tell 
 you how we talked this secret over some dozen years or 
 so ago — a secret which he was glad to find I had dis- 
 covered as a principle of his work. 
 
 Delacroix thus saw more and more the meaning of 
 the rhythm of movement, and he was also encouraged to 
 go more deeply into the great questions of colour and 
 light which were neglected by the men of his time. From 
 that moment these questions remained with him a con- 
 stant preoccupation in everything that he did, and so 
 his more successful work separates from the usual 
 French tone by a certain richness of appearance . 1 
 
 A certain superiority was conceded to Delacroix by 
 his contemporaries, even when inimical to him, in those 
 questions of colour and of light. But with the usual 
 jealousy of any great superiority they assumed that 
 
 1 It is a pity that because he, like others of the nineteenth century, 
 had no good practical connection with the past, and because the pig- 
 ments of that moment were uncertain and sophisticated by chemists, 
 and because he was poor, many of his paintings, in common with those 
 of the day, have been injured by the changes of time. No men have 
 suffered more than the majority of the Barbizon men from the manner 
 in which their paintings have changed. 
 
 60 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 he must have been deficient in everything else. Opposi- 
 tion to him increased, preventing his obtaining orders 
 for decorative work, for which the qualities that his 
 enemies conceded were eminently fitting. 
 
 We have, therefore, but little of him in that direc- 
 tion. With Puvis de Chavannes he is the only one of 
 the French painters who has any claim to connection 
 with the great mural painters of the past. It is to the 
 eternal disgrace of the government and official influence 
 that Delacroix, this one most important exemplar of 
 decorative art, had so little opportunity to illustrate his 
 nation by monumental work. 
 
 He was compelled to execute work at a loss to himself. 
 The personal fortune of Puvis de Chavannes allowed 
 him to accept commissions at a loss. But for all the 
 gigantic work of Delacroix, who lived a somewhat ab- 
 stemious life, spending on nothing but his work, and 
 leaving a fortune in paintings , he had not at his death 
 more than a few thousand dollars. 
 
 The great pieces of decorative work merely gave him 
 enough to go on with. One of them especially is the 
 ceiling in the so-called Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre, 
 where form and colour fully carry out the rich old 
 architectural forms. There the Greek myth, “ The Tri- 
 umph of the God of Day over the Powers of Darkness,” 
 
 61 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 is represented as freshly as if the subject had just 
 stepped out of the brain of Minerva. In no ancient, in 
 no modern work, is there a greater swing than in the 
 charge of the divine horses, carrying Apollo who aims 
 his bow, while his sister supplies him with the deadly 
 arrows. In the paintings in the church of Saint Sulpice 
 two great wall spaces of rather gray surface — showing 
 as well as anything by Puvis de Chavannes the careful 
 treatment of the wall — represent the wrestling of Jacob 
 with the angel, and the driving of Heliodorus from the 
 temple by the angelic avengers. In the former, the 
 impression of a pastoral scene, of the interruption of 
 travel in a great wooded country ; in the second, the 
 fierce descent of two angelic powers hurled through the 
 air at the pagan desecration, are the subjects. 
 
 These are late works, and at that very time especially 
 was Delacroix most attacked, and yet the critics who 
 liked him little were not afraid to compare his work with 
 Raphael’s on the same subject. And it gives one the 
 measure of the importance of this man that the com- 
 parison is necessary, that it can be made with no one 
 else, and that in some ways he animates the main figures 
 with a larger feeling. That alone, in fact, ranks Dela- 
 croix beyond all modern men in the great question of 
 style and the grasp of the meaning of a subject. 
 
 62 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 In truth he was a stupendous composer. Studied as 
 mere arrangement of lines his pictures are valuable 
 lessons, but this fundamental quality is covered up, 
 as in the works of Rubens, by so much drama and ex- 
 ternal movement that one does not discover easily the 
 laws by which no great work lives in plastic art that 
 has not those qualities at bottom; the same qualities 
 which make all decorative work, that are all questions 
 of proportion, all questions of balance. Perhaps this 
 very point annoyed his opponents, even his slighter 
 works being so much more serious than they appeared 
 to be. But the admirers of Delacroix were all men of 
 great and persistent importance. He appealed to the 
 feelings of the poets and of the younger artists, and 
 the Institute was obliged at length to accept him; yet, 
 to the disgrace of the official architects and painters of 
 France, he would not have been elected had it not been 
 for the votes of the musicians, who recognised in him a 
 lover of that branch of art. For Delacroix the place 
 seemed important because it gave him a fixed position 
 before the public, always ready to accept any one be- 
 longing to organised institutions. He was a prudent 
 man and refused no honourable chance of continuing to 
 exercise what was to him a real call. He was also a very 
 generous man to his rivals and on certain occasions even 
 
 63 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 took up the cause of his most implacable enemies, men 
 who hated him beyond expression. In all he was a right- 
 minded gentleman, with a profound contempt for mean- 
 ness. We have the accidental record of his life through 
 his habit of noting for many years the small events of 
 his day, his methods of work, and his artistic opinions. 
 They are all to his infinite credit ; indeed, we might be 
 sure beforehand that such would be the case from the 
 nobility of his work and its detachment from the pur- 
 suit of public favour. But there is a significant side, as 
 I noted before, to his explanation of his artistic views, 
 that is, their conservatism and love of the past, and 
 the assertion of the very principles which his enemies 
 imagined he contradicted by his work. However, as 
 Millet remarked, “ They have passed and he remains. 
 Their voices disappeared hurled as against a monu- 
 ment.” His life, which had always been endangered by 
 illness, came to an end in 1864. He slowly passed away, 
 receiving the visit of the members of the Institute on 
 his deathbed, and saying when they left : “ Haven’t they 
 already bored me enough? ” 
 
 In his long and carefully devised will, dictated a few 
 hours before his death, the last words typify his loves 
 and hatreds. He asks for neither emblem nor inscrip- 
 tion on his tomb, which was to be copied from “ classic 
 
 64 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 forms with firm masculine mouldings,” “ contrary,” he 
 says, “ to all that is now done in architecture.” 
 
 At the time of his death there were still living men 
 whom he had influenced, as in fact he influenced all who 
 were out of the Academic School: Barye, the sculptor, 
 whose work resembles his closely, for Delacroix was a 
 great lover of animals and has left very many drawings 
 of the great wild beasts, the subjects also of Barye’s 
 genius ; Decamps was dead, who belonged more to his 
 own time ; Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Millet, were in the full 
 springtide of their great careers. Most of the ideas that 
 he believed in, they worked in also, but in other ways, 
 as he himself thought right. They too, were fond of all 
 art, and they objected to the narrowness of Parisian 
 teaching, and were also more or less persecuted by the 
 representatives of official art. 
 
 I do not dare to take up Millet in this lecture, but 
 I hope to do so in the next lecture and to connect him 
 with Delacroix. We must bear this in mind, that they 
 are extremely different in the quality of mind, in their 
 origin, in their social ideas. Millet, accused of socialism 
 because of his general ideas, which in reality are as far 
 back as the middle ages ; Delacroix, having the feeling 
 of the Englishman of rank, perfectly willing to have lib- 
 erty and everything of the kind, everything for the best 
 
 65 
 
SECOND LECTURE 
 
 private order that goes along with it ; each of these men 
 living in differing parts of society and continuing in 
 differing parts of society, knowing each other only by 
 their works. Therefore I can take them up in this way 
 separately and perhaps without injuring the connec- 
 tion. 
 
 66 
 
 ! 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
The story of J. F. Millet is a vision of emotional art , 
 and balances the record of Delacroix, with whom we 
 began. The admiration of Millet for Delacroix so dif- 
 ferent from him. Corot’s astonishment at Delacroix’s 
 mysterious power which “ frightened ” him. The 
 “ Amende Honorable ” ( now in Philadelphia) cited. 
 
 Millet saw in Delacroix the proper dramatic expres- 
 sion belonging to the art of painting. The theatrical 
 opposite in French art, especially modern, “ gave him a 
 distaste for the theatre itself.” The source of dramatic 
 expression, however, in Delacroix is lyrical. Compare 
 Heine. Origins of Millet in Norman France. His family; 
 his grandmother. The Bible and Virgil. His antecedents 
 and origins are really the subject of his pictures . In 
 this he separates from other painters. Therefore his 
 personal story is important. He learns as he best can. 
 He comes to Paris to study, also to work. He marries. 
 His wife’s death sends him back to the home life of 
 peasantry. He marries again: returns to Paris. Paints 
 variously. Is suddenly converted to abandon his methods 
 and subjects and to take up the life at Fontainebleau 
 which he has illustrated by his drawings and paintings. 
 His connection with the ancient past of France as ex- 
 pressed in the middle ages. Ideals of life, spiritual and 
 moral, little known to us here. 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 I HAVE chosen to continue with the story of Jean 
 Francois Millet because of his bringing a vision 
 of emotional art fit to balance the record of Delacroix 
 with whom I began. 
 
 Delacroix was Millet’s first and only admiration 
 among modern painters, notwithstanding their very op- 
 posite points of view, their extremely opposite training 
 end education, their social views, and a distinct antith- 
 esis, or opposite of character. You can see that if I 
 can fall back on the admiration of such a man, I cannot 
 have exaggerated what I told you yesterday. I cannot 
 have exaggerated 44 Father ” Corot’s statement, that the 
 other man (Delacroix) was an eagle, and he himself was 
 but the small bird twittering in the clouds; or his 
 astonishment at Delacroix’s painting, which we now 
 have here, the 44 Amende Honorable.” In a way it is im- 
 possible to analyse. He has given the type of the Gothic 
 interior building. It is taken from an original, but it 
 resembles it in no way. It is, as it were, a type of all 
 
 69 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 Gothic buildings of the late period. It was this which 
 amazed Corot, who said, “ What a terrible man he is.” 
 For Delacroix had passed beyond the limit even of 
 Corot’s long experience in the methods by which a man, 
 when he does a work of art, gives a type , not a mere 
 representation of a single fact, but a representation of 
 all the facts that have happened or may happen. 
 
 Now these two men, Delacroix and Millet, extremely 
 different in their natures, who used the most divergent 
 technique, in many cases could not be more apart. But it 
 is one of the characteristics of this group of men (whom 
 we misname the Barbizon, or Fontainebleau, men), 
 that their scheme of ideas could be different, and yet 
 that they could recognise a common bond of union. In 
 the work of Delacroix Millet could see the proper dra- 
 matic expression belonging to the art of painting, while 
 the expression of most of the painters of the time was 
 to him based on the art and methods of the theatre. 
 That, you will remember, we spoke of yesterday. As he, 
 Millet, once wrote : “ The paintings of the Luxembourg 
 Gallery” (the gallery of modern French art), “have 
 given me a distaste for the theatre itself.” But the 
 dramatic expression of Delacroix has another basis than 
 Millet’s. It is lyrical; it is an expression of personal 
 mood, of desire, of sentiment, perhaps only momentary, 
 
 70 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 and the story or image depicted is the method of imply- 
 ing this. Let us take an example of this attitude in 
 poetry, and remember Heine’s “ King Richard Cceur- 
 de-Lion ” : 
 
 Wohl durch der Walder einodige Pracht 
 Jagt ungestiim ein Reiter; 
 
 Er blast ins Horn, er singt und lacht 
 Gar seelenvergniigt und heiter. 
 
 Sein Harnisch ist von starkem Erz, 
 
 Noch starker ist sein Gemiite, 
 
 Das ist Herr Richard Lowenherz, 
 
 Der christlichen Ritterschaft Bliite. 
 
 Willkommen in England! rufen ihm zu 
 Die Baume mit griinen Zungen — 
 
 Wir freuen uns, o Kdnig, dass du 
 Oestreichischer Haft entsprungen. 
 
 Dem Konig ist wohl in der freien Luft, 
 
 Er fiihlt sich wie neugeboren, 
 
 Er denkt an Oestreichs Festungsduft — 
 
 Und gibt seinem Pferde die Sporen . 1 
 
 In poor English it is this way: 
 
 Right through the forest’s solitary pride 
 Chases undisturbed a knight; 
 
 He blows his horn, he sings and he laughs, 
 
 Full joyful in heart and happy. 
 
 His harness is of iron hard, 
 
 But harder still is his temper, 
 
 He is Lord Richard of the Lion Heart, 
 
 The bloom of Christian knighthood. 
 
 71 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 Now here we have the same thing as Delacroix’s 
 painting. Like King Richard, Heine has also escaped 
 from the oppressions and dangers of German captivity, 
 and still quivering with joy in the air of a free country, 
 occasionally he spurs his horse, remembering the cruel 
 past. So naturally flow from him the lovely lines which 
 tell of the English king, back from his German prison, 
 galloping again through the woods of England. The 
 trees call to him a welcome, he sits his saddle in joy, as 
 if new-born, and oh ! the thought of the past tyranny 
 makes him give his steed the spurs. It is a picture of 
 the king, “ the bloom of Christian chivalry.” It is also 
 the picture of joyful escape, and the picture of Heine’s 
 deliverance. 
 
 Quite otherwise is an attitude like Millet’s, though 
 
 his characteristic paintings are more than most the 
 
 expression of perpetual deep feelings — but they are 
 
 mainly based on actual sight, on a severe realism. (When 
 
 I speak of Millet, I speak of the man, the Barbizon man, 
 
 Welcome to England! Call out to him 
 The trees with tongues of green — 
 
 We rejoice, O King, that thou 
 Hast escaped from Austrian durance. 
 
 For the King it is well in the free air, 
 
 He feels as if new-born; 
 
 He thinks of the Austrian prison air. 
 
 And he gives the spurs to his horse. 
 
 72 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 the man of the forest of Fontainebleau, not of the 
 youngster who tried experiments and worked for bread 
 at the moment, and also was learning his trade, as 
 we all must, never knowing it well enough.) We all 
 know that he suffered much from the meanness of the 
 men who pressed about him, but that meanness of mind 
 that he felt in others has left no trace in his works. 
 Except for an absence of all vulgarity, of all common- 
 place, of all that may degrade, there is nothing in their 
 severe serenity, or sadness, to imply even the feeling of 
 disdain, a feeling so apparent in the man he most ad- 
 mired, Michael Angelo. A singular fate chose him to 
 express forever certain things from out of which he was 
 born, and into which he returned. His antecedents and 
 his origin are in reality the subject of his pictures; 
 I mean of those by which he separates himself entirely 
 from all other painters and will be remembered. There- 
 fore his early story is all-important. It has the note of 
 his pictures, austerity, the nature of the landscape of 
 his birthplace, beaten by the winds and rains of the 
 Channel, and simple and stern in form. It is occupied 
 by the somewhat harsh descendants of Normans, the 
 men who conquered England. The names of places 
 through that part of France indicate that from there 
 came the persistent invaders of England and adventur- 
 
 73 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 ers to other lands, Sicily, Italy, the Canaries. The name 
 of the first patron, that is to say, of the man who first 
 gave an order to our artist when he began to paint at 
 home, is the same as that of the bold Norman burgher 
 who, standing before the altar of the abbey church at 
 Caen at the burial of William the Conqueror, claimed 
 the place and the price of the grave as belonging to his 
 own estate, of which he had been unjustly deprived by 
 the building of the church. The Normans and their 
 descendants everywhere are fond of law ; fond of prop- 
 erty ; fond of everything steady ; they are acquisitive ; 
 they are not always pleasant, but whenever there has 
 been a chance for them to develop some great form of 
 poetry in action, or in what we call the arts, they have 
 done so. 
 
 On the cliffs of La Hogue, that overlook the sea by 
 Cherbourg, in the hamlet of Gruchy, Jean Francis 
 Millet was born, October 4, 1814. His first name came 
 from his father’s, Jean Louis, and the second from the 
 love for St. Francis of Assisi, that filled the austere 
 soul of his grandmother, who was the real head of the 
 family, according to ancestral habits. For each part of 
 what we call France has separate qualities, a separate 
 existence, exceedingly different, absolutely contradic- 
 tory, and what is called France is an ideal w T hich does 
 
 74 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 not exist in the actual people. There can be no greater 
 difference than between this Norman here and the south- 
 ern Frenchman, almost a Spaniard, or belonging to the 
 Mediterranean, or else the slow, ponderous Fleming of 
 northern France, or again of Lorraine, and formerly 
 of Alsace. All these parts of France, within the time of 
 two lives, have been joined together by law, by force, 
 by tyranny, by profit, by all the things that gradually 
 help, but they each in their own day had as separate an 
 existence as any nation on earth. So that when we come 
 to Millet’s origin, we can feel that this special man of 
 pure Norman blood had not in himself the same thing 
 to say, so as to be easily understood by the southern 
 Frenchman with whom he lived every day and with 
 whom he shared friendly ideas. But those ideas, those 
 which the French define as “ behind one’s head,” remain 
 absolutely different. 
 
 They were no commonplace people, these peasant 
 proprietors, of whom Millet was born, who in frugality 
 and unremitting toil, and in another characteristic so 
 important and so different that we can hardly realise it 
 here — “ in the respectability of admitted poverty ” — - 
 in religious practice and the fear of God, maintained a 
 large family on the few inherited acres. Understand that 
 it was respectable to be poor, and to admit it, and that 
 
 75 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 it might be a special gift of God to be poor, it might 
 be a special grace that one had to endure. It was a 
 special grace that one had to work; it was a special 
 grace that one had not all the temptations of happiness. 
 Such a realisation of fate gave to those people, and 
 probably might give all of us more or less, a dignity of 
 mind which is not otherwise explainable without this 
 inspiration . 1 
 
 Millet’s mother was of a family of gentlemen who 
 were broken in fortune by the great Revolution. His 
 father had a great sense of beauty, and early called the 
 child’s attention to the perfection of natural objects, 
 to the lines and arrangement of the landscape about 
 them. He was fond of music also, and noted the church 
 chaunts with the care and elegance of a mediaeval scribe. 
 Here again he taught the boy what could be made out 
 of the forms of letters. There was an uncle, a miller, 
 who read Pascal and Montaigne and the great Jansen - 
 ists of the seventeenth century; that is to say, he read 
 two of the great opposite thinkers in the very best 
 forms that one of the most classical of languages has 
 developed. He may have been also according to some re- 
 
 1 Let us be reminded of the Persian poet. Dejami wrote: “Oh, Lord! 
 Do Thou honour my head by giving me the crown of poverty.” 
 
 “ On the road that leads to Thee, make me draw back from any path 
 that does not lead to Thee.” 
 
