The delicate branching of trees is depicted in his work with accuracy
tempered by a sense of the beauty of line, which prevents it from
becoming photographic. Leon Germain Pelouse, who was born at Pierrelay
in 1838, and died in Paris, 1891, carried somewhat the same qualities
to excess. His pictures, though undeniably excellent, are marred by
the dangerous facility which degenerates into mere virtuosity.
Charles Jacque, who was born in 1813, and lived until 1894, was of the
original group living for many years in Barbizon. He was, perhaps, of
less original mind than any of the others, but was gifted with a power
of assimilation which enabled him to form an eclectic style that is
now recognized as his own. His pictures are many in number and varied
in character, though his somewhat stereotyped pictures of sheep, done
in the later years of his life, are best known.
The limits of space render it difficult to make even a summary
enumeration of certain tendencies in figure painting which marked the
years of the growth of this great landscape school. Gustave Courbet
(born at Ornans in 1819, died in Switzerland, 1877), who might be
classed both as a figure and a landscape painter, would demand by
right a longer consideration than can be here given. Of his career as
a champion of realism, as a past master in the peculiarly modern art
of keeping one's self before the public, culminating in his connection
with the Commune in Paris in 1871, and the destruction of the column
in the Place Vendome, there could be much to say.
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