AFTER A PHOTOGRAPH FROM
LIFE.
This portrait represents "good Papa Corot," as he was universally
known, at work out of doors.]
It was Corot's good fortune to meet at the start a young landscape
painter, Michallon, who had lately returned from Rome, where he had
gone after winning the prize for historical landscape, which then
formed part of the curriculum of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Michallon
died in 1824, when only twenty-eight years old, too soon to have shown
the fruits of an independent spirit which had already revolted against
the trammels of the school. Desiring to save Corot from the mistakes
which he had himself made, he adjured him to remain _naif_, to paint
nature as he saw it, and to disregard the counsels of those who were
for the moment in authority. Gentle, almost timid by nature, having
met so far in life with little but disapproval, Corot disregarded his
friend's advice at first, and placed himself under the guidance of
Victor Bertin, a painter then in vogue, and, needless to say, deeply
imbued with scholastic tradition. In his company Corot made his first
voyage to Italy, in 1825, and thus came for the first time under the
true classic influence. The lessons taught in the school of nature,
where Claude had studied, were those best fitted for the temperament
of Corot, who has been called "a child of the eighteenth century,
grown in the midst of that imitation of antiquity so ardent, and so
often unintelligent, where the Directory copied Athens, and the Empire
forced itself to imitate Rome.
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