THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS 
"AUG, 25, 1934 
A PAGE FOR COLLECTORS. 
COROT IN THREB MOODS. 
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By FRANK DAVIS. 
but not being able to stand it, I became a painter 
of landscapes. At first I was a pupil of Michaillon, 
but, having lost him, I went to the studio of Victor 
Bertin. Afterwards I threw myself all alone upon 
nature — and here I 
am!” Can one 
lemand anything more 
modest, more‘ illumin- 
ating ? No boasting, 
ao theories of art, not 
»ven a hint of success, 
whether monetary or 
ırtistic. No wonder 
;hat, after his death, 
»eople said that one 
night perhaps replace 
ım as a painter, but 
ı1ever as a man. 
Such a character 
was incapable of paint- 
ng anything but what 
ıe saw and felt, and I 
for one solve this little 
problem in gesthetic 
ıppreciation by giving 
ıll the blame to myself 
ınd not to Corot. I 
>jelieve that I don’t 
nuch like these late 
landscapes of his be- 
;ause I’m so constituted 
and 1828, It is, at first sight, simple enough, and—as 
is the case with so many apparently simple pictures— 
reveals new beauties every time you return to it. 
It states things with an abruptness which has nc 
parallel in the 
other picture — 
trees, for example 
are treated with 
a few broad 
touches only, and 
the whole com: 
position, with its 
clear atmosphere 
and heavı 
shadows, is knil 
together with the 
grace of a race: 
horse ; it reminds 
me, rightly oı1ı 
wrongly, of Mozart 
("Ihe Magic 
Flute’’?), while 
the other is pure 
Wagner (the forest 
music in “ Sieg- 
fried’?); but 
then, of course, it 
is beneath a 
southern sky, 
where edges are 
not blurred. 
One can say 
with confidence 
that the new pic- 
ture shows a facet 
of Corot’s tem- 
perament which 
will be unknown 
to many of his 
admirers, and _ wil 
help‘ them tö“”gei 
nearer to his real 
character, both 
as an artist and 
as a man. One 
is. inclined to 
take him at the 
precise value of his own understatements. ‘“] 
have a single aim in life,‚’”” he said, “ and that is 
to make landscapes.’”’ Without a doubt, that is hir 
main contribution to French achievement. London 
now can satisfy itself that his range is wider than 
he cared to admit, and that he could, had necessity 
or his own natural bent insisted upon it, have pro- 
duced portraits as powerful and as subtle as any 0° 
his time and country. Not without reason was it 
said of him that beneath a quiet peasant exterior 
were concealed the rarest of human qualities, The 
visitor to Trafalgar Square may 
profitably compare this portrait with 
the delicious little picture that hangs 
near it—the portrait of his \neigh- 
bour and friend, M. Pivot, who ir 
seen on horseback against a Back: 
ground of green trees, a canvas 
which one classifies with difficulty, 
so charming a landscape is it, and 
so revealing an. impression of a 
quiet, bearded man on a grey horse. 
In short, the National Collection 
is fortunate in its Corots, so far— 
what is missing is an example of 
those earlyish (the 1840’s), rather 
academic, statuesque female figures, 
a little too obviously posed, perhaps, 
but none the less in the broad classica! 
tradition, that inevitably convince 
all but the most fanatic modernist 
that there were great men before 
Picasso was ever heard of. It is 
hardly necessary to add that I refer 
to the. youthful Picasso before he 
:;ommenced his experiments in 
various brands of abstraction. But 
this is leading me to theories which 
seem to rouse angry passions on both 
sides ; I return to Corot for poise and 
a divine common sense, Thus: “If 
painting is folly, it is a sweet folly 
which mankind should not only for- 
give, but search out for itself. If you look at my appear- 
ance, I defy anyone to find in it a trace of the ambition 
or the remorse which bring lines to the featnres 0* 
so many Door nennle ” 
THE National Gallery has just acquired a new. 
