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David believed absolutely in the abiding greatness of classical art. He was blind to the faults of the ancients and infatuated with the power of line and form. If only the outlines were correct, he repeatedly told his students, the rest mattered but little. For almost a quarter of a century his conception of art's fitting expression held the country fettered, yet far-reaching tendencies were silently operating to break the bonds of classicism.

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CHAPTER VIII.

RECENT FRENCH ARTISTS: THE BARBIZON SCHOOL.

The new life with its manifold problems which the French people, suddenly set free from despotic rulers, found engulfing them, demanded new methods of expression, whether the medium were art or literature. Action, feeling, and emotion were required to represent even a small portion of this life on canvas. The founder of the romantic school was Delacroix. The term "romantic" came originally from the Romance language, set over against the Latin. In other words, the classical school had its beginnings in a revival of Greek forms passed down through the medium of the Latin language. This new movement originated not in the Latin but in the Romance countries, and hence was called the romantic movement. The romantic school gave no thought to producing beautiful effects but to portraying action and feeling. It is said that Delacroix restored feeling to the human face. A struggle ensued between the two schools and finally there came forth the third, the so-called Eclectic school, which borrowed the best qualities from both. Delaroche originated this school, and, while it was quite lacking in originality, the paintings produced by its adherents have much to commend them.

The latter portion of the nineteenth century witnessed the progress of the Individualistic School of art, called so for lack of a more characteristic name. The art evolved by the individualistic painters was in many instances a natural outgrowth of earlier schools, but, although aided by the experiences of the past, the later artists developed an individuality denied early classical painters.

Several landscape artists came to prominence, called sometimes the Barbizon school from the fact that they settled for the most part in the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, near a village called Barbizon. Among them were Corot, Rousseau, Dupré, Diaz, and Millet.

"They gave supremacy to the sky and its influence, and record the delicate changes of the atmosphere until modern

landscape becomes 'more a painting of air than of earth.' Though all were rebels against a system and were working with similar aims, their work is remarkably individual. Supplying to the French nation expression for poetic feeling, they are truly the French poets of rustic nature, irresistibly attracted to her, though many of them and of their numerous, though less conspicuous, allies were city-bred. But each has his special department of rustic nature. Corot and Jules Dupré are the poets of nature's power to reflect the sentiments of men; Rousseau, the poet of forest scenery; Daubigny, of atmospheric effects-in which, however, all add a strophe of more or less power, and Corot no doubt outsings them all; Diaz of hue and color, while Millet, in the later development of this influence, landscape and figures, is the profound and pathetic poet of lowly labor. Sympathy with rusticity, too, associates Jules Breton with the same movement. It was, no doubt, through the keen feeling for the humble life depicted in their landscape-genre, and of which out-door life and human toil, as the sowing and reaping, the stone picking and weeding, were so essential a part, that human sympathy was so deeply enlisted in landscape. Thus, it is partially a result, or growth, of the democratic attainment of the age which gives the sense of individual worth, making the humble peasant 'the man for a' that,' and, while it is not a painting lesson learned from the Dutch, it has its source in the same underlying feeling of the importance of humble things to which the Dutch, as a result of their struggles for a government by the people, for the people,' attained two centuries earlier."

COROT.

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Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) was by natural temperament and circumstances the happiest, most content of the "1830" school. His father intended him to follow a mercantile life and was disappointed when nothing could allure his son into paths of worldly gain. When it was plain that his heart was forever with the natural world and the representation of it, he granted Camille a modest allowance with permission to follow his true bent. Never after was there 'Stranahan, Hist. of French Painting, 231.

any worriment or dissatisfaction-no longing for means which finally were his by inheritance. Corot was content to study landscapes in varying lights and shadows and to set up his easel wherever he caught an inspiration. Trees were his delight and no other ever painted them so wonderfully. While he never lived in Barbizon he was a friend of the Barbizon painters, and his work belonged with theirs. Although popular opinion of the time favored landscapes without human figures, Corot's nymphs and wood-creatures were acknowledged as belonging to his pictures. We can get into the spirit which animated Corot best by reading his description of a morning's dawn which he once wrote to a friend.

"A landscape painter's day is delightful. He gets up early, at three in the morning, before sunrise. He goes and sits under a tree and watches and waits.

"There is not much to be seen at first.

"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.

"Bing! The sun is becoming clear and begins to rend the veil of gauze behind which the meadow and the valley and the hills on the horizon hide. The vapors still hang like silver tufts on the cold green grass.

"Bing! Bing! The sun's first ray-another ray. The little flowers seem to be waking in a joyful mood and each one of them is drinking its drop of quivering dew. The leaves feel the cold and are moving to and fro in the morning air. Under the leaves the unseen birds are singing-it sounds as if the flowers were singing their morning prayer. Amoretti with butterfly wings are perching on the meadow, and set the tall grasses swaying.

"We can see nothing, but the landscape is there, all perfect, behind the translucent gauze of the mist which rises-risesrises, inhaled by the sun, and, as it rises, discloses the river silver-scaled, the meads, the trees, the cottages, the vanishing distance. We can distinguish now all that we divined before. Bam! the sun is risen. Bam! a peasant crosses the field, and a cart and oxen. Ding! Ding! says the bell of the ram who leads the flock of sheep. Bam! All things break forth into glistening and glittering and shining in a full flood of light,

of pale, caressing light.
-and I paint.
hot-the flowers droop

It is adorable! and I paint

Boum! Boum! The sun grows

the birds are silent. Let us go home!

We can see too much now. There is nothing in it.

"And home we go, and dine and sleep and dream; and I dream of the morning landscape. I dream my picture, and presently I will paint my dream."

ROUSSEAU.

Théodore Rousseau was another successful painter of trees. Born of the middle class in 1812, he early gave promise of much native ability. When eighteen he was already one of the acknowledged leaders of the romantic school. It was a sore cross to him that for years none of his pictures were accepted by the jury of the Salon, but then, neither were those of Delacroix or any of the new and so-called revolutionary artists. Among his friends his work was greatly appreciated. However, we must take into account the fact that most of these artists had no income and depended upon the sale of their canvases for their living. Pictures that were rejected by the jury of the Salon were seldom salable, and at times Rousseau was sadly reduced in circumstances.

When disappointed with the reception of his pictures, he would repair to the forest of Fontainebleau where he would wander for days at a time. He had an unusual affection for trees, finding them capable of expressing thoughts and ideas. He painted them with the spirit in which portrait painters paint men and women. Whatever the season he represents, whatever the other accessories of the picture, there is the same mysterious power in his trees, unlike those of other artists.

Public favor turned at last and a new understanding brought the messages of the romanticists home to the bitterest critic, but unfortunately the seal of merit was too long deferred in the case of Rousseau.

MILLET.

Unlike either of these two artists both in work and temperament was Jean-François Millet (1814-1875). He came of a long peasant ancestry, of men who were proud of their

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