Identifier: fiftyyearsofmode00phyt (find matches)
Title: Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Phythian, John Ernest, 1858-
Subjects: Painting Painting
Publisher: London, G. Richards
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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painters was drawn from literature, and thatwhen they went into the country to find appropriate scenesin which to place their Lorenzos, Ophelias, and other charac-ters taken from history or poetry, they painted the land-scape with hardly less than scientific exactness andelaboration of detail. In their biographies and reminis-cences we read little or nothing of music, but much abouthistory and legend. It was quite otherwise with Corot.Music was little if at all less dear to him than painting.He sang as he painted, he anticipated Whistler in makingcomparisons between the two arts, was regularly to be seenat concerts, and himself played the violin. Tradition couldnot for ever blind him to the visible music of nature, andwhen at last he saw it, the rest of his life was passed in thetranslation of natures harmonies into art. He inevitably selected that which was nearest akin towhat was dominant in his own temperament. Not therugged strength of nature, but her delicate, fleeting beauty; ,
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THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 69 not the insistently obvious splendour of autumn, but thetranquil harmonies of spring and summer—in brief, all thatwas lyrical in nature found a response in him. He came to know well, or, better, to feel deeply howlarge a share the atmosphere had in the playing of thismusic. In it all things—the fields, the flowers and thetrees, and the streams that flowed and the lakes that laytranquil amidst them, and the people who moved about orlaboured there—had their being. The sky came to be nolonger to his sight and feeling a mere background, a vastoverhanging firmament; it was close at hand, around,amid, the nearest objects, and thence passed away into theillimitable distance. What need was there of a subject, orof unusual effects of nature, or of exceptionally beautifulplaces, to one to whom nature spake thus? As to theprophet of old, to him also God was present, not in thetempest, the fire or the earthquake, but in the still, smallvoice. By what m

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