Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/703

He then explained that it was necessary to prepare colours so as to obviate as much as possible this eventual change.

"But have I accomplished that end?" he queried. "It is some sixty years since I first saw Troyon's great canvas, The Return of the Cattle, which is in the Louvre. When I viewed the painting again, several years ago, the vapour rising from the muzzles of the animals and the hazy sunlight which bathed the scene, had quite disappeared. It is for that very reason one must study the action of pigment without cease."

I asked him if he especially liked landscape.

"Well, naturally," he replied, "I like it very much, but I find it difficult. I am known as a figure painter, and with reason. My landscape is but an accessory, and I aim always to blend it with my figures, an expression which the Old Masters never attempted."

"But what of Giorgione?" I protested.

Renoir did not reply, and feeling that he did not approve of my question, I spoke of Corot, of whom he said:

"That was the great genius of the century, the greatest landscapist ever known. He has been called a poet. That alone does not explain him. He was a naturalist. I have studied him without ever attaining to his art. I could never approach him, yet I have placed myself in the very spots where he painted, certain corners of Venice and La Rochelle, and oh, those excursions of mine about La Rochelle only made me miserable, because of Corot. I wanted to imitate him, but he had ‘given colour to the very stones of the place that I could never emulate."

He threw his cigarette into a bowl at his feet and made a sign to his attendant for another. He then continued: "Landscape is the stumbling-block of the painter. He will think a certain scene grey perhaps, but how much colour one finds in a grey landscape! If you only knew, Monsieur, how difficult it is to penetrate the foliage of trees with brushes."

"It is extraordinary," I said, "that you and a few friends are of an epoch that produced several masters. When the School of 1830 was at its apogee, when no hint of decadence had made its appearance among that group, in spite of your admiration for these men you were able to create a school not only rivalling theirs but actually opposing it."

"That was the effect of chance," he answered. "There was at