 76 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 ports, and apparently also by something of Millet’s 
 story, affected by what is called Jansenism, that is to 
 say, perhaps a stricter view of the church than the 
 average church has developed. Another uncle was a 
 physician and chemist, once indeed an associate of Spal- 
 lanzani. Another uncle was a peasant priest, who, at the 
 risk of his life, refused to conform with the state 
 against his conscience. That was during the French 
 Revolution. Later, when freed from church obligations, 
 he helped, enormous in size and strength, at the harsh 
 field labours, still keeping the dress of his cloth and 
 observing its rules in little as well as great things, and 
 teaching besides the children too poor to pay for 
 schooling. 
 
 But the grandmother was the great influence. She 
 w r as the director and help of all: her austere ideas of 
 duty and religion, mingled, as Millet has said, with the 
 love of Nature, as they did in the life of that St. 
 Francis, after whom she had named the little boy Fran- 
 cis. “ Wake up,” she used to say at dawn, “ wake up, 
 little Francis ; already the birds have begun to sing the 
 glory of God.” That, you will remember, is a following 
 of St. Francis, of the story of his love of Nature as 
 expressing the glory of the Creator and the happiness 
 which all should have. They all read St. Augustine and 
 
 77 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 the “ Lives of the Saints ” and St. Jerome’s letters, 
 which the painter later read and reread, and also the 
 works of the great opposing bishops, Bossuet and 
 Fenelon. 
 
 Later, when the boy went to school the exquisite 
 charm of Virgil moved him. Virgil and the Bible re- 
 mained his books to the end. They are the books of his 
 great pictures if we see them right. 
 
 But the boy’s duties were those of outside work, and 
 for eighteen years he laboured with his father and his 
 kindred. His father, however, had always felt kindly 
 toward the boy’s attempts at drawing. One day, on his 
 making some special drawing, his father said : “ I should 
 have been willing to have thee taught the painter’s 
 trade; they say it is beautiful, but I needed thee: now 
 thy brothers are growing up, and I shall not prevent 
 thy learning what thou desirest.” 
 
 So that they went to the town of Cherbourg and 
 showed the drawings to a painter of the place, who 
 recognised a great promise and began directing the boy 
 in a training interrupted by his father’s death. Jean 
 Francois returned for a time to help the family, then 
 returned to study under an artist professor at the 
 Cherbourg College. Then for a time he drew and copied 
 pictures in the city museum, which contains some fairly 
 
 78 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 good examples of various old schools, and indeed at 
 least one interesting Rubens. The boy read also all that 
 he could find, from Homer to Cooper’s novels. Within 
 a very small place were some few advantages. I am re- 
 ferring not to his country place, his country living, and 
 what he saw that way, but to the ordinary teaching that 
 a much smaller town then, than now, could give to a boy 
 who had a taste for art. Then upon the recommenda- 
 tion of his teacher the municipality of Cherbourg 
 agreed to give young Millet an annuity of two hundred 
 dollars to allow him to study in Paris more seriously. 
 Two hundred dollars — of course we are talking of a 
 great many years back — and then, in France it would 
 go farther than our dollars do here. With this small 
 amount and a little aid from home, Millet began his 
 studies and work in Paris. He was then twenty-two years 
 old and now independent for the first time, and therefore 
 dependent upon his own resources, having to earn some- 
 thing to supplement the two hundred dollars. He had 
 read, as you see. Without knowing it he had prepared 
 his views of art and the direction of his technique. But 
 he suffered from isolation. He had already developed 
 a shyness that never left him, and he always felt this 
 when he met a stranger or a new question. This shy- 
 ness, the habit of silence, that we know to be born of 
 
 79 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 the fields, made Millet appear to the youngsters of 
 his time a “ Barbarian,” “ a man of the woods,” as 
 they said. 
 
 The young “ Barbarian ” had to choose a master, 
 and we have seen how he felt toward modern French 
 art. He entered the studio of Delaroche, then one of the 
 most famous and successful painters. Many well-known 
 names were among his fellow-students. They did not un- 
 derstand him, though his teacher in a way understood 
 the merits of the beginner’s points. They were not those 
 which he specially taught. Yes, there were many of those 
 students, men of considerable mark afterward, and one 
 of my great sorrows was to find among them at the 
 time Millet was beginning really to mark his very 
 course, to find a distrust, a disbelief, and almost a hatred 
 of him. 
 
 Millet’s consolation lay in the works of the old mas- 
 ters, in Michael Angelo’s designs, in the early paintings 
 he saw in the Louvre. They “ magnetised ” him, as he 
 said. When he was alone in his little garret “ he thought 
 alone of those fervid, sweet masters who have made 
 human creatures so passionate as to be beautiful, and 
 so nobly beautiful that they are images of God.” This I 
 take from a letter of Millet’s to his friend Sensier. 
 Millet looked at the eighteenth-century work mostly 
 
 80 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 later, imitating what it had, or at least some part of 
 what it had. He little knew at first that soon he should 
 have to imitate it, or suggest it, or recall it in colour- 
 ing, to supply the constant market which is made by 
 the furnishings and furniture of a period which is 
 still necessarily in the fashion, as being more con- 
 nected than any other with modern life. But this was 
 later, when he was driven to do anything that might 
 give food and lodging and a little time for graver 
 study. Delaroche, who had thought of making him an 
 assistant, chilled him by explaining that whether he 
 deserved it or not, the support he could give him in 
 his contest for the Roman prize, which sends a youth 
 free to Italy and study of the masters, naturally could 
 not be his (Millet’s) until another more favoured, 
 but less deserving, pupil was helped first. This man, 
 who did get the Roman prize, is known only by 
 the fact. 
 
 The whole course of Millet in art, the course of 
 French art, was thereby changed to suit a young man 
 of some unimportance to whom the great man, the 
 manager of the French art patronage, wished to give 
 a little favour. 
 
 Millet then was deterred from further remaining with 
 Delaroche, who yet had otherwise been kind and gener- 
 
 81 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 ous to him. He then decided to work by himself, for 
 himself. He had made a studio friend of some means, 
 who studied with him and helped him to sell little pic- 
 tures and drawings, that Millet made, by his friend’s 
 advice, more or less imitations of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. These paintings and drawings, which we call 
 among artists “ potboilers,” realised small sums, four 
 dollars, let us say, and sometimes they went down to a 
 dollar or less. Also portraits at one dollar, and with 
 these sums Millet managed to continue his more serious 
 studies. Once he went back to the town of Cherbourg, 
 where he had some orders, whose execution seemed un- 
 successful to the people there. With what he had of 
 his own and his little gains he dared to marry, and 
 brought his wife with him to Paris. Then began the 
 more serious struggle from which he never absolutely 
 escaped. 
 
 Delacroix, on the contrary, remains a bachelor. He 
 knows ; he has been brought up in another way, and he 
 repays the training of high society; he knows, and he 
 refuses anything which will entangle anybody else with 
 himself. Delacroix knows beforehand, without any ex- 
 perience and without any training, and he keeps firmly 
 to that all his life. Nor for the man Millet, of the tem- 
 perament I have suggested, with a view of the world 
 
 82 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 which I have described, so opposite to the other who 
 accepts the world at its worst, could anything else be 
 more expressive of the difference. 
 
 Millet’s work at this time shows occasionally the fu- 
 ture gravity that we note. It is usually either very real- 
 istic in manner of study, or is merely a pleasing ar- 
 rangement of colour and form sufficient to make an 
 appeal to a public for a reward to keep the little family 
 together. Millet later did right to close out his past. It 
 had nothing to do but to accustom him to the use of 
 paint, which is after all much like the use of language 
 in literature; to handle a brush; to get what other 
 people had been at ; to decide whether he liked this, or 
 whether he liked that, or the other. Some pieces of this 
 time are beautiful, but they are not really the man ; they 
 are “better painted,” if I may use the French sordid 
 term ; they are in more conformable technique than some 
 of the greater work and the more important; and by 
 better technique I don’t mean higher technique, I mean 
 technique which is complete in itself and rounded out, 
 which explains itself and has all its laws developed, 
 while the great technique of Millet with which he ended, 
 has no continuation for average men ; it cannot be imi- 
 tated ; it would be an unpardonable mistake, a piece of 
 insolence to try to do the same thing again. It would be 
 
 83 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 inexcusable. Certain things are allowed to certain people 
 and not to others. 
 
 Some appreciation Millet met, but not enough to help 
 him far. His wife died, and Millet, broken in mind for 
 a time, escaped and made for his old home. There again 
 he did better, had a little success and gathered a little 
 money. Marrying again, he ventured a second time to 
 Paris and was slowly finding his way to the expression 
 by which we know him later. He painted pictures upon 
 imaginative subjects, or stories, motives forever real 
 and lyrical, but which works were not formed by any 
 expression of his own passion, therefore not true es- 
 sentially. Then he slowly made his way to the expression 
 by which we know him later. According to the usual 
 habit of painters, especially at that moment, many of his 
 pictures represented nude subjects, which allowed him 
 to study further, of course, as we students know, the 
 construction of the human form at the expense of the 
 purchaser. Nor should I note the fact were it not that 
 upon this question of the morality of the subject turned 
 the decision of Millet’s later life. The question is placed 
 in a letter addressed to him by his grandmother, re- 
 ferring to his painting of an imaginary temptation of 
 St. Jerome. Its biblical appeal is the key to the mind 
 of the family. This is what the old lady wrote : “ Thou 
 
 84 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 art painting a portrait of Saint Jerome mourning over 
 the dangers of youth. Do thou, dear child, live as he 
 did; draw therefrom a holy profit; follow the example 
 of that man of thy profession who said ‘ I paint for 
 eternity.’ For whatever reason, never allow thyself to do 
 any wrong work. Lose not the presence of God; with 
 Saint Jerome, think continually of the call to judgment.” 
 
 Like all true artists Millet was in love with life. He 
 pictured it as it came to his memory or imagination, 
 but the temper of the man was too serious to pass over 
 that line which limits our view of life to self-abandon- 
 ment to its impulses; and whatever his subjects, his 
 rendering of them is essentially chaste. In fact he re- 
 sembles the great Tintoretto, whose important repre- 
 sentations of classical mythology are as far from cen- 
 sure as any religious work. They are merely the human 
 form in healthy, glorious innocence, realising therein 
 the words sometimes attributed to Saint Thomas 
 Aquinas, giving, to the comfort of us artists and stu- 
 dents, in a single definition the innocence of art itself ; 
 calling it “ The place of innocence ” ; the land of in- 
 nocence ; it has no hurt in its condition. 
 
 Millet had begun to make friends and earn a little; 
 whereupon came the well-known episode, his hearing two 
 men who were looking at a picture of his in a shop 
 
 85 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 window — some women bathing. One of them had said: 
 “ That picture is by a certain Millet, who paints only 
 naked women.” Our artist’s dignity was revolted. He 
 told his wife what he had heard, saying : “ If it suits 
 you I shall never do anything more of that kind of 
 work. Our life must become harder, and harder for you, 
 but I shall be free, and shall accomplish what has filled 
 my mind for a long time.” To this she answered, being 
 a woman of like turn of mind: “ I am ready.” It is not, 
 as you see, from want of admiration in the mind of this 
 man for the paintings, the drawings, the designs, every- 
 thing in which the nude has been most successfully and 
 splendidly used, from Delacroix, whom he liked, to 
 Michael Angelo, away back. He did not judge them, 
 or object in the slightest, but for him it was evident 
 he could not do certain things and have any doubt in 
 his own mind. The pair had a little money then laid up. 
 They left Paris for the country, at Barbizon, which 
 was to become the continuous residence of Millet for 
 the next twenty-seven years — the remainder of his life. 
 He found other painters there; among others, Rous- 
 seau, who with him was to give the forest adjoining a 
 celebrity in art sufficient to name the school, with a bet- 
 ter name, I think, than that of Barbizon, the school of 
 Fontainebleau. 
 
 86 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 Then began, in 1849 and 1850, the development of 
 the extraordinary career which separates Millet from 
 all the other painters before him and which will never 
 be repeated. The charm of landscape surrounding him 
 had seized him. It was sufficiently different from his 
 native open spaces, often wind-swept and barren, to 
 bring in him a new enthusiasm for what Nature says: 
 “ The calm and grandeur of the forest is so great that 
 I feel as if I were afraid: I don’t know what the trees 
 say to each other, but they say something which we do 
 not quite understand, because we do not speak the same 
 language.” That is in a letter to Sensier in 1850. Be- 
 sides these new varieties of shapes of things, different, 
 but yet the same; dawn, the midday heat, the cool of 
 the evening, the rain of autumn, the snow, every mood 
 of which brought back the man’s eighteen years of field 
 life. Millet again saw peasants somewhat similar to those 
 of his youth, to those from whom he sprang. All their 
 ways he understood : he himself could instruct a man at 
 work in the field how to do a better job. His friend and 
 my friend, William Hunt, our American, told me that 
 he had seen Millet tie up bundles of corn to prove to 
 some peasants how much better it could be done. And 
 this is the important point ; all the more was Millet im- 
 pelled to disengage from the realism which he under- 
 
 87 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 stood and could copy, the ideal type of each of the 
 functions in the life of the worker in the field . 1 
 
 Therefore it is not, I say, a sower, a reaper, a gleaner 
 that he has given ; it is the sower, the reaper, the glean- 
 er. In that he resembles the Greek masters, who have ex- 
 pressed themselves under the form of sculpture, let us 
 say, and who have given us great types, which may or 
 may not be portraits, but which have fixed the expres- 
 sion of certain human conditions in such a way that we 
 unconsciously think of them as the definition of things. 
 
 For that very reason Millet’s work tended to a form 
 of technique which resembles the idea of sculpture. That 
 is its great charm, its superiority, but at the same time 
 its frequent limitation as far as the differential idea of 
 painting interferes. He was forced to a balance of ex- 
 pression which obliged him to forego often many charms 
 belonging to the special art of painting, which is a 
 representation of surfaces. These great sacrifices, sacri- 
 
 1 Millet’s brother told me, showing me one of the engravings he had 
 made, from the painter, that he himself had posed for that peasant in 
 the picture, though he himself had lost the habit of the fields and was 
 no longer a peasant, with the ideas of a peasant, the impressions of a 
 peasant. But the real peasant could not do it so typically as this man 
 brought now to understand, though for him it was merely the memory 
 of his boy life, and Millet had made the brother pose after having tried 
 over and over again from the actual peasant. You will see that this is 
 entirely contrary to our usual way of looking at realism. 
 
 88 
 
“ON THE 
 CLIFFS OF 
 LA HOGUE ’ 
 
 NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF JOHN 
 
MILLET 
 
 k 
 
 £ 
 
 HH 
 
 PH 
 
 <S\ 
 
 JOHNSON 
 
“GOOSE GIRL BATHING' 
 
SPRING 
 
 THE LOUVRE 
 
MILLET 
 
 “LA FILEUSE ” 
 
 NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF J. J. HILL 
 
GLEANERS 
 
NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF AUGUST BELMONT 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 fices of beauties he himself loved, shocked the public of 
 his time and many of his fellow-artists. They will always 
 be felt, and will repel to some extent the desire for charm 
 that we naturally expect in the representation by colour. 
 
 But as they are logical and necessary and caused by 
 great emotion and noblest sincerity they will also be 
 accepted as final. No one without the mind and aim of 
 Millet can hope to tread a similar path, nor can the first 
 impulse that created these pictures come again easily. 
 It came from long inheritance of hard work, accepted in 
 a religious disposition of mind, in acceptance of labour 
 and suffering as the lot of the many, and indeed, as a 
 divme gift. It was based also on the rarest of all pos- 
 sible expressions through art, the ancestral respect for 
 poverty, and in so far he was misunderstood by most 
 people, especially by the critics of his day, who thought 
 that they saw social protest in what was really the ex- 
 pression of duty and resignation to the common fate of 
 most men. The echoes of these objections have died 
 away, but they served as a means of opposing the 
 painter and preventing his obtaining reasonable rec- 
 ognition, and were used to turn away his pictures 
 from the great exhibitions, the Salons, which is the 
 great French means of appealing to the general public. 
 They were even refused as immoral ; that was the 
 
 89 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 ground ; they were immoral, they were vicious, accord- 
 ing to these gentlemen, who were doing all they could 
 to disgrace French art themselves, more or less frankly. 
 The gravity and sometimes the harshness in Millet’s 
 works met an opposing current in the art of his time 
 among the official artists, the teachers of the great gov- 
 ernment school, and all those who desired to be amused 
 by paintings rather than to be moved. 
 
 Difficult as was Millet’s struggle, and though his 
 gains were but just enough to support himself and his 
 family, he had some sincere friendships among a few of 
 the artists, notably Rousseau. They formed a manner 
 of “ twinship ” in habits, yet the two were very differ- 
 ent in their social beginnings, ideas, and aspirations. 
 Rousseau as far as possible had been a manner of Re- 
 publican, a firm believer in new theories, thinking prob- 
 ably in little sympathy with the ancient, traditional 
 religious feeling. 
 
 Slowly the perception grew that a great master, ab- 
 solutely different from and yet belonging to classical 
 antiquity, was working for the glory of French art, and 
 as the one recorder of a side of France that explains 
 its extraordinary persistence. Religious art had almost 
 ceased, it had ceased to have any real expression. In 
 these works of Millet remains the feeling which marks 
 
 90 
 
THIRD LECTURE 
 
 the great works of the middle ages, in which the soul 
 of old France established a form as important as the 
 Greek. So much of modern France for centuries has 
 moved in another direction that it is but natural that 
 Millet’s work should have been appreciated more imi- 
 mediately by Americans, in whom remained a certain 
 mental tradition belonging to an older time. If in your 
 sculpture room you look about and see any fair render- 
 ing of some of the older mediaeval figures, you w T ill see in 
 a moment what I mean. Those are nearer Millet ; his are 
 more decidedly traditional than any other work could 
 possibly be. 
 
 Millet’s paintings, as I said, came to America for our 
 admiration at a time when he was misunderstood in 
 France. The very seriousness which troubled the French 
 mind was rather an appeal here than a difficulty. I think 
 it should remain a satisfaction and pride to us that we 
 saw a great deal further than the official dispensers of 
 fame in cultivated France. 
 
 The story closes as it began. Our artist painted to 
 the end in difficulties, very often in ill-health, which 
 came from earlier hardships, but he managed to bring 
 up a family and to live a life which does honour to man. 
 
