It was Corot's good fortune to meet at the start a young landscape painter, Michallon, who had lately returned from Rome, where he had gone after winning the prize for historical landscape, which then formed part of the curriculum of the École des Beaux Arts. Michallon died in 1824, when only twenty-eight years old, too soon to have shown the fruits of an independent spirit which had already revolted against the trammels of the school. Desiring to save Corot from the mistakes which he had himself made, he adjured him to remain _naïf_, to paint nature as he saw it, and to disregard the counsels of those who were for the moment in authority. Gentle, almost timid by nature, having met so far in life with little but disapproval, Corot disregarded his friend's advice at first, and placed himself under the guidance of Victor Bertin, a painter then in vogue, and, needless to say, deeply imbued with scholastic tradition. In his company Corot made his first voyage to Italy, in 1825, and thus came for the first time under the true classic influence. The lessons taught in the school of nature, where Claude had studied, were those best fitted for the temperament of Corot, who has been called "a child of the eighteenth century, grown in the midst of that imitation of antiquity so ardent, and so often unintelligent, where the Directory copied Athens, and the Empire forced itself to imitate Rome." It is a curious and interesting fact that when, as in this case, the spirit of classicism reveals itself anew, its never-dying influence can be the motive for work as fresh and modern as that of Corot. It is also true that the rigid enforcement of the study of drawing was a healthy influence on Corot's early life. All the pictures of his early period show the most minute attention to form and modelling; and when he had finally rid himself of the hard manner which it entailed, there remained the substratum of a constructive basis upon which his freer brush played at will. [Illustration: A BY-PATH. FROM A PAINTING BY JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT. One of Corot's later works, and treated with greater freedom than the earlier.]