the air, in the forest and
the plain, and a new sense of the pathos and beauty in simple lives
and common things.

827, L. wall, is Rousseau's Forest at Fontainebleau, a fine effect of
setting sun and loving representation of his favourite tree, the oak;
829 and 830, R. wall, are also by this master. On the same wall 643,
Millet's Spring, whose coloration at first sight may seem forced and
strange, is absolutely faithful to Nature, as the writer who once
observed similar colour effects in the forest can testify. 644, The
Gleaners, "the three fates of poverty," is, next to the Angelus, the
most popular of Millet's works. Corot, the Theocritus of modern
painting, is represented by 138, the lovely and poetical Morning, 141,
Souvenir de Mortefontaine and 141 _bis_, Castelgandolfo. R. and L.
are, 889 and 890, two grand and massive compositions by Troyon: Oxen
going to the Plough; and, The Return to the Farm: landscapes that
smell of the very earth, and rendered with a marvellous breadth of
style and penetrating sympathy; 184, end wall, and 185, R. of
entrance, Grape Harvest in Burgundy, and Spring, are by Daubigny.

One of the most aggressive, ebullient and individual of painters was
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), whose harshly realistic Funeral at Ornans
we have seen in Room II. In 1855 Courbet, finding his works badly hung
in the International Exhibition at Paris, erected a wooden shed near
the entrance, where he exhibited thirty-eight of his large pictures,
and defiantly painted outside in big letters--REALISM: G. COURBET.
Strong of body and coarse in habit, this _peintre-animal_, as he was
called, delighted to _epater le bourgeois_, and painted his studies of
the nude with a brutal reality that stripped the female form of all
the beauty and grace with which the superior ideality of man has
invested it. This swashbuckler of realism, who despised the old
masters, denounced imagination as humbug, and would have great men,
railway stations, factories and mines painted as the _verites vraies_,
the saints and miracles of the age, was, however, often better than
his artistic creed, and is here represented by some pleasing
Fontainebleau pictures: L. wall, 147, Deer in Covert; R. wall, 66,
Source of the Puits Noir, and L., 147 _bis_, The Waves, a most
powerful and original interpretation of the sombre majesty of the sea.
For in truth the creed of Realism, whether in literature or in art,
involves a fallacy, and the creations of