l ponds, with distances whose accents are
pricked out with white houses and yellow cows and placid fishers and
ferrymen in red caps, seen in glimpses through curtains of sparse,
feathery leafage--or peoples woodland openings with nymphs and fawns,
silhouetted against the sunset glow, or dancing in the cool gray of
dusk. A man of no reading, having only the elements of an education in
the general sense of the term, his instinctive sense for what is refined
was so delicate that we may say of his landscapes that, had the Greeks
left any they would have been like Corot's. And this classic and
cultivated effect he secured not at all, or only very incidentally,
through the force of association, by dotting his hillsides and vaporous
distances with bits of classic architecture, or by summing up his
feeling for the Dawn in a graceful figure of Orpheus greeting with
extended gesture the growing daylight, but by a subtle interpenetration
of sensuousness and severity resulting in precisely the sentiment fitly
characterized by the epithet classic. The other trait peculiar to
Corot's representation of nature and expression of himself is his color.
No painter ever exhibited, I think, quite such a sense of refinement in
so narrow a gamut. Green and gray, of course, predominate and set the
key, but he has an interestingly varied palette on the hither side of
splendor whose subtleties are capable of giving exquisite pleasure.
Never did anyone use tints with such positive force. Tints with Corot
have the vigor and vibration of positive colors--his lilacs, violets,
straw-colored hues, his almost Quakerish coquetry with drabs and slates
and pure clear browns, the freshness and bloom he imparted to his tones,
the sweet and shrinking wild flowers with which as a spray he sprinkled
his humid dells and brook margins. But Corot's true distinction--what
gives him his unique position at the very head of landscape art, is
neither his color, delicate and interesting as his color is, nor his
classic serenity harmonizing with, instead of depending upon, the chance
associations of architecture and mythology with which now and then he
decorates his landscapes; it is the blithe, the airy, the truly
spiritual way in which he gets farther away than anyone from both the
actual pigment that is his instrument, and from the phenomena that are
the objects of his expression--his ethereality, in a word. He has
communicated his sentiment almost without material, one