 9 1 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
Decamps and Diaz may be fairly held within the 
 Barbizon circle; one associated with the place itself , 
 the other being a precursor and in personal sympathy 
 with the others. Both of these men were welcomed by 
 the world , in opposition to the fortunes of Delacroix 
 and Millet. Decamps was thereby removed from sordid 
 cares. With much nobility of feeling he withdrew awhile 
 toward the end of his career , with regret at having 
 been too easily successful and to prepare for more seri- 
 ous work. His beginnings : poor teaching in part. He 
 begins to absorb , however , the universal teaching of art 
 in the older masters. He travels in Switzerland , in 
 Italy , later in the East. His first impressions there are 
 so carried out with certain early teachings that he 
 forms a distinct manner , which even concealed is to be 
 discovered. It is in part the use of certain great lines 
 of division. Later he felt that he had something more 
 to say than the things by which he had acquired respect- 
 able fame and fortune. His attempts that way — which 
 are extraordinary as story , and fine as feeling and 
 poetic grasp — did not meet the public at once. Mean- 
 while , accident closed suddenly his career. Diaz — suc- 
 cessful as being always liked by men inside and out — not 
 often taken seriously. A natural painter; more so per- 
 haps than some more serious artists. His work has also 
 a charm of analogy which unites it to that of the men he 
 admired. 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 I N this lecture I shall speak about two of the paint- 
 ers w r ho may be fairly held within the “ Barbizon 99 
 School: one intimately associated with the place itself, 
 and the other connected by being a precursor and 
 in personal sympathy with these other men. These then 
 are Decamps and Diaz. You will remember that I was 
 to continue, with these two artists, a consideration of 
 the greater precursor Delacroix, because they were more 
 or less connected with him, by intention, by manner, and 
 by time. Millet, who is the farthest removed from Dela- 
 croix, was connected by sympathy, by admiration, by 
 the fact that he was an intimate friend of other men, 
 who were connected with Delacroix ; but he, however far 
 away in feeling, far away in origin, far away in age, 
 had one great precursory trait in common with Dela- 
 croix, the hatred of the theatrical, of the commonplace 
 so-called 66 classical,” in the making of what he did. The 
 theatrical for both these men, in different ways, was an 
 abhorrence. Of course they are also united by the fact 
 
 95 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 that they were both lofty souls, pure-minded men ; that 
 they did not live for the public ; that they followed their 
 own lives so as to live a clean life, free from what they 
 thought diminished the value of man. Of course their 
 contempt for the crowd was returned by the crowd for 
 a long time with more or less indifference, but time 
 usually brings in the mass of people; and prejudice, 
 which is bad in one way is good in another ; and people 
 who would never have known of either of these men, if 
 they had had to discover them, admired them at last. 
 
 Conversely to the opposition encountered by Dela- 
 croix, approval, consequent purchase, and still further, 
 freedom from sordid care was the part of Decamps and 
 Diaz, who, welcomed by the crowd, were always success- 
 ful. That these men had also some touch of nobility of 
 character is emphasised by the fact that this successful 
 man Decamps withdrew while at the end of his life 
 (he died in 1861), with a regret at having been too 
 easily successful, and a desire to prepare himself again 
 for another career. 
 
 He was younger than Delacroix ; born on the 44 third 
 day of the third month of the third year of the cen- 
 tury,” as he himself says : 44 That was the only remark- 
 able thing about my childhood.” He was a rough boy, 
 difficult to manage, fond of neither reading nor writing, 
 
 96 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 and was sent out into the country to be got rid of. 
 There, paddling in the river water, running in the 
 woods, burned by the sun, accustomed to do without hat 
 or shoe, he acquired a love for rocks and woods and 
 pasture that brought tears to his eyes when he was 
 brought back to school and had to learn his own lan- 
 guage again, and the dreadful Latin grammar. He says 
 that he 66 resembled a young fox tied by the neck to the 
 leg of a chair.” 
 
 Thus the desire to record those things that he loved 
 took hold of him as a child. He had lost them and he 
 could get them back by drawing. He was hardly out of 
 school before he entered the studio of a worthy but in- 
 different artist, who, however, taught him some geome- 
 try, some architecture and some perspective, upon which 
 materials he has curiously based the general project of 
 almost all that he has done, however much it may be 
 covered up by the story, by the light and shade, and 
 by a curious appreciation of strange and far-away 
 things. He then tried the regular studio teachings under 
 an excellent master, but a gentle and too kind one, who 
 let him have too much of his own way ; and he was bored, 
 and escaped, and lost thereby the chance of that fair 
 discipline, that abandonment of one’s self to the neces- 
 sary circumstances, which, of course, makes part of any 
 
 97 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 education. He remained to a certain extent therefore 
 uneducated, though he is a remarkable executant and 
 almost a great painter. Later he regretted all this, as 
 we shall see, when too late. He happened first to paint 
 some little pictures, was at once successful in selling 
 them, and he gave up attempts at a more serious educa- 
 tion. He made caricatures, which were a fashion of the 
 day; little hunting scenes, and representations of such 
 life as he saw about him ; all works which require his 
 further fame to make them worthy of notice. Lie is one 
 of that great army of illustrators which mark the nine- 
 teenth, and probably will continue marking the twen- 
 tieth century. 
 
 But as he looked at everything and at pictures also, 
 he began to absorb the universal teachings of art. He 
 liked the old painters, the old masters, and, at a great 
 distance, saw the greatness of Rembrandt. Strangely, 
 but wisely, another of his great admirations was Pous- 
 sin, the classical image-maker, the refined and sometimes 
 rather dry impersonator of a classical dream of the 
 Scriptures, or of the late Roman views of poetry. Dela- 
 croix had already begun his career with the sudden as- 
 sertion of the great painting of “ Dante and Virgil.” 
 Just at that time Decamps, who admired him, managed 
 to be able to travel into the south of France, a country 
 
 98 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 of light and shade; into Switzerland and into Italy. In 
 the subjects from the south of France and from Italy 
 which began his career, his successful career, the use of 
 the geometrical arrangement, of the perpendicular and 
 horizontal, of the great cast shadow, all of which marks 
 him in all that he does, are noticeable. Whatever he 
 learned, though he learned so little, was well learned 
 and marked throughout his whole career. The same ar- 
 rangements, the same perpendiculars, the same large and 
 small openings, the sense of architecture, the sense of 
 construction, mark even the paintings where figures are 
 prominent; and the figures, though they are very im- 
 portant, would hardly hold without the great lines to 
 place them. The subjects of a single figure big in pro- 
 portion to the rest show that however important a 
 figure, however it tells the story, it is really a part of 
 the story of all these great lines. Even in 44 The Shep- 
 herd,” though less visible than in other examples, you 
 will see that the great horizon and the relative perpen- 
 dicular of the rocks really make the story, and the 
 figures would have been placed otherwise in any way 
 that would insist upon these great provisions. In that 
 way Decamps is almost a great man ; he is so full of the 
 origin of what he wishes to do, and he so contrives to 
 make a picture of whatever subject he tries. It becomes 
 
 99 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 at once a balanced whole, a little world, with all its parts 
 interdependent. And if in “The Smoker” his great parti 
 pris is not quite so visible, yet the moment your mind 
 remembers the horizontal and perpendicular, you can 
 see again that the seat, and the chair, the steps, the 
 little opening above, all that is really the picture, and 
 that the man is arranged to fit the scene. 
 
 These two pictures are the reminiscences of his Italian 
 experience. They are not absolutely of that one date ; 
 they are influenced by his trip, and he continued for a 
 long time to bring in these reminiscences. But the great 
 thing that happened to him was to have been a little 
 later in the East. There probably began the desire for 
 an expression of a beauty in the use of great lines ; 
 a beauty of a certain kind, for beauty is not an exact 
 entity, the beauty that he found in the spread of the 
 horizon, in large spaces, in great horizontals broken 
 by abrupt perpendiculars, which beauty he pursued 
 throughout the remainder of his life. 
 
 He had already learned to paint in a remarkable way, 
 and had begun the habit of painting certain comic sub- 
 jects, notably the placing of monkeys in the characters 
 of men, as painters, as picture experts, as cooks, and for 
 a good part of his life he continued in this small vein, 
 partly out of fun, partly because it helped him to study 
 
 100 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 a technique which was becoming more and more success- 
 ful, and also because it brought him a great deal of 
 money. In these pictures he could pursue the study of 
 light and shade of which he is still one of the repre- 
 sentatives, although his expression of these mysteries is 
 narrower than what greater masters have accomplished. 
 I have shown you how he brought back from the East 
 the love of wide horizons, of great spaces rather, and 
 developed still further that little seed of geometry, 
 architecture, and perspective, by which he began as a 
 boy. In the painting known as the “ Syrian Landscape,” 
 you see this love of wide horizons and great spaces. 
 There in the East, in his travels, he also found great 
 shadows cast upon blank walls upon which fell a dazzling 
 light. Those ancient walls, gilded by the sunlight of 
 many years, showing their cement, the marble, or brick, 
 or stone of which they were made, blotched with moss 
 and pierced with narrow, dark holes of windows or of 
 doors, and making sudden perpendiculars upon dry 
 levels of pavements, or of earth, are the cornerstone of 
 his pictures. He made no attempt at reproducing all 
 these things literally, any more than the people he 
 placed around them or the broken skies which covered 
 them. Others have been more exact, but no one has given 
 the unity of that feeling more than he has ; and as he 
 
 101 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 felt thoroughly the difference between a picture and a 
 study, he has composed with clouds and trees and fig- 
 ures, and has made the variations of his atmosphere 
 to accentuate, or repeat, the main impression of his first 
 aim. You can see then in the “ Syrian Landscape,” for 
 instance, which is a fair example of the interdependence 
 of every part, how the clouds are chosen for those 
 masses of trees, for the horizon, for every part ; the sky 
 is a sky arranged by him. It may have been that way, or 
 he may have tried to see it that way, but this is in one 
 sense not realism. He was taken in his day for a realist : 
 and in a certain way, as copier of a certain part of 
 nature which he used to play with and make his picture 
 of, he was a realist ; but he is not a realist at all, in the 
 sense of so many who do not understand that a picture 
 is not a piece cut out of nature which could be con- 
 tinued indefinitely if you had an order for a little bit 
 more of it ; but that, on the contrary, it is a little earth 
 of its own, a little world of its own, every part of which 
 affects every other part. In that way this new man con- 
 tinued the older tradition. The “ Turkish Butcher,” one 
 of his typical Eastern pictures, represents the extreme 
 defects and qualities of his work. The house stands 
 against the intense blue sky ; the front of the shop pro- 
 jecting, blazes dully in the white sunlight; a dog 
 
 102 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 crouches near a mass of something, a goat is fastened 
 to the door awaiting its fate; bits of meat from which 
 drip blood are hung on the line of spikes, while inside, 
 the butcher, with bare arms, leaning against the wall, 
 smokes his long pipe. The light is powerful but oppres- 
 sive, the sweetness of the sky does not light up the 
 shadows, and in the very ugly subject one feels op- 
 pressed and troubled. That was the unbeautiful side of 
 Decamps, however wonderful the work; the heaviness 
 of the shadows, the fear of not having them sufficiently 
 indicated as cast, the anxiety to make use of the extraor- 
 dinary technique which he had invented for represent- 
 ing a wall, the surface of a wall, or the surface of the 
 earth; a technique not absolutely his own, for he must 
 have followed to some extent some of the Dutch paint- 
 ers, or the Flemish — at least they might have met him 
 halfway and given him the clue to follow. But there was 
 another reason and a strong business reason. The de- 
 mand for his technique was great in these particular 
 things, this particular kind of wall, this particular kind 
 of cast shadow, this look of solidity ; all that is different 
 from what other men did, and is done in a peculiar way. 
 And that he sold. But the workman has often covered up 
 the poet who really was there, and the impression is 
 rarely quite a pleasant one. But the impression remains, 
 
 103 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 and it is difficult to forget anything important of his 
 when once seen, he is so insistent upon the points he 
 makes. With smaller things he is a little the victim of 
 his time, which was beginning to ask for the machinery 
 of his work and cared little for much else. But, whenever 
 a higher subject, something he cared for more, some- 
 thing which appealed to him, took hold of him, then 
 Decamps became more than a mere executant, and in 
 the attempt at rendering new difficulties he moved more 
 easily. That, of course, you all know is the type of the 
 man who is either great, or might be great, or belongs 
 anyhow to the class above. That is to say, the weight of 
 the difficulty is the reason of his rising. This “ Le Chas- 
 seur ” is again one of the fine types of his landscape 
 painting. It does not matter where and what it actually 
 pictures, but we feel the solidity of the turf, the solidity 
 of the rock, the solidity of the path, the manner in which 
 the path leads up to the woodland ; we feel the air mov- 
 ing about that clump of trees ; we see how the horseman 
 may go around it ; we feel the construction he had put 
 in, in the way in which an architect, if he built with 
 earth, might like to indicate; you can see that nature 
 may have given that long sweep of trees to the left, but 
 at any rate he put it in such a way as to stop his picture 
 without your thinking it ; the picture stops on the right, 
 
 104 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 though it might go on indefinitely. He has arranged 
 that by the intersection of a few lines. The whole thing 
 is a masterpiece of engineering, of arrangement of lines, 
 massed shadow, and of course, as I said before, it is 
 a reminiscence of his early training, of his geometry, of 
 his perspective, of all that first beginning which showed 
 him what things were made of. And again, the sky 
 above may have been like that ; it probably was ; it has 
 no appearance of having been invented. At any rate he 
 has thrown it right in where it would hold together and 
 strengthen his picture ; it helps the solidity of the earth, 
 and yet, in itself, hangs over, instead of being a drapery 
 behind. 
 
 So in the “Turkish Children Coming Out of School,” 
 the “ Children Watching a Tortoise,” in the “ Watch at 
 Smyrna,” the difficulties of expressing movement and 
 character carried him with them, and the pictures are, 
 to a certain extent, more than mere records of a given 
 story; they are typical. Nobody will ever do over again 
 the subjects of Decamps. 
 
 One begins to feel the poet who more and more dis- 
 engaged himself in Decamps. The great landscapes, the 
 “ Syrian Landscape,” the “ Diogenes,” the “ Muses,” 
 blend together his great observation of nature and the 
 desire to make a synthesis, what we call a picture. “ The 
 
 105 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 Tower of Bordeaux,” which I think is tolerably dis- 
 agreeable, is a thing that some of us may have seen at 
 Bordeaux in the Crypt, where certain dead bodies are 
 shown in this state, and we all know that things of 
 that kind impress the public, who always like to have 
 something horrible at times, but I think we could do 
 without it and see something a little more poetic. Again, 
 the “ Porte de Ferme ” is singularly personal, but it is 
 not an imitation of nature. I think you can see in it the 
 points I mark, the use of the background and the seat 
 and the door and the woman, whatever is there, the 
 horizontal and perpendicular to confine it within the line 
 of the picture. When you think of the way Millet does 
 the same subject, you realise that this work of Decamps 
 is not exactly great work. But there it is, and it has its 
 character. There are “ The Witches,” a work of great 
 importance in his own mind. It has the element of good 
 taste and is well worth seeing; intersection of lines 
 again, so carefully used you can hardly realise how very 
 important those few horizontals are. Then again we 
 come to the greater landscape, that “ Syrian Land- 
 scape ” which we saw, I think can be called one of these. 
 The “ Muses,” in which again the figures are used sim- 
 ply to charm you with a little look of motion, or a little 
 look of passing, or moving, and are still merely orna- 
 
 106 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 ments in the general arrangement of the picture; but 
 they have, with the picture, a sense of peace, a sense of 
 far away, and also a sense of having been seen. The 
 composition, however simple, however child-like, is not 
 easily deciphered. You do not see why he placed his fig- 
 ures that way unless you think of the clues I gave, the 
 clue of the great horizontal. 
 
 To the people of his time he must have seemed some- 
 thing of a realist. In reality, notwithstanding his ex- 
 traordinary power of copying nature, he never did 
 otherwise than use it to record an impression he had re- 
 ceived; and in certain cases his pictures, deficient as 
 they may be, are final types of the particular subject. 
 The “ Turkish Cavalry Passing a Ford 99 is a beautiful 
 example of what I mean. The Oriental subject has given 
 him choice of colour and form and of a certain indi- 
 vidual movement for each rider. The picture might 
 easily be called “ The Passing of the Ford.” The gen- 
 eral movement of the horses treading their way; the 
 stepping out on dry land, and the drawing up when 
 landed, are given in five single figures whose separate 
 movements make one combined motion. There may be 
 one hundred before or one hundred after, or only those 
 few, but the movement would be the same ; and one feels 
 that the picture is the story of the movement. 
 
 107 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 The absence of continuous early study, and the desire 
 of making that study for himself and not for what is 
 called success, began to trouble him as an older man, to 
 whom a larger view of the world and greater sympathy 
 of humanity had come. And so when his education by 
 life made him desirous of a greater expression, when the 
 intension of his work grew larger and the human story 
 he tried to tell more subtle or more intense, or more full 
 of feeling, then the narrowness of his very successful 
 and very splendid work could not fit (and he saw it), his 
 newer and greater ambitions. It is infinitely to his 
 credit that he perceived this, and infinitely to his credit 
 that the great public are scarcely aware of what De- 
 camps could have done. 
 
 Accident closed his career at the moment I am de- 
 scribing, but already he had shown in his painting the 
 beginning of a larger life by the suggestion of a story 
 in the landscape which represents “ Christ Crossing the 
 Lake of Genesareth.” It is what we saw before, a lake, 
 a beautiful lake, nothing more, with high hills; but 
 somehow or other, you feel that the little bark that 
 crosses it is so important that there must be a story in 
 it. There is no other point indicated ; it is hardly visible, 
 but in some subtle way the painter has managed, by the 
 use of all the lines, to place at one moment of motion the 
 
 108 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 most important line, and that one is that of the little 
 bark. He had begun to be something more than a re- 
 markable painter, and his imagination asked for the 
 record of great impressions. 
 
 The great sketch of the “ Defeat of the Cimbri by 
 Marius ” is a proof of what he had hoped to do. It is 
 the representation of any great struggle, in which a 
 vast multitude charging against a smaller number on 
 a well-chosen point of vantage, are driven back by an 
 orderly counter-charge. One can see the story without 
 knowing who these people are ; one can see on which side 
 victory must settle. The spread of landscape is extraor- 
 dinary, as well as the impression of the quantity of 
 combatants. According to his principle, which is that 
 of the great masters, and which the group of artists to 
 which he belongs, however diverse, have always kept, 
 the movement of the clouds and of light and of shade 
 on the great line of the earth are all one with the move- 
 ment of the figures. This view of art is absolutely dif- 
 ferent from the modern realistic notion of a possible 
 separation of the meaning of the picture and of the 
 possible facts. For every one knows that the weather 
 may contradict absolutely what man feels or suffers. 
 It is the province of art to bring these things together, 
 whether it be in the hands of Beethoven or Shakespeare, 
 
 109 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 or any of the painters who are more than mere copyists. 
 We all know that nature is separate from us ; does not 
 sympathise with us; cares very little what happens to 
 us, or may happen ; in art we give it a meaning, and in 
 that way realism, absolute realism, if such a thing is 
 possible, would be the most absurd of all representa- 
 tions. In this picture, as in a great many of Decamps, 
 there is still too great use of artifice or tricks, which he 
 learned in beginning to do things for the public; that 
 of using some foreground matter, whether rock or tree, 
 or in this case some of the fugitives, as a theatrical ac- 
 cessory to push back the rest of his picture. For De- 
 camps was the victim of his tricks ; so completely indeed 
 that notwithstanding his affiliations and his many ad- 
 mirations, he never quite understood the translation 
 of colour, and light, and atmosphere into gradations of 
 light and dark, which is the essential mechanism of 
 painting, and which was the shibboleth of the school to 
 which he really in nowise belonged. 
 
