DOI Heft:
The International Studio (June, 1908)
DOI Artikel:Cary, Elisabeth Luther: The Barbizon painters
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28254#0509
The Scrip
detachment in the fullest measure. His concern
appears to be less with the ponderable world than
with the air that wraps it round. In his landscapes
the ground has solidity, the water is a liquid me-
dium, the trees spring from the earth with account
taken of their firm anchorage through the network
of roots beneath the soil, objects such as houses and
boats are by no means visionary, and, when the pic-
ture is of a human figure, there is apt to be an over-
solidity of modeling, yet the general impression
given by his art is of a world in which there is noth-
ing to tie one to the earth, one in which, moreover,
no word of personal experience is uttered, in which
the mind is continually engaged with abstractions,
in which the spirit floats upward as naturally as a
bird takes flight—and with the same appearance of
freedom from obligation. Rapture is too violent a
word to apply to such lyric gladness, yet there is the
suggestion of rapture in these ascetic visions of
material beauty.
But Corot was obviously sincere in declaring his
fondness for the old. He was fifty when he aban-
doned his early style and his taste was fixed. If
Millet is classic in his feeling Corot is certainly not
less so, even where he is most a realist. Where
Millet depicts the characters in the great drama,
Corot reads the chorus for us with a haunting music
that makes unreal the heartrending realities of
human life. He may chant of emotions and even
of passions and of horrors as in his Dante and Virgil
and of grotesque purpose as in his Don Quixote,
but his chant reaches us through the sweet shadows
of a fragrant wood and mingles with the song of
birds and is cool and pure in tone as the sound of a
boy’s voice in sacred hymns. His modernity lies a
little in his spiritual attitude toward the natural
world, an attitude to which we are increasingly
sensitive, and still more in his interrogation of
nature for certain qualities upon which the moderns
have concentrated their attention, upon the move-
ment of the atmosphere chiefly: his respect for the
old shows itself in his severity of composition.
Neither in line or color is there ever a hint of exces-
sive expression or of eccentricity. His conformity
is so great as almost to constitute in itself individu-
ality. In his Orpheus Greeting the Dawn we have
a figure typical of his art—so closely does its human
aspect harmonize with the clear pale landscape, so
perfectly is the emotion it expresses attuned to the
old Greek worship of unhuman forces and phe-
nomena.
He was a painstaking worker, as most people are
who achieve a light ease and delicacy of touch. He
valued especially definite execution. "There must
Property oj the Metropolitan Museum oj Ar
VILLE D’AVRAY
By Permission
BY J. B. C. COROT
detachment in the fullest measure. His concern
appears to be less with the ponderable world than
with the air that wraps it round. In his landscapes
the ground has solidity, the water is a liquid me-
dium, the trees spring from the earth with account
taken of their firm anchorage through the network
of roots beneath the soil, objects such as houses and
boats are by no means visionary, and, when the pic-
ture is of a human figure, there is apt to be an over-
solidity of modeling, yet the general impression
given by his art is of a world in which there is noth-
ing to tie one to the earth, one in which, moreover,
no word of personal experience is uttered, in which
the mind is continually engaged with abstractions,
in which the spirit floats upward as naturally as a
bird takes flight—and with the same appearance of
freedom from obligation. Rapture is too violent a
word to apply to such lyric gladness, yet there is the
suggestion of rapture in these ascetic visions of
material beauty.
But Corot was obviously sincere in declaring his
fondness for the old. He was fifty when he aban-
doned his early style and his taste was fixed. If
Millet is classic in his feeling Corot is certainly not
less so, even where he is most a realist. Where
Millet depicts the characters in the great drama,
Corot reads the chorus for us with a haunting music
that makes unreal the heartrending realities of
human life. He may chant of emotions and even
of passions and of horrors as in his Dante and Virgil
and of grotesque purpose as in his Don Quixote,
but his chant reaches us through the sweet shadows
of a fragrant wood and mingles with the song of
birds and is cool and pure in tone as the sound of a
boy’s voice in sacred hymns. His modernity lies a
little in his spiritual attitude toward the natural
world, an attitude to which we are increasingly
sensitive, and still more in his interrogation of
nature for certain qualities upon which the moderns
have concentrated their attention, upon the move-
ment of the atmosphere chiefly: his respect for the
old shows itself in his severity of composition.
Neither in line or color is there ever a hint of exces-
sive expression or of eccentricity. His conformity
is so great as almost to constitute in itself individu-
ality. In his Orpheus Greeting the Dawn we have
a figure typical of his art—so closely does its human
aspect harmonize with the clear pale landscape, so
perfectly is the emotion it expresses attuned to the
old Greek worship of unhuman forces and phe-
nomena.
He was a painstaking worker, as most people are
who achieve a light ease and delicacy of touch. He
valued especially definite execution. "There must
Property oj the Metropolitan Museum oj Ar
VILLE D’AVRAY
By Permission
BY J. B. C. COROT