Corot

The sun sinks more and more behind the horizon. Bam! he throws his
last ray, a streak of gold and purple which fringes the flying
clouds. There, now it has entirely disappeared. Bien! bien! twilight
commences. Heavens, how charming it is! There is now in the sky only
the soft vaporous color of pale citron--the last reflection of the
sun which plunges into the dark blue of the night, going from green
tones to a pale turquoise of an unheard-of fineness and a fluid
delicacy quite indescribable.... The fields lose their color, the
trees form but gray or brown masses.... the dark waters reflect the
bland tones of the sky. We are losing sight of things--but one still
feels that everything is there--everything is vague, confused, and
Nature grows drowsy. The fresh evening air sighs among the leaves--
the birds, these voices of the flowers, are saying their evening
prayer.--Corot's Letter to Graham

Most young artists begin by working for microscopic effects, trying
to portray every detail, to see every leaf, stem and branch and
reveal them in the picture.

The ability to draw carefully and finish painstakingly is very
necessary, but the great artist must forget how to draw before he
paints a great picture; just as every strong writer must put the
grammar upon the shelf before he writes well. I once heard William
Dean Howells say that any good, bright High-School girl of sixteen
could pass a far better examination in rhetoric than he could--and
the admission did Mr. Howells no discredit.

"Would you advise me to take a course in elocution?" once asked a
young man with oratorical ambitions of Henry Ward Beecher.

"Yes, by all means. Study elocution very carefully, but you will
have to forget it all before you ever become an orator," was the
answer.

Corot began as a child by drawing very rude, crude, uncertain
pictures, just such pictures as any schoolboy can draw. Next he
began to "complete" his sketches, and work with infinite pains. If
he sketched a house he showed whether the roof was shingled or made
of straw or tile; his trees revealed the texture of the bark and
showed the shape of the leaf, and every flower contained its pistil
and stamens, and told the man knew his botany. Two of his pictures
done in Rome in his twenty-ninth year, "The Colosseum" and "The
Forum," now in the Louvre, are good pictures--complete in detail,
painstaking, accurate, hard and tight in technique. They are bomb-
proof--beyond criticism--absolutely safe. Have a care, Corot! Keep
where you are and you will become an irreproachable painter. That is
to say, you will paint just like a hundred other French painters.
There will be a market for your wares, the