 Corot represents that conclusively. Corot represents 
 what the painters know as the doctrine of “ values,” the 
 great battle-ground of the last century, and which has 
 remained to us more or less unsettled. That is, the trans- 
 lation of whatever one sees into a certain proportion of 
 dark and light according to the tone and general in- 
 
 110 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 tention of the artificial picture ; the translation of the 
 light and dark in any particular tone in the real pic- 
 ture, either imagined or seen, into a relative quantity 
 of light and dark in the other. In this case then the 
 colours, as we call them, are merely representatives of 
 light and dark. 
 
 Now Decamps, as you will see by the few examples 
 that you have about you here (and there are a good 
 many in the United States, but scattered), Decamps 
 never thoroughly understood that before. He never 
 felt it. He had so bound himself to success by the 
 exaggeration of light and dark at all hazards to 
 make his perpendiculars, as we have seen, count 
 with the great shadows ; to make his horizontals count, 
 that it was necessary then to follow this thought 
 and get at any rate the main element of his pictorial 
 world. 
 
 The Samson series, with which I shall conclude, are 
 no more than drawings. He had hoped for encourage- 
 ment; he had hoped for a long life. He was a healthy 
 man, had been a healthy man, fond of exercise, fairly 
 rich, having a great deal of time on his hands, and dis- 
 couraged by nothing else than that he felt how so far 
 he had not been strictly educated, but that he was still 
 young enough to learn — every man who is worth any- 
 
 111 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 thing feels something like this — and that he had some- 
 thing more to say than these things by which he had 
 acquired his fortune. But in the first place the public 
 did not care for these new sketches and smaller paint- 
 ings and drawings which he began to do. In the next 
 place he himself had so tied himself in his habits that 
 as soon as he began to try to break away from them the 
 result was disagreeable, distressing to the public, who, 
 not knowing exactly what he was after, only saw that 
 the man was not expressing what he really meant, that 
 something in the work was a failure. That began about 
 1857, at which time I remember the very things quite 
 well, and I remember the sadness of his friends, I re- 
 member the impression of doubt that came upon us as 
 to whether the man had, as they said, lost his powers. 
 He had only a few more years to live, though he died by 
 accident. 
 
 The Samson series are nothing but drawings, but 
 they are extraordinary in their scope. One realises how 
 later, and very soon after, Gustave Dore absorbed some 
 of the system laid out in these great drawings. And 
 there are also some Turners which are analogous. They 
 are skillful and balanced in arrangement ; but this in- 
 tensifies the imagination implied. In the “ Samson 
 Watching the Fires Which he has Lit,” the central, 
 
 112 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 solitary figure of Samson, sitting with foot in hand, is 
 evidently the cause of the entire picture. 
 
 So in the tragic story of “ Samson at the Mill.” The 
 hopeless solitude of this mutilated giant treading his 
 enforced round under the stick of the guard is made to 
 tell a story of continuous work by the figure of the 
 rat basking in the sun’s rays that fall into the mill. 
 And in “ Samson Breaking His Bonds,” one feels 
 the quiet of the night, out of which Samson leaps 
 at the cry of Delilah, all the more on account of the 
 quiet pattern of moonlight which falls on the floor of 
 the room. 
 
 Now in this one of the beautiful stories in which he 
 has used his experience of the East, he has used his love 
 of the great horizons ; he has used the pleasure of com- 
 position and the reminiscence of many studies to remind 
 one of a biblical story. It is <fi Joseph sold by his breth- 
 ren.” On the right you will see the well from which he 
 has been sold. It is as identical as if Decamps has said to 
 himself : “ Why the story is what I have seen over and 
 over again. I have seen slaves handed out to the cara- 
 vans ” ; and he has simply added to that a certain kind 
 of feeling, and he has clarified it and made it bold by the 
 artificial composition in great lines, the great solidity 
 of earth, the indifferent looks cf the beasts ; and above 
 
 113 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 is one cloud balancing over the entire meaning of the 
 picture. 
 
 These signs of a greater development in our painter 
 were not received by his admirers with equal satisfac- 
 tion, nor were most of them capable of feeling the poetic 
 influence that animated him. That assertion of the 
 value of the mind was unpleasant to the men of the 
 “ school ” and to the men of the school who still felt 
 kindly toward Decamps and contrariwise; the mere ad- 
 mirers of technique felt intensely doubtful, as always, 
 for what Decamps might have been is still unsettled. A 
 successful man otherwise, he had retired to live peace- 
 ably in Barbizon and to prepare himself for his new 
 fields. There, in one of his rides through the forest, he 
 was thrown against a tree and died from the effects of 
 the blow in August, 1861. 
 
 The Barbizon school is, as we are agreed to under- 
 stand, a mere convenient way of remembering a number 
 of men whose great characteristic is their personality, 
 and who, consequently, are properly not a school. They 
 represent almost all the tendencies of painters except 
 the strictly academic. There can be no better illustration 
 of the diversity of their aims and of their sympathies 
 than the fact that they all liked and sometimes admired 
 
 114 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 one of the men whose name is joined with theirs: Diaz, 
 properly, Narciso Diaz de la Pena. This general good 
 will has always followed his work. I dare say that all 
 of you have the same feeling. It was liked and bought 
 by many who were rebuffed by the severe intentions of 
 the other painters, his friends, or by their passionate 
 love of nature, which in him was the passionate love of 
 painting. It is this charming proof of being born for 
 it which has given to his reputation a seriousness that 
 even his admirers will not desire to insist upon. There 
 was also this, that he was an admirer of the works of 
 other Barbizon painters, and helped the men whose lives 
 and works we are now considering. For some of them 
 he had more than appreciation, he had enthusiastic ad- 
 miration ; his imitation of their ways of looking at na- 
 ture, his use of as many of their qualities as he could 
 make acceptable to his public and to his practical good 
 sense, have given to much of his work a charm of 
 analogy which runs it into theirs as if he had had the 
 same intention. 
 
 He was born early in the century, probably in 1809 ; 
 a Spaniard, the son of two Spanish exiles who had fled 
 from Spain in the terrible days of the invasion of Na- 
 poleon. He remained a Spaniard in so far that the an- 
 cestral love of power, of tone, and of colour never gave 
 
 115 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 way to the dry cleverness that might have marked a 
 similar French mind. Clever he was, but always within 
 the lines of a real painter, of a man delighting in ex- 
 ternal shapes, and in the beauty of the material in which 
 he worked. Thereby he and the men of the Barbizon 
 school, notwithstanding their not being absolutely per- 
 fect painters, differ from many of the men, not only of 
 their own day, but of a later time, who never seem to 
 understand that a painting ought to be properly a 
 pleasant surface to look at. 
 
 Diaz’s father seems to have disappeared, and his 
 mother took care of him long enough to reach Paris 
 from Bordeaux in a long, toilsome pilgrimage. She had 
 worked as a teacher, earning enough for the simple sup- 
 port of herself and her child, whom she left at her death, 
 when he was ten years old, in charge of the kind Protes- 
 tant pastor Paira. 
 
 Paira took care of the boy, and may have given him, 
 moreover, some book education, but allowed him an 
 extraordinary amount of freedom in his rambles in the 
 country about Paris. There one fine day, after playing, 
 young Diaz fell asleep in the grass and was apparently 
 bitten by a viper. His wound was badly treated by some 
 kind villager, and the result was that the boy had to 
 lose a leg after months of suffering, entering life dis- 
 
 116 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 abled, but still with a natural cheerfulness which made 
 him always refer to his wooden leg as somewhat of a 
 joke. He was apprenticed to porcelain painting in the 
 company of other boys, since famous, among them Jules 
 Dupre, Cabat, the distinguished landscape painter, and 
 a famous illustrator, Raffet, a really great man in this 
 smaller way. 
 
 The boy adored the theatre; at the same time he be- 
 gan an admiration for Delacroix which influenced his 
 entire life. He tried to study somewhat, notably under a 
 man little remembered, but who seems to have taught him 
 well enough, and who also helped him by negotiating the 
 sale of his first little pictures, “ which he produced,” 
 said this master of his, 56 as an apple-tree bears apples.” 
 It was fortunate that they dropped off so easily, for 
 they brought small prices ; a dollar to five dollars seems 
 to have been the average of payment, but even then the 
 Sancho Panza side of our Spaniard enabled him to put 
 aside money, and to trade successfully ; and he seems to 
 have slipped rapidly into the manufacture of every kind 
 of pretty thing which would sell, and yet satisfy sufficient- 
 ly his love of the beautiful surfaces and shapes and pat- 
 terns that painting gives. Therefore it is impossible to 
 be severe with him and measure him by the same rule we 
 apply to men with either real or assumed seriousness. 
 
 117 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 He began to be an example of a habit which since his 
 day has extended enormously among artists. That is 
 to say, collectorship, or the accumulation of things sup- 
 posed to be precious, what is roughly called in the shops 
 “ antiques,” and what we call “ bric-a-brac.” The middle 
 years of Diaz’s life witnessed the development of this 
 modern mania, fostered by many noble impulses ; no- 
 tably a turning back to the story of the past by the 
 writers of England, Germany, and France, and through 
 the better knowledge of foreign countries, and of history 
 in general and the history of art in particular. But for 
 all that it has become a disease even with people who are 
 not artists, and who have more right to indulge in 
 miscellaneous and haphazard admiration. Diaz then ap- 
 pears also to have been a little of a dealer, which is the 
 not nice side of the collector, but which is his danger. 
 Nor would all this be worth noticing were it not one of 
 the special marks of the time and thereby a form of his- 
 torical statement — the result of our time. 
 
 The paintings of our artist became richer in material 
 and in study, and worth more as he obtained higher 
 prices. With all his shrewdness he was not the man to 
 trade on a past reputation, and later in life he even made 
 some seriously grave mistakes in his work, owing to a 
 misplaced desire to give more serious results. He painted 
 
 118 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 a great deal from the nude, continuing as well his land- 
 scape studies, which helped him to give to his light and 
 fantastic figures a setting with some foundation of 
 reality. As I have said, he was a passionate admirer of 
 Rousseau and of Dupre for landscapes, as he was also 
 of Delacroix and Correggio, for he took only the best 
 of everything for his little manufactured world. 
 
 This picture, the 66 Descent of the Bohemians,” is a 
 famous one, one by which he established his reputation. 
 But where is the scene of the forest and trees that he 
 felt ' and which, alas ! the black and white does not ren- 
 der ? In others of his works we shall see more distinctly 
 the meaning through the black and white, and we will 
 also see a certain seriousness which must have come to 
 him from other men. There is the “Fountainebleau For- 
 est,” which was brought to America by one of our earli- 
 est collectors, the late August Belmont. It is the same 
 forest in which he was fostered and where the others 
 would often go. Here it is not a serious affair like those 
 of his friends, but it is, as you see, charming ; it gives 
 you a succession of woods and of all sorts of things. 
 How good it must be, when we think we miss all the 
 colour, his charming colour. 
 
 That again (referring to another picture), is more 
 real, more a study, like those of his friends, and it is for 
 
 119 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 all that a picture ; it is not a mere study. There is some- 
 thing, I think, quite charming, called “ Les Odalisques,” 
 half-way between a sketch and a painting, a composi- 
 tion, an historical subject, and a beautiful artistic 
 result; purely artistic. We see a great “chef,” good 
 things cooking, and yet with a sense of delicacy of 
 feeling, of treatment. I used the word cook ; I remember 
 a statement from an important artist with regard to 
 Diaz and Rousseau. It was a statement made to me, a 
 student, by my master, Couture, whose specialty, and 
 a useful one at times, was the saying of disagreeable 
 things about other artists. And he, with a justice that I 
 shall try to explain afterward, but which was a result 
 of jealousy, the jealousy of a smaller man, said to me: 
 “ Well, for an artist, between Rousseau and Diaz, give 
 me Diaz. Rousseau is a cook sent out to market, bring- 
 ing in everything that is there ; vegetables, leg of mut- 
 ton, carrots, all that is piled in the basket just as it 
 comes from Nature and that is all there is to it. It is 
 Nature, if you like. Now Diaz is a 4 chef.’ Out of all 
 these things he makes a mess nice to the taste, and you 
 have not got the sense of the cook bringing in the things 
 any longer.” There was in this criticism a justifiable 
 remark in the abstract, that is to say, that the render- 
 ing, the mere copying of Nature, is not the realm of 
 
 120 
 
DECAMPS 
 
 THE SMOKER” 
 
 FROM LITHOGRAPH BY J. LAURENS 
 
ASIA MINOR” 
 
 BY J. 
 
DECAMPS 
 
 A STREET IN SMYRNA ” 
 
 THE LOUVRE 
 
DECAMPS 
 
 ITALIAN SUBJECT” 
 
 FROM LITHOGRAPH BY C. NANTEUIL 
 
DECAMPS 
 
 “LE CHASSEUR” 
 
 FROM LITHOGRAPH BY FRANCA IS 
 
DECAMPS: “LA SORTIE DE L’ECOLE TURQUE 
 
DECAMPS: “THE TOWER OF BORDEAUX 
 
DECAMPS 
 
 “PORTE DE FERME ” 
 
 NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF JOHN W. SIMPSON 
 
 (from A lithograph) 
 
WITCHES’ 
 
 LE ROUX 
 
FROM LITHOGRAPH BY EUGENIO LE ROUX 
 
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 BOSTON MUSEUM 
 
DIAZ: “A POND IN FONTAINEBLEAU FOREST ” 
 
DIAZ: “TURKISH WOMEN IN LANDSCAPE 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 art; and it was unjust, of course, to Rousseau. We 
 know that he was not a copyist. That he had in so far 
 to copy, because he fell in love with each theme, one 
 after the other ; he was simply in love with the mother 
 earth; everything was precious to him; everything was 
 worth rendering; but he still had the love of the old 
 masters, the love of that good sense which feels strongly 
 that form has to be given to one’s imagination. I only 
 quote the saying as a mark of how, in the first place, 
 Rousseau was antagonised ; how Diaz was loved anyhow, 
 by anyone, all through, and never an object of jealousy. 
 The explanation is evident, and it is painful to think 
 that a man of some importance like Couture could de- 
 mean himself in teaching the wrong thing to a pupil, 
 and a pupil in whom he believed. 
 
 As I have said, all these things are more or less charm- 
 ing, being more or less anything. Nymphs, Dianas, 
 Venuses, women bathing, cupids and children, and every 
 variety of real or imaginary costume, Oriental subjects 
 (because they could be made splendid), all these are 
 subjects of this fascinating nonsense. And as it is non- 
 sense, there is no suggestion of harm in the nudest 
 images or most mythological subjects that he ever 
 painted. He might have introduced a murder — he would 
 if it would have sold — but nothing is in the least harm- 
 
 121 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 ful in anything that he ever painted. In fact there seems 
 to have been nothing in the man’s mind which was not 
 kindly and generous. 
 
 These pretty objects were sought on every hand, by 
 the dealers, and the actresses and actors, bankers and 
 bankers’ wives, by all connected with the stock-market, 
 as they call it, as well as by other artists and graver stu- 
 dents. And occasionally when this man has felt like 
 bestowing much time and attention on these little treas- 
 ures, they have the similitude of great work and are les- 
 sons also in the possibilities of painting. 
 
 Once only and at the end, possibly out of good na- 
 ture, out of the love for his fellow-artists, out of the 
 love for what he hoped was a nice ambition, perhaps also 
 to pay off a mortgage on the house, because he spent 
 money and lived nicely, he painted certain things 
 which were more tawdry, which were thinner, which 
 were weaker were less valuable in every way than 
 those in which he had attempted nothing. This is al- 
 most an approach to some of his monetary affairs. 
 There is a look as if he had attempted to be still 
 more pleasing to others and said : “ Well if you like 
 6 spirits,’ like these things, I too can do it. It is no more 
 difficult.” 
 
 There is little more to say about him except to insist 
 
 122 
 
FOURTH LECTURE 
 
 upon the help which he extended to those fellow-artists 
 whom we are considering, and who often needed a more 
 practical mind, some one to help them in their business 
 relations, for which they were less fitted than this sensi- 
 ble man. He had retired in 1856 to Barbizon, had also a 
 house near the sea, and died of some form of consump- 
 tion in 1876, with the great regret of painters as differ- 
 ent as Meissonier and Dupre, who were his pall-bearers. 
 Dupre, always a silent man, had been silent during the 
 funeral ; he said as he left : “ The sun has lost one of 
 its most beautiful rays.” 
 
 123 
 

FIFTH LECTURE 
 
With Rousseau and Dupre we touch the reasons of 
 the name of the Barbizon school. They are essentially 
 landscape painters. Corot influenced by the “ human 
 form divine” Rousseau' s origin and education: the lat- 
 ter a poor one. He with the others , Dupre for instance , 
 feels early the influence of the earlier masters. The 
 Dutch , the Italians. These young men appeared to be 
 revolutionists , being very conservative. All the more 
 they were opposed. Extreme sincerity and simplicity of 
 Rousseau. His wish to represent the entirety of his 
 sight and still to be within the limit of conventional art 
 — what we call a picture. His saying that he would have 
 liked to devote himself to the creation of one sole and 
 unique painting. 
 
 Analogies of Dupre , his friend , and of Daubigny. 
 The record of all these men is a lesson to students in 
 this , that the consideration of great artists as repre- 
 sentatives of problems , puts aside the idea of imitation 
 of formulae. 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 Y OU will remember that in our last lecture we 
 were still in the division of the precursors, 
 of the teachers and founders of the general direction 
 to which the name of Barbizon school has been given. 
 It is almost a pity that that name should be con- 
 tinued by habit, and if it were possible to break it 
 we would have a more reasonable and also in reality a 
 more poetic form of nomenclature. With the men of 
 whom I shall speak to-day we come more distinctly into 
 the reason of this misnomer. With the names of Rous- 
 seau and Dupre we touch more closely the reasons which 
 give to our group of painters the name of the Barbi- 
 zon school. These two men are essentially landscape 
 painters, with no influence of the human figure in their 
 work, such as we feel in Corot, for instance, who, by the 
 by, became a wonderful painter of the human figure. 
 
