Thomy Thiéry was a rich man of the formerly French, but afterwards English, island of Mauritius, who lived and died in Paris, and left his art collection, consisting of paintings, Barye bronzes, and some Gobelins, to the Louvre. Thomy Thiéry was a man of a single passion and a single thought; he loved only the Barbizon School and some of its artistic contemporaries who, in his opinion, stood in an elective affinity to it; but he loved them with unshaken fidelity and constant self-sacrifice. And in contrast to other more eclectic amateurs, he did not perform his heroic deeds of an undaunted purchaser in auction rooms and art-shops, but carried his money to the studios of the living and struggling as long as he was able, and appeared on the market as an ordinary collector only when the brush had slipped from the hand of the creators. In this way his gallery got the warmth and unity of an organic being, and besides its beauty, gave joy through the idea that it was not the result of parvenu vanity, or of that cruel fancy that takes satisfaction in a work without troubling about the originator, but that a grateful patronage, which not only wishes to purchase art treasures, but also to lighten and beautify the artist’s earthly pilgrimage, had created it. As a legacy to the Louvre, the collection has from a fraction become an integral section that methodically dovetails into its place in the frame of this incomparable museum, in which the history of art is made to live before our gaze in select examples. The management has added the pictures which it formerly possessed of Thomy Thiéry’s favourites, so that the three halls of the collection now afford a good survey of the fruitful movement, which, about 1830, took place in French painting, and diverted it from the degraded classicism then dominant into the path pursued at present.

The School of Barbizon! A convenient, but, for that very reason, a meaningless, expression. The men comprised in this commonplace designation have not much in common. In age not far apart, they were bound to each other by personal friendship, and partly inhabitants of that Fontainebleau wood, in which some of them experienced Nature’s revelation. They were, however, very different in temperament, genius, and impulse, and they strove for personal ideals with dissimilar modes of expression. Only one peculiarity belongs in like degree to all, viz., the burning longing with which they yearned to get out of the stupid hole-in-the-wall of the academic studio that had become to them a goal into freedom and life.

Without punning, the free air and freedom meant to them the same thing. Landscape furnished them with the means of renewing their acquaintance with Nature. Under a completely Faust-like impulse, they struggled out of the atelier, where, “in reek and decay, only the skeletons of brutes and dead men’s bones” surrounded them, “into the far country.” Their appearance about the time of the July Revolution was the Easter-morning walk after brooding in the Gothic studio.

The David tradition held painting in thrall. The master’s greatest pupil, Baron Gros, and, with him, the gifted Géricault, sought to overcome the stiff mummifiedness and dryness of forms, the staginess of subject of this art, which found its triumph in the “Rape of the Sabine Women” and the “Coronation at Notre Dame.” But Géricault, misjudged and undervalued, died early a conquered man, and Gros, going astray in uncertain sounding of himself, returned, after his short revolt, to the tin and paste formulary of his first epoch, recognised in alarm its hollowness, and, by voluntary death in the Seine, got rid of the pains of the sceptic who has lost his faith and his ideal. The then young generation, warned and shaken by the tragedy of this seeker who found nothing, broke with the dominant rule, and sat down at the feet of Nature, to learn from her.

The country is the great master-workshop. There Nature speaks her most eloquent language of form. There she finds the tones that awaken the loudest echo in the soul of the genuine born painter. The creation of a pictorial artist is, like each of the higher mental activities, very complicated; the most opposed organs of the brain have a variously graded and mixed share in it. The vivid reception and rendition of a phenomenon at rest, of the expressive line of one in motion, is an exercise of the motor centres. In the representation of man, or what pertains to man, which is, directly or indirectly, through the awakening of anthropomorphic ideas, to seize on our minds, trains of thought, reason, and judgment play a part by the side of the emotions growing out of the unconscious. But the real and essential element in painting is neither the motorial production of the drawing, nor the travail of thought in the composition, but is ever the giving of light and colour. Now what counts in landscape is the effect of light and colour. Here the painter stands before the magic changes of lights and the alluring colour-mysteries of Nature, which excite him most keenly; for they stimulate his optical centre, of which the extraordinary development and particular susceptibility of light is the psycho-physical basis and preliminary condition of the primitive, impulsive gift of painting. Ever when men of talent feel the stiffened traditions of the schools to be intolerable, and want to follow their own inward impulse, they flee to the country in order, in its free light, to wash themselves clean from the dust of the schools, and bathe into health their limbs, aching from constrained positions. There is profound instruction in the fact that to Giotto, in his effort completely to burst the fetters of Byzantinism, which his master, Cimabue, had already strongly shaken, it first occurred to introduce into his work the elements of landscape. His picture in the Louvre of St Francis of Assisi is a touchingly naïve example of this.

It was Corot who first uttered in the French painting of the nineteenth century the creative words, “Let there be light.” Of course, he did not discover day, for there were masters before him in whose pictures the sun shone. We find in Ruysdael the keen, chilly clearness of a northern sky. Claude Lorrain gives warm, tender evening tones of the south, which have the effect of luxurious warm baths. From him, Turner directly traces his descent, who overheats Claude’s pleasant tepidity to a glow, and raises his gentle clearness to a blinding splendour of radiancy. But no one before Corot has understood, like him, how to fill pictures with such discreet yet penetrating, delicate yet glowing light. It is no melodramatic, no Bengal or concocted light, no light of strange, exceptional occasions, of confusing colours, no vulgar, pompous, excessively brilliant light, but a restfully even, inexhaustibly rich, cheerful light that fills the soul with joy and hope.