‚picture by Corot (Fig. 2) which is so different 
{rom our usual recollection of his work that the 
average visitor.to the Gallery is quite likely to doubt 
the correctness of the label on the frame. Numerous 
people, who hold to the opinion that female portraits 
should be of pretty and somewhat vacant young 
women only, will treat this new acquisition with a 
lisdainful sniff of disapproval: the rest of us will 
note with pleased surprise an extraordinary intensity, 
powerful and solid modelling, and splashes of glowing 
colour—mainly pink—which are unfortunately lost 
in a monochrome reproduction. This is, in short 
a picture which might have been painted by Rem: 
orandt, had Rembrandt been a nineteenth-century 
Frenchman and a colourist. One forgets that the 
subject is a woman whose disposition was obviously 
a little difficult, and remembers only that here the 
gentle, the good-humoured, the pastoral Jean Baptiste 
"Corot must have been shaken out of his normal atti- 
tude to the world about him, and inspired to set down 
on canvas a penetrating psychological study disguised 
as a great picture. ; 
The man was so kindly and modest that it is 
strange to see him working on so high a plane of 
2. A REMARKABLE COROT JUST ACQUIRED BY THE 
NATIONAL GALLERY: A PORTRAIT, PAINTED IN THE ’SIXTIES, 
WHICH REVEALS THE ARTIST AS A PENETRATING READER 
OF CHARACTER. (Reproductions by Courtesy of the Trustees of the National 
Gallery. Copyright reserved_\ 
that I can’t see beauty 
where I ought to see it— 
a dreamy fantasy of this 
Juality is too subtle for 
my mind, and it’s no 
consolation to share this 
blindness with many 
others, who, like me, 
much prefer the limpid 
straightforwardness of 
such an early canvas as 
([. AN ARRESTING COROT HUNG IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY; ‘THE CLAUDIAN 
AOQUEDUCT’: PAINTED IN 1826-28, DURING COROT’S FIRST VISIT TO ITALY 
emotional intensity, but if, from what we know of 
his character, this portrait is something of an enigma, 
the contrast provided by his landscapes is no less 
puzzling. Perhaps I can illustrate this best by repro- 
ducing the two which hang near Fig. 2—'‘ The Claudian 
Aqueduct ” (Fig. ı) and ‘ The Bent Tree ” (Fig. 3). 
It is safe to say that a visitor from Mars, confronted 
by these two pictures, would have difficulty in be- 
lieving that they are by the same hand. The latter 
with its fluffy foliage, its dim, romantic mistiness, 
has been enormously popular ever since it was painted, 
somewhere between the years 1855-60; but many are 
convinced that it is essentially base on false senti- 
ment, and that Corot, when he evplved this charac- 
teristic formula for his landscapes/ after about 1850, 
was led astray into second-rate poetry because he 
found it paid, and not because he really saw the 
forest at Fontainebleau like this—that he was, in 
{act, deliberately painting down to the level of his 
zlientele. There are several reasons which make 
this view seem nonsense: one is that, right up tc 
-his death in 1875, Corot was painting not only these 
romantic landscapes, hut others, especially those in 
which a nude is reclining in the foreground, which 
rouse the enthusiasm of the most pernickety critics , 
and, secondly, there never was an artist more honest 
and less likely to fall short. of his own standards. 
He was a law unto himself, but with what integrity 
he interpreted that” Iäw can be deduced from the 
following. When he was Sseventy-five , years old 
in 1871, he was asked to write an account of his life, 
and replied: ‘ Dear Sir,—At your request I am 
sending you a few biographical details. Until J 
was eighteen I was at the Rouen Lyc&e. After that 
F spent eight vears in business lin a draper’s shop]. 
3. AN EXAMPLE OF THE TYPE OF LANDSCAPE MOST COMMONLY 
ASSOCIATED WITH COROT’S NAME! ‘THE BENT TREE,” PAINTED 
IN THE ’FIFTIES, AND EXHIBITING A MFACILE, PASTORAL 
MELANCHOLY >; A MOOD WHICH THE ARTIST HAS BEEN ACCUSED 
OF EWXPLOITING TO PLEASE HIJS CLIENTELE. 
Fig. 1. This, which was purchased at the Degas 
sale in 1918, is one of the many pictures which 
were the result of Corot’s first stay in Italy. He 
went there in 1825: this was painted between 1826