Romantic Painting, Part VI

Mike G. on 12 31, 2009

Rousseau carried the fundamental principle of the school farther than
the others–with him interest, delight in, enthusiasm for nature became
absorption in her. Whereas other men have loved nature, it has been
acutely remarked, Rousseau was in love with her. It was felicitously of
him, rather than of Dupré or Corot, that the naif peasant inquired, “Why
do you paint the tree; the tree is there, is it not?” And never did
nature more royally reward allegiance to her than in the sustenance and
inspiration she furnished for Rousseau’s genius. You feel the point of
view in his picture, but it is apparently that of nature herself as well
as his own. It is not the less personal for this. On the contrary, it
is extremely personal, and few pictures are as individual, as
characteristic. Occasionally Diaz approaches him, as I have said, but
only in the very happiest and exceptional moments, when the dignity of
nature as well as her charm seems specially to impress and impose itself
upon the less serious painter. But Rousseau’s selection seems
instinctive and not sought out. He knows the secret of nature’s
pictorial element. He is at one with her, adopts her suggestions so
cordially and works them out with such intimate sympathy and
harmoniousness, that the two forces seem reciprocally to reinforce each
other, and the result gains many fold in power from their subtle
co-operation. His landscapes have in this way a Wordsworthian
directness, simplicity, and severity. They are not troubled and dramatic
like Turner’s. They are not decorative like Dupré’s, they have not the
solemn sentiment of Daubigny’s, or the airy aspiration and fairy-like
blitheness of Corot’s. But there is in them “all breathing human
passion;” and at times, as in “Le Givre,” they rise to majesty and real
grandeur because they are impregnated with the sentiment, as well as are
records of the phenomena, of nature, and one may say of Rousseau,
paraphrasing Mr. Arnold’s remark about Wordsworth, that nature seems
herself to take the brush out of his hand and to paint for him “with her
own bare, sheer, penetrating power.” Rousseau, however, is French, and
in virtue of his nativity exhibits always what Wordsworth’s treatment of
nature exhibits only occasionally, namely, the Gallic gift of style. It
is rarely as felicitous as in Corot, in every detail of whose every
work, one may almost say, its informing, co-ordinating, elevating
influence is distinctly to be perceived; but it is always present as a
factor, as a force dignifying and relieving from all touch, all taint of
the commonness that is so often inseparably associated with art whose
absorption in nature is listlessly unthinking instead of enthusiastic
and alert. In Rousseau, too, in a word, we have the classic strain, as
at least a psychological element, and note as one source of his power
his reserve and restraint, his perfect self-possession.
In Daubigny a similar attitude toward nature is obvious, but with a
sensible difference. Affection for, rather than absorption in her, is
his inspiration. Daubigny stands somewhat apart from the Fontainebleau
group, with whom nevertheless he is popularly and properly associated,
for though he painted Normandy mainly, he was spiritually of the
Barbizon kindred. He stands, however, somewhat apart from French
painting in general, I think. There is less style, more sentiment, more
poetry in his landscapes than in those of his countrymen who are to be
compared with him. Beyond what is admirable in them there is something
attaching as well. He drew and engraved a good deal, as well as painted.
He did not concentrate his powers enough, perhaps, to make as signal and
definite a mark as otherwise he might have done. He is a shade
desultory, and too spontaneous to be systematic. One must be systematic
to reach the highest point, even in the least material spheres. But
never have the grave and solemn aspects of landscape found a sweeter and
serener spirit to interpret them. In some of his pictures there is a
truly religious feeling. His frankness recalls Constable’s, but it is
more distinguished in being more spiritual. He has not Diaz’s elegance,
nor Corot’s witchery, nor Rousseau’s power, but nature is more
mysteriously, more mystically significant to him, and sets a deeper
chord vibrating within him. He is a sensitive instrument on which she
plays, rather than a magician who wins her secrets, or an observer whose
generalizing imagination she sets in motion. The design of some of his
important works, notably that of his last _Salon_ picture, is very
distinguished, and in one of his large canvases representing a road like
that from Barbizon through the level plain to Chailly, there is the
spirit and sentiment of all the summer evenings that ever were. But he
has distinctly less power than the strict Fontainebleau group. He has,
in force, less affinity with them than Troyon has, whose force is often
magnificent, and whose landscape is so sweet, often, and often so strong
as well, that one wonders a little at his fondness for cattle–in spite
of the way in which he justifies it by being the first of cattle
painters. And neither Daubigny nor Troyon, nor, indeed, Rousseau
himself, often reaches in dramatic grandeur the lofty landscape of
Michel, who, with Paul Huet (the latter in a more strictly historical
sense) were so truly the forerunners and initiators of the romantic
landscape movement, both in sentiment and chronology, in spite of their
Dutch tradition, as to make the common ascription of its debt to
Constable, whose aid was so cordially welcomed in the famous Salon of
1824, a little strained.

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