 I mean by the influence of the human figure, not only 
 the mere question of the introduction of the human 
 figure as part of the picture, or as a recall, somehow 
 or other of the school, or as a recall to art of the same 
 
 127 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 kind that exists in the pictures, I mean that particular 
 influence which study of the human body gives to the 
 artist. It should permeate in reality his entire work. 
 It fits, somehow or other, the work to the scale of man. 
 The curves become those of the body, or those that the 
 body describes. Thereby, perhaps, it is a more logical, 
 a more reasonable, a more philosophic proportion than 
 the mere abstract look at outside Nature, which is per- 
 haps too much akin to the view of the photograph. It is 
 of no consequence to us that the view which the artist 
 takes of Nature should be unprejudiced. We do not ask 
 that of him. On the contrary, we wish him to be prej- 
 udiced as much as he can make it beautiful or advan- 
 tageous to be so. If he is prejudiced he has an inherit- 
 ance, and his inheritance cannot be too rich. It is the 
 part of him which he does not know of, which is the 
 important part. The part he knows of, his training, his 
 reasoning, the result of his studies, are rather the 
 rudder, the governing machine of what he does. 
 
 Now in Corot, for instance, we have a view of Nature 
 which is constantly steeped in that peculiar influence 
 inseparable from the love of the human form. That is to 
 say, he is a composer, a builder of proportion, even 
 though the apparent record is only that of a landscape 
 at a given time of day. 
 
 128 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 I have to refer to other men, but you know all these 
 men, you know them all, you have them here in this very 
 building, you have them in the city. If you move to any 
 of our great cities you have them again. The shops have 
 them, the imitations of them ; forgeries fill galleries and 
 shops throughout the world, especially with these three 
 or four names, Rousseau, Dupre, Corot, Daubigny. 
 
 With Rousseau the love is not of the human form 
 divine — it is of earth and its growth, and comes from the 
 impression made by outside Nature, and a desire to con- 
 quer it and carry it away. It is a sort of answer in full, 
 and perhaps the most complete we can have, notwith- 
 standing its great limitations, to a question asked of me 
 by a child — one of my own children, now grown up, 
 a scholar, a thinker — concerning his other brothers, who 
 were all natural artists, who liked to copy, who liked 
 to draw, who liked to keep continually some reference 
 to what they saw, in their minds, or with the pencil on 
 paper. He said to me, using a form of question very 
 much such as the Greeks made years ago : “ Why do 
 you and why do my brothers copy these things? They 
 already exist in Nature. Is it necessary to make a copy 
 which must necessarily be bad ? ” This was the view of 
 a boy of twelve years old, and is naturally the absolute 
 criticism of what we call realism, if such a thing as 
 
 129 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 realism ever existed. But it is impossible. The photo- 
 graph even has its fits. The photograph even is not quite 
 steady in its mind. The photograph varies a little. The 
 photograph is sentimental at times, it is inaccurate at 
 least. It does some things it ought not to do. There is 
 no realism and never can be except in the mind. 
 
 Now the answer to my little boy’s question is what 
 Rousseau did; and it began also with the boy Rousseau 
 — this love of out-of-doors. At the early age of twelve 
 he was secretary to the proprietor of a saw-mill in the 
 forests of Franche Comte. His employer was a relative. 
 He failed in business and the boy returned home to 
 school; but having shown by some early attempts at 
 painting an extraordinary desire and capacity, the 
 family allowed a cousin, a landscape painter of whom we 
 know a little, to begin his training, under a teacher per- 
 haps as far removed as could well be from what was 
 really to be the view of nature expressed by Rousseau. 
 He was taught a certain curious formalism which existed 
 in the early part of the nineteenth century, and which 
 probably can never exist again. All the problems that 
 affect the modern mind were skipped; the problems of 
 light, of what we called 6 values ’ yesterday, of form, 
 of real construction. He was taught what is called draw- 
 ing, that is to say, what is usually and foolishly called 
 
 130 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 drawing — the following of an edge of some kind, say the 
 edge of a form, and the representation of anything by 
 some agreeable trick. We have yet the same fault, but 
 it is dignified by some painters through the extreme 
 difficulty of so doing it, the representing the thing by 
 the touch of the brush. The touch of the brush is so 
 difficult when it comes to be a very successful thing, that 
 it becomes ennobled. The touch of the little lead pencil 
 which the boy learned was nothing but a movement to 
 right or left, without any implication of form. I went 
 through that myself as a small boy, at no great distance 
 from the date of this man Rousseau, when I was taught 
 to draw by a teacher of the eighteenth century, brought 
 up in the eighteenth century, who had the eighteenth- 
 century habit, and if he had studied later would have 
 begun the nineteenth century. Our teaching of land- 
 scape was absolutely perfunctory. It was very pretty; 
 it had quite a little ideal of its own, there was something 
 behind it, but it was merely a touch which represented 
 this or that. But one cannot argue about these things. 
 The touch used in another way, as it is in Japan, is the 
 result of long study by a great many very great men, 
 and is of sufficient difficulty to be in itself a matter of 
 long study, and in itself also a matter of education. 
 
 Rousseau’s father was a clothier in moderate circum- 
 131 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 stances. Rousseau was born in 1812 . The family had for 
 a long time some connection with art. An uncle had been 
 a portrait painter, and a portrait painter with some 
 faint talent, at least with some proof of character and 
 of romantic disposition. His mother’s cousin was the 
 artist who first directed the boy’s study. Rousseau’s ex- 
 planation of himself is that his first teaching was so bad 
 that its spectre pursued him for years. But, however, 
 while a boy and up to his seventeenth year, he seems to 
 have played truant most of the time, and made con- 
 tinuous but timid attempts to express what he was be- 
 ginning to see. That is to say like the usual boy that 
 you know. The boy of eighteen broke away from the 
 wishes of his teacher, anxious to have him prepare for 
 the career of a reputable official artist by competing 
 for the Roman prize. In the mountains of Auvergne he 
 began certain studies which to his official friends were 
 monstrous, but which brought him the good-will of some 
 of the more important men of the new movement, and 
 among others the influential artist, Ary Scheffer. The 
 young man then became one of the new movement with 
 which he had really little connection, apart from that 
 sentiment of natural opposition to the government, the 
 Government Institute, hatred of the Academy and its 
 narrowness, and a willingness to believe that all the 
 
 132 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 new ideas were really his. Really they were not, yet the 
 youth’s entanglement with men of revolutionary and 
 socialistic leanings stood later in his way, and served 
 as an excuse for a continuous opposition on the part 
 of representatives of government teaching, which lasted 
 almost to the end of his meritorious and independent 
 career. This was largely based on untruthful allega- 
 tions. It embittered many moments of Rousseau’s later 
 life, and made him even suspicious at times of friends 
 who were in realty his faithful helpers and champions. 
 I only know by hearsay and by a few hints of these facts 
 of his connection with the more advanced ideas of that 
 time, but he withdrew from them so completely that, as 
 it were, the traces had been obliterated. Some of his 
 champions — and of course they encouraged his enemies 
 — some of his champions attempted to connect him, as 
 they did others, with socialistic ideas, with communistic 
 ideas more properly, in one of the movements which go 
 on forever of making art a mere expression of certain 
 tendencies at certain moments. Rousseau and his friends 
 were to be representatives of the new way of thinking, 
 of a new social form of government, a new social form 
 of life, of which I only knew in the way that we all know, 
 and with which we sympathised more or less. But on 
 the contrary, now that the storm is over, now that the 
 
 133 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 literary men’s work is only a curiosity, we know that 
 these painters of ours represent a form — the steadiest 
 form — of conservatism in what they did. The young 
 man was already, in 1833, a prominent person, fought 
 over by writers on art, who delighted in introducing 
 their social and political questions into the peaceful 
 domain of aesthetics. Anything will do for a stone ; any- 
 thing will do for a thing to sling with. Rousseau’s first 
 celebrated picture, “ La Descente des Vaches,” is a pic- 
 ture which to-day is almost gone, owing to many imper- 
 fections of execution. You remember what I said about 
 the execution of the men of the middle of the nineteenth 
 century being really bad, because it passed over the 
 fundamental reasons that make oil painting, and was 
 detached from the experience of the eighteenth, seven- 
 teenth, sixteenth, fifteenth, and fourteenth centuries. 
 This picture made a great sensation. It was refused at 
 the Exposition of 1836. It was defended and admired 
 by critics and artists, established the reputation of the 
 painter to all of the greater men of the day, and 
 brought him the friendship and good-will of such men 
 as Ary Scheffer, Delacroix, Decamps, Barye, and Dupre, 
 but increased still more the opposition of the men of 
 the Institute. Probably the Institute saw further than 
 these other men did — saw the danger of bringing back 
 
 134 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 the real past, that is, the past of ages from which one 
 can get greater, wider and more liberal inspiration than 
 from the narrower past just behind us. They saw behind 
 some of these new artists the Dutch school and the 
 poetry of Rembrandt. They saw the early Italians, they 
 saw the evidences of tone, the value of what would be 
 impressionism later, of everything that they hated most. 
 They saw the formulas of Nature and not the formulae 
 of composition. Our young men were revolutionists from 
 being ultra-conservatives. They knew nothing of what 
 they were doing in that way. They merely made the 
 natural opposition that any one does by going on in his 
 own way. All the more, therefore, did they suffer; all 
 the more did they not understand. The painters Dupre 
 and Rousseau began to work together, visiting together 
 different parts of France, establishing a community of 
 feeling and interest which was only once broken into by 
 a jealous suspicion of Rousseau’s. But there seemed to 
 be always more clear and special opposition to him, be- 
 yond all the others who were in the movement not fa- 
 voured by the Institute. Time and again his pictures, 
 famous in history of art, were refused at the exhibitions, 
 or, if accepted, then they were badly hung, and such 
 honours as were granted to others were refused to him. 
 Money matters naturally were also difficult, until a later 
 
 135 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 moment, 1851, when the tide had begun to turn and 
 Rousseau was able to earn a living and enjoy for some 
 time a commercial success. He was then able to help his 
 friends, purchasing under another name, for instance, 
 Millet’s salon picture of 1855. His commercial success 
 later was even mingled with the curious handling of his 
 pictures as of merely commercial value, in the same way 
 that we see in stocks. One of the great firms bought 
 Rousseaus to sell low and put them in the market below 
 the price at which they had obtained them so as to 
 make an opposition to the other dealers who handled, 
 naturally, the Rousseaus for a rise. Opposition to Rous- 
 seau took even the form of his pictures as I say, being 
 bought at higher prices. These fluctuations in his means 
 involved Rousseau in financial difficulties for which his 
 temperament was of course not fitted. His was the tem- 
 perament of a dreamer, not at all the man described by 
 some of his political friends as a reformer, as a person 
 engaged in general ideas ; no, he was purely and ab- 
 solutely a painter, a dreamer, a man in love with certain 
 things he had seen. And his living in solitude, and in a 
 state of opposition and intellectual struggle brought on 
 an irregularity of habit of work, which is singular, per- 
 haps, in the career of one of the most strenuous and 
 sincere of artists at any time. He occasionally painted 
 
 136 
 
NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF GEORG] 
 
NOW IN THE COLLECTION OP 
 
ROUSSEAU: “ LE PUY ” 
 

 
nvassnou 
 

ROUSSEAU 
 

NOW IN THE WILLIAM 
 

“ON THE ROAD” 
 
 h e 
 x 5 
 
 >5 2 
 
 INSTITUTE 
 
DAUBIGNY: “MOONLIGHT 
 
DAUBIGNY: “DIEPPE 
 

 
 
 
NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF WILLIAM 
 

 
 
 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 pictures which were nothing but the result of much 
 knowledge, and were understood receipts, not differing 
 from ever so many of the fairly great men, and then 
 again, putting aside all questions of interests, of his 
 money interests, he attacked new problems of extreme 
 difficulty, spending months, extending into years, for 
 elaboration, rehandling, and changing the problems. 
 
 He is known to have absolutely painted in a new way 
 works which were already among the most remarkable 
 studies of Nature that modern art has given. One case 
 that I recall was caused by his sudden introduction to 
 the question brought up by the ordinary little Japanese 
 prints that you know, the extreme luminosity obtained 
 by a few flat, clear colours, and by their relation one 
 to another, so that the mere quality of the tone and its 
 belonging to one or other of what we call divisions of 
 what we call colour, that is to say, that a red, placed 
 in a sky of a certain value, not too deep, is forced at 
 once into the background and into being a sky by a cer- 
 tain blue which comes against it. There is nothing con- 
 cealed or involved — anybody can see it as it were — there 
 is no trick in it. It is a scientific statement. There it is. 
 Somehow or other you see that the pink sky involves the 
 opposition of blue as a perpendicular against it, and the 
 thing is solved with no modelling, or modelling so slight 
 
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 that it is not worth speaking of, and there it is. And a 
 man like Rousseau has spent months, years, of hard 
 work, of modelling, of darkening, of lightening, of 
 every trick that he knows of to produce something as 
 good, or not quite so good as this thing, realised in 
 Japan by a naked man seated on a mat and daubing a 
 little wet water colour on a block. There is enough 
 herein to make a man of the temperament of Rousseau 
 (an investigator, an analyst) pause and become fright- 
 ened. Would it be possible to paint with that simplicity 
 in his material, oil? Would it be possible to use these 
 evident secrets? Would it be possible to bring them into 
 what he was doing? It was not. The question was too 
 large in reality and he merely spoiled for a time some of 
 the things he was at work on. The later painters, as 
 you know, immediately afterward began to take up 
 questions of a similar kind, and since then up to the 
 present movement we have had the struggle to repre- 
 sent light by colours, by an arrangement of colours, 
 an opposition of colour, a concatenation of colour. 
 
 Rousseau had undertaken, as it were, a personal 
 struggle with Nature, a wish to transfer absolutely into 
 the space of a frame all the characteristics of Nature 
 which he saw before him : the solidity of the ground, the 
 growth of plants and trees, the complications of foliage, 
 
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FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 the infinite tapestries of weeds and grass, the hardness 
 of rock, the softness of marsh, the flow of water, its 
 transparency, its reflection, the play of the clouds over 
 the scene, their make, their lights and shadows, and the 
 sunlight or cloudiness that drops through all this vege- 
 tation, lighting here and there, logically this more than 
 that, and yet also to have the view, not a piece cut out 
 from the panorama, but a little world complete in itself, 
 with the optical modulations which our eyes make and 
 which constitute a picture and not a mere study. That 
 is to say that Rousseau’s struggle was a dual one. It 
 was to take up the work of the great masters of the 
 past who painted pictures, that is to say, little worlds, 
 and to introduce into these new creations all that he 
 could gather together of the infinite facts which make 
 the world we see. Hence perhaps, there is too much in 
 many of his pictures, but it is not the too much of a 
 mere record, of a mere catalogue, of an addition of 
 facts put in because they were there ; it is that less than 
 what he put in would be sufficient, and that in a struggle 
 with all the difficulties of representing Nature, the man 
 must be, to a certain extent, defeated. But the cause of 
 this deficiency or failure in Rousseau’s work is not to 
 his discredit. It is a form of overconscientiousness. If 
 we had his portrait here I think you would see it in his 
 
 139 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 face, and this very defect gives to his work a relative 
 solemnity when compared with that of his great friend 
 Dupre, whom he touches so closely, and Decamps, who 
 is more nearly a recorder of Nature, as already seen, 
 a student unwilling to thrust into the pictures before 
 him problems that have belonged to other sights al- 
 ready matured, or yet to be studied. The question of 
 possible problems came to Rousseau’s mind as he went 
 along. He repainted a completed work to place before 
 himself a new difficulty unthought of before when he 
 was beginning the painting. He laboured for years over 
 a picture in the anxiety of making it one final expression 
 of the subject. It seems — I am thinking back — it seems 
 to me as much as eight years in one case I remember. 
 He explained to a remonstrating friend that what he 
 would have wished would have been to devote himself to 
 the creation of one sole and unique picture, to devote 
 himself to it, to take all his delight in it, to suffer for 
 it, to enjoy it, until, content with his work after 
 years of trial, he should be able to sign it and say: 
 “ There my powers end, and there my heart stops beat- 
 ing.” The rest of his life he said would be passed in 
 making, drawing, or sketching pictures for amusement, 
 which he would throw, like flowers, at the foot of the 
 work with which he would be satisfied. There were times 
 
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FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 therefore when Rousseau could sell nothing, and was 
 again in the straits of poverty and anxiety. Creditors 
 pressed him, and the perpetual uncertainty of his wife’s 
 mental health, threatening a separation to which he 
 would not consent, while he insisted that he could not 
 take his own respite at the expense of her feelings. 
 
 Meanwhile he continued his career, which became 
 more and more successful, but which was to end fatally 
 in the middle of triumph, and owing again to the op- 
 position of the government artists. In 1867 he had 
 realised a great position, was selling his pictures for a 
 great deal of money, had received the gold medal, was 
 elected president of the jury of the great International 
 Exhibition of 1867, where, however, he of all the jurors 
 and all the exhibitors representing the mass of the 
 world, was excluded from the foreordained compliment, 
 a promotion in the Legion of Honour. He felt the blow 
 more than it deserved. As I said before he had become 
 suspicious of many of his friends ; he had also believed 
 that fame would free him from the persistent malice 
 of the government school. He fell ill with something 
 like a form of paralysis and died the same year, Decem- 
 ber, 1867. 
 
 It is difficult to disentangle Dupre from Rousseau, 
 and in this case the name of the Barbizon school is 
 
 141 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 justified — that is to say, a union of methods of work 
 as well as of intention. How much one got from the 
 other, what would have happened if they had not met 
 and formed a manner of partnership with each other 
 it is difficult to say to-day. 
 
