It was impossible not to perceive that, surprising as were his essays in
other fields to those who only knew him as a landscape painter, he was
essentially and integrally a painter of landscape, though a painter of
landscape who had taken his subject in a way and treated it in a manner
so personal as to be really unparalleled. Outside of landscape his
interest was clearly not real. In his other works one notes a certain
_debonnaire_ irresponsibility. He pursued nothing seriously but
out-of-doors, its vaporous atmosphere, its crisp twigs and graceful
branches, its misty distances and piquant accents, what Thoreau calls
its inaudible panting. His true theme, lightly as he took it, absorbed
him; and no one of any sensitiveness can ever regret it. His powers,
following the indication of his true temperament, his most genuine
inspiration, are concentrated upon the very finest thing imaginable in
landscape painting; as, indeed, to produce as they have done the finest
landscape in the history of art, they must have been.
There are, however, two things worth noting in Corot's landscape, beyond
the mere fact that, better even than Rousseau, he expresses the essence
of landscape, dwells habitually among its inspirations, and is its
master rather than its servant.
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