Part 3 (1/2)

Corot's style changed; but it changed gradually, as nature changes, waxing like the ht Guided by a perfect instinct, he progressed, fulfilling the course of his artistic destiny We notice change, but each change brings fuller beauty And through the long and beautiful year of Corot's genius--full as the year itself of e that comes over his art is always in the direction of purer and more spiritual beauty We find him more and more absorbed in the e to sacrifice the superfluous and circus

Look at the ”Lac de Garde” and say if you can that the old Greek melody is not audible in the line which bends and floats to the lake's edge, in the race of the broken birch which sweeps the ”pale co into the heart of nature, and do we not hear the silence that is the soul of evening? In this, his perfect period, he is content to leave his foreground rubbed over with so well that the eye rests not there, and upon hishis picture on so in which for hi ripples on the lake or the shi+ht dies out of the sky

I only saw Corot once It was in soone to paint, and I caentlelade After ad is lovely, but I cannot find your coround is a long way ahead,” and sure enough, nearly two hundred yards away, his picture rose out of the di a little beyond the vista into the meadow

The anecdote see, for it shows us the painter in his very employment of nature, and we divine easily the transposition in the tones and in the aspect of things that he was engaged in bringing into that picture And to speak of transpositions leads us inevitably into consideration of the great secret of Corot's art, his employment of what is known in studios as values

By values is ht and shadow contained in a tone

The relation of a half-tint to the highest light, which is represented by the white paper, the relation of a shadow to the deepest black, which is represented by the chalk pencil, is easy enough to perceive in a drawing; but when the work is in colour the values, although not less real, are more difficult to estimate For a colour can be considered fro ht and shade Violet, for instance, contains not only red and blue in proportions which may be indefinitely varied, but also certain proportions of light and shade; the forht, represented on the palette by flake white; the latter tending towards the deepest dark, represented on the palette by ivory black

Similar to a note in music, no colour can be said to be in itself either false or true, ugly or beautiful A note and a colour acquire beauty and ugliness according to their associations; therefore to colour well depends, in the first instance, on the painter's knowledge and intimate sense of the laws of contrast and similitude But there is still another factor in the art of colouring well; for, just as the musician obtains richness and novelty of expression by h the instruments of the orchestra, so does the painter obtain depth and richness through a judicious distribution of values If ere to disturb the distribution of values in the pictures of titian, Rubens, Veronese, their colour would at once seem crude, superficial, without cohesion or rarity But soht the values ht too

However plausible this theory may seem, the practice of those who hold it a and instructive to notice how those who seek the colour without regard for the values inherent in the colouringmore than a certain shallow superficial brilliancy; the colour of such painters is never rich or profound, and although itin the element of romantic charm and mystery

The colour is the melody, the values are the orchestration of the melody; and as the orchestration serves to enrich the melody, so do the values enrich the colour And as melody may--nay, must--exist, if the orchestration be really beautiful, so colour must inhere wherever the values have been finely observed In Rembrandt, the colour is brown and a white faintly tinted with bitumen; in Claude, the colour is blue, faintly flushed with yellow in the ht of these painters to be considered colourists

They painted with the values--that is to say, hat remains on the palette when abstraction has beenmatter--a delicate neutral tint of infinite subtlety and charm; and it is with this, the evanescent and impalpable soul of the vanished colours, that the most beautiful pictures are painted Corot, too, is a conspicuous exa the world's colourists has never, so far as I know, been seriously contested, his pictures are alreen, and yet the result is of a richly coloured evening

Corot and Reoal by absolutely different ends He saw clearly, although he could not express himself quite clearly, that, above all painters, Rembrandt and Corot excelled in that mode of pictorial expression known as values, or shall I say chiaroscuro, for in truth he who has said values has hinted chiaroscuro Reh a darkened roorey light of iac poet The story told idely different, but the ht, the other attenuated in the shadow: both sacrificed the corners with a view to fixing the attention on the one spot in which the soul of the picture lives

All schools have not set great store on values, although all schools have set great store on drawing and colour Values see like a fashi+on One generation hardly gives the eneration finds the whole charine aand instructive history than the history of values in painting It is far from my scheme to write such a history, but I wish that such a history ritten, for then we should see clearly hoere they who neglected the principle, and how much they lost

I would only call attention to how the principle ca of this century It cah the pictures of Turner and Constable It was an Anglo-Dutch influence that roused French art, then slu in the pseudo-classicisms of the First Empire; and, half-awakened, French art turned its eyes to Holland for inspiration; and values, the foundation and corner-stone of Dutch art, became almost at a bound a first article of faith in the artistic creed In 1830 values caion Rembrandt was the new Messiah, Holland was the Holy Land, and disciples were busy dispensing the propaganda in every studio