 Perhaps at times one feels the work of Dupre to be 
 less of a separate creation and more of a study, but this 
 is only at times, for there are many cases in which he, 
 Dupre, is very decidedly the painter of a subject. What- 
 ever the differences may be, his life is inseparable from 
 that of Rousseau. He was born in 1812, therefore he 
 was the same age as Rousseau. He was the son of a 
 manufacturer of porcelain near Nantes. He learned 
 something of his father’s and brother’s business, and 
 not unnaturally was taught something about painting 
 from the one point of view of the workman, which we 
 all ought to consider an excellent one. He came to Paris 
 almost a boy, and seems to have had his future de- 
 termined by his acquaintance with Cabat, who was of 
 his own age and also an apprentice decorator. They had 
 seen together the pictures of the Louvre, where Cabat 
 was copying, and this determined Dupre’s desire to be- 
 come an artist beyond the stretch of his usual work on 
 mere plates. Some help he got outside, but certainly the 
 acquaintance with Cabat, who is a real precursor also, 
 
 142 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 is sufficient to have placed the foundations of serious 
 study. And there were others. There was a precursor 
 of pre-Raphaelism : Delaberge, there was Huet, who 
 might be described as the painter of a general impres- 
 sion, and there was Diaz coming, and I have to skip a 
 dozen names which belong to the friends and acquaint- 
 ances of these young men, so that the boy of nineteen 
 appeared with sufficient importance in the great Salon 
 of 1837, alongside of great names. In a few years he 
 was in England and must have been affected by the 
 English school, some few of whose works made a great 
 impression on the younger French artists. Delacroix, 
 as you know, not only felt this influence, but had de- 
 liberately studied the methods of the English painters 
 with a view to connect again through them with a past 
 that no longer existed on the Continent. This English 
 residence brings the painter’s life to 1836, and then 
 toward 1840 he had become more intimate yet with 
 Rousseau. They painted in adjacent studios after ex- 
 cursions into various parts of France. At some mo- 
 ments in their acquaintance Rousseau’s more suspicious 
 mind doubted, as we know, Dupre’s services, and a cool- 
 ness of some duration ensued. The basis of this mis- 
 understanding was the difficulty Rousseau had always 
 found in the reception of his works by the management 
 
 143 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 of the government Exposition called the Salon, and the 
 withholding of any government honours. About this 
 time Dupre seems to have retired from public exposi- 
 tions for a term of years ending toward 1852, but his 
 importance was duly recognised and he seems almost 
 alone of the men so far mentioned to have lived in cir- 
 cumstances allowing him to pursue his art freely and 
 to help the men he cared for, notably Rousseau. The 
 steadiness of his career leaves little to say. He was one 
 of the last survivors of the men classed under the name 
 of the Barbizon painters, living until 1889 in a repu- 
 tation solidly established and recognised. 
 
 And a career of still greater evenness is that of 
 Charles Francis Daubigny. He was born in 1817, was 
 the son of a drawing-master who had studied under 
 Bertin, the representative, classical formulist landscape 
 painter, a manner of formal painting that you hardly 
 know unless, perchance, you have been abroad. It is dif- 
 ficult to define, being merely an abstract between a cheap 
 form of composition and the early influences of the 
 past — the eighteenth century and the seventeenth cen- 
 tury — the great paintings of Claude and others. So that 
 vaguely there is a little reminiscence, a slight something, 
 like a schoolgirl’s analysis of “Paradise Lost.” An uncle 
 and aunt were successful miniature painters, so that the 
 
 144 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 boy began his life, as he ended it, under the influence of 
 the studio. When a child he was much in the country as 
 a remedy for delicate health, and became acquainted 
 with the land he painted later. As a youngster he sup- 
 ported himself, learned etching and engraving, and put 
 aside enough money to allow him and a friend to go to 
 Italy. It is true he went on foot, but all the better for 
 what they saw and enjoyed. He returned on foot also 
 and, like himself, still having money in his pocket. He 
 helped to restore the pictures in the Louvre and appar- 
 ently lost his place by expressing an opinion as to the 
 propriety of some of the repairs he was asked to do. 
 He managed to visit Holland and admire the old paint- 
 ers, and on his return made many friends among artists 
 of various temperaments. He even attempted to get the 
 Roman prize, and seems to have been disqualified by a 
 technical rule, namely, not having attended school the 
 day before the examination. This absolutely threw him 
 out. One may wonder what would otherwise have hap- 
 pened with so easy going and plastic a nature, which 
 was also a sensitive one. His missing the Roman prize 
 turned him to the study of outside Nature in the free 
 way we have now learned to accept as being the only 
 possible way; but he kept to his engraving as a means 
 of support, and made his painting his ambition, his 
 
 145 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 pleasure, his glory. The simplicity of mind with which 
 he looked at things has made his pictures stand well 
 alongside of the more powerful men with whom he sym- 
 pathised. For they are more like studies, that is, like the 
 representations of the pleasure he took in certain scenes. 
 They might often be pictures but they are very often 
 slices cut out of Nature. And in that way he departs 
 somewhat from his friends whose names live with us. All 
 those that we have named are builders of pictures, and 
 yet one bond unites them, a great love of Nature and a 
 certain reaching out of the hands back to the greater 
 art of the past. As Daubigny etched and engraved con- 
 tinuously, one sees in these smaller matters the use for 
 his independence. As he attempted greater ones he 
 entered more and more necessarily into the idea of the 
 deliberate work of art ; but the charm lies greatly in his 
 fluidity, in his acceptance of very many different inten- 
 tions, so that he is hard to define from the absence of 
 any strain of intention in his career. As we have seen, 
 he prospered, was able to provide for his people, and at 
 the end of his life to paint just as he liked. General 
 friendship and good-will and admiration surrounded 
 him. He died in 1878, leaving Dupre the last repre- 
 sentative of the group. 
 
 For my next lecture I propose to take up Corot, who 
 
 146 
 
FIFTH LECTURE 
 
 is a very large figure, not only by what he has done 
 himself but by all that he implies. Perhaps I shall re- 
 sume somewhat what I have already said, and explain 
 to you how the consideration of these men (who are 
 necessarily a part of yourselves as far as you do any- 
 thing in the way of painting), how far knowing them, 
 looking at them separately and analysing them — may 
 be of use to you. I think that the consideration of 
 greater artists as representatives of problems, puts 
 aside, or may help to put aside, from the younger man 
 the idea of mere imitation, the idea of using them in a 
 cheap way, as a formula, which, if their souls could 
 penetrate ours, would probably be the last insult that 
 they could obtain. For one thing above all else they did, 
 and that was to protest all their lives against a doctrine 
 of mere form. 
 
 147 
 

 
 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
Millet separates more entirely from the general in- 
 tentions of the artists we are considering. In Corot 
 we have also a distinct separation in that , during the 
 failures or successes of others , Corot was forming a style 
 for himself which was to appear newer , hut which was , 
 in reality , the result of a desire to retain the teachings 
 of the past , and also naturally to represent external 
 nature in some moods which had no previous interpreter. 
 Corot 9 leaving trade , begim painting not early in life. 
 His strong body and good nature well inherited car- 
 ried him thankfully through life. Recognition of his 
 work very slow. He studies in Italy , and in reality 
 never separates from its lessons and influence. The 
 human form he is always in sympathy with , in con- 
 tradiction with most landscape painters. His study 
 that way influences all his work ; and as we shall see he 
 becomes an extraordinary figure painter outside of land- 
 scape. But in his landscapes the figures are at ease in 
 a manner only approached by very few , as they are in 
 Nature. 
 
 Explanations of these points; again a reference to 
 the theatrical as opposed to the natural; and also to 
 the recognition of the use of convention , not to be con- 
 fused with the representation of Nature. The use of the 
 frame. The bad technique of the painting of the last 
 century. A summary of the values of the artists consid- 
 ered here. Dupre’s large definition of their attitude. 
 The encouragement to be derived from their works 
 and lives . 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 I N this last lecture I shall talk to you about Corot 
 and probably say a few things of his relation to 
 the other men whom we have chosen to connect with 
 him under the name, the unfortunate name, of the 
 Barbizon school. You know that Millet separates more 
 entirely than any of them from the general inten- 
 tions of the school, and in Corot we also have a very 
 distinct separation. During the failures and successes 
 of the other men of whom I have spoken, the land- 
 scape painter Corot was slowly forming a style for 
 himself which was to appear much newer than the man- 
 ners of these coeval artists and yet was the result of a 
 similar desire to retain the teachings of the past in some 
 especial ways, of which the artist was fond, and which 
 happened to have had no previous interpreter. As he be- 
 gan late, somewhat obscurely and certainly modestly, 
 Corot appears a younger artist than he was. In reality 
 he was born in 1796, in what is known as the year 8, 
 the eighth year of the foundation of the fi< one and in- 
 
 151 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 divisible Republic” of France. Corot came of a good 
 peasant stock of Burgundy, of which origin he was 
 proud and from which he inherited, perhaps, the strong 
 body and sturdy good nature which carried him thank- 
 fully through life, but this was not direct or near ; for 
 I am talking of the father of his grandfather. Corot’s 
 mother was a successful milliner, owning her house on 
 a quay of the Seine, and his father was a thrifty trades- 
 man. After the usual school days passed away from 
 Paris in that charming city of Rouen, far down the 
 great river Seine, the boy was employed in a draper’s 
 shop from 1812 to 1820 , a disagreeable discipline, to 
 which he attributed, however, his habits of order and 
 regularity, so regular that he timed within three min- 
 utes each morning his appearance at his studio. When a 
 boy he had made the acquaintance of a landscape painter 
 of whom we know little, who is not worth insisting upon, 
 and he had obtained some drawing lessons. He has re- 
 corded that in his earliest childhood he had fallen in love 
 with Nature, with out-of-doors and with certain moods 
 of Nature which he used to see in his hurried walks at 
 dusk, by the big trees or by the side of the river, ac- 
 companied by his guardian, who himself was fond of 
 solitude and took him to out-of-the-way places in walks. 
 When the time came that the boy desired more than 
 
 152 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 anything else in the world to become a painter, his 
 father was able to give him a small annuity, and 
 later his income was sufficient for his always modest 
 needs. We have any number of anecdotes about Corot; 
 there is one which explains the artistic mind, which was 
 quoted to me first by a business friend with whom I 
 was discussing the curious impracticability of the ar- 
 tistic temperament. Corot had reported to his employer 
 that he had successfully sold a quantity of beautiful 
 Lyons silk. He expected some acknowledgment, on the 
 contrary the draper explained to him that there was 
 no merit whatever in disposing of really excellent goods, 
 the only real merit was to sell what was bad. Whereupon 
 Corot perceived that this is exactly what an artist can- 
 not do; and he decided to quit commerce. He obtained 
 his father’s consent for his career as a painter on what 
 was to him a large annuity of three hundred dollars. He 
 was over thirty when he first began to paint on the 
 very day that his father freed him, going straight out- 
 of-doors and painting near the shop. He used to show 
 that first picture of his to his friends, saying : “ It is 
 as young as ever; it marks the hour and the time of 
 day when I did it. But Mademoiselle Rose, who worked 
 at my mother’s, and who looked at me while at my work, 
 and I — how do we stand it, and where are we P ” 
 
 153 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 He studied faithfully under the direction of his mas- 
 ters, who represented the school of the artificial, mis- 
 named “ classical ” formula, in all its rigour. In 1825 
 he went to Rome to carry out still further this mode of 
 study, but curiously enough began there to study for 
 himself in exactly the opposite manner to the way incul- 
 cated, without probably feeling in the recesses of his 
 mind that he was contradicting what he had been told. 
 He made rapid notes of everything that moved, that was 
 transitory and different from the posing of the studio. 
 In that way he learned the difference between Nature on 
 the wing, as it were, and that artificial combination of 
 parts successfully adjusted, which is the usual founda- 
 tion of the picture or the statue made in the studio. I 
 cannot too much insist upon that. In every one of these 
 talks I have in some form or other referred to it, and 
 with these men of our talks the idea was so grounded and 
 so natural that they were not aware of the exceeding 
 difference they were making at the beginning of their 
 career. I said “ the usual foundation of the picture or 
 the statue made in the studio.” In talking with M. Rodin, 
 the sculptor, when I first made his acquaintance some 
 ten or twelve years ago, we agreed over this fact which 
 had made me admire his work, though I had seen it only 
 a few days before for the first time. The figures which 
 
 154 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 he built were no abstract; even if they were alone. In 
 groups they were related to each other all the way 
 through. If the subject were but a single figure, that 
 figure did not move in space but moved as if other human 
 figures might possibly interfere or be present. Every 
 being, as you see it go along (you yourself included), 
 has a motion related to other beings or to the place it is 
 in. This is not so of course on the stage, where the 
 place is arranged for the stage walk and the stage 
 gesture, or on the’ studio model stand with nothing to 
 get in its way. Every part of two people walking to- 
 gether, or two animals rising, pulling or moving to- 
 gether, is influenced by their being in common, apart 
 from the chance of meeting others, which is another 
 complication. As an example you have but to look at 
 photographs of people walking in the street. 
 
 Now that is at the bottom of the reasons why these 
 men are a lesson. Not more than the great men of the 
 past, perhaps not as much, but they are nearest to us, 
 and thereby a little more visible, and we know more of 
 their traits, and we know more of their methods, and 
 we ourselves are to a certain extent part of them. You 
 will remember how I insisted, but not enough, upon the 
 point in Delacroix’s “ Women of Algiers ” that these 
 people moved or sat in reference to each other, in ref- 
 
 155 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 erence to the place they were in. They can get up and 
 change places and one almost feels that certainly they 
 will do so. That is not what one sees in the very excellent 
 and handsome pictures of French artists of the Institute 
 when they paint original scenes. There the theatrical 
 always prevails, and one cannot believe for a moment 
 that each person is free to get up and spoil his “ part.” 
 Of course all is fair in art, but we had better also see 
 clearly what we are looking at, and not accept for real- 
 ism what is really make-believe. 
 
 At the time that Corot turned his attention to such 
 variations of Nature and stocked his unconscious mem- 
 ory with these movements of line, he retained that part 
 of his training which obliged him to exercise firmness 
 and precision, and his studies in that direction are still 
 models of very complete observation. The first one that 
 we saw on the screen reminds us of that, but of course 
 you will have seen a certain number of those studies of 
 Italy in which accuracy is evidently a great part of 
 his intention. The work that he was doing was already 
 a little beyond the average of school formulae, though a 
 few of the better artists of the classical school en- 
 couraged him, for which the kindly man was forever 
 grateful. 
 
 In 1827 Corot began exhibiting regularly in the 
 156 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 official exhibition which we call the Salon. He continued 
 to the day of his death in 1875. If he was discouraged 
 by being misunderstood, he was patient and he made no 
 protest. The critics of the day passed over his work. 
 He sold nothing, and the admiration of a few artists 
 rather impressed upon the public that there was some- 
 thing mysterious and overaesthetic in his work. That we 
 know ourselves from our own sad experience. It is only 
 just now that Mr. Whistler, for example, the myster- 
 ious, seems more common property and not an extraor- 
 dinary example of curiosity. The representatives, too, 
 of official art were slow to understand that this man 
 did not believe himself to be at all revolutionary, but 
 was in fact a worshipper of all that they preached, but 
 which, alas! he and they practised differently. With 
 fifteen or twenty years of waiting some more open 
 recognition came at length. Corot went again to Italy 
 and carried out still further the direction of his studies. 
 Then he began to be recognised, but was still considered 
 strange. In 1847 he was made a Knight of the Legion 
 of Honour, a form of acknowledgment which made his 
 father increase the allowance of this man now past 
 middle age. 
 
 More and more years passed on, and toward the 
 end of the fifties Corot, while not triumphant, 
 
 157 
 
 was 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 known and even admired beyond the circle of his great 
 admirers, the other men of whom I am talking. The new 
 poetic feeling in his treatment of well-worn subjects be- 
 gan to be recognised, and the accuracy of impression 
 of those of his paintings which seem mere records of 
 Nature, was understood better and better by the many 
 artists who had started out to conquer the different 
 phases of out-of-door appearances. Further than any of 
 them he carried the translation of special light and 
 colour into what we call values, that is to say, the rela- 
 tion of light and dark of any place in the entire scope 
 of the picture. 
 
 He was no longer an eccentric ; he was a master, evi- 
 dently capable of handling easily some of the most 
 formidable problems that the painter meets. But it re- 
 quired still another decade to affirm this for every one, 
 and perhaps even the next quarter of a century was 
 necessary to place him, just before his death, in his 
 secure position. Meanwhile he was looked at with friend- 
 ly feeling and even with affection by all who knew him. 
 His kindness to all who needed it, his sincere admiration 
 for those who deserved it, the simplicity and serenity of 
 his mind gave him a position free from all envy, and 
 allowed those who stood in his way to forgive him more 
 easily the harm they had done him. He was charitable 
 
 158 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 and when he began to make money he at once helped 
 others with it. As he said : “ It all comes back again 
 somehow.” 
 
 In 1870, when he saw that the siege of Paris was in- 
 evitable, he returned to Paris to help in the ambulances 
 and among the poor, spending what was a large sum 
 for him, and yet managing even then to go on with his 
 work as a consolation in those dark days. And he was 
 happy in it (as his paintings show). He said to another 
 painter a few hours before his death : “ Truly, if my 
 hour has come I shall have nothing to complain of. For 
 fifty- three years I have been a painter. I have there- 
 fore been permitted to devote myself entirely to what I 
 love most in the world. I have never suffered from pov- 
 erty. I have had good parents and excellent friends. I 
 can only be thankful to God.” This was in the begin- 
 ning of 1875. Corot therefore lived during the entire 
 movement of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Only two of the men who belonged to his group out- 
 lived him — Dupre, who died in 1882, Daubigny dying 
 in 1878. He belonged to them in so far that he was 
 especially fond of Nature in all its aspects, though he 
 more especially loved certain features of landscape 
 which he saw more frequently and also certain kinds of 
 days which seemed to him especially lovely. A letter of 
 
 159 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 his, describing the delightful day of a landscape painter, 
 tells just what he liked most. “ He has watched for the 
 dawn ” ; “ Nature is behind a white veil, on which some 
 masses of form are vaguely indicated. Everything smells 
 sweet, everything trembles under the invigorating 
 breezes of the dawn. The sun begins to rend the veil of 
 gauze. The vapours of night still hang like silver tufts 
 of cool green grass. The leaves feel cold and move to 
 and fro in the morning air. Under the leaves the unseen 
 birds are singing. It sounds as if the flowers were saying 
 their morning prayers. We can see nothing, but the 
 landscape is all there, all perfect behind the transparent 
 gauze. The mist rises and rises and pales in the sun. 
 And rising it discloses the river’s silver scales, the 
 meads, the trees, the cottages, the vanishing distance. 
 We can distinguish now all that we divined before. The 
 sun has risen, all things breaking forth into glistening 
 and glittering and shining and a full flood of light, 
 of pale, caressing light — as yet. The sun grows hot — 
 we can see too much now. Let us go home.” 
 
 The wet morning and the dewy eve, then, were what 
 he painted most — and on that side of representing mo- 
 ments in Nature, he was closely affiliated to those of his 
 day who were moving more and more toward realism. 
 For all else he held on to the sequence of the greater 
 
 160 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 masters of the classical past. It needs not for us to 
 follow his choice of stories, his pleasant poetical legends 
 in landscape, derived from what he saw about him, or 
 remembered of Italy. The essence of those paintings, 
 even when most veiled by the movements of light and 
 shade, is the arrangement of light and the proportion 
 of space. It is that which gives the strange recall of 
 something which we have dreamed of, which we knew be- 
 fore. It is the recall of all the solemn dispositions of 
 light and space which have come down to us from all 
 time. In such landscapes he has placed figures under 
 influences equally divided. They are placed as if they 
 had been really seen ; they have the look of realism very 
 often, and they are so seen in that they are intimately 
 associated with the space that holds them, with an ac- 
 curacy far beyond that of the majority of the most 
 accurate representations. They are so placed that they 
 could move; they do not look as if the painter had 
 chosen their position, but look as if he had only re- 
 corded what he saw, and at the same time in reality they 
 are a part of the mechanism of the make-up of the pic- 
 ture which could not do without them. 
 
