One is the way in which he poetizes, so
to speak, the simplest stretches of sward and clumps of trees, and long
clear vistas across still ponds, with distances whose accents are
pricked out with white houses and yellow cows and placid fishers and
ferrymen in red caps, seen in glimpses through curtains of sparse,
feathery leafage--or peoples woodland openings with nymphs and fawns,
silhouetted against the sunset glow, or dancing in the cool gray of
dusk. A man of no reading, having only the elements of an education in
the general sense of the term, his instinctive sense for what is refined
was so delicate that we may say of his landscapes that, had the Greeks
left any they would have been like Corot's. And this classic and
cultivated effect he secured not at all, or only very incidentally,
through the force of association, by dotting his hillsides and vaporous
distances with bits of classic architecture, or by summing up his
feeling for the Dawn in a graceful figure of Orpheus greeting with
extended gesture the growing daylight, but by a subtle interpenetration
of sensuousness and severity resulting in precisely the sentiment fitly
characterized by the epithet classic.
Pages:
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85