l his feelings and labor on
what he used to call "_sujets intimes_," the picturesque nooks of
landscape one can always find in a highly cultivated country, where
nature is tamed to an intimacy with the domestic spirit, or where she
vainly struggles against the invasion of culture, as in the borders
of the forest of Fontainebleau. In such material, nature withdraws
farther and makes a wider margin for art, and the wedding and welding
of the two become more subtle and playful.

It has always seemed to me that with all the differences inherent
in the antagonism of the characters of the two men, the essential
features of the art of Rousseau and Turner were the same; pure
impressionism based on the most intimate and largest knowledge of the
facts of nature, but without direct copying of them--rather working
from memoranda or memories, for neither ever painted directly from
nature; the same conception of the subject as a whole, its rhythmic
and harmonic unity as opposed to the fragmentary manner of treatment
of most of their contemporaries; the lyric passion in line and tint;
the same originality which often became waywardness in the conception
of subject in itself; the same revolt from all precedent; and the same
passion for subtle gradation and infinite space, air, and light--and
some of Rousseau's skies were the most vaporous I have ever seen.
These are the fundamental agreements of the art of the two great
masters, and in those qualities no other man of their countries and
epoch has equaled them, but outside of these the contrasts are of the
most pronounced. Pyne told me that Turner said he wished he could do
without trees; Rousseau worshiped them. Turner loved the mountains;
Rousseau never cared to see them and never painted one. Turner, a
colorist, reveled in color like a Bacchanal; Rousseau, a tonalist,
felt it like a vestal; but both had the sense of color in the subtlest
refinement.

Rousseau used to say that if you had not your picture in the first
five lines you would never have it, and he laid down as a rule that
whenever you worked on it you should go over the whole and keep it
together, growing in all parts _pari passu_. Wishing to give me a
lesson in values one day as he was painting, he turned his palette
over and painted a complete little scheme of a picture on the back of
it, suggested by the subject before us as we looked out of the studio
window. He showed me his studies from nature, mere notes of form a