 In this matter, as in almost others of Corot’s ex- 
 cellences, we have been slow to discover the wonderful 
 art concealed under the appearance of that simplicity — 
 
 161 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 what the French call “ naivete ” — which belonged to 
 Corot’s expression, as it was a part of his nature ; which 
 prevented his being taken as seriously as he might have 
 been under more pompous formulas, which allowed many 
 to patronise him under the name of “ Good Corot,” and 
 of “ Father Corot,” but which far down at the bottom 
 was what might have been expected of that rich ancient 
 Burgundian sap, which through peasant ancestry de- 
 veloped intense shrewdness under the forms of ironical 
 indifference. 
 
 In the same way that the subtleness and complete- 
 ness of his landscapes were not understood on account 
 of their very existing, the extraordinary attainment of 
 Corot in the painting of figures is scarcely under- 
 stood to-day even by many of his admirers and most 
 students. And yet the people he represents, and which 
 he represents with the innocence of a Greek, have a 
 quality which has skipped generations of painters and 
 is not unlike what possibly a Greek sculptor might have 
 tried to do if he had had no prejudiced habit of using 
 the brush in too artificial a way. 
 
 How, when, and where Corot passed into the mastery 
 of the figure I do not know — far back we know he noted 
 and studied movement and pose and we have commented 
 upon the singular, exceptional faculty he always showed 
 
 162 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 for placing figures in his landscapes, which were there 
 as they might have been in Nature, accidentally, and 
 having followed, if one may so say, the movement of 
 ground as if they were real beings. 
 
 And then many French painters, and perhaps others, 
 have the excellent habit of painting from the figure as 
 an exercise, a daily gymnastic practice. And so Father 
 Corot liked to continue his habit of studio study from 
 the model whom he took as he or she might turn up. 
 Most of them were vulgar little beings, and sometimes 
 they are mere people painted in the studio, and some- 
 times they are nymphs or beings of higher nature 
 challenging our memories of the most superior idealisa- 
 tion. The great Ingres would not look at the figures of 
 Corot, but his great pupil Flandrin said of them: 
 “ They have something which specialists have never been 
 able to put into theirs.” Corot has explained somewhat 
 the cause of this exceptional quality, exceptional among 
 all painters of figures, by this account — he allowed 
 his model to move as much as he or she liked. The 
 models of his studio could do very much as they 
 liked and move about as if in their own place. Some 
 correct person having alluded to these liberties of some 
 one of them, Corot answered : 66 Why it’s exactly that 
 restlessness that I like in that girl ; I am not a specialist 
 
 163 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 doing a thing piece by piece, my aim is to express 
 life and therefore I need a model that shall not keep 
 still.” 
 
 And as you will see by the various studies, however 
 careful they may be, however innocently the costume 
 may be copied, however the appearance even of a por- 
 trait, the human being is alive and is going to move and 
 has moved. Take the painting of the “ Girl Reading,” 
 who is also walking gently ; the observation of movement 
 is so subtle it is difficult to understand why the figure 
 does not look steady, nor would she in Nature. And 
 sometimes the model passes into a life of poetry and 
 romance and we have the “ Bacchante,” so called, still 
 a model, but so completely a part of the landscape, so 
 completely free from the suggestion of a study, or an 
 imitation of prose, that the satyrs or nymphs or other 
 figures of classical recall in the distance, seem as proper 
 to the place as if the painter had really seen them and 
 merely noted the fact that they were there. And yet it is 
 only a model with a tambourine and a leopard’s skin, 
 and she is not any more troubled by her being half di- 
 vine any more than she would have been in reality. And 
 so, partly from great knowledge, and still more from 
 simplicity of mind, this landscape painter that we know 
 is the equal of very great men who have painted the fig- 
 
 164 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 ure, even Rembrandt, or Van der Meer, or Poussin. But 
 he is not like them, and in such paintings as the “ Bac- 
 chante,” or the other pictures of human beings whom 
 he has seen in the light of classical antiquity, they are 
 all by themselves as if the Greek figures of the sculptors 
 had become coloured and breathed in the open air of this 
 special place in which Corot has seen them. 
 
 And now to return to prose ; it is worth your while to 
 look at the portrait of the great caricature painter 
 Daumier and to realise how the honesty of the other 
 artist’s soul is given by the artist whom we know to 
 have been himself a straight-minded and honourable 
 creature. 
 
 I should like to conclude with a few more general ex- 
 pressions concerning these men, concerning their re- 
 semblances and their differences, and perhaps to state 
 again in other forms some of their doctrines, though, 
 as I have pointed out continually, these men were con- 
 servative, were the direct inheritors of the past. They 
 believed that they preached nothing but what had al- 
 ways been known, and their justification was that it was 
 so. With Delacroix and Millet, whom I have to place un- 
 der the insufficient title of the Barbizon School, we have 
 seen a wish to express at times religious emotion and 
 feeling. In each case, that of Delacroix and Millet, the 
 
 165 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 form of expression is extremely different, but theirs is 
 almost the last successful attempt. The church itself has 
 scarcely any place at present for such expression. The 
 religious feeling is permanent in man, but it must of 
 course find a place and opportunity. The conditions of 
 the last two centuries have not been favourable, and 
 to-day’s are more than doubtful. The other men of 
 whom I write have certainly expressed their moral na- 
 ture in their landscapes. 
 
 A story will give us the height of his thought and the 
 deep feeling for human sentiments which filled the heart 
 of the absent-minded dreamer. His statements were very 
 sudden, as you may remember when he woke out of his 
 astonishment to say something about Delacroix’s work. 
 This anecdote will give all of this in a few words. He was 
 out with one of his students and they were working : the 
 sun was going down and all the splendour of dying day 
 was before the artists, the young man and the old one, 
 both held by the feeling of the moment. The young man 
 turned to Corot and said : “ O Master ! is not Nature 
 beautiful?” “Yes very beautiful,” said Corot, “but 
 Saint Vincent de Paul is also beautiful. Beautiful, very 
 beautiful.” The old artist was thinking of the Sisters of 
 Charity and his one work for the help of the sick and 
 wounded, and the sense of comfort and help of the 
 
 166 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 great Giver of Light brought up the feeling of thanks 
 for the man who had devoted a long life to the help of 
 the poor and afflicted. 
 
 One more word for you, the students of art I address 
 among the others. There is another point about the 
 study or knowledge of these men’s works which will 
 help you. You may not have noticed it externally, but 
 you believe in it completely. As I say, you do not always 
 realise that you believe it. It is this — that it is we who 
 are judged by the work of art, and that the reverse is 
 not true. In all that we have said and in any considera- 
 tion of our artist’s life at any time we come across the 
 fact that his work is either appreciated or not by his 
 nation or his surrounding. If he is great and applauded 
 as with Michael Angelo, we laud the race and the nation 
 and they remain forever adorned by this glory of ap- 
 preciation. By the work of art then we judge them. If 
 there be slow success, as with two or three of these men 
 of ours who still wait for full recognition, you know 
 that it is because their public was stupid and unde- 
 veloped, or ill-read, or provincial in some way or other 
 and we judge that public by these works of art. And 
 slowly the public in these cases has been educated. 
 
 Art is like a mirror and reflects. In fact, the French 
 artists have a fierce studio-saying about the pictures 
 
 167 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 of pretty women as mirrors ; like the Bi Jin of the 
 Japanese kakemono. 
 
 In the student or younger artist, therefore, the ques- 
 tions of patience and endurance may become the natural 
 mode of life in which the artist must live if he wishes to 
 achieve an intellectual existence of his own. 
 
 Nature to these men was not a thing to copy from, but 
 in Dupre’s wording — and it is a large wording — “ their 
 painting from Nature was an excuse for the statement 
 of their capacity for reverence and admiration.” These 
 excuses they did not always find in the art about them 
 and its representatives. They found about them, and 
 perhaps to their surprise and official coldness, a mili- 
 tary dogmatism in church and state; and in France 
 especially, the church had little to do but what the 
 state granted, even in art. But the state long ago had 
 laid its hand on art, as on everything that it could 
 regulate. The military organisations of Napoleon 
 reached after him into the domain of art and literature, 
 and the great educational mechanisms of France are the 
 means of controlling the powers which in their essence 
 are the freest function of man. 
 
 By the management of state patronage a hierarchy 
 is established which holds the farthest removed in some 
 manner of control by those chosen by the state. Conse- 
 
 168 
 
COLLECTION OF M. RYERSON 
 
COROT 
 
 NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF JOHN G. JOHNSON 
 
COROT: “VILLE D’AVRAY— MORNING 
 

COROT 
 
 “ LANDSCAPE ” 
 
 NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF SIR GEORGE DRUMMOND, MONTREAL 
 

“DANSE DES 
 NYMPHES ” 
 
COROT 
 
 “LA DANSE DES AMOURS 
 
 IN THE COLLECTION OF GEORGE J. GOULD 
 
PSgSj"g!£« 
 
 COROT 
 
 “LA PETITE CURIEUSE ” 
 
 NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF SIR W. C. VAN HORNE, MONTREAL 
 
COROT 
 
 “GIRL READING 
 
 NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF JAMES J. HILL 
 
COROT 
 
 THE WOUNDED EURYDICE” 
 
 NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF JAMES J. HILL 
 
COROT 
 
 ^L' ATELIER ” 
 
 NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF P. A. B. WIDENER 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 quently the struggle has been for ambitious talents to 
 get some place in this machinery which would insure 
 them for life a safe position, but under military con- 
 ditions of obedience and discipline and the keeping out 
 of all others who, knowingly or not, believed in inde- 
 pendence of thought or feeling. The reason or secret 
 of the constant opposition to this group of men of ours 
 is thus a perfectly natural one. They were forced into 
 an antagonism from which morally and intellectually 
 they could not escape, nor did they always know how 
 much they were in opposition. They pursued what are 
 called ideals, which allow little compromise. It may be 
 said that they were imprudent, that they might have 
 yielded some few higher ideals to practical success, but 
 in reality they were mostly unaware of the danger of 
 their tendencies. They scarcely knew how they were the 
 successors of the great artists who were recommended 
 and preached by the government schools. As Fromentin 
 has put it, the Academy and the school on the con- 
 trary, clearly saw behind these men the hated traditions 
 of Rubens and Rembrandt. They, on the contrary, like 
 the devotees of science, saw only the disinterested end 
 which they pursued with difficulty and mostly in ad- 
 versity. Nor can we blame them any more than we do 
 the mathematician or the astronomer whose calculations 
 
 169 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 aim at abstract results. We know, and they know too, 
 that there is no absolute mathematics in practice, but it 
 is only by the pursuit of such abstractions that the 
 progress of our practical science advances. These men 
 are bound together more lastingly to us, than they 
 could have been to themselves, by the opposition of the 
 great government influences which still rule in France. 
 Their not being in the authorised list of producers of 
 aid: leaves the official art of France relatively barren of 
 production and more of a mere common-school force. 
 The names of these men also are those which have been 
 carried throughout the world. Their names are known 
 far beyond the limits they knew themselves, and their 
 fame is as great as if they had not been Frenchmen. 
 In some form or other all outside art has been influenced 
 by them, and their names are types of forms of art. 
 With all of them, except perhaps the favourite, Diaz, a 
 certain moral dignity, a certain human value, is part 
 of the very texture, the fibre of their work. Through 
 its weight it has helped to carry their influence out of 
 the fashion of their native land. It has made more sym- 
 pathetic some of the beauties which they tried to em- 
 body. So that however partial and deficient were some 
 of them, it may be said of their works, in the words the 
 Greeks used for their favourite poets, that “ many 
 
 170 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 times the immortal gods themselves had chosen to be 
 seated at their hearthstone.” 
 
 We have said that these men have made, to a cer- 
 tain extent, almost all of us. All modern painters or 
 draughtsmen to whom the word values is a guide owe 
 something — sometimes a great deal — to the fact that 
 these men carried the older tradition through the dark- 
 est part of the nineteenth century. They helped also 
 foreign artists of all kinds who could not get govern- 
 ment instruction in France, or who disliked it, or from 
 some manner or other — sometimes mere accident — were 
 excluded from it. One of my friends who with me pur- 
 sued for many years the modern scientific study of the 
 relations of light and colour, with the hope of using it 
 for our work, missed his chance at the government 
 school, as one of these men did, by the mere slip of a 
 little formula. He drew under the model whose picture 
 he had made for the competition, the black stand, the 
 cube of polished wood on which the model stood. He 
 made it black, with a reflection — and that excluded his 
 drawing. This anecdote is a way of stating how small 
 the reason was by which a foreigner or a native might 
 not get under government instruction. Many of them, 
 as did my friend, regretted it somewhat ; he would have 
 been anyhow an independent man in meaning and in 
 
 171 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 thought, but he would have liked to have had, as it were, 
 some work in what he thought was rather the enemy’s 
 camp. 
 
 In one of my lectures I think I referred to one of our 
 artists, to Winslow Homer, as having been influenced by 
 these men. It is so true that away far back in the fifties, 
 not being able to see the originals, he drew from the 
 French lithographs we had here, which were almost en- 
 tirely devoted to the reproduction of the work of these 
 men. At that time we had but very few examples in 
 the country, exceedingly few, perhaps it might be said 
 none, of Corot, none of Rousseau. By chance there hap- 
 pened to be a few Millets. The foundation then in great 
 part of such an independent talent — I might say more 
 than talent, of such a genius as Mr. Winslow Homer’s 
 — refers back then to this school and to the teachings, 
 the inevitable teachings, even from studying them in 
 translations. 
 
 On that, as a proof again of what I wish students to 
 understand, is built a form of painting as absolutely 
 different as it could possibly be ; a thoroughly American 
 system of painting, a representation of American light 
 and air, of everything that makes the distinction; even 
 the moral fibre and character of New England being 
 depicted all through the picture, whether it be the 
 
 172 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 rocks and the sea, or the men who hang about 
 them. 
 
 Those are the lessons that these men give. I only refer 
 to that to encourage you, those of you who are stu- 
 dents, to look to these men for the principles rather than 
 sometimes the practice of their work. For of course 
 they, like all men of the nineteenth century, almost with- 
 out exception, painted not so well as they ought to. 
 That is to say that the older traditions, those beautiful 
 traditions which allow you to see a work of a Flemish 
 painter over four hundred years old in all its freshness, 
 had departed. The real intention of oil painting had 
 been more or less disfigured. The use of unfortunate 
 colours prepared for them by new chemistry, and also 
 by traders on the new chemistry, has changed most of 
 their pictures. I am old enough to remember some of 
 the famous ones and to be shocked at the way they 
 look to-day. 
 
 But as I reflect, there are exceedingly important 
 points to be dwelt upon which these men touch. As I 
 have been questioned by students outside of my lectures 
 upon the point, I want to bring again to your atten- 
 tion the question of the difference between the study and 
 the picture. In reality the question is very simple, but 
 like all very simple questions, it is veiled at corners — 
 
 173 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 veiled at certain places — by our using words which do 
 not cover particular points. It may be said that the in- 
 vention of the frame, but let us go back, the study then, 
 let us say, is a copy, or pursuit, of a part of Nature 
 with the mere intention of knowing well for one’s self 
 what one happens to be looking for. The study may 
 cover all the impressions that you receive as far as you 
 are capable, or only a few. It is evidently quite possible 
 to make your study without colour, or with more or 
 less colour. It is possible to pursue your study in the 
 shapes of outline. It is possible to pursue your study 
 in the mere shape of form. It is possible to care for 
 nothing for the moment but the values of certain places 
 as you go along. It is possible to look only for the 
 colours. It is possible in a larger way to make a note of 
 the time of day, to make a note of the relation of sun- 
 light and shadow. It is possible — as in the drawings 
 which I once had in my hands for a few hours, the draw- 
 ings of the note-books of Sir Joshua Reynolds — it is 
 possible to make a study of how much space the middle 
 tone occupies in what you see, of where the highest 
 light is, and how many times the highest light will occur 
 in such and such proportion, of how far the dark can 
 be in the middle of what you are looking at, and how 
 far you can move it to the side. All this is in the sketch- 
 
 174 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 books of Sir Joshua done with the point of a pencil : a 
 mere scribble, and a little circular line run round such 
 a space, or an irregular one in case he wished to insist 
 on the irregularity of distribution; all these ways are 
 studies, and do not by my definition make a picture. 
 We might say that the difference is made in this way: 
 The invention of a frame — that is to say the rectangu- 
 lar border, or the circular border, or any other border 
 which you wish to choose — but these are the evident 
 ones known to all mankind, and mostly the rectangular 
 border or frame. The frame decides the question, for 
 there is no frame in Nature. The moment that you begin 
 to set your picture or your study on a square piece of 
 paper, and with relation to that square piece of paper, 
 you have decided already an artistic conventional 
 formula, because if we carried out logically what we 
 see we should not have a square result. Hence, some- 
 times the very honest student is astonished at finding 
 that his study is uneven and the corners left blank, or 
 they are not even corners, because as long as he really 
 gives his real impression they are of necessity irregular. 
 They represent maybe corners and ovals blended to- 
 gether. Even I myself, with fifty or sixty years of study- 
 ing and sketching from Nature, find it difficult when I 
 am making nothing but a really conscientious study of 
 
 175 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 a new view in place, to remember to fill in the corners 
 of my paper and canvas. If once I have not done it I 
 find it impossible to be sure of what was there. In so far 
 I am pleased when that happens to me. It shows me that 
 I am still a faithful observer of Nature. Hence, as you 
 know, the so-called impressionists, men who have been 
 trying to develop still further the representations of 
 light and colour through various mechanisms have had 
 great difficulty at once with their frames, because if 
 they were were absolutely truthful there would be no 
 frame; there cannot be any. They have to step from 
 Nature into the world of art. And perhaps you know the 
 difficult plight of many of my friends with regard to 
 dodging that question. Some of the weaker-minded ones, 
 and the more logical ones too, have painted their frames 
 in different ways, have painted their frames in different 
 colours, have lopped over the frame, and have thought 
 that by lopping over the frame that the suggestion of 
 irregularity would be sufficient, but none of them have 
 ever had the courage to paint in the outline of the frame 
 which they really saw, because it would be too ugly, too 
 impossible for the human mind. 
 