Since the bad example of Greuze, literature had wound round every branch of painting until painting seemed to disappear in the parasite like an oak under a cloud of ivy The excess had been great--a reaction was inevitable--and Reends, furnished the necessary transition But when a taste for painting had been reacquired, one after the other the Dutch painters became the fashi+on It is almost unnecessary to point out the influence of Hobbema on the art of Rousseau Corot was less affected by the Dutchmen, or, to speak more exactly, he assimilated more completely what he had learnt from them than his rival was able to do Moreover, what he took froh Hobberave as Wordsworth, must have made more direct and intiaiety of Hobbema's water--forgotten science of values in the Barbizon painters They sought their art in the direction of values, and very easily Corot took the lead as chief exponent of the new principle; and he succeeded in applying the principle of values to landscape painting as fully as Re

But at the moment when the new means of expression seemed most distinctly established and understood, it was put aside and lost sight of by a new generation of painters, and, curiously enough, by the orously proclaimed the beauty and perfection of the art which was to be henceforth, at least in practice, their mission to repudiate For I take it that the art of the i whatever in common with the art of Corot True, that Corot's aim was to render his impression of his subject, no ure; in this aim he differed in no wise fro Corot's aims but his means of expression, and his means of expression were the very opposite to those employed by Monet and the school of Monet Not with half-tints in which colour disappears are Monet and his school concerned, but with the brilliant vibration of colour in the full light, with open spaces where the light is reflected back and forward, and nature is but a pris and iridescent tints

I re about one of Monet's innumerable snow effects: ”This picture is in his most radiant h the picture--only poor houses with a single square church tower, but they are beautiful as Greek tereat iround, a few yellow bushes, bare and crippled by the frost, and around and above a litter in pale blue and pale rose tints” I asked if the touch was not more precious than intimate; and I spoke, too, of a shallow and brilliant appearance But if I had asked why the picture, notwithstanding its incontestable gested _un decor de theatre_, why one did not enter into it as one does into a picture by Wilson or Corot, one to the root of the evil And the reason of this is because Monet has never kno to organise and control his values

The relation of a wall to the sky which he observes so finely seem as if deliberately contrived for the suppression of all atmosphere; and we miss in Monet the delicacy and thewithdrawn, a landscape becomes a mosaic, flat surface takes the place of round: the next step is some form or other of pre-Raphaelitism

MONET, SISLEY, pissARO, AND THE DECADENCE

Nature demands that children should devour their parents, and Corot was hardly cold in his grave when his teaching calected and even denied Values were abandoned and colour becaht of the new school

My first acquaintance with Monet's painting was ine and his celebrated troop of life-size turkeys gobbling the tall grass in a h up in the picture, a French chateau

Impressionism is a word that has lent itself to every kind ofis penetrated with impressionism, but, to use the word in itsof illusive appearance--Monet is the only painter to whom it may be reasonably applied I re coloured necks of the turkeys Truly it lance, the canvas radiates; it throws its light in the face of the spectator as, perhaps, no canvas did before But if the eyes are not immediately averted the illusion passes, and its place is taken by a somewhat incoherent and crude coloration Then thebeen obtained by excessive acco like a formal protestation of the non-existence of the other two-thirds Since that year I have seen Monets by the score, and have hardly observed any change or alteration in his , or any development soever in his art At the end of the season he comes up from the country with thirty or forty landscapes, all equally perfect, all painted in precisely the san of hesitation, and no one suggests the unattainable, the beyond; one and all reveal to us a man who is always sure of his effect, and who is always in a hurry Any corner of nature will do equally well for his purpose, nor is he disposed to change the disposition of any line of tree or river or hill; so long as a certain reverberation of colour is obtained all is well An unceasing production, and an alree of excellence, has placed Monet at the head of the school; his pictures cooes noith the erudite American but Monet's landscapes But does Monet e, and if so, what are the qualities in his work that make it superior to Sisley's and pissaro's?

Sisley is less decorative, less on the surface, and though he follows Monet in his pursuit of colour, nature is, perhaps, on account of his English origin, so more to him than a brilliant appearance It has of course happened to Monet to set his easel before the suburban aspect that Sisley loves, but he has always treated it rather in the decorative than in the meditative spirit He has never been touched by the humility of a lane's end, and the sentiment of the humble life that collects there has never appeared on his canvas Yet Sisley, being more in sympathy with such nature, has often been able to produce a superior though much less pretentious picture than the ordinary stereotyped Monet But if Sisley is more meditative than Monet, pissaro is more meditative than either