He is a sensitive instrument on which she
plays, rather than a magician who wins her secrets, or an observer whose
generalizing imagination she sets in motion. The design of some of his
important works, notably that of his last _Salon_ picture, is very
distinguished, and in one of his large canvases representing a road like
that from Barbizon through the level plain to Chailly, there is the
spirit and sentiment of all the summer evenings that ever were. But he
has distinctly less power than the strict Fontainebleau group. He has,
in force, less affinity with them than Troyon has, whose force is often
magnificent, and whose landscape is so sweet, often, and often so strong
as well, that one wonders a little at his fondness for cattle--in spite
of the way in which he justifies it by being the first of cattle
painters. And neither Daubigny nor Troyon, nor, indeed, Rousseau
himself, often reaches in dramatic grandeur the lofty landscape of
Michel, who, with Paul Huet (the latter in a more strictly historical
sense) were so truly the forerunners and initiators of the romantic
landscape movement, both in sentiment and chronology, in spite of their
Dutch tradition, as to make the common ascription of its debt to
Constable, whose aid was so cordially welcomed in the famous Salon of
1824, a little strained.
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