Corot’s light sheds its rays from a hopeful soul. It is luminous optimism in visible form. Some years ago, a Corot Exhibition took place in the Galliera Museum, and those who arranged it contrived to collect about the whole of the master’s life-work. I looked attentively at one point: it contained hardly a single evening, not a single autumn note or muttering of a storm, but only morning and spring and blue sky. That is characteristic of this child of the sun. In Corot the elements of beauty are nearly always the same: pleasant hill-countries, winding paths that lead to weird distances and invite our yearning to fare thither; at a curve of the road gleaming water mirroring silver cloudlets; in the foreground delicately-leaved trees; around and over everything the wondrous air thrilling with light, animated with a thin haze of mist, in which, bewitched by the feeling of spring, by an association of ideas, we fancy we can hear the soft bell-notes of invisible church towers, the twitter of pairing birds engaged in building their nests, and the buzz of early beetles. Some of the Corots in the Thiéry rooms, e.g., the view of the Coliseum, are youthful productions, and do not yet show the dreamily soft, as it were, inspired style and silver glow of his maturity. They are still somewhat dry and hard, yet, even in these more prosaic pictures, the heart-quickening light falls from heaven—Corot’s incomparable strength.

Corot did not belong to the forestmen of Barbizon, but he was the founder of their religion of light. Th. Rousseau shares with him the silkiness, and approaches him in the down-like delicacy of his young foliage. Daubigny has more temperament; he is sturdier, more manly, perhaps I should say: more like a peasant. What raises him to the rank of master is the depth of his pictures, and his gift of working out his subjects in almost stereoscopic relief, in all planes—in the fore-, middle-, and background. His “Skiff” is, therefore, an excellent example. The mast of the vessel stands absolutely free. We see how air is encompassing it on all sides. Dupré shares in equal degree the praise of his two friends. That is not quite just, for he has by no means so much personality as they. He does not feel originally, but imitatively. Nature moves him first through the eyes of his companions in art. He imitates alternately the softness of Corot’s foliage and his silvery mistiness, Rousseau’s smoothness and insinuating harmony of colour, and Daubigny’s tree-poetry, but I look in vain for the feature that distinguishes him from the others.

The delicate, and at the same time reverential love with which the Barbizon-men treat the individual tree, Troyon expends on domestic animals. As to the former the tree, so long as it does not melt in the haze of distance, is never merely part of the scheme, but a distinct, living being, possessing a physiognomy of its own, of which they render a strongly individualised likeness; so the latter regards animals with the understanding of a shepherd, who is known to recognise by their countenances all the sheep of a numerous flock. He will correctly depict the physiognomy of animals, without any propensity to giving them the look of human beings, through which animal painters only too easily become, without intending it, comic.

Millet is the continuation and consummation of the great landscape painters of 1830. We are not conscious of this if we regard him only by himself; but it is at once forced on us if we see him in the Thiéry Collection in connection with his comrades. Millet is also, fundamentally, a landscape painter, only his landscapes are animated by men; but not by men who are accessories, as is the case with Corot, but by men who are a part of the landscape, its most important and essential part, precisely as the trees and clouds are, but more dignified and spiritual than trees or clouds. With him man grows together with his rural environment, is himself a bit of nature in the midst of nature, and it is not easy to decide whether he is degrading man, or is elevating the earth with all that on it creeps and flies, when he puts them on the same level. Millet discerns in nature an all-living element that can take manifold bodily forms and be expressed in a variety of ways, but is one and the same in all different forms. This grand pantheistic feature uplifts his pictures from genre to high, spiritual art. And since nature is never comic, so Millet’s peasants—themselves a bit of nature—never affect us comically, but always pathetically, even when they are as sturdy, clumsy, and simple as David Teniers’s boors. In one picture in the collection, “Maternal Foresight,” Millet has apparently a humorous intention: a peasant woman is assisting her very small youngster at the doorstep of her house in a little necessity. Even here I cannot find anything to laugh at, unless from kindly sympathy for the hop-o’-my-thumb and his tender mother. It is just a glance at life, and at such no one who feels a reverence for the sanctity of life ever laughs.

The devotees of the great Pan—Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny, Millet, and their followers of the second rank, gain in significance side by side. Their contemporary, Delacroix, loses beside them. What I felt at the Century Exhibition of French art, I feel even more strongly in the Thiéry rooms at the Louvre. I am afraid Delacroix is one whose trial must be revised. Perhaps we shall then be obliged to confirm the unfavourable verdict that the adherents of the Classical movement passed on him at his appearance, although on quite different grounds.

Delacroix was not in love with life; he did not seek and find nature; he followed in her footsteps only in books. He was essentially an illustrator; apart from Victor Hugo he is not to be thought of. The Romantics performed a duty of gratitude when, with fanatical violence, they carried him triumphantly through his detractors. He is their henchman with the brush; he fights with them and for them. They only act according to the rules of chivalry when they protect him. His magic colouring is not to be contested, although it is often gaudy and theatrical. But out of his “Hamlet with the Gravediggers,” his “Medea,” his “Bride of Abydos,” his “Abduction of Rebecca” (“Ivanhoe”), a dreary waste stares us in the face, which would be hardly bearable if we did not happen to know the poems from which Delacroix drew his subjects. We must put life into his dead pictures by what we remember of our reading. Delacroix stops at the externals. We have to add soul and passion.

After the men of 1830 came, on the one side, the neat painters of the Empire, of whom Meissonier is the best type; on the other, the naturalists with Courbet, the impressionists with Manet and Monet; and so the development went on to the confused struggles of this moment. That period of the July Revolution was felt by its contemporaries as an age of storm and stress in art. On us later-born children it has the effect of halcyon days, the full, rapturous life and sunny joys of which the present generation longs for in vain.