Print collector's quarterly (6.1916)

not the slightest aptitude for salesmanship in his second
place, he was finally set to work outside the establish-
ment, carrying heavy packages through the streets.
But he was equally a failure in this department. More
than once his employer, M. Delalain, came across him
either loitering along and looking up at the clouds, or
else standing before the shops in whose windows prints
and other pictures were displayed, as one may see in
Carl Vernet’s cover sketch for an album issued by
Delpech — another of the great lithographic publishers
of the period, like Engehnan.
Every one knows how, finally, in 1822, Corot’s father
consented to his son’s abandoning the mercantile career
he had marked out for him, and becoming an artist.
The young man immediately entered the studio of
Michal!on, and thereafter, wrapped up in his painting,
he apparently quite forgot the humbler medium in
which he had made his obscure debut as an original
artist. Only once before 1871 did he, so far as is known,
again touch a lithographic crayon, and that was merely
to make a cover for a little brochure, La Caisse
d’Epargne, a vaudeville, both words and music of which
were written by the sons of Corot’s old patron, M.
Delalain. It represented Madame Rose in the role of
Mere Boisseau, at the Thedtre-Comte, in 1836, and of
this work Robaut possessed a unique example.
In 1845 Corot’s interest in Charles Jacque’s experi-
ments with the needle led him to etch a plate, the
Souvenir de Toscane, and later, urged by his friends
Bracquemond, Michelin, and others, he made a dozen
or so delightful etchings which, in spite of many evi-
dent shortcomings, succeed to an extraordinary degree
in expressing the most poetic aspects of Corot’s genius.

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