 How the frame first came about, I mean how it 
 came by this arbitrary shape, I do not know. I have 
 not as yet found an adequate explanation. I have cross- 
 
 176 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 questioned without result so-called savages with whom 
 I have lived, and I have watched their ways of work and 
 their ideas of representation of Nature, and I do know 
 that at some remote period they invented a rectangular 
 frame, but that they did for decoration. When they 
 came to representation, the so-called savages never tried 
 to make what we call a picture, or a realization of some- 
 thing in a place, and that place the frame. They were 
 trying always to make a symbol, or what we call a draw- 
 ing. I have seen even their children make very beautiful 
 drawings, mostly in the sand, sometimes when given a 
 pencil. The difficulty of the pencil was in their way, that 
 is to say, it was an unaccustomed form of friction. They 
 represented both the real outline and the suggestion of 
 form in a single sweep very much like what we see in very 
 accomplished draughtsmen, in Raphael for instance, 
 or Ingres and so forth, and the two extremes met in 
 the savage child. All my savage artist was after was to 
 give the symbol which represented the animal or what- 
 ever it was that he tried to show and never was able. I 
 don’t believe that the savage has understood the frame. 
 Therefore I don’t know when it began. There may have 
 been the including of the picture or symbol inside of the 
 decorative frame, and then the passage from that to our 
 realisation of Nature. That realisation from Nature 
 
 177 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 went on in the middle of the last century in a form which 
 we know. Men like Meissonier for instance, struggled 
 in a race with the photograph. The photograph or the 
 whole system of photography was being developed. 
 They followed in the track which our ancestors have 
 followed for so long, a sort of struggle with Nature. We 
 see it far back with Leonardo. We see the way through 
 the scale from then, the anxiety to have a record of all 
 the facts of Nature. 
 
 The photograph then is the other racer in the course, 
 and it might be some day that the vision of Nature 
 would be still nearer if the photograph — the machine — 
 should be able to give a little accurate colour. Then per- 
 haps that line will be cut off and some great revolt of 
 feeling might come. But that is a mere manner of let- 
 ting you understand that I do not mean that the men 
 of the other schools were unjustifiable. They were fol- 
 lowing, as I say, the conquest of Nature and not the 
 conquest of art. They were artists and they thought 
 that they followed art more, but they really in their 
 own way were trying to justify themselves by their 
 correct appreciation of Nature. 
 
 One thing more as I close the subjects of our talks. 
 I don’t mean to diminish any one’s part nor take part 
 of any one away. Nor is it necessary because we like 
 
 178 
 
SIXTH LECTURE 
 
 a man very much that we should think him bigger 
 than others. He may be smaller and on account of that 
 smallness better fitted to ourselves. It is evident that 
 the life with the greater beings cannot be so easy. 
 That is the reason why in presenting our dear old 
 friend Diaz, I have still kept to the fact that he was 
 relatively a small man compared to most of his friends, 
 but a charming creature, a man whose work is fit to 
 be placed anywhere, to give you that same charm that 
 you get, let us say from flowers. Is there anything 
 against the flower that it should not have the intel- 
 lectual significance of other things that we look at? 
 And that is always worth thinking of. The smaller man 
 may have his own perfect existence, and for our benefit 
 Decamps, whom I do not wish to consider on the same 
 high plane with Delacroix (and who might perhaps have 
 reached a higher plane of his own if he had lived), 
 Decamps has shown us — and that is what I insisted on in 
 our representations on the screen — the use of certain 
 formulae, and in those smaller formulae he is a great 
 man. He has his own life and his own interpretations 
 just as much as the greatest. That lesson ought to 
 satisfy all pupils. There is no school, if one may so say, 
 in Nature or in art that we can absolutely measure. 
 
 179 
 
INDEX 
 
 No attempt has been made to give detailed references to 
 Corot, Daubigny, Decamps, Delacroix, Diaz, Dupre, Millet, 
 and Rousseau within the Lectures of which they are the subject 
 matter. Under the name of each artist mention is made of the 
 pages in the particular Lecture devoted entirely or in part to 
 said artist. 
 
 The titles of paintings are given in Italics. 
 
 Algerian Women at Home ( Alge- 
 rian Women in Their Room), 
 Delacroix, The Louvre, 57, 
 58, 155 
 Allston, 31 
 
 An Episode of the Massacres of 
 Scio ( The Massacre of Scio ), 
 Delacroix, The Louvre, 42, 
 44, 48 
 
 Apollo, Ceiling of the Gallery of. 
 The Louvre, Delacroix, 20 
 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, on the 
 “ innocence ” of Art, 85 
 
 Bacchante, Corot, 164, 165 
 Barque of Dante , The ( Dante and 
 Virgil Crossing the Infernal 
 Lake), Delacroix, 44, 46, 57, 98 
 
 Barye, friend of Delacroix, 59 
 his work and Delacroix, 65 
 his friendship for and apprecia- 
 tion of Rousseau, 134 
 Belmont, August, early American 
 collector of Barbizon pictures, 
 119 
 
 Bertin, the classical formulist land- 
 scape painter, teacher of Dau- 
 bigny, 144 
 Blake, 33 
 
 Byron, Lord, his influence on the 
 Dramatic School and on Dela- 
 croix, 17, 30, 47, 52 
 
 Cabat, a co-student of Diaz, 117 
 early association with Dupre, 
 142 
 
 181 
 
INDEX 
 
 Chardin, 23 
 
 appreciated by the men of the 
 new movement, 31 
 Chasseriau, Theodore, his promise 
 of conciliating the opposite 
 Schools, 11 
 and Ingres, 11, 13 
 and Delacroix, 11, 13 
 and Puvis de Chavannes, 12 
 and Millet, 12 
 his life, 11, 14, 15 
 his work in the Cour des Comp- 
 tes, 11 
 
 the secret of his career, 15, 16 
 Chateaubriand, his influence on 
 the painters of 1830, 30 
 Chavannes, Puvis de, and Chas- 
 seriau, 12 
 
 and Delacroix, 55, 61, 62 
 Children Watching a Tortoise , De- 
 camps, 105 
 
 Christ Crossing the Lake of Genes- 
 areth, Decamps, 108 
 Christ in the Garden , Delacroix, 
 52 
 
 Classical School, represented by 
 Ingres, 10 
 Claude, 144 
 
 Corot, see particularly Sixth Lec- 
 ture, 151-179 
 fame established, 7, 8, 65 
 and Delacroix, 69, 70 
 represents the doctrine of “val- 
 ues,” 110 
 
 a painter of the human figure, 
 127, 128 
 
 his imitators, 129 
 
 Corot, see also Girl Reading , and 
 Bacchante. 
 
 Correggio, admired by Diaz, 119 
 
 Courbet, 8 
 
 Cour des Comptes, and the paint- 
 ings of Chasseriau, 1 1 
 
 Couture, 8 
 
 his comparison of Diaz and 
 Rousseau, 120 
 
 Dante, and Delacroix’s subjects, 52 
 
 Dante and Virgil Crossing the 
 Infernal Lake ( The Barque 
 of Dante), Delacroix, The 
 Louvre, 44, 46, 57, 98 
 
 Daubigny, Charles Francis, see 
 particularly Fifth Lecture, 
 144-147 
 
 David and the Empire Classical 
 School, 7, 9 
 
 Death of Sardanapedus, Delacroix, 
 52 
 
 Decamps, see particularly Fourth 
 Lecture, 95-123 
 and Delacroix, 65, 179 
 and Rousseau, 134 
 a recorder of Nature, 140 
 See also Children Watching a 
 Tortoise, Christ Crossing the 
 Lake of Genesareth, Defeat of 
 the Cimbri by Marius, Diog- 
 enes, Joseph Sold by His 
 Brethren, Le Chasseur, The 
 Muses, Porte de Ferme, The 
 Samson Series, The Shepherd, 
 The Smoker, Syrian Land- 
 scape, Tower of Bordeaux, 
 
 182 
 
INDEX 
 
 Turkish Butcher , Turkish 
 Cavalry Passing a Ford, Turk- 
 ish Children Coming out of 
 School, Watch at Smyrna, The 
 Witches. 
 
 Defeat of the Cimbri by Marius , 
 Decamps, 109 
 
 Delaberge, a precursor of pre- 
 Raphaelism, 143 
 
 Delacroix, see particularly Second 
 Lecture, 27-66 
 
 his name representative of the 
 Romantic School, 8, 10 
 influence on Chasseriau, 11-13 
 influenced by literature, 17 
 student of real life, 18, 19 
 a dramatist, 20, 21 
 characteristics of his work, 22, 23 
 admired by Millet, 69 
 dramatic and lyrical power and 
 expression, 70-72 
 a user of the nude, 86 
 and Millet, 70, 82, 95, 96 
 influence on Diaz, 117, 119 
 and Rousseau, 134 
 and Dupre, 143 
 his expression of religious feel- 
 ing, 165 
 and Corot, 166 
 and Decamps, 179 
 See also Algerian Women at 
 Home ( Algerian Women in 
 Their Room), The Barque of 
 Dante ( Dante and Virgil 
 Crossing the Infernal Lake), 
 Christ in The Garden, Death 
 of Sardanapalus, Guard of 
 
 the Sultan, Jewish Marriage , 
 L’Amende Honorable, Mad 
 Dervishes of Tangier s, Marino 
 Faliero, Massacre of Scio (An 
 Episode of the Massacres of 
 Scio), TriumphoftheGodofDay 
 over the Powers of Darkness. 
 Delaroche, teacher of Millet, 47, 
 80, 81 
 
 De Musset, and the Romantic 
 movement, 30 
 
 Descent of the Bohemians, Diaz, 
 Boston Museum, 119 
 De Vigny, and the Romantic 
 movement, 30 
 
 Diaz, see particularly Fourth Lec- 
 ture, 95-123 
 
 a favorite with the differing 
 Schools, 8 
 
 the springtime of his career, 65 
 and Dupre, 143, 170, 179 
 See also Descent of the Bohe- 
 mians, F ountainebleau Forest, 
 Les Odalisques 
 Diogenes, Decamps, 105 
 Dore, Gustave, his indebtedness 
 to Decamps, 112 
 
 Dupre, see particularly Fifth Lec- 
 ture, 127-147 
 his early recognition, 8 
 and Diaz, 117, 119, 123 
 and Daubigny, 146 
 and Corot, 159 
 
 his definition of the attitude of 
 his fellows, 168 
 
 Dutch School, The, and the Bar- 
 bizon men, 135 
 
 183 
 
INDEX 
 
 Faust, as treated by Delacroix, 21 
 
 Feilding, fellow-student and friend 
 of Delacroix, 46 
 
 Flandrin, exponent of the Academ- 
 ic teaching, 10 
 comment on Corot, 163 
 
 Fontainebleau Forest , Diaz, pur- 
 chased in the sixties by August 
 Belmont; now in the collection 
 of his son. Perry Belmont, 
 119 
 
 Fontainebleau School, 27, 86 
 forest, 27, 73 
 
 Fromentin, on the old and the new 
 Schools, 169 
 
 Gainsborough, 7, 42 
 
 Gallery of Apollo, in The Louvre, 
 painting by Delacroix, 20, 
 61 
 
 Gericault, early paintings, 8 
 
 companion, and fellow-student 
 of Delacroix, 35, 36 
 precursor of the Romantic 
 School, 36 
 
 first famous painting, 36 
 his theories and teachings, 38-40 
 death by accident, 41 
 See also Portrait of Mr. M., Raft 
 of “La Meduse ,” Wounded 
 Cuirassier Leaving the Field 
 of Battle 
 
 Gerome, a promising disciple of 
 the Academy, 9 
 
 his work influenced by the “ the- 
 atre notion,” 55 
 
 Giotto, 55 
 
 Girl Reading , Corot, now in coll, 
 of J. J. Hii:, 164 
 
 Goethe, and Delacroix, 17, 30, 52, 
 
 57 
 
 Greuze, 7 
 
 Gros, offers to take Delacroix with 
 him, 45 
 
 Guard of the Sultan, Delacroix, 
 
 58 
 
 Guido, 10 
 
 Hamlet, as portrayed by Dela- 
 croix, 21 
 
 Heine, his “King Richard Coeur- 
 de-Lion,” and Delacroix’s lyr- 
 ical attitude, 71 
 
 Homer, Winslow, influenced by 
 the Barbizon men, 172 
 Huet, the influence of his work on 
 Dupre, 143 
 
 Hugo, Victor, and the Romantic 
 movement, 30 
 
 Hunt, William, comment on the 
 Barbizon men, 7 
 early friend and admirer of Mil- 
 let, 87 
 
 Ingres, his name represents the 
 Classical School, 8, 10 
 and Chasseriau, 11, 13 
 his views once held doubtful, 39 
 and Corot, 163, 177 
 Italians, The Early, and the Bar- 
 bizon men, 135 
 
 Jansenism, 76, 77 
 Jewish Marriage, Delacroix, 57 
 184 
 
INDEX 
 
 Joseph Sold by His Brethren , De- 
 camps, now in coll, of J. J. 
 Hill, 113 
 
 “King Richard Coeur-de-Lion,” 
 of Heine, and Delacroix’s lyri- 
 cal attitude, 71 
 
 Lamartine, 30 
 
 L'Amende Honorable , Delacroix 
 now in the Willstach coll., 
 Philadelphia, 69 
 
 La Descente des V aches, Rousseau, 
 134 
 
 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 7 
 character of his art, 33 
 Le Chasseur , Decamps, 104 
 Leonardo, and the struggle of Art 
 with Nature, 178 
 Les Odalisques , Diaz, 120 
 Louvre, The, Millet in, 80 
 Dupre and Cabat in, 142 
 See Gallery of Apollo 
 Luxembourg Gallery, Millet on 
 the pictures of the, 70 
 
 Mad Dervishes of Tangiers, Dela- 
 croix, 58 
 Manet, 8 
 
 Marino Faliero, Delacroix, 52 
 Massacre at Scio, The, (An Episode 
 of the Massacres at Scio), Del- 
 acroix, The Louvre, 42, 47, 
 48 
 
 Meissonier, pall-bearer of Diaz, 
 123 
 
 and photography, 178 
 
 Michelangelo, and Delacroix, 19, 
 22, 73 
 
 influence on Millet, 80, 86, 167 
 
 Millet, Jean Francis, 7, 8, 172. 
 See particularly Third Lec- 
 ture, 69-91 
 
 his work and that of Chasseriau, 
 
 12 
 
 early acknowledgment in Amer- 
 ica, 28 
 
 his admiration for Delacroix, 21 
 comparison and traits in com- 
 mon with Delacroix, 65, 95, 96 
 disparages criticism of Delacroix, 
 64 
 
 comparison with Decamps, 106 
 and Rousseau, 136 
 and the Barbizon School, 151 
 religious expression, 165 
 
 Montaigne, 76 
 
 Muses, The, Decamps, 105, 106 
 
 Napoleon, his influence on French 
 art, 28, 31 
 
 Pascal, 76 
 
 Pena, Narciso Diaz de la, see Diaz 
 
 Porte de Ferme, Decamps, now 
 in coll, of J. W. Simpson, 
 106 
 
 Portrait of Daumier , Corot, 165 
 
 Portrait of Mr. M., Gericault, The 
 Louvre, 36 
 
 Poussin, and Corot’s figure paint- 
 ing, 165 
 
 Prix de Rome, and Delacroix and 
 Millet, 47 
 
 185 
 
INDEX 
 
 Raffet, apprentice with Diaz, 117 
 Raft of “La Meduse,” Gericault, 
 The Louvre, 41, 42 
 Raphael, and the art of Ingres, 10 
 and Chasseriau, 16 
 his influence upon Delacroix, 22 
 his drawings, 177 
 Rembrandt, and Delacroix, 19, 51, 
 54, 98 
 
 and Corot, the figure painter, 165 
 and the Barbizon men, 31, 135, 
 169 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 7 
 
 admired by Gericault and Dela- 
 croix, 42 
 
 the drawings of his note-books, 
 174 
 
 Rodin, Delacroix and the studio 
 in painting and sculpture, 59, 
 60, 154 
 
 Romantic School, represented by 
 Delacroix, 10 
 Gericault a precursor, 36 
 Rousseau, see particularly Fifth 
 Lecture, 127-147 
 early recognition, 7, 8 
 at time of Delacroix’s death, 
 65 
 
 friendship for Millet, 80 
 at Barbizon with Millet, 86 
 admired by Diaz, 119 
 compared with Diaz by Cou- 
 ture, 120, 172 
 
 See also La Descente des V aches. 
 Rubens, as compared with and in- 
 fluence upon Delacroix, 17, 
 19, 22, 51, 63 
 
 Rubens, paintings in the Museum 
 at Cherbourg, where Millet 
 studied, 79 
 
 and the Barbizon men, 169 
 
 St. Francis of Assisi, Millet and 
 his grandmother, 74 
 Saint Sulpice, church of, paintings 
 of Delacroix, 62 
 
 Samson Series, The, Decamps, 111, 
 112 
 
 Samson Watching the Fires Which 
 He has Lit, Decamps, 112 
 Samson at the Mill, Decamps, 113 
 Samson Breaking his Bonds, De- 
 camps, 113 
 
 Scheffer, Ary, and Rousseau, 132, 
 134 
 
 Sensier, letters of Millet to, 80, 87 
 Shakespeare, and Delacroix, 17, 
 52 
 
 Shelley, 30 
 
 Shepherd , The, Decamps, 99 
 Smoker, The, Decamps, 100 
 Syrian Landscape, Decamps, Wal- 
 lace coll., London, 101, 102, 
 105, 106 
 
 Tintoretto, his art and Delacroix’s, 
 19 
 
 Millet’s resemblance with, 85 
 Titian, his art and Delacroix’s, 51 
 Triumph of the God of Day over 
 the Powers of Darkness, Dela- 
 croix, ceiling of the Gallery 
 of Apollo, The Louvre, 61 
 Tower of Bordeaux, Decamps, 106 
 
INDEX 
 
 Turgot, and Delacroix’s father, 
 42 
 
 Turkish Butcher, Decamps, 102 
 
 Turkish Cavalry Passing a Ford, 
 Decamps, 107 
 
 Turkish Children Coming Out of 
 School, Decamps, 105 
 
 Turner, 7, 32 
 
 his work and that of Decamps, 
 112 
 
 Van der Meer, and the figure work 
 of Corot, 165 
 
 Velasquez, influence on the Bar- 
 bizon men, 31 
 
 Watch at Smyrna, Decamps, 105 
 Watteau, his technique of painting, 
 23 
 
 appreciation of his art by the 
 Barbizon men, 31 
 Whistler, belated recognition, 157 
 Witches, The, Decamps, 106 
 Wordsworth, 30 
 
 Wounded Cuirassier Leaving the 
 Field of Battle, Gericault, 38 
 
 THE END 
 
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 RESEARCH 
 
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